For thousands of years, Indians travelled to other parts of the world as traders, Buddhist monks, Hindu priests, labourers and, more recently, immigrants. Seals testify to the presence of merchants from the Indus Valley in the cities of Mesopotamia. In ancient and medieval times, merchants went to the Middle East, eastern and northern Africa, and Southeast Asia. Some went by sea to the Middle East, Sri Lanka and Indonesia, others by caravan along the great Silk Road that extended through Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia all the way to China.
From the seventeenth century onwards, a few Indians trickled into South Africa, Britain and North America as slaves or servants.1 However, massive emigration from the subcontinent began only in the 1830s with the introduction of the indentured labour system. In the late nineteenth century agricultural workers settled on the west coasts of Canada and the United States. Restrictive immigration policies in the early twentieth century, however, reduced the inflow of Asian immigrants to North America, Britain and Australia to a trickle, until the policies were amended in the 1960s and ’70s.
Today, those of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin constitute a diaspora of some 30 million people, a scale matched only by the Chinese.2 Over the centuries they have developed their own distinctive cuisines that combine the dishes of their native regions with local ingredients and influences.
In August 1834 the British declared slavery illegal in the West Indies. The sugar plantations had been worked by African slaves; after regaining their freedom, most refused to continue this back-breaking, poorly paid work. The economic consequences for the owners of plantations, many of whom were politically well connected (including Prime Minister William Gladstone’s father), appeared to be devastating, so the East India Company came to their rescue by recruiting workers from the poorer parts of India. These so-called indentured labourers signed contracts agreeing to work on a particular sugar estate for two terms of five years each, at the end of which the owner would pay for their passage back to India, or they could stay on and purchase land. When the French and Dutch abolished slavery in their overseas possessions in 1846 and 1873 respectively, the East India Company provided them with workers, as well.
Between 1834, when the first ship arrived in Guyana, and 1917, when the system of indentured labour was abolished, an estimated 1.4 million Indians left the subcontinent, including 240,000 to Guyana, 144,000 to Trinidad and 37,000 to Jamaica. Another destination was the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, acquired by the British from the French in 1810. Some 500,000 Indians went there to work on the sugar plantations. Others went to the French colonies Réunion, Guadeloupe and Martinique, the Dutch-owned Suriname, and even the Danish island of Saint Croix.3 The voyages lasted as long as eighteen weeks. The migrants’ skimpy rations on-board ship consisted of a little rice and flour, preserved meat, dried fish, coconut and mustard oil, and a few seasonings, such as cumin, fenugreek, tamarind and salt. The cooking of meals often resulted in fires.
Most of the migrants came from the famine-ravaged rural areas of eastern Uttar Pradesh and western Bihar, and spoke a language called Bhojpuri. Around 10 per cent were from South India. The proportion of Hindus to Muslims was 85 to 15 per cent. Surprisingly, between a quarter and a third of the immigrants were women, often widows or women fleeing unhappy marriages. Unlike the African slaves, who were completely dispossessed of their identity, the Indians were allowed to practise their religion and customs, and a few brahmin priests and imams accompanied them. (The Trinidadian Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul is descended from one of these brahmin priests.) While some returned to India at the end of their tenure, most purchased plots of land and stayed. Today people of Indian origin constitute two-thirds of the population of Mauritius (the largest proportion outside the subcontinent), and around 40 per cent of Guyana, Suriname and Trinidad.
In 1852 the system was extended to Southeast Asia to supply Indian workers for the coffee, palm and rubber plantations there. Approximately 2 million people went to Malaya (now Malaysia) and another 2.5 million to Burma, mostly from South India. Most left Burma after the military coup in 1962. Starting in 1860, some 150,000 Indian workers went to South Africa and another 30,000, largely Sikhs from the Punjab, came to British East Africa (now Kenya and Uganda) to help build the railway into the interior of the country. Another group went to the sugar plantations of the island of Fiji.
