Definitely local cuisine,” we decided on our first day in Port Blair, when we were asked what sort of food we’d like to eat. The concierge of our hotel looked a little puzzled as he asked, “What about Bengali food?” We stuck to our desire for local delicacies. “Tamil?” the man cajoled. “No, no!” we persisted, “Only local food for us.” He slumped, defeated. “But Bengali and Tamil are local only….” We stuck to our guns, thinking maybe he was just not a very good concierge.
We then asked the cabbie where to try local cuisine. “Seafood?” he asked hopefully. We agreed with alacrity, thinking that crab, lobster and prawns must be the staple of these lucky islanders. “We can cook seafood of your choice in authentic Bengali or Mangalorian style,” the waiter informed us. “How do locals eat it?” we asked. He also looked stumped: “The locals also eat it like this….”
Replete but slightly bemused after a Bengali meal, we began to wonder why nobody could tell us anything about “local” cuisine and culture. “Port Blair is largely a town of settlers,” said Raju, a cabbie/guide who we met later. “Before independence, it was largely a penal settlement, with prisoners of the British and Japanese living here. Post-Independence, the government offered the land here at throwaway prices to encourage people from the mainland to settle here.” Further, the original inhabitants of these jewel-like islands were tribes like the Jarawa, Onge and Sentinelese, all throwbacks to the Stone Age. “Some of them didn’t even know fire existed until recently!” said Raju. We slowly began to comprehend why our questions about local cuisine had been met with utter incomprehension.
“Even the so-called ‘Bengali’ or ‘Tamil’ culture you’ll see here isn’t authentic,” Raju went on. “There’s been so much intermingling that we often forget who we really are!” His own family is a case in point: he is a Buddhist from Burma married to a practising Muslim. “Add to this the fact that my mother was Hindu and my two school-going children love Holi and Diwali, and you get an interesting mishmash of cultures,” said he. And his family was not unique, for the migrant community in Port Blair was way too small to afford the luxury of marrying only within one’s own culture or community.
Their staple cuisine, said Raju, was very different from the “authentic” Bengali and Tamil food one found in restaurants. “You may find lobster and jumbo prawns on restaurant menus, but if you go to a simple man’s home in the Andamans, you’ll get shrimp or local fish with rice, regardless of whether the person is Burmese or Indian, Bengali or Tamil,” said he. The taste buds of the migrants have, in fact, adapted to local produce quite well. “What we eat today has more to do with what’s cheap and fresh in the market, rather than what our community traditionally eats,” said Raju. So while his grandfather used to reminisce about a diet of dried fish, vegetables and rice in Burma, the third generation in Port Blair is now happy to eat fresh fish and prawns cooked with tomatoes and onions. “We hardly eat any vegetables, as they are very expensive here,” said he, “But we do make liberal use of locally grown spices like black pepper.”
Anyway, after this conversation, we knew better than to ask for “local” food again. So, we ate everything from fish grilled in banana leaf to crab cooked in spicy tomato gravy, without really bothering to find out where it was really from…. At the end of the day, in the age of the new “local”, such things really didn’t seem to matter.
