Anoothi Vishal savours this tome of food images.
In the main bazaar of Pahar Ganj, a popular area amongst backpackers who visit Delhi, there is a pakora stand that’s been there since the beginning of time. A fat man used to run it, at the corner of the vegetable market, selling pakoras for ten rupees a plate.”
This would be a common image from the bazaars of India. Every city, every locality in the country has its own snack-maker — frying bhajiyyas or pakoras or samosas or puris, choose what you will — a man you may have given very little thought to if you are an Indian immune to the many colours, aromas and charms of the country that invariably draw the Western eye to it. Sephi Bergerson goes on to explain that the pakoras were the “first food I ever ate in India” after deciding to explore the “real” country as distinct from the antiseptic environs of its hotels. “After the first tongue burn and runny nose, I was hooked,” he adds, thus establishing his love for the street food of India, his willingness to explore, and therefore his credentials in attempting a pictorial account of these very foods — their preparation, marketing and consumption.
It’s a great concept to begin with. There is no beating the vibrancy of street subjects in India. And Bergerson fine tunes this focus to give us something other than the usual Indophile accounts. As a commercial photographer in Israel, he says in the introduction, he felt the need for freshness in his work. For that he turned to India, a country he had visited earlier and fallen in love with, not in the least for its fritters! The move facilitated this project that began as a one-off “India story” for a Tel Aviv food magazine but took on a larger dimension as Bergerson travelled, over a period of time, and discovered many more flavours and textures. The images themselves are hugely appetising as Bergerson explores colours and textures in a way that food photography in India doesn’t usually. One of my favourites is a shot of bread pakoras from Amritsar. It involves cut triangles so that the yellows of the besan and (stuffed) potatoes invitingly alternate with the whites of the bread and paneer. The oily preparation is taken to a another aesthetic level.
Indian food can be a tough proposition for a photographer: It gets easily reduced to a brown mess on film. True, Bergerson here does not face the challenges of shooting a dal or a mashed subzi — snacks are easier—but he does attempt a runny aloo ki subzi in Varanasi.
There are some quintessentially “kitsch” pictures too — juice stalls or paan ones with bright film posters in the backdrop. And there are some typical beach scenes as well (hawkers on Chowpatty) not to mention Ramadan scenes that every newspaper regularly publishes around Id so as to make whirls of fried sweet vermicelli or huge paranthas a cliche.
What I like about other pictures is the way in which the body language of people comes through. Food is not the only protagonist here. You can get glimpses of real people, not cardboard cut-outs — a tired hawker, a content one, a curious onlooker, someone happily posing at the novelty of perhaps being clicked by a “foreigner”, also one who seems to be the master of all he surveys...
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Recipes accompany the pictures and there’s an attempt to authenticate — “aamlete” for omlette — these. But that’s the gimmicky bit. Were they sourced from the streets? Or are they sanitised versions all of us know and make at home?
STREET FOOD OF INDIA
Author: Sephi Bergerson
Publisher: Roli Books
Pages: 192
Price: Rs 695