An estimated 40 per cent of the population of this small island nation just off the coast of South America is of Indian origin; 38 per cent are Afro-Trinidadians and the remainder European, Chinese and Middle Eastern. On their arrival, immigrants received daily rations of rice, dal, coconut oil or ghee, sugar, salt, turmeric, onions and sometimes salted or dried fish. When their period of indenture was over, most of the workers bought land, formed villages and tried to settle down into their former way of life, cultivating rice, sugar and vegetables. Naipaul wrote that the indentured Indians managed to ‘recreate an Eastern Uttar Pradesh village in Central Trinidad as if in the vastness of India’.4 Because Trinidad and Tobago possesses large amounts of oil and gas, the country has never been as dependent on tourism as other Caribbean islands, and this may have helped to preserve cultural and culinary traditions. (The discovery of oil also contributed to the demise of Trinidad’s sugar-cane industry.)
The India immigrants’ regional origins explain some distinctive features of Trinidadian cuisine. Wholewheat flour is not used to make bread as it is in India, because the immigrants came from rice-consuming regions and the first flour they encountered on-board ship or in Trinidad would have been white flour supplied by the British. The savoury snacks sold on the streets and in small shops are very similar to those found in nineteenth-century Bihar: phulorie, deep-fried balls of ground, seasoned split peas; bara, a flatter, heavier version of phulorie; kurma, a sweet made of flour, sugar and clarified butter; sohari, cakes fried in a little butter; sweet-and-sour tamarind balls; and sahenna, green vegetables fried in lentil batter.5 These snacks are usually served with sour mango sauce or spicy green mango chutney. Another typical Bihari dish is chokha: vegetables, often potatoes, mashed with oil and chopped onion.
Tomato Chokha (Trinidad and Guyana)
This breakfast dish is often eaten with sada (plain) roti.
450 g (1 lb) ripe tomatoes
1 small onion, diced
1 chilli, finely chopped
2 tsp vegetable oil
2 garlic cloves, crushed
salt, to taste
Grill the tomatoes until they are charred. Leave to cool, then remove the skins and mash the tomatoes until they are pulpy. Add the onion, salt and chilli.
Heat the oil in a small pan and briefly fry the garlic. Add it to the tomato mixture and mix thoroughly.
Sada Roti (Guyanese flatbread)
250 g (8 ¾ OZ) plain flour
2 ½ tsp baking powder
¼ tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
1 green or red bird’s-eye chilli, finely chopped
about 150 ml (5 fl. OZ) lukewarm water
1 tbsp oil, ghee or butter, plus about 3 tbsp extra for
brushing
Mix all the ingredients to make a supple dough.
Shape the dough into a ball, then put it in an oiled bowl and cover with clingfilm. Leave to rest for 30 to 60 minutes. Re-knead the dough lightly, then divide into four pieces. Roll out each piece into a circle about 15 cm (6 in.) in diameter, dredging with a little flour if necessary.
Preheat a tawa (or a heavy griddle or frying pan). When the pan is hot, turn the heat down. Slap a roti on to it and let it cook until tiny brown spots appear on the bottom. Flip the roti over and allow the other side to cook. Brush with ghee or butter on both sides and keep wrapped in a tea towel until ready to eat.
From Gaitri Pagrach-Chandra, Warm Bread and Honey Cake (Pavilion, London, 2009)
Curry is a common main course in Trinidad and Tobago. The chief spices – cumin, coriander, fenugreek and turmeric – are those used in a rural Bihari household. Because curry leaves, fresh coriander and mint were not grown in Trinidad, substitutes were found. Coriander was replaced with a local herb called shado(w) beni (Eryngium foetidum) that grows wild in drainage ditches. The chilli used in Trinidadian curries is the fiery scotch bonnet, so called because it looks like a little pleated bonnet. In place of the spinach-like greens called sag in India, Trinidadians (and Jamaicans) use callaloo, the leaf of the dasheen plant, a form of taro. Curries are accompanied by chutneys and sauces, such as mango kuchela, a mango and mustard oil pickle, and ‘mother-in-law’, a hot vegetable relish, and served with roti, a flatbread made from white flour.
