Niti Sampat Patel

Reading General Amar Singh’s diaries from 1905 in the museum named after him, Mita Kapur came across detailed descriptions and cultural analyses of the different food served to the British, Rajputs, and Muslims in the military on a daily basis as well as that served at occasions such as the general’s own wedding. In an essay for The Indian Quarterly, Kapur laments that little effort has been made to archive and publish culinary manuscripts such as these – “How I wished there were published translations of them. What might we not learn of those times?”

Kapur sees in the general’s simple, but careful journal entries on the meals people consumed in his time opportunities for the historian (and the lay reader) to learn more about societal and cultural realities of a certain time. Kapur’s ruminations helped me identify a defining characteristic of the food writing I am personally drawn to – writing that recognises that the human reliance on and craving for food plays out in ways that are dependent on geography, socio-economic realities, and historical circumstances. Out of the numerous examples of insightful writing about food in the subcontinent that explore subjects like the culinary habits and history of sub-cultures, food security, the allure of local spices and ingredients for colonial powers, and more, I have curated a short list that captures some of the finest and most diverse perspectives in the field.

Each writer in the list approaches food differently with some combination of nostalgia, curiosity, reflection, and reverence, and each lends the field something of historical and cultural significance by mapping small fractions of a vast and complicated heritage.

Marryam H. Reshii

Thirty years into her career as a beloved food critic and writer, Reshii compiled decades of accumulated findings about an essential ingredient in global cuisine whose roots lead back to the subcontinent: spices. In The Flavour Of Spice, Reshii traces the history of both widely-used and little-known spices from their origins to their contemporary uses. She travels to spice plantations and markets around the subcontinent, studying means of harvesting, ancient routes, the trade in contemporary times, closely guarded recipes, the correct combinations of spices for a cook to experiment with, and more. The Flavour is ultimately so engrossing because Reshii has spent years collecting these stories that made me respect the remarkable journey these spices make from farms to kitchens.

Esther David

David’s Book of Rachel is inspired by real-life elderly Jewish women in India and Pakistan, sometimes the last surviving member in the region, who would task themselves with preserving the remnants of the Bene-Israeli structures and culture around them even as they aged. Her protagonist, Rachel, is one of the last Jewish inhabitants in her town by the sea, and the caretaker of the local synagogue. Her rituals of cleansing and maintaining the space, and painstakingly preparing the food of her people each week offer a glimpse into the lives of a community on the brink of disappearing. When a proposed development threatens to take over the synagogue’s land, Rachel fights for its preservation. Book Of Rachel uses the recipes of traditional Bene-Israeli dishes to remember the rich and troubled history of the community. I enjoyed it because it is a rare glimpse into a culinary heritage that most people in the subcontinent wouldn’t otherwise know of.

Madhur Jaffrey

Jaffrey grew up within a comfortable, large family in Delhi who gathered for communal meals each day. When she migrated to the United Kingdom as a young adult, she hadn’t yet learned to cook, but she would draw on her experiences of food and drink as a child at every step of her long, illustrious career as a food writer, host of food and travel shows on television, and a consultant to restaurants. Of all the writers on my list, Jaffrey is the one who casts her net widest – writing about each aspect of culinary culture she encounters from the smell of Hyderabadi breakfasts she compares to the smell of bacon and eggs in the West to the
the sweet, milky tea she drank as a child on railway platforms served to families like hers by the domestic help travelling with them to the continental food offered on the houseboats of Kashmir (a lasting impact of the preferences of the boats’ colonial era British inhabitants). Jaffrey has written several books, though my personal favourites remain her childhood memoir, Climbing The Mango Trees, and A Taste of India, which tours the cuisine of fourteen of India’s states.

Lathika George

In Mother Earth, Sister Seed, George has gathered the stories of India’s farming communities (both coastal and inland) from around the country. The crops covered are as varied as coffee, seasonal herbs, fish, honey, grains, and vegetables. She shows the lives of people who grow the food we consume in cities, who rely on their temperamental produce to eke out a living despite unreliable climate and unstable market rates. More than any other writer on this list, she tells the stories of these regions without incorporating their voices into her own as she recounts the risks increasingly desperate honey-gatherers in the Sundarbans take by venturing into tiger territory, the harvest festivities in different regions that help mark milestones within a life of hard-work, terrace farming in cities, and more. George’s book is unlike any other book I’ve read on the subject.

More on these writers and food!

