Review of Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors by Lizzie Collingham, Alimentum, June 2011

 (Originally appeared in the June 2011 web edition of Alimentum: The Literature of Food)

Source: http://www.alimentumjournal.com/curry

Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors

by Lizzie Collingham

Oxford University Press|USA, March 2007

Paperback: 352 pages, 34 halftones & 5 maps

ISBN: 978-0195320015

Every time I stir a pot of some tomato rasam (a home-cooked version of the mulligatawny soup that you might find on an Indian restaurant menu) I conjure up images of my mother, my mother’s mother, and then her mother making the same rasam, using the same proportion of lentils to tomatoes to tamarind, with a good bit of rasam spice mix thrown in. The aroma of the simmering tomatoes, tamarind and red chilies, so essential to this recipe, and so quintessentially South Indian, engulf me as I stir the concoction, slowly losing myself to the sepia-toned nostalgia of home, food memories and the heavenly aroma of garlic on ghee. The food of my forefathers. And mothers.

Romantic? Yes. Overly romantic? Why, yes, according to Lizzie Collingham. The recipe for rasam may be quintessentially Tamil, but not what goes into it. Chances are, my ancestors’ rasam tasted a lot different from what I make today—not merely because my Roma tomatoes are the chemically frozen kind. The red chilies and tomatoes, native to the New World, were introduced to the Indian palate by the Portuguese via the Spanish, and the tamarind, native to Africa, came perhaps by way of the Portuguese.

In Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, Collingham offers up a fascinating study exploring the history of Indian cuisine from around the time of the Mughal empire. A historian by training, she takes us through India’s rich, vast and varied culinary history, offering up a veritable “biography of curries,” as she calls it.

Curry documents the history of central Asian, Persian and later European influences that over time created, converged, and interacted to produce what can loosely be called Indian cuisine. Beginning with the Mughals, its narrative meanders through the Portuguese and later British colonization, then moves on to the global diffusion of Indian food, beginning with curry, a uniquely British invention and contribution to the globalization of Indian food. An entire chapter is devoted to the sustained marketing efforts of the British in selling a hitherto unknown and strange brew to the natives: tea.

The chili, which many still mistakenly believe to be native to the Indian sub-continent, was a new world crop that was introduced by the Portuguese in the 15th century. Christopher Columbus set off in 1492 to capture the lucrative spice trade by means of a new sea route for Spain. On landing in the Caribbean islands, he chanced upon a local spice, which he believes is a pepper. It wasn’t; it was a type of chili. Columbus not only mistakenly anointed the Native Americans as Indians, but he also misclassified the chili, which in itself would have been an amazing discovery, as a pepper, something that the Europeans had come to enjoy and crave. The chili—with the spiciest variant now grown in India—soon grew to replace the long pepper or the Piper longum in spice mixes and quickly became a staple of the south Indian diet.

Collingham’s deep passion for the history of Indian food is matched by her writing. Charming, witty, and honest, her prose provides just the right mix of scholarly and popular writing for both casual readers and students of culinary histories.

As I season yet another pot of rasam with spluttering mustard and cumin seeds, I ask myself if the new world chili and tomato make this rasam any less South Indian. Probably not, since food, Collingham might agree, is not a mere summation of ingredients. Food is the collective memory of taste, texture, color, and the aroma of spluttering mustard and cumin seeds passed on from my grandmother to my mother to me.

My recipe for Tomato Rasam:

Ingredients:

2 tbsp of ghee/clarified butter

3-4 cloves of garlic, minced, roughly chopped or whole. (I prefer minced garlic).

lime-sized ball of tamarind, soaked in a bowl of warm water

6 cups of water

2-3 Roma tomatoes, chopped

1 tbsp of rasam spice mix (also available in Indian grocery stores)

2 tsp of turmeric powder

¾ cup of cooked toor dal (yellow pigeon peas, available in Indian grocery stores)

2 tbsp of vegetable oil (olive oil works too)

3 tsp of black mustard seeds

3 tsp of cumin seeds

handful of cilantro springs, finely chopped

handful of curry leaves, if available

Heat the ghee in a 1.5 quart saucepan on medium-high.

As soon as you can smell the aroma of melting ghee (an aroma like none other), throw in the garlic. When garlic turns golden brown, add the tamarind water (squeezing the tamarind to extract as much juice as possible); add up to 4 cups of water, including the tamarind extract.

Bring to a boil, and then add the chopped tomatoes.

Bring to boil again, and gently squish the tomatoes until well-blended.

Add the spice mix, turmeric, and salt to taste.

Reduce heat to medium-low, cover, and let simmer for about 10-15 minutes, until an orangish froth begins to form.

When frothy layer is evident, mix in the cooked toor dal with 2 more cups of water and turn heat back up to medium-high.

