For the millions of Indians travelling abroad, food lessons from Gandhi, Vivekananda and Mamata

Around 1893, a young Mohandas Gandhi started writing a guide to London. He was working as a barrister in Pretoria, South Africa, but did not have much work and decided to put his recent experience of living in the United Kingdom while studying law to good use by writing a guide for Indians travelling there. A great part of this manuscript, which was never completed, involved food.

It started with the long voyage: 22 days by sea to London, or 13 by sea to Brindisi in Italy, from where it was two days by rail. Food was served onboard, but Gandhi hints it was boring: “As a precaution, it would be better to keep a stock of some fresh fruits and sweets, e.g., jalebi, halva, etc., and some salt things, e.g., ganthia.”

Gandhi notes: “If a pious Indian does not want to eat food cooked by Europeans, he can cook his own food in the Indian quarters…whether this is advisable or not is quite another matter.” On his own first trip, he quickly exhausted his snacks and was apprehensive of the dining room food. But a more resourceful passenger struck a deal with the Indian crew and got the crew to cook for them. It was the kind of informal arrangement that helped many Indians survive their journey by sea.

In London, Gandhi advised Indian travellers, whatever their dietary habits, to try the Vegetarian Hotel in Charing Cross, which was presumably more used to dealing with Indians than most establishments. They could then search for more permanent lodgings and eating arrangements. A great deal of the manuscript’s text goes into arguing that a vegetarian diet was the cheapest and most nutritious way to survive in London. But from the food examples he gives – oatmeal, pulses, nuts, vegetables and fruit only in season – it does not sound too appetising.

Gandhi realised this for himself after encountering Narayan Hemchandra, an eccentric Gujarati writer who was travelling the world despite having fixed eating habits and little money. Gandhi was used to English vegetarian fare by then and offered to make him carrot soup. Hemchandra scorned this. He found mung dal from somewhere and cooked it. “I ate it with delight,” Gandhi admitted. Sometimes only desi food will do.

Swami Vivekananda had the opposite problem. After his triumphant address to the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago in 1893, he travelled all over the United States and Europe for three years, usually hosted by people interested in Hinduism or Theosophy. Many of them had become vegetarian and automatically assumed that Vivekananda was too. But he wasn’t and, while he had long periods of ascetic life, he felt the energy expended in his travels and many speaking assignments required him to eat meat, especially in colder climes.

In Guru to the World, Ruth Harris’s biography of Vivekananda, she writes: “In California, he asked Lucy Beckham and George Roorbach, vegetarians in the Bay Area, to provide him with ‘proper food’… ‘I must have meat. I cannot live on potatoes and asparagus with the work I am doing!’” But any frustrations with food were easily assuaged by the one food Americans had perfected – ice cream. Harris quotes one follower, Maud Stumm, on how when ice cream was offered, “he would sink into his place with a smile of expectancy and pure delight seldom seen on the face of anybody over sixteen.”

Politicians are not exempt from food problems. In her memoir My Unforgettable Memories, Mamata Banerjee writes about the food issues she has faced while travelling abroad as a young political worker. On her first trip in 1983, for an international trade union conference in Kuala Lumpur, she survived on bread since she hated the smell of the palm oil used for cooking all the food. She was better prepared in the future, and always took stocks of puffed rice as a fallback. And since she liked eggs, it was always possible to have simple egg dishes.

In 1987, she went to Vietnam as an All India Youth Congress representative, along with a colleague, Ganesh Shanker Pandey, who was a strict vegetarian. Banerjee managed with eggs, but Pandey was unnerved by the variety of meats he saw the Vietnamese enjoying and stuck to bread. After a while though, when he got deeply bored with this, Pandey asked Banerjee if they could get something made with potatoes. With their interpreter’s help, she spoke to the kitchen staff and they agreed to make a potato curry.

When it arrived, Pandey eagerly started eating, but then Banerjee realised the chefs had mixed in diced chicken. First, she hoped he wouldn’t notice, but then he came across a bone. “He asked me, ‘Mamataji, what is this?’ I replied ‘Vegetables.’” But larger bones started turning up and Pandey became furious, asking Banerjee why she did not stop him from the start. Equally annoyed now, she replied, “Then you would have gone hungry again. This is not home where I can organise an alternative for you. If you don’t want to depend on others you should carry some dried food like puffed rice or pressed rice.”