What I find compelling about novels whose protagonists are artists and writers is the way these stories lay bare the full and varied lives creative people lead. So much of a creative person’s background and daily life is demystified in these stories that show that inspiration or lack thereof exists in the throes of the same drudgery, tragedies, and joys that populate other lives, that talent and creativity can thrive in the most unlikely environment and may die out in the places one would think to look for them. I chose a list that includes a crime novel featuring an artist in Wales, a literary novel filled about young, unfocused writers which is driven by character rather than plot, one in which the values of the hippie generation align with those of poetry and art, and one about a travel writer and his family reeling from a loss.

Clare Mackintosh’s I Let You Go

The crime writer’s debut, which remains her strongest work so far, is set in the seclusion of the Welsh countryside. A woman called Jenna Gray, plagued by terrible memories, arrives in a quiet, tourist town along the coast during the off-season and settles into a life that involves few interactions with other people. An artist in her old life, she takes on commissioned photography projects as a way to support herself. I won’t spoil any of the details for you, but gradually Jenna’s careful bifurcation of past and present begins to fall apart. It’s a gripping read with likeable characters – a book I read cover-to-cover in a single sitting.

Andrew Martin’s Early Work

I read Early Work because numerous reviewers confessed that they couldn’t explain why a lazy, privileged, and amoral young man made a compelling character – they could only say that in the hands of this particular writer, he held the reader’s attention. If you’re a writer, or for that matter any other kind of creative individual, you’ll have met someone like the protagonist Peter – tiresomely wasteful of their time and resources, unable to commit to a project. Martin’s masterful novel uses a small cast of characters – Peter and the two women in his life, Julia and Leslie, who also aspire to write – to comment (though not to judge) on the lives of these overeducated and underemployed liberal arts graduates, aimlessness, and the vague calling to be a writer. One of the reasons I’ve included this book because it shows artists of a different ilk who are at an early, unfocused point in their creative journey.

Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist

Much like Alice Munro, Anne Tyler’s writing has consistently followed the lives of ordinary people and their families – recognising that even the quietest life contains the minutia of conflicts and sorrows. In The Accidental Tourist, Macon Leary is a travel writer who has carved a niche for himself telling people how to feel at home in the places they visit. Leary’s readers are people like him – anxious and unwilling to leave the comforts and familiarity of home and looking to maintain their routine and diet wherever they go. It’s a sensitively written novel that follows Leary as his marriage falls apart a year after the untimely death of his son, and he moves back into his childhood home to piece together a new life in the aftermath of loss.

Ann Hood’s Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine

Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, is the kind of book you can read anytime, anywhere. There’s an accessibility in her prose that’s largely missing from literary fiction, and if you haven’t read in a while, Somewhere is a book to consider turning to. Set between the 60s and the 80s, the novel follows a group of three young women who pursue love, activism, hippie values, and art. As they grow older and form their own families, they find the world around them changing and discover devastatingly that the circumstances of one’s life aren’t controlled by good intentions and hard work alone. It’s Hood’s best-known work for a reason – her other novels don’t retain the simple charm of this story.

The photography most associated with the subcontinent often ties into simplistic ideas of what the lives of over a billion people entail. Situated at different points on the axes of socio-economic, cultural, and geographic status, the work of the following five photographers show a sliver of personalities and experiences from across South Asia that push the boundaries of what we’ve come to accept as the general reality of people outside cities. I thought I’d share some of their work here.

Deepti Asthana

Asthana, a self-trained artist, is interested in photographing women in large, open frames that show moments of quiet freedom for her subjects. She features a diversity of women from various parts of the country, concerned only with showing them as they are. There is no glamorisation or implied pathos.The photographs capture split seconds and admit to being one still in a life of infinite variation. In Tamil Nadu, a woman in a light pink sari is shown speaking happily on a mobile phone. A woman from a nomadic community in Ladakh is seen standing with one hand on a local goat. Asthana’s sensitive, honest photographs can be seen here.

Arati Kumar-Rao

Kumar-Rao’ photographs are unique for their commitment to telling little-known stories about India’s rapidly changing ecology. Through reportage and photographs, she has documented the “slow violence” of environmental degradation. One of her reports exposed the compelling story of how people along the banks of the Ganga lose their land to river erosion, but aren’t offered relief funds by the government because erosion isn’t classified as a disaster the way earthquakes and floods are. She’s capturedthe practice of river piracy in Bangladesh where the boats of poor fishermen are stolen and held for ransom. Her work in this field won her the inauguralAnupam Mishra Memorial Medal for excellence in river journalism in 2017. One can view her environmental and nature photographyhere.

