Modal Minority on the silence before and after the other shoe drops.

Himal South Asian has a special issue this month on food. (The editors say “It is clear that Southasians write much better on food than they do on geopolitics, veg or non-veg.”)

In his essay, Ashis Nandy writes about the “creeping crypto-nationalist cuisine” in India and elsewhere. He also observes that when it comes to food culture, we are being provided a new look at our social divisions:

The colonial clubs in what were then called the ‘old presidency’ towns were the sites where you could sift the ‘truly cultured’, urbane, settled elite from the newly rich, the upwardly mobile, first-generation city-dwellers. But never was the split so pronounced as it is now. Never would we have found in India, for instance, among the educated middle class, so many who find out from the newspapers and glossies where the rich and trendy go to dine, gossip and display their designer clothes. These recruits to a new food culture seem completely unaware of the 25,000 farmers who have committed suicide in the past decade. Nor do they seem aware of the way farming as a means of sustenance for a majority of Indians is quickly collapsing as a 4000-year-old way of life – instead becoming, for many, a disposable adjunct of urban-industrial life. I have seen, with only slight variations, similar attitudes in other parts of Southasia, China and Thailand.

And:

There can be no generic concept of authentic Southasian – or for that matter Gujarati, Bengali, Punjabi or Tamil – cooking. There can only be authentic family traditions and sometimes local traditions. When you nostalgically look back at your mother’s cooking as the last word in a cooking style, it is not merely an attempt to return to the uterine warmth of a lost world, or an expression of your exasperation with your spouse or domestic help. It is also an admission that any generic concept of authenticity does not ring true to you, despite the advice of knowledgeable food critics and expert chefs.

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