PENGUIN BOOKS

A MATTER OF TASTE Nilanjana S. Roy is a columnist for the Business Standard and the Telegraph, and reviews books for a host of publications.

A M AT T E R O F TA S T E The Penguin Book of Indian Writing on Food

EDITED

BY

N I L A N J A N A S. R O Y

PENGUIN BOOKS USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia New Zealand | India | South Africa | China Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com Published by Penguin Random House India Pvt. Ltd No: 04-010 to 04-012, 4th Floor, Capital Tower -1, M G Road, Gurugram -122002, Haryana, India

First published by Penguin Books India 2004 This anthology Copyright © Penguin Books India 2004 Introduction copyright © Nilanjana S. Roy 2004 This copyright for the individual pieces vests with the contributors or their estates Pages 360–63 are extensions of the copyright page All rights reserved 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 ISBN 9780143031482 For sale in the Indian Subcontinent, UK and the Commonwealth only Typeset in Sabon by InoSoft Systems, Noida

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. www.penguin.co.in

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction: Setting the Table

xi

INDIVIDUAL PORTIONS Salman Rushdie On Leavened Bread

3

Busybee My First Buffet Lunch

6

Vir Sanghvi Past Times: First Tastes That Lasted Forever

8

Rohinton Mistry Gustad’s Chicken

14

M.K. Gandhi Eating Meat

28

Frank Simoes Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Feni but Were Too Drunk to Ask

34

Sudha Koul Flesh in the Valley

41

Githa Hariharan The Remains of the Feast

54

HISTORY ON A PLATTER Mukul Kesavan Banquet Nationalism

65

E.M. Forster The Outsider’s Thali

67

I. Allan Sealy Trotter Laws

69

Geoffrey C. Ward and Diane R. Ward English Soup

71

Saadat Hasan Manto Jelly

75

Salman Rushdie Chutnification

76

Amitav Ghosh Tibetan Dinner

79

FOOD AND THE SENSES Raj Kamal Jha Baby Food

87

Anuradha Roy Cooking Women

89

Busybee Charms of Life

98

Radhika Jha Initiation

100

Ruchir Joshi Shrikhand

107

LINE OF CONTROL Mulk Raj Anand Bread for the Sweeper

127

Suketu Mehta Black-Collar Workers

134

Sarat Chandra Chatterjee Mahesh

142

Purabi Basu French Leave

154

Abdul Bismillah Guest is God

160

P. Sainath Everybody Loves a Good Drought

168

MASALA MIX Vir Sanghvi Bhelpuri: It’s All about Texture

183

Bulbul Sharma The Anger of Aubergines

187

David Davidar The Great Mango Yatra

193

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni The Secrets of Spices

199

I. Allan Sealy Just Desserts

213 DEPRIVATION

Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyaya Apu’s Trials

219

R.K. Narayan Fasting

227

Manjula Padmanabhan The Diet

236

Anjana Appachana Leftovers

246

Mahasweta Devi Salt

259 ACROSS THE SEVEN SEAS

Jhumpa Lahiri Mrs Sen’s

279

V.S. Naipaul Mr Biswas Rebels

302

Anita Desai Shopping for More

313

Chitrita Banerji A Barisal Winter

320

Atul Gawande The Man Who Couldn’t Stop Eating

326

Notes on Contibutors Copyright Acknowledgements

349 360

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Other anthologists have editors; I had a miracle-worker in Diya Kar Hazra. She and David Davidar, former CEO of Penguin India, germinated the idea of a food anthology and then let me run with the ball. Diya saw the original concept change and grow through several versions and allowed me to make it a homage to good reading as much as to good food. Her patience, intelligence and determination saw this project through; her ability to combine feeding me excellent mangsho-bhaat while reminding me that I’d overshot yet another deadline saw me through. Like all good editors, she provided a firm hand on the tiller and told me what to exclude as well as pointed me in the direction of authors I’d never heard of; like all great editors, she shaped this book without taking it over. Poulomi Chatterjee’s energy and enthusiasm never waned; without her, we would never have survived the permissions process. Her gentle advice on structure and content made this a much better book than it would have been otherwise. She and Diya survived the constant updates, the endless revisions. They treated the frantic appeals to include ‘just one more’ with mercy while refusing to let the book bloat beyond all norms of decency. Without their dedication, their sense of what made a good piece of writing, and their kindness, A Matter of Taste would never have got off the ground. I’ll miss ‘Auto Ravi’, who patiently ferried masses of material back and forth between editor and editorial team, and who put up