In a separate pan, heat up the vegetable/olive oil; throw in the mustard and cumin seeds.

Remove from heat when seeds start spluttering and add to tomato/toor dal mixture in saucepan. Stir.

Remove saucepan from heat, taste and add more salt if necessary.

Garnish rasam with cilantro and curry leaves.

Serve with white rice, south Indian potato curry, and papadams.

Serves up to 4.

My own private heaven will serve this rasam every day.

Review of The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma by Gurcharan Das, May 2011, India Currents

To be (good) or not to be (good)

Girija Sankar • Published on May 5, 2011

THE DIFFICULTY OF BEING GOOD: ON THE SUBTLE ART OF DHARMA by Gurcharan Das, Oxford University Press, USA. Paperback. 488 pages. $16.95.

The debate over what is good and what is evil is as old as humanity. An absolutist might say, “We are good and they are evil” while a relativist might point out that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. In a complex world, where nothing is black and white, it is hard to discern what is good or evil from the shades of grey that envelop every issue. It is precisely this grey area that Gurcharan Das tackles in TheDifficulty of Being Good…. 

Das takes dives deep into the Mahabharata, the great Indian epic, to investigate this weighty topic of good and evil, and what emerges is a thoroughly enjoyable, well-informed, and researched account. The book’s subtitle, “On the Subtle Art of Dharma,” captures the intricacies and nuances in the Mahabharata that are often left out in comic book or television versions of the epic.

Das, a prolific writer, studied philosophy as an undergraduate at Harvard University and enjoyed an illustrious career in the corporate world.  He took early retirement from his job as the CEO of Proctor & Gamble, India to pursue writing. In his 60s, the author decided to take an academic holiday spending a number of years at the University of Chicago researching and writing this book under the guidance of preeminent Indologists and Sanskrit scholars.

The book uses the term “dharma” to broadly outline a framework of evaluating what might be good or evil. The Mahabharata is deconstructed from this perspective, and the refrain of whether an action is dharma or not becomes a recurring theme of the book. At the same time, the very nature of dharma is also examined in the light of various events in the Mahabharata—Yudhishtra gambling away his kingdom, the attempted disrobing of Draupadi, or the war at Kurukshetra. The book is organized into chapters based on the character traits of its main actors. Hence chapter headings such as “Duryodhana’s envy,” “Arjuna’s Despair,” and “Krishna’s Guile” lead to an examination of the role of each character in the epic and the morality of their actions.

A reader who is already familiar with the Mahabharata’s themes, characters, and stories will be able to better enjoy the author’s perspectives, for though Das provides an overview in the beginning, and intersperses the chapters with details from the epic, the nuances of the author’s arguments are better understood with a much more detailed knowledge of the epic.

One chapter that might not be to the liking of the religious-minded, though, is the one that examines Krishna’s role in the epic, especially the questionable tactics that he persuades the Pandavas to espouse in order to win various battles. Das points out that Duryodhana himself, as he lies dying on the battlefield, questions Krishna’s advice to Bhima on how to vanquish Duryodhana—by breaking his thighs using Bhima’s mace. He also questions Krishna’s similar advice to Arjuna to kill Karna when he was fixing his chariot, or orchestrating the killing of Drona, the Pandavas’ teacher, by committing Yudhishtra to a lie.

Das’s analysis of Krishna’s role is a liberal secularist reading of the epic as a historical document, much like Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest for the Historical Jesus attempted to treat the life of Jesus in more of a historical than religious context. Krishna’s instruction to the Pandavas “Casting aside virtue, ye sons of Pandu, adopt now some contrivance for gaining the victory” captures the essence of his conviction which, in the words of the great football coach Vince Lombardi, is, “winning isn’t everything, it is the only thing.”

However, Das seems much too eager to drop frequent references to his Ivy League past and his corporate career, with a number of references to Western philosophers and extensive name-dropping. Moreover, the author’s attempts to compare the epic’s quandaries with Western religious thought and provide all-too-easy answers seem incongruous with his exegetical approach in the book. There is a continuing element of moral outrage against Indian politicians which not only becomes overbearing but rather defeats the central point of his analysis, which is that that there is complexity in every human endeavor, as exemplified in theMahabharata, and that one should not rush to quick judgment.

The book encourages the reader to make their own investigation of the Mahabharata in its entirety (100,000 verses) and Das provides an extensive bibliography and many sources from which to begin. It also provides excellent background material to begin contemplating contemporary moral problems, such as the legitimacy of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the use of torture as strategy, and what constitutes a just war.

In conclusion though, the book raises more questions than it answers. In a way that seems to be the author’s intent, for that too seems to be the point of the Mahabharata, that there is no easy way to engage with the world and everything that inhabits it, and that even great heroes have doubts, they often despair, and are remorseful. There is good and evil in the world and sometimes one cannot tell which is which. 

