I ! South Asian Food in Britain
I think it is important to understand how a recuperative biography might look, and how exactly it might respond to an existing model of cultural valuation. What the likes of Appadurai and Kopytoff have claimed of objects generally, Ian Cook and Michelle Harrison have claimed specifically of food. They argue for “re-materializing the postcolonial geographies” of food, suggesting that earlier work on cross-over foods – those items of “exotic” origin that have been commoditised for, say, British supermarket shelves – has overwhelmingly involved ‘cultural readings of commodities that pay no heed to processes of commodification’.1
They ask:
What if we were to treat goods marketed as 'ethnic' or 'exotic' in the UK not as texts, but as material culture? What if we were to study them not only as textual and visual reservoirs of cultural codes, but as things in the making and things in use, materially and symbolically, within as well as between contexts?2
Cook and Harrison focus mostly on how individual foodstuffs are commoditised for mass-market sale, and on the way in which whole brands are constructed, and later deconstructed, in a manner that ignores the social, historical and economic relations that structure them. They use the example of the historic marketing of Jamaican food, the dominant paradisiacal images of the Caribbean and its
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1 Ian Cook and Michelle Harrison, ‘Cross Over Food: Re-Materializing Postcolonial Geographies’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 28 (2003), 296-317 (p. 299).
‘relaxed spicy lifestyles’. 3
They note, though, the need for “counter- topographies” that respond to this imagery that, as bell hooks has noted, “exoticises the other”.4
It has not only been the marketing of food that has been ahistorical and dismissive biographically: the commoditisation of the knowledge of postcolonial cuisines has been equally unenlightening. Elizabeth Buettner writes of the ‘celebratory’ or ‘boutique’ multiculturalism of the curry house in Britain, where ‘multiculturalism as white consumption of “Indian” food produced to accommodate [white] tastes, enacted within the space of the restaurant, became distinct from the multiculturalism required by other everyday social interactions with Asians.’5
Elsewhere, we might draw upon the words of Lloyd and JanMohamed, who write of the contradictions of this cultural pluralism in the United States: ‘Such pluralism tolerates the existence of salsa, it even enjoys Mexican restaurants, but it bans Spanish as a medium of instruction in American schools.’6
The ubiquity of the curry house in British towns and cities has often been read, popularly at least, as a metonym of cross-cultural exchange, as though the meeting point of cultures that the restaurant introduces automatically produces a socially productive dimension. Yet, as Buettner puts it, ‘South Asian food may have become seen as integrated into the nation and its localities, but not its purveyors, who still stand accused of self-segregation.’7
In her essay, Buettner addresses the issue of the “Indian” food to be found in some curry houses, which has been thought of at one time or another as a poor parody of traditional South Asian cuisines – particularly in the 1980s during the proliferation of so-called Tandoori and Balti restaurants on British high streets. To an extent, the same is true today of certain restaurants whose offering is predominantly arranged around the preconceptions and tastes of white diners. Arranged along a Scovillian scale, an assortment of dishes has come to stand as for the canon of ”Indian” curry house cuisine: Korma, Dupiaza, Rogan, Dhansak, Madras, Vindaloo.
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3 ibid.
4 See bell hooks, ‘Eating the Other’, in Black Looks: Race and Representation (London, Turnaround, 1992), pp. 21–39.
5 Elizabeth Buettner, ‘“Going for an Indian”: South Asian Restaurants and the Limits of Multiculturalism in Britain’, The Journal of Modern History 80:4 (2008), 865-901 (p. 880). 6 Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd, The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 8.
What I am more interested in, though, is taking the debate further than the question of authenticity. Whether or not food is deemed authentic or not – that is, whether or not it is held to have a valid historical heritage – is to miss the point, for all foods are the product of a history; it is only that the histories of some are privileged over the histories of others. In The Settler’s Cookbook (2010), Yasmin Alibhai-Brown retrieves the lineage of recipes passed on ancestrally and date back to figures who had voyaged from India to East Africa as labourers, before their descendants later moved to Britain. The dishes with origins in East Africa are traced to the families of indentured labourers who worked on the construction of the Uganda Railway. These recipes speak to the fact of circumstance: the limited availability of vegetables necessitates the emergence of uninspiring but now ritualistic dishes like Khichri, a porridge-like pulp of moong dhal, rice and butter. Alibhai-Brown writes:
The cultivation of vegetables and fruit away from the coast was yet to come. Decades later, children who were fussy eaters were asked to remember those men who built the railways, who gave their lives so we could get to the beach on the train. Khichri was what kept them strong and unbeaten. All kinds of properties were attributed to this simple dish. We still cook it on the first day of our new year, 21 March. It is best for baby, the old ladies say to nervous new mums eager to buy infant food in pretty glass jars. Dying folk ask for the soft mush as they prepare to depart, and sometimes this super-food revives them.8
Equally, we see in Meera Sodha’s Made in India (2014) the incorporation of local produce into traditional dishes – the accompanying evolution of dishes and their histories – necessitated by circumstance. Sodha’s heritage, similar to Alibhai-Brown, traces back to India through East Africa. Evicted from Uganda by the decree of Idi Amin in 1972, Sodha’s mother is said to have ‘reassembled our family kitchen in Lincolnshire and carried on cooking the family recipes’.9 Sodha continues:
At the same time, she started to use local ingredients. Indian cooking can be adapted to any place by encompassing whatever ingredients are available. As we lived in Lincolnshire, a county that abounds in local produce, she was able to use gorgeous beetroot, rhubarb and squash in her cooking, as well as fish from the nearby docks in Grimsby and local meat (including the famous Lincolnshire sausages).10
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8 Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, The Settler’s Cookbook: A Memoir of Love, Migration and Food (London: Portobello, 2012), p. 58.
