Last week saw the passing of one of Indian soft power's most skilful exporters. Gulam Kaderbhoy Noon, who sat in Britain's House of Lords as a Labour Party-affiliated peer and was a 26/11 survivor - he was in the Taj during the siege - died aged 79. Mr Noon was born in what was then Bombay in 1936, a Dawoodi Bohra, a community known for two things: their business acumen and their delicious food. His family ran a sweet shop in the city; Mr Noon first began to export its products and then, in the 1970s, moved to London - to the South Asian district of Southall - and set up shop there with the £50 that was all that our draconian foreign-exchange regulations allowed him to bring.
Long before he passed away, he could have reflected on a job well done; it is few men who can claim to have helped change an entire nation's culinary preferences, but Mr Noon's career helped that extraordinary mash-up, chicken tikka masala, supercede the old English fish and chips as Britain's favourite dish.
It isn't as if curries didn't exist in England before the wave of desi immigration in the 1960s and 1970s that brought Mr Noon to its shores. But before Mr Noon, the British curry was an odd thing indeed. It survives today in the occasional pub, too bland for most Indians but, in my opinion, a pleasant and subtle dish - heavy on raisins and almonds and cream and, crucially, that fascinating colonial invention: old-fashioned "curry powder".
"Curry" was, in fact, integrated enough into British society that coronation chicken - invented by two cordon bleu chefs in honour of the accession of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 - is basically a drier British curry. And, especially in sandwiches or on top of a salad, it's super. (Don't take my word for it - if you live in Delhi, take a trip down to the pseudo-Edwardian tearoom Elma's in Hauz Khas Village or Meher Chand Market and find out for yourself.) One of the chefs who came up with coronation chicken, Constance Spry, talked about how delicate the flavour of "curry powder" actually was: "One would not venture to serve, to a large number of guests of varying and unknown tastes, a curry dish in the generally accepted sense of this term... I doubt whether many of the 300-odd guests at the coronation luncheon detected this ingredient in a chicken dish which was distinguished mainly by a delicate and nutlike flavour in the sauce."
The actual taste of "curry powder" is something that actually is completely unfamiliar to Indian palates. I remember asking at a Persian restaurant once what the dominant spice was in a particularly fine hummus-and-chicken dish, explaining I was from India and unfamiliar with Iranian spices. The chef explained he used "curry powder", while looking at me as if I was raving mad.
Amusingly, coronation chicken, although designed for a royal luncheon party, was actually meant to be very much a creature of the 1950s and not of the lavish imperial era. It was, in fact, Britain's first "TV dinner" - a post-War phenomenon associated normally with the American labour-saving suburban boom. "Many people bought their first television to watch the coronation," writes Joe Moran in his delightful romp around quotidian Englishness Queuing for Beginners, and "this dish was easy to combine with TV-watching... Designed to appeal across the Commonwealth, it combined convenience with exoticism in what would become a classic ready-meal combination."
Mr Noon's curries, when they supplanted coronation chicken on Britain's supermarket shelves sometime in the 1980s, were also aiming for that "classic ready-meal combination". By then, perhaps, England was ready for something in which the nuts did not dominate the spices; Spry, if alive in the 1980s, need not have worried about startling her 300 upper-crust guests.
And certainly, there were enough Asian immigrants in London to make a reasonably-sized market of their own. When the Conservative firebrand Enoch Powell gave his famous "river of blood" speech about immigration, he could with far more justice have talked about a "river of curry". The comic genius Rowan Atkinson had a sketch in the 1980s in which he played a weaselly Tory delivering an anti-immigrant speech at a party conference. "Don't get me wrong", the politician snivels, "I like curry. But, now that we have the recipe...." This is my second-favourite curry-related Brit comedy sketch, behind only Goodness Gracious Me's famous "Going for an English", in which the show's stars play a bunch of yobs in Bombay who turn up drunk at an "English restaurant" and compete over who can order the blandest dish.
By 2007, chicken tikka masala itself was on the decline - according to Mr Noon's clients at Sainsbury's, and reported in the Telegraph - as Britons began to demand spicier curries, led by the equally pre-fab "chicken Madras". And Guardian-writers now complain that you can't get a packet of curry powder in London for love or money; in fact, I suspect if you ask for it you'd be more likely to receive the kind of are-you-a-lunatic look that Iranian chef gave me.
Mr Noon made a name for himself, particularly after 26/11, as a firm opponent of religious extremism. The third thing Bohras are famous for is philanthropy, and he was famed for that as well. Britain, he said when explaining his decision to move there, was "a soft country"; certainly, he - perhaps one of the most influential of our entire diaspora - did a great deal to toughen up the lining of its collective stomach.
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