Review of India Calling by Anand Giridharadas, JMWW, Spring 2011

Originally appeared in the Spring 2011 edition of JMWW.
Source: http://jmww.150m.com/IndiaCallingrev.html

India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Re-making
by Anand Giridharadas
Times Books, NY, New York. 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9177-9, $25.00

Let's hold up Anand Giridharadas's India Calling as a mirror that reflects the zeitgeist of 21st-century India. What does one see? One sees aspirations, dreams, new-found desires, and hope. But the mirror only reflects what is immediately opposite. In reading India Calling, one realizes that what better reflects India is a fun-house mirror, at once exaggerating the new riches and lest you are caught up in the euphoria of a resurgent India, smacks you in the face with chilling images of crushing ,debilitating poverty, malnutrition, and corruption, of farmers committing suicide and politicians slipping cash-loaded envelopes into daily newspapers, quite literally, securing vote banks.

Anand Giridharadas, a writer and columnist for the New York Times, grew up in suburban Ohio of the 1970s and 80s but moved to India in the early 2000s. A product of a multi-ethnic family (father, a Tamil from the south and mother, a Punjabi from the north), his initial idea of India was severely limited to his yearly vacations spent with family and friends who belonged to what he calls the Anglicized elite of India. Giridharadas's India of the 1970s and 80s was stagnant, unchanging, caught in the morass of caste, communalism, and the license raj. When he returned to India in 2003 for a lucrative job with an international consulting firm and then onto a position with the Times, he witnessed a transformation in the very soul and psyche of its peoples. Giridharadas's India of the 2000s was an India breaking free from the shackles of its colonial, caste-ridden past, an India "that was changing when I arrived, and it continued to change dramatically, viscerally, improbably."

Six chapters, variously titled "Dream," "Ambition," "Pride," "Anger," "Love," and "Freedom," are each devoted to the author's own musings and supporting character portrayals in the vein of the chapter's title. Thus, in Ambition we encounter the ambitious Ravindra, who by far is the most fascinating of that people that the author chronicles. Ravindra lives in Umred, a small town in rural Maharashtra state, home also to Bombay. Born into a poor family, of a caste that while not untouchable was still considered backward (belonging to the vague category of OBC or "Other Backward Caste"), Ravindra, dreams big and what's more, makes it big too. He organizes a pageant for young men and women in Umred, opens up finishing schools that provide personality development and English language coaching, and even heads a delegation of roller-skaters to an international competition in Hong Kong. In Ravindra, the roller-skating, Dale Carnegie-quoting, English-speaking small-town entrepreneur, Giridharadas finds all that is new and resurgent in today's India.

A broader question that emerges from reading India Calling is one of representation. Who and whose point of view does the author represent? Indeed, should he represent anybody but himself? Further yet, is the question of representation even pertinent to this discussion? Well, The answer is yes and no. No, if works such as this provide vignettes with minimal meta observations and allow the readers to come to their own conclusions. Yes, if, as the byline to India Calling suggests, the author is attempting to paint an "intimate portrait of a nation's re-making." Now that's a tall order, and with it comes a great responsibility. One of presenting a well-rounded and balanced argument or view point. Giridharadas sets out to paint this portrait by falling back on his family's history in and out of India and then by teasing out strands of similarity between his family's experiences and a few other characters that he meets along the way during his time in India. While his character portrayals are strong, immediate and provide fertile ground to display both his story telling and journalistic skills, where the book falls short is in its analysis. Girdharadas's arguments though while not explicitly so, are one of economic determinism, whether in portraying Ravindra's meteoric rise from small town lad to an ambitious entrepreneur or in contrasting the old guard India with the new guard India.

Review of Delhi:Adventures in a Mega City by Sam Miller, February 2011, India Currents

(Source: http://www.indiacurrents.com/articles/2011/02/25/down-and-dirty-with-delhi)
Down and Dirty with Delhi

Girija Sankar 

DELHI: ADVENTURES IN A MEGACITY, by Sam Miller. St. Martin’s Press, New York, N.Y. July 2010. Hardcover. 304 pages. $24.99  

So often in travel writing, the protagonist (travel writer) is an intrepid, nomadic backpacker-traveler whose goal is not so much to sight-see but to meet the locals, to get into their heads, live their lives and get at the essence of what it means to be local whether it be Latvian, Bhutanese, or Chilean. They revel in their chance encounters—the auto-rickshaw driver that invites them home for a cup of tea and then to his sister’s wedding—pondering,  together, the purpose of the universe and how, in its infinite wisdom, it brought them together. I have to say that, having been to a few places on the map, this is not an easy thing to emulate. You don’t always meet interesting locals at the bus-stop. Mostly, they are too busy to notice you. You don’t always get invited to weddings. And these are not experiences the average traveler can relate to.

