A Sensual Revolution

I was about five years old when I first visited a restaurant. Located on Main Street (later renamed Mahatma Gandhi Road) Indus was one of Poona's earliest 'posh' eating places. Started by a Sindhi refugee from Pakistan, it specialised in refreshments never prepared in our home: cucumber sandwiches, mutton puffs, cutlets, pastries and, above all, an assortment of ice-creams which were topped with a bright and buxom red cherry. You kept the cherry in the cup until the last drop of ice-cream had been scooped out and then savoured it bit by succulent bit. It is Indus with its thick, creamy vanilla ice-cream and its red cherry which turned me into a multi-palatal being.

Five decades ago, eating out required more than gastronomic daring. Anyone sighted in a restaurant had to explain for transgressing a taboo. For my grandparents' generation the shortest route to damnation was through a brothel, a bar and a restaurant. To eat out was, first and foremost, a waste of money. But this was not half as valid as another, lethal argument: the deeply ingrained belief in notions of pollution and purity. I never heard my grandparents use these words. But sarcastic references to hygiene in restaurants, and to eating from crockery used by "God alone knows who" were sufficient to understand their complaint. And so it transpired that to step into Indus was to defy caste rigidities and to graduate, as it were, to the rarified realms of cosmopolitanism and modernity.

The ground for this transition was prepared much earlier. The test of a social reformer in 19th century Maharashtra was a gastronomic test. In October 1890, for instance, the Panch House Mission at Poona was the venue of a tea-party which an eccentric social reformer, Gopalrao Joshi, had helped organise. Among the guests were luminaries like B.G. Tilak and M.G. Ranade. Tea and biscuits were served. Some accepted these 'Christian' preparations. Some declined politely. But Joshi had the entire guest list published in a newspaper ostensibly to expose the doublespeak of the reformers. The choice before them was straightforward: perform the required expiatory rites or face excommunication for losing caste. Embarrassment and harassment followed but the point driven home was that food is no trifling matter. (Meena Kosambi recalled this episode in a recent article in The Economic and Political Weekly.)

The nature of eating out changed when students and workers from all over Maharashtra began to pour into Poona and Bombay. In a series of lively articles, Loksatta Editor Aroon Tikekar highlights the importance of the khanavals (board, cost of eating). Initially these supplied meals of a particular region and sub-caste to members of that caste at extremely reasonable rates on a monthly basis. But things changed when certain enterprising widows opened khanavals to all without distinction of caste (though not of creed). Social reformer Keshav Sitaram Thackeray (father of the Shiv Sena chief) has penned a powerful portrait of one such pioneer, Sakhubai, whose khanaval in Bhatwadi can well be considered a precursor of the modern restaurant. She took the first step to rid 'eating out' of its obnoxious social connotations.

However, the credit for taking this trend far beyond, and indeed for 'industrialising' it, belongs to the Irani restaurant. By the time the first such restaurant opened in the first decade of the century, western education, industrialisation and urbanisa-tion had created congenial conditions for gastronomic cosmopolitanism. In her essay Dining out in Bombay published in Consuming Modernity, Carol A. Breckenridge argues that Irani restaurants have altered eating habits and entrenched social mores.

Three other developments have made 'eating out' what it is today: proliferation of Udipi restau

Space does not allow me to salute other entrepreneurs who have enriched the Indian palate and the idea of Indianness: Punjabis from the Frontier who have made tandoori a synonym for national cuisine; Muslim cooks in Delhi, Luck now, Hyderabad and Kerala who have developed cuisines which defy the generic notion of 'Muslim food'; Parsi food (with its blend of Persian, Gujarati and western savours); Bohra food; Ben gali food; and, not least, cuisines from China, Thailand, France, Italy and the Arab world.

 Thus, from Vedic times to present times, the Indian palate has travelled a long way. But much remains to be discovered. Food, more than sex, provides innumerable combinations and permutations. We would not have realised this but for the media. In matters gastronomic, we would not have realised our capacity for culinary adventure without, say, a Jiggs Kalra or a Madhur Jaffery or a Tarla Dalal. Such writers have driven home the point that the celebration of taste is at once a sensual, spiritual and social act: we are called upon to reach out to other aromas, other flavours, other cultures. This might lead to an upset tummy now and then, but that is a small price to pay for the delectable, if ephemeral, joy of living to eat.

True, Indians, like people everywhere, remain attached to their mother's cooking. But increasingly they are eager to extend their gastronomic experience: from sub-caste to caste, then to the region as a whole, to neighbouring regions, then to all of India and finally to wherever their culinary fancy takes them in the world. In the process, at least for the duration of the meal, caste and community, national and cultural faultlines disappear. To the extent that an Indian is now a bricoleur of his or her own culinary delights, we have, gastronomically speaking, come of age as a people.