9 Meera Sodha, Made in India: Cooked in Britain: Recipes from an Indian Family Kitchen (London: Penguin, 2014), p. 9.
Sodha acknowledges the function of circumstance in the evolution of food. Her mother’s cooking, so she suggests, is shaped by locality. If only we were able downplay the emphasis on what we might call the mixedness of dishes, reading from them their convenient divisions of influence – part Indian, part East African, part British – we would see that the meanings are to be found in the respective biographies of individual dishes, and not just by reading them as cultural texts. The ingredients Sodha refers to (beetroot, rhubarb and squash) find their way into her cooking, initially at least, by way of circumstance and availability. In other words, I am warning against reading cultural mixing as an oversimplified matter of choice, and suggesting instead that biographies of dishes yield more enlightening meanings.
Now, in among the more familiar dishes on the menu of Khyber Tandoori restaurant on Leicester’s Belgrave Road, are dishes that have been introduced over the past two decades in order to respond to various circumstantial changes. For example, the so-termed Chilli dishes on the menu – Chilli Paneer, Chicken, Baby Corn and King Prawns, ‘fried in crispy batter and cooked with spring onions, fresh sliced garlic, black pepper, mild chillies and soy sauce’ – were recipes added by the head chef, who was responding to the emerging trend of Indo-Chinese cuisine. Other dishes have evolved over time to cater to the changing tastes of customers, the price of ingredients and so on. Indeed, the increasingly high cost of sourcing poultry led directly to the inclusion on the menu of chicken wings, a dish not traditionally to be found in curry houses.
In the three cases mentioned, I am interested both by the structuring of recipes by any combination of historical, economic, social or cultural factors, and by the values assigned to each dish by diners. It is impossible to read Alibhai-Brown’s Khichri as a cultural text without acknowledging an accompanying context of Indian indentured labour in East Africa, nor without addressing the forced removal of Indians from Uganda in 1972 and their subsequent arrival in provincial British locations. By the same token, Khyber’s chicken wing dish cannot be separated from the context of the cost of poultry farming, nor its Chilli dishes from the popularisation of so-called fusion food in the last decade. Importantly, though, we must also see that those apparently poor parodies of curries to be found in certain British curry houses, as inauthentic as we might
view them, also have to be read as dishes structured by historical, economic, social and cultural factors. In this case, we might put it that, say, the Madras dish served at some provincial restaurant, for argument’s sake called A Passage to India or Bombay Spice, cannot be dismissed as a valueless dish, but must instead be read in the context of – or perhaps as a direct consequence of – the popularisation, the perceived exoticism, and the rise in the commercial viability, of “Indian” cuisine in the 1970s and 1980s. Equally, in the relevant cases, our reading of these dishes must also attend to the wider context of the economic opportunism of working-class Bangladeshi and Pakistani migrants in Britain, given that it has been members of these groups who have taken advantage most of favourable market conditions, played upon the enduring fascination of white British diners with “Indian” food, and ultimately become owners of their own businesses.
II ! Culinary Histories
The biographical narratives of cuisines are not generated without provocation; they are deeply embedded within particularised histories and are moved along by specific factors. That we understand them as such, and that we understand that all biographies of objects, and not only a privileged few, contribute to the production of a knowledge base, is vital to the valuation of cultural capital en masse. When in 2013 traces of horsemeat were identified in frozen foods advertised as beef in British and Irish supermarkets, investigations eventually illuminated the complex passage of food in the global supply chain. Horses, considered something of a culinary taboo in Britain and Ireland, had been sold in many cases by Romanian farmers who seemingly knew little concerning the ultimate destination of the meat. From the rural Romanian hinterland, the horses had been transported to various locations across Western Europe where they were slaughtered and processed. Finally, the meat was passed off as beef in meals produced for apparently reputable brands – notably, Findus, a pan- European manufacturer. The same investigations revealed traces of pork DNA in other beef products marketed as being suitable to Jewish and Islamic diets.
