• Running a café purely for charity! Well, Madras Café in the United Kingdom does so and has provided a new lease of life to many needy women in India’s rural South, partnering Action Village India and other agencies in micro-finance initiatives

– Maithreyi Nandakumar,
Bristol, England

Wafting in the chill summer breeze as I near this stone cottage in the Cots­wolds was the unmistakable smell of frying pakoras and the potent mix of spices. Rather a contrast with the very English setting of the party I was attending – in the middle of the bucolic splendour of the countryside, and with the promise of Shakespeare to be enacted later that afternoon in the back garden. The Winter's Tale was being put on and you could tell by the passion in the voices of the amateur actors (fellow guests) that The Bard's work continues to feed the souls of his fellow countrymen and women. I was one of a handful of South Asian guests that afternoon enjoying the entertainment and, more importantly, the laden plates of freshly prepared Indian food. On the menu was dal, raita, delicately tempered vegetables and, of course, generous portions of hot pakoras. So, when I was accosted by a smiling Englishman demanding payasam pidichutha? I could hardly pretend that this was an ordinary interchange. What followed was an entertaining conversation in Tamil with Bryan Osbon, co-ordinator of Madras Café, the caterers of the event, and a man whose connection with rural India, especially villages in Tamil Nadu, goes back over forty years. He insisted that he was a true country boy and I must admit to spluttering over my rice pudding when he declared naan oru pattikaadu! Guests were asked to donate the amount they would pay in a restaurant for a meal such as this (at least £15) and the proceeds were all for Action Village India and the projects it supports with its partners in Uttaranchal, Orissa, Jhar­khand, Bihar, Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

When I arranged to meet Bryan almost six months later for the purpose of this article, the setting was a smart German vegetarian café off Regent Street in central London. Bryan works as a builder when he’s not busy fundraising.

Every summer, when it’s outdoor festival season in the UK, Madras Café comes into its own.

This unique concept of running a café purely for charity is something Bryan is very proud of. The Café has a popular stall at WOMAD, the famous world music and dance festival each year, cooking idlis, dosas, and serving masala chai and is helped entirely by volunteers who do the cutting, chopping, cooking and cleaning for free. “People here in the UK always ask us why a growing economy like India needs outside funding,” Bryan says of the practical challenges he faces, “We tell them that when 400 million of its people live on less than a dollar a day, this is still necessary.”

In 2007, a small group of Madras Café regulars went to Switzerland to cook for the ten-day Land for Life march from Bern to Geneva. They provided breakfast, lunch and dinner for between 60 and 100 people for ten days, leapfrogging ahead of the marchers each day after breakfast, catching them up with lunch and then moving ahead to set up a new kitchen for dinner at a new night-stop each evening. This was done as a shadow march to Ekta Parishad’s Janadesh.

Recently, private micro­finance schemes that have gone wrong in Andhra Pradesh have received a bad press in the British media. Bryan truly believes that well-run micro-finance initiatives have revolutionised women’s lives in rural India. “Our partners ASSEFA (Association for Sarva Seva Farms) and their co-operative bank KOSH provide starter schemes for around 25,000 women. These go towards sewing machines, for example; they won’t lend money for wedding dowries.” In the project in Periambakkam/Chinglepet, a widow is given starter money to buy a cow. Swedish financing has helped set up a dairy in Madurantagam and the widow is able to milk her cow and take her yield to the collection point every day and get paid.

We were later joined by Alan Leather, who sits on the board of Action Village India and has lived and worked in Bihar with Oxfam for many years in the 1970s. In his view, “Rural poverty boils down to land ownership and bonded labour. There is a situation that exists where anything you give to the poor ends up benefiting the rich.” There is also a worry when mutual credit schemes have to deposit their accumulated savings in a commercial bank for safekeeping, and this money is then inadvertently used to finance schemes outside of the rural areas. This displaces potential rural economic activity. In the four decades he’s been visiting India, he says, there’s been plenty of change for good – for example, mobile phones, watches, and more auto-rickshaws in the rural
areas. “But,” he says, “I’m not sure how civic organisation has improved. The caste system is much the same.” Alan says, “The focus for us has to be on the tragedies – though the condition of women has improved, there is still a significant amount of abuse and exploitation.”

The Violence Against Women campaign is run by the Village Services Trust in Theni. Bryan’s connection with the trust is a longstanding one. It’s where he first began as an 18-year-old back in 1968. It has empowered Dalit women to
understand their rights (Domestic Violence Act 2005) and to be able to complain through the right channels.

Bryan’s wish is to arrange a visit with the education officer of the local police force in Essex to visit the campaign in Theni, “There’s a lot the British system could learn from the way this campaign has been run. Rural Indian women now understand their reproductive rights and matters relating to their sexual  health.” And perhaps there’s the possibility of a reciprocal visit from Theni to the UK.

The stark realities of life in rural India continue to be fundamental – absentee doctors, lack of medicine and corruption in the country’s health service. Bryan believes that NGOs doing good work in these regions will continue to need the support they get from foreign charities such as Madras Café / Action Village India and those needs will have to be met – (Courtesy: Grassroots).