Sam Miller’s peregrinations through Delhi offers a antidote to travel writing that fetishize, romanticize, and exoticize. Miller’s account of Delhi is at its best the quintessence of travel writing—recount your experience as an itinerant and an observer.

Miller’s wife is Indian and grew up in Bombay, a city that Miller initially finds more endearing than Delhi. He also speaks Hindi, a marketable skill that probably makes it easier to get a conversation going with the locals.

The premise in Delhi is quite simple. Discover the city. By foot. In a spiral route starting out at Connaught Place. The people he meets are incidental to the places he sees on the route. Quite deliberately, conversations with individuals get their own mini chapters titled “Intermission,” suggesting that the route and the perambulations take precedence over the chance encounters. So while he does meet the odd idiosyncratic professor, or the undertaker, or rag picker, it is the very idea of  walking, albeit in a peculiar spiral route, (which the author rationalizes quite well) through a city of close to 15 million with no remarkable walking paths  that makes this a unique attempt at travel writing.

Miller chooses a walking route after carefully considering various geometric possibilities. This eliminates what often intrigues the reader—how does the travel writer travel, i.e. what are the elemental mechanics of travel? In this, Miller’s Delhi is a true guide. One could pick the book up and quite literally follow in his foosteps. But do it soon, if you must, for Delhi, as Miller suggests, is ever-changing, its contours forever being redrawn.

Miller takes on the french “flaneur” approach to traveling and writing (a flaneur is a wanderer, taking in all that comes one’s way, not charting any detailed route, but walking wherever your  feet take you). The author’s first brush with all things Delhi was through a film called theHouseholder, an early Merchant-Ivory production. The characters, the locations, the colors, and the nostalgia so influence the author that the film plays a charming cameo throughout the book. Miller is so captivated by Delhi that is portrayed in the film that he chases the exact location where a certain scene is shot on a rooftop of a building next a mosque. He somehow manages to locate both the mosque and the building. Lovers of Hindi film nostalgia will certainly appreciate these vignettes that run through the book.

Interesting contrasts can be made between Dalrymple’s Delhi and Miller’s Delhi. While Dalrymple is eloquent in his praise for Delhi’s unique  architectural styles, Miller is more cynical about the explosion in suburban growth, malls, and the widening social gap.

As a social commentator, however, Miller’s arguments  tend to be prosaic and debatable. For instance, Miller suggests “.. and Delhi is, more than ever, full of people who see the West as a model for ‘progress,’ who covet luxury cars and European holidays, or crave an American education ...” Observations about the East looking West and the West looking back at the East had their hey-days in the 90s. Again, while at  a hospital to donate blood, Miller observes how the hospital waiting room is perhaps  the only place where “an eclectic group of people might be thrown together and the occasion [of blood donation] has a classless...feel.”  He then goes on to say that “it was a reminder of ... how rarely the rich and the poor have the chance to interact, and never as equals.” Is one supposed to believe that the rich and poor indeed do behave as equals in London or that the denizens of the upper west side rub shoulders with their counterparts from Jamaica, Queens? That does not hold water. The “south side” is almost synonymous with disadvantaged neighborhoods in most American cities where gentrification forces poor people farther out of the city. In the United States, the better-off can choose not to drive through seedy neighborhoods, avoiding any interaction altogether. In India, the huge informal economy necessitates and facilitates interactions between the various classes. Thus a middle class household would in any given day interact with the vegetable vendor, the fruit seller, the laundry wallah, the maid, the driver, the ayah etc. These interactions do not necessarily translate to greater empathy or understanding on the part of the better-off for the not-so-better-off, but they do render class differences starker than in the west. Contrary to what Miller observes, class differences are not brushed under the lush carpets of the South Delhi elite. Miller the travel writer is much better than Miller the social commentator.

However, Miller’s wit and humor are evident through out the narrative, whether in describing, in candid detail, the shit-squirter by a subway close to Regal Cinema, or the number of attempts (17) to visit different ministries (3) and offices (5) to obtain a PIO card, or his near-surreal experience at the International Center for World Renewal—an outfit run by the Brahma Kumaris.

Miller’s Delhi is a narrative in the here and the now, and not merely about the tombs and forts of the previous incarnations of Delhi. His walks take him to Delhi’s swanky new metro stations, to open air slaughter houses, and through garbage dumps. And Miller does not sanitize his experiences for the reader.

The author’s travel is one that travelers and adventure seekers can actually emulate, one spiral after another, and that, I would argue, can be the best compliment for a travelogue. But be wary, though. Walking Delhi is a difficult endeavor. Miller was hit by an auto-rickshaw, chased by pigs and fell into a man hole—none life-threatening, but to be taken into consideration nevertheless for flaneurs inspired by the writer.