Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors by Lizzie Collingaham, Vintage Books 2005.

Food and writings on food always fascinate me. Be they food served on table or recipes and scholarly documents I read. Anything to do with food, other than cooking it myself! That is how I came upon this book, surprisingly not in the History section of the bookstore, but in the Recipe section! The mix was too heady and appealing not to pickup – spice, gossip, culture, history,
Indian history through Indian food.
It was a birthday gift from my colleagues that I was suppossed to select myself. Thank you friends!

The book is about the British relationship with Indian food and gradually becomes a history of Britain in India. Another book by Collingham seems to be about how the British changed, disciplined and displayed their body in India, according to their growth from traders to emperors. Equally interesting! Let me find out where I can catch this book. Now return to Curry. The book starts with author’s own first taste of sweet velvety Lassi in Colaba and what is served as authentic Indian food in Britain to how finally a pan Indian food culture is finally developing with the help of homogenizing recipe books now.

The book is chapterized into various dishes – ChickenTikka Masala, Biryani, Vindaloo, Korma, Madras Curry, Curry Powders, Cutlets and Chai. All of them contain history of a certain era in Indian history and more importantly, recipes. There are so many illustrations, maps, photos and anecdotes to add ease of reading. What I liked most is the inclusion of recipes in the discussion, not only from travelogues and narratives from the past as documents of history, but real recipes to end each chapter which Collingaham tries in her own kitchen. That is a genuinely good foodie!

I like the discussion on tea the best. Collingaham reassures, as most of us have always believed, that the quintessentially Indian food is most often a foreign import, like Chilly or accidental inventions, like kebabs. Same is the case with tea. Now the largest producer and a good consumer of tea, India never heard about tea before the British. When tea was planted in Assam and labourers died out of Malaria and abuse from masters, tea was not an Indian thing at all. It took massive marketing strategies – which included distribution of tea in temples, movie screenings to distribute tea and special chinaware and apparently not contaminating and impure to caste “ to make tea popular in India. Along with that it also brought along another changes. In an attempt to somehow sell tea, it was sold separately to Muslims and Hindus so that religion is untouched. This added to the divide and rule policy and widened the gap. On the positive side, tea with its neutrality as a new drink, and not with a history of ayurvedic or purity associations, was easier to be drunk with other castes. Gradually teashops became places for intercaste food sharing and people came here from villages to indulge sinfully in what they cannot do in villages. But I am also glad that Collingaham does not forget to mention the existence of the two-glass system in some Indian cities, where tea is served only in disposable glasses to the earlier untouchable caste. She sees it and she also sees the recent resistance from these castes to assert their rights for same glasses.

Teashops, had been of much interest to me as a person coming from Kerala where there is a strong culture of teashop. Teashops have been an integral part of defining the public sphere and dominant thinking in Kerala. This is a place where men, not many women, from different walks of life come not only to drink tea, but to read newspaper, initiate discussions and form political impressions. Things have gone to such extent that, some teashops publicly ban discussion of politics to avoid squabbles. The teashop remains a cultural meeting point in any locality. And they are always called teashops, not coffeeshops, negating the stereotype of a South Indian predilection for coffee. Here again, Collingaham offers another surprise. Coffee is not the prerogative of the South Indian, if not Tamil, Brahmin. It came with Arabs to South India and for a long time only very rich Muslims used to drink it! So much for our claims that order coffee in an Udupi restaurant and tea in a Muslim one.

And this one about Biriyani. It is not a quintessential Muslim dish. The Persian idea of cooking meat and rice together was improvised by Indian, possibly Hindu, cooks with what they like most of the spices. It seems, the Lucknowi elite muslims looked down upon the greasy spicy invention as it was not part of their culture.

The book is so full of such surprises. It reassures my belief in several ways that the real Indian is a constant flux of influences and inventions. But surprisingly I didn’t find many references of food and food habits of the freedom movement. I was looking for references of Gandhi’s remarks on vegetarianism, Sri Narayana Guru’s reformation on food and drink, Ambedkar’s take on food etc. They are also part of British relation with Indian food, right?

As the subtitle suggests, the book is about the conquerors and not too much about that part of the society which does not usually considered “making history”.

Recipe books is an integral part of Food history and get a decent mention only in the last part of the book. There are a lot of studies on recipe-cum-self help books and their project of forming the modern Indian citizens. I found this area not referred in Collingaham’s study.

However, if you are a foodie and like to read about food, this is a book that cannot be easily put down. I am also planning to try out some of the recipes in the book.