There’s a vast gulf between the India as fantasised in diaspora cookbooks and the reality of its modern food
In Britain, food writing by “minority groups” – and here I’m talking about Indians, because that’s my own background – almost always gives a central role to those “heirloom family recipes” handed down the generations from mother or grandmother. When I started writing about food 20 years ago, an editor even joked that I would have to “invent a grandmother”. It was already a cliche a generation ago, but now this problematic pursuit of “authenticity” through appeals to a mythic matriarch is simply done to death.
I’m not the only one fed up with the trope. I recently tweeted about my wish to see an Indian cookbook that actually reflected the growing reality of how so many people in India and across the diaspora learn to cook: not through a storied encounter between grandmother and child, but online. It struck a chord, with Indians commenting in droves. “I feel so seen,” wrote one, while random strangers wondered if I was referring to them.
Sejal Sukhadwala is a London-based food writer. Her book, The Philosophy of Curry, will be published in March 2022