Alarming as the findings were, what the whole scandal achieved was to retrieve the biographies of individual dishes where otherwise they would have been lost. In this particular case, it managed to join in the same chain neatly packaged products on supermarket shelves with destitute Romanian farmers who had supplied the meat for them, all via a complicated cross-continental route. In doing so, the actual value of the products at the point of sale – some of which had retailed for disturbingly low prices – illustrated the exploitation of those in the supply chain who would otherwise have remained invisible. It also illuminated the covering up of movement of items across cultural borders (read: the erasure of cultural difference), given that the disparate attitudes towards the consumption of horsemeat across the supply chain were disregarded in the grand interest of profit. The point is that, for those with a vested interest in the complexity and the historicity of the labour expended in the production of objects, adequate biographies lead to the truest possible understanding of them at their commodity phase. In the horsemeat case, the lack of a biography motivated the unethical, profit-driven decision-making of manufacturers and resulted in products purchased by consumers on the mutually dependent basis of low price and low production knowledge. Nevertheless, my original starting point here was the cultural valuation of foods, whose accompanying biographies stand to have different benefits.
As an example, take the samosa, a food item that has been written into the symbolic imagination, in Britain certainly, as a quintessential sign of Indianness – typically, as part of an alliterative triumvirate that joins it to saris and saffron. Its annexation by large-scale British producers, who have marketed the samosa often as a frozen party food, to be sold alongside spring rolls and tiny bite-sized pizzas, does much to hijack the complexity of its cultural biography (as well as the biographies of the others, too). It does so partly by overlooking the British imperial connection to Indian cuisine – that is, by suppressing the violence inherent in the events that lead ultimately to the availability of samosas on the British market – and also by overlooking the item’s much larger history beyond India itself. More than that, aligning it under this moniker of a national cuisine threatens only to seize its fluidity, when in fact the numerous biographies of the samosa itself are notable for their variations. To simplify a history of movement
and adaptation, perhaps in order to suggest a straightforward transfer of an item from one culture to another, is to underestimate the complexity and the scale of the factors that structure it. By understanding these variations, we are able to more fully appreciate the cultural and social lives of the samosa, and thus better placed to understand their particular relationships to specific cultural and social groups.
The samosa is first traceable in India itself during the rule of the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526), a three centuries-long period of Muslim rule in the north of present-day India, meaning that its origins likely stretch back, via any number of trading routes, to various different locations across Central or Western Asia. The Middle East is largely credited with its invention. Among its earliest records is a mention in Abu'l-Fadl Bayhaqi’s history of the Ghaznavid Empire, Tārīkh-i Bayhaqī, in the eleventh century; but its history goes back further still. In terms of its ingredients and its preparation, early samosas (sanbosag) were commonly triangular pastries filled with minced meat, with the three-sided design the consequence of folding a circular piece of pastry inward around the filling. Later, as they the moved around the region, across India and into present-day Myanmar (samosa), East Africa (sambusa), Uzbekistan (samsa) and so on, the samosa was adapted according to local custom and ingredients. Given the Christian influence in Portuguese India, Goan samosas (chamuças) were often filled with pork, where in Muslim or Hindu lands this has not been the case. Unlike the general method, samosas in Central Asia are almost always baked rather than fried, while Mauritian samosas often and unsurprisingly contain fish, given the geography of the island. The versions of samosas that arrived on British shores have been various, but a significant number have been vegetarian samosas, in line with the diets of many migrants from the Punjab and Gujarat. Much as they differ in appearance, ingredients, and names, samosas appear variously in the disparate customs of cultural groups. In Hindu birth observances in the Punjab, it is noted that samosas are given as an offering to ‘avert the evil effects of Rah’.11
The items are central to the folk life of Afghanistan, meanwhile, where they form part
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11 H.A. Rose, ‘Hindu Birth Observances in the Punjab’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 37 (1907), 220-236 (p. 221).
of a ceremonial wedding breakfast of ‘fried chicken and samosas, sweet puffs, shir māl and tea’.12
More contemporaneously, we might look to the likes of M. Neelika Jayawardane, whose 2012 essay on the South Asian diaspora in South Africa illuminates not just the migration of the samosa to the tip of Africa, but its embeddedness in its modern culinary culture there. Writing of her return to South Africa after a lengthy hiatus, Jayawardane puts it that,
I was delighted to find a space in which “Indianness” was engaged in a different conversation. It was only then, almost twenty years after I first left, that I realized that it is possible to renegotiate a relationship with a place that had little patience for the nuances of difference. But that interstice—where confluences between seemingly vastly different bodies could take place—wasn’t found on the front pages and the blaring headlines.
But just by the pervasiveness of samosas along the eateries of Cape Town and the interior of the Western Cape, one knows that there had to have been Indians in these quarters for much longer than the nouveau-riches that make the front page. We don’t know exactly how the famous fried savory [sic] pastry got to Cape Town, but it’s firmly ensconced there, as Cape Town writer Rustum Kozain famously described in ‘You Can’t Get Lost in the Samosa Triangle’ in Chimurenga. One Friday afternoon, when I was looking for the right kind of hors d’oeuvres to serve with a Sri Lankan-style fish, braised in a tamarind and black peppercorn sauce, I found a version of pakoras on the corner of Strand and Rose Streets in the Bo-Kaap. 13
Jayawardane’s essay is helpful here because it speaks to the transfer from cultural difference to embeddedness within South African culinary culture, even if, given she does not explain the narrative of the samosa’s arrival in the Cape, it does not retrieve a biography of the sort we are looking to generate here. The language refers not to an “Indian” culinary space at the periphery of Cape