In Eating India, food writer Chitrita Banerji celebrates her home nation’s regional cuisines – just don’t call it “curry,” she tells Susan Low
A map of India introduces Chitrita Banerji’s most recent book, Eating India.
The simple line-drawing is an apt way of orienting the reader for the journey to follow. It’s more than just a navigation aid: it was also the starting point for the author as she researched the book, an odyssey through the food culture of India.
Calcutta-born Banerji, who now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, relates how the idea for Eating India took root. “It suddenly struck me when I was looking at the map,” she says. “India’s so very like America. Those two coasts – my goodness! From antiquity, people have been coming to India from outside. There have been so many people coming in from both sides of the coast and settling down, and everybody has added their two bits.”
Banerji was born in interesting times. “I was born the same year as the independence of India, in 1947, so I’m a Midnight’s Child,” she says with a wry laugh. Banerji was brought up in a well-to-do, middle-class Hindu Brahmin household. The privations of post-independence India formed the backdrop to her childhood years. “It’s hard to remember these things now in big cities in India, but in the late 1950s and 1960s there was a food shortage. In my teen years, we had ration cards.”
Banerji describes her family as being “absolutely obsessed” with food. “Food was such a big part of our internal dialogue,” she says. “I always found it very strange when I visited other families and nobody bothered about food and people ate very indifferently cooked food without caring. Their mothers never went into the kitchen; the servants did everything. My mother was a full-time school teacher but she still did most of the cooking because it was serious stuff.”
A bright and ambitious student, Banerji moved to the US at the age of 20 to study English literature at Harvard, although she later dropped out. “I came to the US as much too young a person,” she recalls. “I could not fit into anything and it was a very alienating experience.” Banerji married a Pakistani (Bangladeshi) Muslim man, who was studying for his PhD.
In 1972, after the war of independence, the two went to Bangladesh, where they lived on and off for nine years. After the failure of her marriage, Banerji “had to go through the process of figuring out what to do with my life,” she says. “I did not wish to go back to India and live with my family. So I went to England and freelanced for the BBC World Service for a while. Then I re-applied to Harvard – being older and wiser – and they allowed me back.”
In 1986, emboldened by the passage of time and urged by her parents’ advancing years, she returned to Calcutta and took a job as assistant editor on an English-language magazine. It was during this time that several important events took place: she met her soon-to-be second husband; and she was asked “out of the blue” by publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson to write a book on the food of Bengal. Although her initial response was one of incredulity – to this day she’s not entirely certain why the publisher approached her – she gave up her journalism job and began researching the book that would become Life And Food In Bengal.
Very soon after, her Green Card for the US came through. Not one to pass up an opportunity, Banerji said, “Why don’t we go and see what happens?” By 1990 she was back in the US and Life And Food In Bengal came out the following year. She has remained in the US ever since, although she visits India frequently.
As with many food writers, the immigrant experience was formative. “Writing that first book brought home the realisation that I would never really have a home and a life like my parents had. That was gone. So I’m sure that a sense of loss fuelled my writing. In my mind, I’m always trying to recapture something.”
Now the world’s foremost authority on Bengali food, Banerji has written two further classic works on the subject: Bengali Cooking: Seasons And Festivals and Feeding The Gods: Memories Of Food And Culture In Bengal. As the title suggests, her latest work, Eating India, is broader in scope, covering regions as disparate as the Punjab, Gujarat and Kerala, but also exploring the foodways of discrete groups such as the Jews of Cochin, the Anglo-Indian community of Calcutta and the indigenous tribal peoples of India’s northeast.
It’s a more impressionistic work, written from the perspective of an “outsider,” albeit one with a deep understanding of the cultural fabric of India. The result is part travelogue, part food book, part personal journey. It takes an anthropological approach, linking past to present, unpicking the intricacies of place, religion, caste and history, and combining the born storyteller’s ability to flesh out the story with colour, personality and an abundance of carefully observed detail.
Banerji was aware that this book would be different from her previous ones. “I knew I was going to write a strange book,” she admits. “It’s not a cookbook, it’s not an academic book, it’s not just about travel. Sometimes when I was writing it I worried that people wouldn’t understand it. But then I thought, ‘to hell with that’ and I wrote the book I wanted to.”
Yet ultimately, Eating India is a very different book from the one that she initially set out to write. Her aim was to discover the unique, “authentic” cooking styles that define the various regions of India – and to dispel the myth of that meaningless term, the “curry,” once and for all.
She explains, “I was definitely the shameless champion of regionalism. American friends and acquaintances used say, ‘Oh, so you’re making curry again today?’” she says, placing the emphasis firmly on the word “curry.” “It would drive me crazy. My husband said, ‘Well, instead of complaining, why don’t you write about it? Why don’t you really find out what regionalism is like in today’s India?’”
The one-time champion of regionalism found something very different from what she sought – a country in a ceaseless state of culinary change. In setting out to explore India’s food map, Banerji writes, that she “felt a bit like those medieval knights who were always setting off on quests, seeking outlandish beasts, damsels in distress, magical tasks, the Holy Grail.” As she observes in the book, “I had set out on a search for authenticity of food, but I have ended up as a witness to endless synthesis.” |