Navtej Singh

While Kumar-Rao’s photographs focus on the darker stories in the South Asian landscape, Singh’s work is a highlight reel of India’s remaining beauty. He has the ability to make even a langoor appear majestic against the walls of Orchha Fort in Madhya Pradesh, and to transform a busy, crowded fish auction in Mumbai into an arresting sight that reveals an order within the chaos. The photographs choose versatile subjects such as doors, parrots, bearded and turbaned smokers, the faces of older women in rustic India, the packed bicycles and carts on the roads, and much else. His more polished photographs can be viewed here, and the more informal shots he posts to social media can be seen here.

Prabuddha Dasgupta

His signature black and white style was raw with the intent that every photograph be striking rather than beautiful or comforting. When thumbing through his photographs, one gets the feeling that in his world it was always afternoon in a quiet house. One of his series, Edge of Faith, is a hazy story of Goa’s relationship with Christianity that moves through the intimate spaces of homes to the chapels and the automobiles rusting from the rains. Another is called Longings and is a lonely montage that shows people at their most vulnerable and at their most introspective. His photographs have been collected in books by Viking and Seagull, and some of them can be viewed here.

Shibu Arakkal

Arakkal is the monarch of photo series. Within a particular series, his photographs mirror and contradict one another to create a visual experience difficult to pin down in words. He manipulates photographs with edits that are subtle and masterful in the way they accentuate the story of the photograph – for example, his Constructing Life series features aged skin with edits that weave cracks into the photograph. One of his most stunning works is a series called Four that maps his emotional journey through four decades of his life. It’s narrated through narrow landscape photographs and dreamy triptychs. His work, varied and expansive, can be explored here.

In a way, my love for these three novels was cemented when I wrote Moon Goddess. The three women at the centre of these narratives resemble my own protagonist who is caught between her ancestral home and an adopted one. Each of these women must necessarily return to her respective home to expand their understanding of their history and of themselves. Moon Goddess is structured as a mystery because characters with roots in more than one place are always trying to fill the gaps, to understand events and motivations from a distance.

The three women at the center of these narratives resemble my own protagonist who is caught between her ancestral home and an adopted one.

I read Ahdaf Souief’s In the Eye of the Sun (1992), Aminatta Forna’s The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Quest (2002), and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) at least ten years before Moon Goddess was published. What my work absorbed from them was largely subconscious and accumulated over time. But I can’t help but notice how the character of Tara has been moulded by the fictional women who came before her.

All three bring to light some of the most turbulent eras of Africa’s history in the twentieth century. For readers like me outside these countries, these eras also happen to be some of the ones we know least about otherwise.
The political struggle of a continent trying to come into its own after the end of colonisation resonates with me as I experience India grapple with the same. In these stories, as in the contemporary landscape, political climates rapidly change and overturn the lives of individuals in the process.

In the Eye of the Sun follows the changing fortunes of a young woman called Asya who has grown up in the liberal, pre-fundamentalist Egypt of the 1960s. Her relationship to art, to marital duty, to her own desire, and to the Cairo of her childhood are strongly juxtaposed with the political, economic and cultural changes that arrive by the end of the 60s to Egypt. The most compelling part of Asya’s story is her vividly remembered youth in Egypt with summer holidays in Beirut and London. When she returns to Cairo as an adult after completing a PhD, she faces a place she must learn all over again.

In The Devil That Danced on the Water, Aminatta Forna returns twenty-five years after her father’s execution to Sierra Leonne where she spends a year locating and speaking to the men who gave false and lethal testimony against her father. Armed with her early memories of her loving father as a conscientious politician, she sets about clearing his name. The first half recounts her childhood, her parents’ divorce, her stepmother’s crucial role in smuggling the Forna children out of the country to safety, and the racism that awaits her in the UK. The second half is the story of the year where Aminatta discovers the truth, twisted and unsparing, about her father’s death.

Set in the years before and during Nigeria’s Biafran war (1967-70), Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun expands on the complicated and rich cultural tapestry she introduces to us in Purple Hibiscus. Told through the perspective of three characters, the novel lays bare the multitude of horrors of a war that left over a million dead. Ugwu is a thirteen-year-old houseboy for an idealistic university professor called Odenigbo. Olanna is Odenigbo’s girlfriend who is drawn to his revolutionary convictions, and leaves her comfortable life in Lagos to be with him. As the war reaches them, they find their lives and loyalties put to the worst kind of test.

In each book, places are just as crucial to the story as people. Their fates are intertwined. When Tara returns to her ancestral home in Karjat, she has dreams and experiences she cannot explain. Her life in New York is completely removed from the surreal atmosphere of Karjat which is the site for memory, magic, instinct and familial truths. If the works I’ve mentioned interest you, then I think Moon Goddess will too.