In Trinidad, the word roti means not just bread, but also a popular street food that has been called the country’s national dish. A large, round wheat bread coated with ground yellow peas is wrapped around a meat, fish or vegetable curry, enclosed in waxed paper or foil and eaten on the move. Another popular street food is doubles, a sandwich composed of two pieces of turmeric-flavoured fried roti filled with curried chickpeas and topped with spicy chutneys and chilli sauce, similar to the Indian snack chole bhature. Other distinctive Trinidadian breads are buss-up-shut roti (named after a ‘busted-up shirt’), a flaky roti torn into ragged pieces; dal puri roti, fried bread stuffed with spiced lentils; sada roti, a plain white bread often made at home; and oil roti, a flaky paratha.
Although they are in the northeastern corner of the South American continent, these two small countries are culturally and gastronomically part of the Caribbean. Guyana was a British colony until 1966, and Suriname a Dutch colony from 1667 to 1975. Both were originally sugar-plantation economies.
Dhalpuri roti is a Trinidadian bread filled with spiced yellow lentils and served with curry, chickpeas and a sweet halwa.
In Guyana, the largest ethnic group consists of people of Indian origin (also known as East Indians), who make up nearly 44 per cent of the population, followed by Afro-Guyanese at 30 per cent, people of mixed heritage at 17 per cent, and indigenous people, Chinese and Europeans at about 9 per cent. As in Trinidad, the food reflects the regional origins of the immigrants. Bara and phulorie, made from chickpeas, are popular snacks that are eaten with hot pepper or mango sauce. In Guyana, and in Trinidad, Hindus celebrate the festivals Holi (called Phagwah) and Diwali. The sharing of traditional Indian sweets is part of both celebrations.
Suriname is a melting pot of cultures and religions that includes people of Indian origin (40 per cent), Creoles (people of mixed African and native ancestry, 30–35 per cent), Indonesians (15 per cent) and various minorities. After independence in 1975, around a third of the population emigrated to the Netherlands, where today 350,000 Surinamese (called Hindustanis) live. Typical dishes in Suriname include roti made from white flour, often filled with potatoes or split peas; baras; phulorie; and samosas, often accompanied by Indonesian condiments.
The Guyanese paratha is distinguished by its loose and flaky layers. As soon as it is removed from the tawa, the roti is flung into the air and caught with both palms in a clapping movement, a process repeated many times to separate the layers. This makes the roti very flexible, even after cooling, and therefore handy for scooping up curry.
About 40,000 Indians came to Jamaica between 1845 and 1917, but after their period of indenture ended they became dispersed among the general population. There was a much higher rate of intermarriage between communities in Jamaica than in Trinidad or Guyana, with the result that only 3 per cent of Jamaicans now claim Indian origin. However, the Indian impact on Jamaican food has been notable, especially in two of Jamaica’s best-known dishes: patties and curry goat, the latter of which is served on festive occasions. It is prepared with commercially produced curry powder (which contains native allspice) and scotch bonnet chillies with a coconut-milk sauce. Patties – spiced minced meat in a dough pocket – are popular snacks not only in Jamaica but also among the Jamaican diaspora.
An island nation in the Indian Ocean, 800 km (500 miles) east of Madagascar and 4,800 km (3,000 miles) from India, Mauritius was colonized in turn by the Dutch, the French and the British, with the result that it is a linguistic and culinary melting pot. Today two-thirds of the population are of Indian origin; the rest are Franco-Mauritian or Chinese.