Fussy eaters

All these food travails demonstrate the challenges Indians have always faced while travelling abroad. Our food habits are misunderstood, or the nuances are confused or, perhaps the biggest problem, people assume one set of rules fits all Indians. But our food habits are as diverse as we are and travelling complicates them with the differing reactions of people when out of home. Some become adventurous and are keen to try new foods. Others turn ultra-cautious as they lose their domestic control over what they eat. And most fall in the middle, wanting food to enhance their experience of travel, but unsure how to find what would satisfy them.

This matters now because more Indians than ever are turning into travellers. “International departures from India more than doubled, to 270m, in the decade to 2019,” wrote The Economist recently, in a long story, accompanied by an editorial, about the global potential of Indian tourists. “Overseas spending by Indian travellers tripled between 2010 and 2023, to $33bn. One forecast suggests it will jump to $45bn next year.” Tourist economies want to get their hands on this money.

The Economist notes two problems. One is the difficulties in getting visas, leading Indian tourists to abjure visa stingy European countries for Middle Eastern and South East Asian ones that are eager to accommodate Indian arrivals. But it was “availability of Indian food – especially vegetarian” that was flagged as the top issue for many. This may be linked to larger numbers of family groups and older people travelling abroad. More settled in their food habits or with health concerns, they are less likely to experiment. Peer pressure is also greater – one young man moaned to me how travelling with family meant he could not eat meat, unless he sneaked out to do it alone.

Indians are not alone in being fussy about food abroad. Complaining about food has always been a part of travel, but before the 19th century, most travellers were traders, pilgrims, diplomats, exiles or soldiers, whose larger issues took precedence over what they ate. But with the growth in the 19th century of travel as an end in itself, food became more of a focus. “The basis of tourism is a perception of otherness, of something being different from the usual,” writes Lucy M Long in the introduction to Culinary Tourism, a collection of essays. And since we have to eat, food while travelling literally brings that otherness into us. We cannot just observe this new world, but have to risk or revel at swallowing it up.

About 15 years back, as the Chinese economy opened up, it was Chinese tourists who were the big opportunity. In his 2011 essay The Grand Tour, New Yorker writer Evan Osnos went along with a Chinese tour group in Europe – and almost never ate local cuisine. In Paris, after a boat trip down the Seine, the group was hustled into a Chinese restaurant literally located underground: “It was a hive of activity invisible from the street, a parallel Paris…Down another staircase, into another windowless room, where dishes arrived: pork braised in brown sauce, bok choy, egg-drop soup, spicy chicken.”

There are practical reasons to be wary of foreign food. Every geography has its own microbes that can upset our digestive system, causing havoc on the short, packed, multi-destination tours common today. This was often used as a slur against tropical destinations, with names like “Montezuma’s Revenge” or “Delhi Belly” for upset stomachs. The Chinese guide on Osnos’s tour suggested the problem could be a little different. The only European food the group was likely to eat was at the free breakfast buffet, so he urged the group “to eat extra fruit, which might balance the European infusion of bread and cheese into our diets”.

Indian restaurants abroad are likely to do good business, but are not a foolproof solution. In the past, in places like the UK, they were famously run mostly by Sylheti migrants who turned out a version of Indian food that was a shock for actual Indians – compounded by how much they had to pay for such food. In other places, the default Indian cuisine was North Indian and few things can seem sadder than a South Indian repeatedly having to eat bad North Indian food.

Terms like South Indian and North Indian food also elide the huge differences that exist at regional levels – and the fact that many Indians are more prejudiced against food from other Indian regions than entirely foreign food. It is easier to accept something completely different rather than something that looks familiar but does not taste that way. One just needs to remember the endless complaints from South Indians about sweet sambhar in Mumbai’s Udipi restaurants, allegedly adapted to sugar-obsessed Gujarati palates. Now imagine the reaction when Indians are confronted with food from diasporic Indian communities, with all the variations that have evolved over time. It can be fascinating if you are ready for it, but many Indian tourists are not.

If the chefs are really Indian, or well trained in Indian food, it can work, but anything less can end up feeling worse. One of my saddest food experiences abroad was on a trip to Ireland with other Indian journalists. The place was wonderful but the food less so, with boring stews, variations on potatoes, and endless farmed salmon tasting like wet cardboard. We were promised a final feast at the Bord Bia, Ireland’s food authority. Anticipating grass-fed steaks, raw milk cheeses and creamy desserts, we landed up to find Indian food cooked, for the first time ever, by their resident chef. “We even bought a cookbook special for it,” said our beaming hosts.

