This history of Indian food goes where no food historian (or Instagram photo) has ever gone before

Writing A History of Food in India sounds like an ambitious, if not impossible, project. On her latest outing, Colleen Taylor Sen attempts precisely that, and with a large measure of success.

Taylor Sen is a Chicago-based independent food historian and has written extensively on India. In her sixth full-length volume, she documents the evolution of Indian food and the dynamics of its intricate, multi-layered composition.

In a surprisingly handy, 350-page volume, Taylor Sen harmonises the diverse voices, traditions, and techniques that underlie the track of India’s culinary heritage without obfuscating a single note. This balancing act, in fact, serves as the focus of her enquiry: how does one speak of an Indian cuisine in the face of the multiplicity of sources that went into its making? Is there in fact a gastronomic culture in common to all Indians, and how does one begin to plot its contours?

The answer, and one of the book’s strengths, lies in rooting cultures of consumption within religious, philosophical, and socio-economic frameworks. Feasts and Fasts posits food not as fuel but as an active, ever-changing product of 5,000 years of political upheavals, migrations and conquests, revelries and lamentation.

Entrée

Taylor Sen begins with the Nehruvian idea of India as an ancient palimpsest, the almost clichéd notion of “unity in diversity,” and breaks it down to its foundational elements. Her methods favour a sort of history from below.

India’s originary moments – the Harappan civilisation, the coming of the Indo-Aryans, and the emergence of Hinduism – are historicised not merely through narratives of subjugation but also through a survey of the crops people grew, the livestock they raised, and most importantly, through what they ate and how they wrote about it. The discourse of food, for Taylor Sen, is just as revelatory of polyphonal engagements in society as its politico-economic one.

Her account, consequently, privileges dialogic encounters as central to the formation of the nation and its distinctive cuisine, detailing the successive waves of invasion that marked the land along with trade and diplomatic missions. The development of regional cuisines and the proliferation of diasporic sub-cultures indicate the impact that global movements of populations and capital witnessed in India from the third century BCE onwards had on its gustatory habits.

Throughout, Taylor Sen is interested in tracing a two-way flow of influence, as enthusiastic about the entry of rice in the classical world via Alexander as she is about the Portuguese origins of batata or the hegemonic draw of curry.

On the side

The richness and diversity of Indian gastronomy aside, a key marker of the food system is its insistence on the regulation of food habits. Accordingly, a significant portion of the book deals with the connection between diet and health, including the development of an entire classificatory system of food attributes and their interaction with the human body.

The book’s title forms a framing device, allowing the writer to bring injunctions on fasting and feasting within the ambit of religion and culture, while also analysing food prescriptions through the lens of health.

Along the way, Taylor Sen creates a text that is as varied in form as it is in content. Odes and hymns, rare visuals and detailed maps, quirky entries on “nabbe mil chai” (meant to take a lorry driver 90 miles!), recipes for items as far apart as shrikhand and barbecued rat, create pockets of happy surprise for the reader. Also creditable is the discussion of some of India’s earliest cookbooks and commentaries, among them the Manasolassa and the Ni’matnama.

Not on the menu

Certain omissions and elisions are glaring, however. Dalits are misidentified as scheduled tribes, as are the chandalas, though they are acknowledged as outcastes later on. The term “scheduled caste” finds no mention in the text at all.

There are other gaps and oversights. Shiva’s bull, Nandi, for instance becomes Nanda. The region-wise break up of cuisine finds no mention of newer states such as Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, and Delhi is given a miss altogether. The North Eastern states are, unfortunately, grouped together and sparsely discussed.

In offering an overview of Indian cuisine, Taylor Sen quotes Octavio Paz on the lack of a course-wise break-up of Indian food, and yet remarks on the “definite progression of flavours” in a Bengali meal a few pages later. For an experienced India commentator, these baffling observations and contradictions mar an otherwise well-researched volume.

The problem lies, perhaps, in the scope of the text itself. In an attempt to be representative, Taylor Sen misses out on subtle variations. Additionally, the book would have benefitted from more vigilant editing and better typesetting, creating a livelier interface between the text and the visuals.

In the final reckoning, it must be said, however, that Feasts and Fasts is a book that charts the culinary map of India with passion and precision, and Taylor Sen offers a fine introduction to its historical antecedents.