Mauritian cuisine is an intriguing mixture of African, Dutch, French and Indian ingredients and techniques. A curry may be made with octopus, or may combine venison and lilva beans (a slightly sweet and bitter bean popular in western India) or chicken and prawns. Vindaille (a word related to vindaloo) is prepared by marinating fresh tuna, octopus or other seafood in mustard, saffron, chillies, garlic, oil and vinegar. A popular Indian-Mauritian snack is dalpuri – fried Indian-style bread filled with curried lentils, rougaille (a spicy tomato-based sauce), chutneys and vegetable pickle.
Nearly half the population of Fiji, an island nation in the South Pacific, is descended from 60,000 Indians brought by the British in the late 1890s to work on the sugar plantations. Fijian cuisine is a melange of Melanesian, Polynesian, Indian, Chinese and Western elements. Fijian curries are made with breadfruit, yam, cassava, taro root and leaves, seafood and usually coconut milk. Flavourings include garlic, ginger, turmeric, coriander, fenugreek, cumin, soy sauce and chilli. A unique home-style curry is ‘tinned fish’ curry made with canned tuna, mackerel or salmon. From Fiji, curries and curry powder spread to Tonga, Samoa and other islands in the Pacific, where they are often served with boiled taro or breadfruit as the starch.
In 1651 the Dutch East India Company established a settlement at the Cape of Good Hope to supply ships sailing between the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies. The colonists built permanent settlements and brought slaves from Bengal, the Coromandel Coast and the East Indies to work on their farms and in their kitchens. The descendants of these workes became known as Cape Malays. (Malay was the lingua franca of trade.) Today, an estimated 180,000 Cape Malays live in South Africa, mainly in Cape Town.
Celebrated for their cooking skills, the Cape Malays were much in demand as cooks. The Indian influence is apparent in the popularity of biryani, dal, kebabs, puris, rotis, samosas and various curries (kerries) served with atjars (Indian-style vegetable pickles), fruit condiments, chutneys, sambals and rice.
In 1806 the British took over the Cape. They brought in 150,000 indentured labourers, most from rural South India. Lentils, beans, rice, flour rotis and mealie rice (crushed corn kernels boiled to look like rice) were dietary staples. The dried fish that was a ration on the labourers’ transport ships also became part of their daily fare. From the 1880s onwards they were joined by Indian businessmen, traders and attorneys (including the young attorney Mahatma Gandhi). Many of these ‘passenger Indians’ came from Gujarat on India’s west coast. They opened small restaurants and shops selling spices and Indian condiments.
The most famous Indo-South African dish is bunny chow, a meat curry served in a hollowed-out loaf of Western-style bread. One explanation of its name is that in Durban, Indian merchants were often called banias, their caste name. They opened small restaurants, which black South Africans could not enter because of apartheid; they could, however, be (illegally) served at the back door. An enterprising restaurateur got the idea of hollowing out a small loaf of bread, pouring in curry, topping it with Indian pickles and handing it over to the customer without cutlery. The dish was named bunny chow, from bania chow.
A hollowed-out loaf of bread filled with curry, bunny chow originated in Durban, South Africa.
When Kalloo was going on four years, a drought came. Last year’s rice crop was bad, and now no rain for this year’s crop to grow, and no money to buy food to eat. We should have planted bajra, millet, but again we hadn’t, so we had to depend on the rice. I was the one cooking every day and I could see the rice getting less and less . . .
I had to find work, but what work was there . . . in a village? So I took the last few handfuls of parched rice my mother-in-law had kept aside, and some sattva powder, from roasted channa, and tied them in two bundles. Then I picked up an extra sari, and walked with the child to the town of Faziabad [a city in Uttar Pradesh].
And that was where I met the arkatiniya, the lady who recruited people to go with her as migrants. She met me on the street, just as I reached, and told me they were looking for labourers to go to a place called ‘Chini-dad’, a land of ‘chini’, sugar. In Chini-dad there were big estates where they made sugar. They wanted labourers to work the sugarcane fields. She told me they were especially looking for women to go, and she promised me an extra advance if I signed up. Only one year there, she said, and then they bring you back. Plenty of money.