x

Acknowledgements

with my eccentric hours. This was definitely a team effort; if omissions and errors have crept in, that’s my fault not theirs. Two books in particular lit the way for me. K.T. Achaya’s magisterial A Historical Companion to Indian Food tells you everything this doesn’t, and is required reading for anyone who’s interested in the rituals of food. Mark Kurlansky’s Choice Cuts: A Miscellany of Food Writing told me what I should aim for: ‘There is simply no better way for a writer to approach the fundamental subjects of the human condition than to talk about the food we choose to ingest.’ It remains my benchmark, even if one that’s impossible to live up to. Many of the writers included here and the editors, publishers and agents we approached for permission rights were hugely encouraging and made significant concessions for us. We needed all the support we could get—our heartfelt thanks. My Didima and my late Thakurma introduced me to the pleasures of eating and the rigours of cooking, while my mother’s recipes led me out of a tangle of early failures in the kitchen. Together they introduced me to a world of women that’s linked, but not circumscribed, by the kitchen. To Tini, Baba, Ruchir, Kamini and Devangshu who fed me when I was too busy with this book to cook, a special note of thanks: for the doi-potol and the meat curry, for the haldi-laced Bloody Marys and the hummus, for the takeaway Punjabi Chinese and the home-made khichuri, and for everything else.

INTRODUCTION

Setting the Table Even an anthology has to begin somewhere, and this one eventually found its moorings in memory. Fictional ones, drawn from books we’ve read, loved and been challenged by; and more personal ones, the kind we all carry, of meals eaten and new tastes, of times of deprivation and moments of sharp, new pleasures. When Penguin suggested an anthology built around the idea of food, Diya and I speculated about the shape that such a compilation would take: did we want an anthology of Indians writing about food? An anthology of writing about Indian food? They are two very different beasts and, as we talked, other monsters loomed hungrily in the distance. The possibilities were endless. Uncharted continents began opening up before our dazzled eyes, great landscapes where I. Allan Sealy’s Smarmite shared the same table as Kesavan’s all-inclusive, nationalist feast from Looking through Glass, and Daniel and Ramdoss made a mango pilgrimage of India (and, in the literary magazine Biblio, a controversy broke out over whether ‘Blue Mangoes’ was really a slang term in Tamil for certain unmentionable parts of the human anatomy). Frank Simoes expanded on the virtues of fresh fish in conjunction with Goan feni; but read Rohinton Mistry if you want to learn, in mellow comic fashion, about the perils of placing too great a premium on the freshness of your chicken. The famine of 1905

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Introduction

found several echoes down the ages, in mutated form, as Apu endured hunger in the middle of plenty, as a bull died from starvation in Sarat Chandra’s ‘Mahesh’. . . Feasting, whether at a nationalist’s banquet or in the presence of royalty, was always accompanied by its counterpart. The guide fasts twice, first as parody and then with genuine fervour in R.K. Narayan’s masterpiece; in America, Anand discovers the strangeness of those who mortify their flesh in the middle of plenty as he explores the polarities of fasting/feasting; Manjula Padmanabhan’s protagonist undergoes the thoroughly modern ritual austerities of The Diet. There were resonances, if you only cared to look for them. The caste norms that applied to Mulk Raj Anand’s eponymous untouchable in the bad old pre-Independence days are refurbished for the times. And food is the ultimate religious divide. If an earlier generation rode the rails to the cries from vendors of ‘Hindu pani, Musulmaan pani’, Abdul Bismillah’s guest in ‘Guest is God’ discovers that hospitality stops short of the dinner plate.

Compiling an anthology is a very, very demanding task. It requires the editor to spend most of her time lounging around in comfortable chairs, reading old favourites and devouring new titles to the detriment of anything resembling real work. Occasionally, in a Herculean display of astonishing effort, she sends a passage to the photostat man in the market. (He runs a small chaat centre alongside, where the pungencies of chutney and chaat masala are overlaid by the fumes of printer’s ink—not an effect Vir Sanghvi recorded in his investigation into the origins of the ultimate snack, bhelpuri, but interesting all the same.) It is a task that requires, most of all, the strength of mind to ignore the anguished yelps from the good souls at Penguin as yet another deadline whooshes by.