Kitchen car

One basic solution is the Banerjee option – bring your own food with you. At its most elaborate, this can extend to bringing your own cook, as in the “kitchen car” tours some Indian operators pioneered decades back, with a large group being accompanied by a cook and supplies to make home food. This is hardly an easy option to organise, but the world of light, easy to carry desi food now offers much more than Banerjee’s muri. A whole industry has come up to dehydrate and vacuum pack desi food, so it can be reconstituted with hot water from the electric kettle all hotels provide. You can even send your own home food to be dehydrated and packed this way.

For tourism industries abroad hoping to attract Indians, one way to start, without getting bogged down in the complexities of regional cuisine differences, is to recognise there are a few broad categories. Jain customers, for example, are becoming a relatively well-understood concept, thanks to the availability of Jain-option airline meals. However odd the proscriptions against root vegetables might seem, there are at least fairly clear rules that kitchens can follow.

With awareness of strict veganism and more flexible ovo-lacto vegetarianism (eating eggs and milk) growing abroad, the concept of Indian vegetarians who eat dairy, but not eggs, is probably harder to understand. Luckily, many such dairy vegetarians help by practicing what might be called “no-view” vegetarianism, where they can accept foods made with eggs, like cakes, as long as they do not see the eggs. This can be tricky – meringues made from beaten egg whites might be too visible, but mousses lightened with beaten egg whites might pass.

Even non-vegetarian Indians can be squeamish about appearances. Prakash Tandon, who was to become the first Indian head of Hindustan Lever, recalled in Punjabi Century, the first volume of his fascinating memoirs, the apprehensions he and a few other young Punjabi men had while sailing to the UK in 1929. They ate meat, but mostly chopped small or minced and formed into kebabs – not the large chunks enjoyed by the British or, much worse, organ meats.

Tandon writes: “We were told they even ate the head, feet and tripe of the unfortunate animal. Surely, we argued, they must draw the line somewhere. One morning as some of us were going up to breakfast, a Muslim boy came running down and shouted excitedly that they even ate that part of the animal, its most private part…” He insisted they had to go see it, and when they went into the dining room they saw a plate with a large sausage. “After that we were prepared to expect anything,” writes Tandon.

Indians are more likely to be familiar with sausages these days, but the growing power of Indian tourists means that a shift needs to happen. It should not be just about keeping them fed but about finding ways to use food to enhance the experience of travel. And the answers often exist in a country’s cuisine, if chefs are willing to look beyond the cooking school classics. Many cultures have histories of vegetarian food that existed because meat was too expensive or a rare indulgence.

This kind of “cucina povera” tends to fall out of favour as countries get richer, but it exists as a resource to develop. For example, Georgina Hayden’s cookbook Nistisima is a revealing introduction to an almost entirely vegan Mediterranean food tradition created for the many strict fast days followed by monks of the Greek Orthodox church. Buddhist traditions play a similar role in Eastern Asia. Jeong Kwan, a Korean Buddhist nun and chef, was featured in Netflix’s Chef’s Table series for her food that is, effectively, Jain since she does not use onions and garlic either.

Social media can also suggest trends that would work for Indian tourists. One example is Pasta alla Ruota, a made-for-Instagram recipe in which freshly cooked, steaming hot pasta is dumped on a large wheel of cheese, usually Parmigiano Reggiano, and then manipulated by the server to melt the surface and coat the pasta. Indians with apprehensions about jhootha – another obsession – linked to reusing the same cheese wheel could be reassured by scraping the surface fresh each time. It is an example of the kind of performative, culture-specific food experience that would be perfect for cheese-mad Indians.

And there is always Vivekananda’s solution. My father had to travel to Russia in the 1970s for work and the food was awful, mostly heavy rye breads and mystery meats. “But the ice cream was always excellent,” he recalled, and he survived by eating a lot of it. For the crowds of Indian tourists venturing abroad, if the local food can seem unappetising, the answer might be an ice cream-powered holiday – which might, in itself, be reason to travel.

Vikram Doctor is a writer based in Goa. His email address is vikdocatwork@gmail.com.