From Peggy Mohan, Jahajin (New Delhi, 2007)
In 1888 the British established the Imperial British East Africa Company to develop trade in the region, and later they created the Protectorate of British East Africa, covering present-day Kenya and Uganda. In the late nineteenth century 30,000 labourers were recruited from India to build the Kenya–Uganda railway. They were followed by other Indian immigrants, including many Gujarati Hindus and Ismaili Muslims, who were moneylenders, traders and owners of small shops, or dukas. By the mid-1960s some 360,000 people of Indian origin lived in East Africa, but most were forced to leave by the new nationalist government and, as holders of British passports, emigrated to Britain and Canada. With regime changes in Uganda and Kenya, some have returned and today run grocers and small stands selling samosas, curry and other Indian dishes. There are many Indian restaurants in large cities like Mombasa and Kampala.
1 small onion, finely chopped
3 tbsp oil
1 kg (2 ¼ lb) chicken pieces, skin removed
1 medium tomato, finely chopped
½ tsp each crushed garlic, fresh ginger, ground cumin and ground coriander
¼–1 tsp chilli powder, to taste
⅛ tsp turmeric powder
¼–1 tsp chopped fresh green chillies, to taste
1 tsp salt
480 ml (2 cups) water
90 g (3½ OZ) unsweetened coconut cream
3 or 4 boiled eggs
3 boiled or fried potatoes
120 ml (½ cup) whipping cream
1 tbsp coriander leaves
Fry the onion in oil until soft.
Add the chicken, tomatoes, garlic, ginger, spices, chillies and salt.
Cook for two minutes, then add the water. Continue cooking over medium heat until the chicken is almost done.
Mix the coconut cream with 120 ml (½ cup) water and add to the mixture. The sauce should almost cover the chicken; add more water if needed.
Continue cooking until the chicken is done.
Add the eggs, potatoes, whipping cream and fresh coriander. Cook for two or three minutes and serve with parathas or rice.
Adapted from Noorbanu Nimji, A Spicy Touch (Calgary, Alberta, 1986)
A standard food of the railway workers was khichri with millet bread (rotli) and dal. Among the middle classes, a hybrid African-Indian cuisine developed, with many Indian dishes acquiring Swahili names. According to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who grew up in Kenya, ‘African servants working for the Indians picked up much of the cooking, so that ghee and mchuzi have become part of the vocabulary of East African cuisine. How common is it today to stop at a wayside kiosk and ask for chapattis or samosas, kebobs or bhajias?’6 Mchuzi is a curry made with tomatoes, coconut milk, tamarind and curry powder and accompanied by bananas and pickles, often made from the very hot bird’s-eye chilli, called peri peri. Mchuzi is also the Swahili word for curry powder, which every household has on hand. Perhaps the most popular Kenyan-Indian dish is kuku paka, chicken in a coconut sauce.
From the sixteenth century onwards the Portuguese established colonies in what are today Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Madagascar, Mozambique and Zanzibar. They brought chillies, maize, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava and the domesticated pig from the New World; salt cod from Portugal; and spices from their possessions in India. Both the Portuguese and the British brought Goans to their colonies, mainly as artisans and clerical workers. The Goan influence can be seen in the use of coconut milk as the sauce for many African dishes, especially those made with seafood. Curries, called carils, are popular dishes in Mozambique and Angola. According to Laurens van der Post, their curries tend to be ‘either straightforward derivatives of the curries of India or pale imitations of those of South Africa, particularly Natal’.7 The spicy chilli peri peri (also spelled piri piri or pili pili; the bird’s-eye chilli) is grown throughout Africa and gives its name to a spicy Goan dish, usually made with chicken, that is popular in the United Kingdom.
