He almost died the first time he came to India, but that didn’t stop David Housego from settling down and doing business here. His affair with India continues.
As a former journalist, David Housego well knows that once the media hangs a label on you, it’s hard to shake it off. So if in the past few years Housego has acquired a reputation for being a foodie, an expert on ‘cooking in the Raj era’, it’s not a distinction that he seems to want to make much of. Even though, just last month, he delivered a lecture at the India International Centre in New Delhi on the subject, and directed the chefs there to make such staples of the Anglo-Indian dinner table as mulligatawny soup, Captain’s country chicken, pork vindaloo and ladies finger foogath.
It all began, says the former Asia correspondent of the Financial Times who now runs Shades of India, a high-end brand of soft furnishings made using Indian textiles and hand-craft traditions, which sells at major departmental stores worldwide such as Harrods, Selfridges, Barneys and Le Bon Marche, with an article that he wrote on the subject for Seminar magazine a few years ago. “They were doing an issue on food. People knew that I’m into cooking, and as you know, once you get labelled for something...”
The problem is, as a cuisine, cooking under the Raj cuisine doesn’t interest him. “I am interested in the background to it, in the sociological and historical perspectives, but as a food much of the cooking under the Raj doesn’t hang together. I followed an old recipe for Anglo Indian mutton curry in a book called The Raj at the Table by David Burton. What emerged was a burger, and a very rubbery kind of burger.”
India has always fascinated Housego, even though the first time to came here, he nearly died. He was very young then, just out of school and — like many of his compatriots — decided to spend the three months before college travelling across India. “It was a mad trip,” he reminiscences, lounging back in his homely first-floor office in Noida. “It was summer, I had very little money and I travelled third class on the train. I got jaundice and dysentery in Delhi, and had to be hospitalised in Allahabad. I went onwards to Santiniketan and came back and went to Oxford. My family was a bit concerned,” he says, his dry humour typically British. Far from putting him off, the experience only made him want to come back.
As a reporter with the FT, The Times and The Economist, Housego had occasion in later years to come back again and again, during interesting junctures in the history of the subcontinent. The first time was in 1971, on the eve of the Bangladesh war. He didn’t come to India, though, but to Islamabad, where the Times sent him to cover the war. “It was frustrating,” Housego remembers, “because, as you learn quickly, if you’re on the losing side of a war then you get very little information.”
He was back again in 1974, to write on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s first year in office. “I met him many times, got to know him really well and used to be invited to stay at Larkana [Bhutto’s family home]. He was the rising star then, a huge change after Yahya Khan, drunken general — intelligent and articulate, with a wide knowledge of the world. It was only later that power went to his head.”
Housego was in Islamabad again in 1979, this time with the FT, to cover Bhutto’s ouster in a coup by his army general, Zia ul-Haq. “I was one of the first foreign journalists to interviews him and I called him very unfavourable things...pompous and the like. The result was that that was the last time I was allowed to interviewed him. He would not see me again.”
It wasn’t the first time Housego had angered a head of state. As a freelance writer in the early 1970s, writing for the British papers from Iran, he’d seriously irked the Shah with his articles. It was a tumultuous time in Iran, or in the light of later events, the start of tumultuous times in the entire region. The Shah was on his way out, being edged out by militant fundamentalists; in a few years oil prices would go through the roof, shocking the world into an economic recession.
“I tracked all these and came to be known as a critic of the Shah. The Shah was very upset. He would summon the British ambassador and absolutely hammer him. In fact, when he travelled to London and met the prime minister at the time, one of the first things he raised was the coverage in the British press, and a lot of it about me,” Housego says, now laughing about it.
The first time he came to India as a journalist was in 1977, as part of a select band of journalists whom industrialist Swraj Paul had persuaded Indira Gandhi to allow back into the country (she had expelled all foreign mediamen during the Emergency).
“I covered the dramatic elections in 1977,” Housego says, “and it was a tremendous experience.”
In his more than 20 years as a journalist with the British press, Housego had many such experiences — staying in London or Paris (where he was FT's bureau chief) for half the year and the other half travelling all over the subcontinent and South Asia, even China (just after the Cultural Revolution), staying in five-star hotels, being able to establish close relations with those in power. In this he more than fulfilled the ambition with which he started out in the profession — “to be present as a reporter at great moments in history such as the French Revolution, etc.”
It was also his travels across the Middle East and later South Asia that sparked the interest in textiles that was to be his second calling. “In Iran we built up quite a large collection of rugs, kilims going back to the 19th century,” he says. Shades of India is now a $4 million business that Housego runs with his wife, textile designer Mandeep Negi. A few years ago, the World Bank held up the company as a laudable initiative in women-focused development. In the past year or so, the 14-year-old company has changed tack and is selling domestically as well, through ‘shop-in-shops’ at two Good Earth stores. Apart from furnishings, Shades of India now makes clothes as well under the brand Whites of India — loose, cotton kaftans, kurtas and dresses with very fine detailing that’s reminiscent of the Raj. Clearly, this is one Englishman whose fascination with India continues undimmed.
