Britain has a revered tradition of Indian restaurants, with perhaps the first opened by Din Muhammad in 1811 (the Hindostanee Coffee House in Portman Square). An explosion of restaurants occurred during London’s swinging 1960s, as a considerable number of Sylhetis set up restaurants to attract the newly adventurous palate of Londoners. (Sylhet is an area famous for its restaurateurs and restaurant workers, a history that goes back to the Lascar era, when Sylhet sent its men to work the galleys on merchant ships). These ‘Indian’ restaurants bore such names as Bengal, Moti Mahal and Calcutta. Across the Atlantic, the first restaurants opened on Manhattan’s Sixth Street in New York during the late 1960s by the Ahmed family, also from Sylhet. Their restaurants were called Shah Bagh, Kismoth and Romna.

Madhur Jaffrey bristled against these restaurants, which she felt had homogenised Southasian food and underestimated “both the curiosity and the palate of contemporary Americans”.

In his review of Suvir Saran and Raquel Pelzel’s American Masala, Vijay Prashad serves materialist history laced with gastropolitics and a generous helping of hybridity on the side.

I have come home from a long stay in Mexico to find - because of the presidential campaign, and especially because of the Obama-Clinton race for the Democratic nomination - a new country existing alongside the old.

Alice Walker writes that we are the ones we have been waiting for.

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