Diss and be damned

When a basic food item galvanised the masses to rise against an empire

If you’re looking for entertainment, some pleasant diversion from your dull workday, Twitter is often the place to get it. Twitter fights are the best of all, in my book. When people throw their 280-character worth of outrage, snark and derision at each other, or at someone, it’s time to get the popcorn and enjoy the show. Last week, the social media platform hosted one such flood of righteous indignation when Tom Nichols, an American academic and columnist, tweeted: “I think Indian food is terrible, and we pretend it isn’t.”

Ouch. Who on earth was Nichols to come out with such a monstrous calumny? (For the record, he’s just an individual who was reacting to someone else’s tweet asking people to post their most controversial food opinion.) Lots of people, mostly Indians, took serious umbrage and Nichols was variously lambasted as uninformed, uncivilised, lacking in taste buds, and, also, a racist, white-male solipsist who could neither fathom nor abide Third World excellence. In short, he was subjected to an aria of outrage that verged on the hysteric, all because he said he did not like Indian cuisine.

Now, I love my country’s food. I love its astonishing variety of flavours and stunning array of cuisines. And when I first read Nichols’s tweet, I was tempted to reply, “Dude, you Americans don’t even have a cuisine! Italy ke paas pizza hai; France ke paas coq au vin hai; Britain ke paas at least fish and chips hai; tumhare paas kya hai?”

But ultimately, my desire to add my two cents to the Twitter storm in a tea cup was overtaken by a sort of sneaking admiration for Nichols. Because, hey, these days it takes courage to criticise the “cool”. I don’t even allow myself to think that I found the movie Inception unwatchable. (My film buff friends thought it was brilliant.) In uppity company, I hesitate to admit that I hate sashimi and find the very idea of beef (sorry, sanskaaris, I meant buff) carpaccio pukey. And here was Nichols, bravely dissing the food of a billion-plus people, not to mention millions of bursting-with-native-pride NRIs. Yes, the guy was severely challenged in the palate department, but he was intrepid. 

Mahatma Gandhi

For, if you think about it, food is not just about culture, and hence likely to arouse nativistic passions. Food also has economic and political subtexts to it. Indeed, there are times when food can be sheer political dynamite. Marie Antoinette’s famous remark, “If they don’t have bread, why don’t they eat cake?” summed up the French aristocrats’ callousness towards the misery of the commoners, a callousness that eventually led to the French Revolution. In 1857, the rumour that cartridges of Enfield rifles had been greased with beef and pork fat triggered a mutiny in the forces of the East India Company. Call it mutiny, call it India’s First War of Independence, it happened because a few insensitive Brits hadn’t bothered to think through the effect of disregarding the food culture of the locals. And remember Mahatma Gandhi’s Dandi March in 1930, where he led thousands of people to the seashore and made salt as an act of civil disobedience against the exploitative Salt Tax? It was a political masterstroke that used the most basic of food items to galvanise the masses against the British Raj. 

Cut to the present, and food politics carries on apace. In India, the bans on cow slaughter and beef and the aggressive push towards vegetarianism — to the extent that poor, malnourished children are denied eggs in their school mid-day meals — are all part of the attempt by Hindu nationalist groups to impose a cultural narrative in tune with their own political identity. As for the stratospheric price of onions that’s bringing tears to our eyes, well, who knows what its political cost will be and which government will end up paying it.

Given the potent economic, political and cultural underpinnings of food, Nichols may have got off lightly. At least, the owners of all those lovely Indian restaurants in the West, usually filled to the rafters with locals, didn’t give out a supari in his name to stop him from trashing Indian cuisine and building a dangerous new narrative around it. Nichols might have found that a hard nut to crack.

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