Introduction

xiii

But as the months rolled by, something happened. Overlapping with the insistent voices of authors—some newly minted, some flashing the stamp of Globalized World-Famous Author on their passports, some obscure—was the voice of memory, insisting that I take another look at the stuff we routinely bury in our bodies. Initially, I had thought I wanted an anthology that provided a banquet, a feast for the senses. I wanted passages as evocative as the dismissive list of Indian dishes (‘chooey-booey brown sauce’) compiled by E.M. Forster, as wickedly contemporary as Busybee’s evisceration of hotel offerings in ‘My First Buffet Lunch’, as directly sensual and funny as the passage from The Last Jet-Engine Laugh where Ruchir Joshi’s characters discover truly alternative uses for shrikhand. With honourable exceptions, including the three offered above, these were the most boring passages to read. Writing about food degenerates swiftly into a version of what a bad newspaper food critic—for a mercifully brief while I was one of the breed; I know whereof I speak—will serve up. With the exceptions of Vir Sanghvi and the late Busybee (both included here), and a handful of contemporary writers—Marryam Reshii and Geeta Doctor among them—most of India’s ‘food columnists’ offer little more than warmed-over restaurant reviews or recipes, neither of which tempt the palate. Nor did I want an anthology filled with learned essays on when exactly the potato came to India, or endless categories of food recommended by the Shashtras, or pieces quibbling over the shopping habits of the Mughal cooks. This is perverse on my part, given that I would gladly read such an anthology. But I wanted nothing to do with the compiling of it. What the stack of books before me promised, and what I was looking for, had to do with a certain kind of writing about food and its place in our lives. Some of the examples that follow are drawn from my store of personal memories: every reader will have his or her own, naturally.

xiv

Introduction

The first section, ‘Individual Portions’, offers an overview of Indian food, quirky rather than comprehensive, thought-provoking rather than magisterially opinionated. Salman Rushdie explores nostalgia for naan and leavened bread even as he discovers the joys of brioche and foccacia abroad; an old woman in Githa Hariharan’s ‘The Remains of the Feast’ discovers the pleasures of forbidden food on her deathbed. They’re both reminding us that food is also about what’s withheld, unavailable, banned. And there’s the nature of what we eat to take into consideration. Behind the story of the chicken bought and nurtured and finally slaughtered with so much care by Gustad Noble in Mistry’s Such a Long Journey, I glimpsed the minor childhood trauma I experienced as a guest in a relative’s house in Bokaro. Someone pointed out the direct connection between the absence of one or another of my feathered playmates and the presence of chicken curry on the table. Until then I had never given much thought to the difference between animal and vegetable and the violence inherent in many of the normal rituals of eating. Living is about killing; what we choose to bury in our bodies and what we choose to exclude says a great deal about us. For some, the idea of eating meat raises Plato’s chant in their heads: ‘you are placing parts of a corpse in your mouth’. Some version of that chant is what Gandhi must have heard when he briefly took up meat-eating only to repudiate it thoroughly. (Non-violence in a nutshell, as generations of weary textbook writers have reminded us. They always skim over the other possible metaphor, the one that might remind us that perhaps the body politic could do with one of Gandhi’s prescribed enemas on a regular basis.) For others, like Sudha Koul, the dilemmas are different: the perfect meat dishes produced by Koul’s Kashmiri cook are a metaphor, not for the taking of life but for the loss of the past. The remembered odours from her Kashmiri kitchen are constant reminders of a time of innocence, now irrecoverable.

Introduction

xv

‘History on a Platter’ sets off on a brief exploration of the twentieth century through our palates—treat this as an indicative rough guide rather than a detailed map. If you look at the history of contemporary India through the palates of its people, you navigate with an alien but illuminating set of charts. Mukul Kesavan’s short exposition on the truly nationalist feast brings together the best of Indian cuisine in an unusual menu. The taste of Independence must have been a curious blend, an uncertain mix, everything, no matter how fresh, tainted by the iron scent and flavour of the blood spilled over Partition. One of Manto’s short shorts, ‘Jelly’, sums it up: there’s the foreign object of desire, imported or newly indigenized jelly, more tempting than our syrupy, heavy sweets because of its wobbling blandness, but it’s the ingredients that make it stand out. Within the folds of the Raj, a soap opera unfolded in many episodes, eloquent first of the unbridgeable divide between ‘native’ cuisine and ‘British’ cuisine, then the birth of mulligatawny soup, until finally in the 1980s chicken tikka masala wreaked revenge on the descendants of the Raj by displacing fish and chips. Other once-familiar objects metamorphosed, too. As Amitav Ghosh discovered when humble momos, student food at the local ‘TibDhabs’ in Delhi, were stuffed with salmon and asparagus to reemerge as trendy emblems of a protest movement gone designer. Some tastes and smells are deliberately missing, best left to the imagination. The taste of pre-Independence India is famine interspersed with abundance. Calcutta stank of dead bodies; famine smelled of a mixture of fleshly corruption, the unmistakeable odour of starvation and the starchy scent of rice gruel. The smell travelled all over India, and appears to have taken up semipermanent residence in places like Kalahandi, where ground mango kernel flour replaces the rice gruel. For others, the pre-Partition days were times of unalloyed plenty, when oysters were sold by the bucket in Cochin and households consumed ghee by the seer; when family orchards supplied mangoes and lychees; when no

Cover painting Cat and Lobster by Jamini Roy, courtesy NGMA, New Delhi Cover design by Pinaki De

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