From ancient times, Southeast Asia held a crucial position on the trade routes between India and China. In the third century BCE Indian merchants brought not only spices and textiles, but also Hinduism and Buddhism, new forms of dance, sculpture and music, and Indian concepts of statecraft. So-called Hinduized kingdoms flourished in what are now Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia until well into the eighteenth century. These traders may also have introduced tamarind, garlic, shallots, ginger, turmeric and pepper to the region, and disseminated such herbs as lemongrass and galangal from one area to another. In the eighth century Arab merchants took over the spice trade and converted many local people to Islam. They introduced kebabs, biryanis, kormas and other meat dishes from the Islamic world and may also have popularized the use of cloves, nutmeg and other local spices.
In 1602 the Dutch created the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC), often considered to be the world’s first multinational, to conduct trade and colonial activities in Asia. At its peak the VOC was far larger than the East India Company, and it eventually extended its control over all of present-day Indonesia (which, as the Netherlands East Indies, was a Dutch colony until it won its independence in 1945).
The British established Singapore in 1819 and later extended their control over the Malay Peninsula and Burma. By 1914 the French empire encompassed Indochina, present-day Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Only Thailand remained free from foreign occupation. Although there is a strong Indian influence on Thai culture and to some degree its cuisine, notably in Thailand’s famous curries, few Indians migrated there, in contrast to other parts of Southeast Asia.
In the nineteenth century 2 million Indian workers, mainly Tamils from South India and Sri Lanka, came to Malaysia and Singapore to work on the rubber and palm plantations. Indian civil servants also settled there. Today around two-thirds of Malaysia’s 25 million people are Malay, 25 per cent Chinese and around 8 per cent Indian, predominantly Tamils. Singapore, which seceded from Malaysia in 1965, has a large Chinese majority and Malay and Indian minorities.
The main Indian culinary influence in the region is Tamil. A common sight in Kuala Lumpur are the banana-leaf restaurants, small establishments that serve idlis, dosas, vadas, sambars, rasams and other South Indian dishes on banana leaves.
Many street foods are of Indian origin. A local equivalent of an Indian stuffed roti is murtabak (from the Arabic word for ‘folded’). Dough made from white flour is wrapped around spiced minced meat and beaten egg and folded into packets that are fried, cut into pieces and served with a curry sauce. Another popular street food is fish-head curry, supposedly invented by two Indian cooks in Singapore in 1964. Indian Muslims in Malaysia have developed a distinctive style of cooking called mamak, which includes such specialities as biryani and roti canai, a layered flatbread served with curry or stuffed fried eggs, onions, sardines, cheese, lentils and other ingredients. It is accompanied by a drink called teh tarik, or ‘pulled tea’: tea sweetened with condensed milk is poured into a glass several times from a mug held high in the air, which creates a froth – similar to the way coffee is made in South India.
Roti canai is an Indian-influenced sautéed bread that is a popular street food in Malayasia, Singapore and Indonesia. It is often served with a meat curry.
One consequence of the French bringing labourers from their colonies in South India to Vietnam is the use of South Indian-style curry powders, made with chillies, turmeric and other spices. Popular dishes are chicken curry (cari ga), made with coconut milk, and beef curry (cari bo), which commonly contains bay leaves, cinnamon, onions, carrots and potatoes or sweet potatoes.
Burma (Myanmar), part of British India until 1948, consists of many ethnic groups, but the two greatest influences on its cuisine have been India and China. In the 1940s half of Rangoon’s population was of Indian origin, but today Indians account for only 2 per cent. The Indian influence is apparent in Burmese samosas, biryanis, breads and curries, which incorporate Indian spices as well as lemongrass, basil leaves and fish sauce. Toasted rice, garlic, onions, lemongrass, banana heart, fish paste, fish sauce and catfish cooked in broth are combined to make the national dish, a Chinese-Indian-Burmese hybrid called mohinga, which is sold on the street.
Indians first came to Britain as long ago as the late seventeenth century, mainly as servants or wives of returning East India Company men, or nabobs, who had made their fortune in India. The general term for Indian habits and customs as practised in England, chiefly London, was nabobery, and so-called Little Bengal grew up in the London districts of Marylebone and Mayfair. Just as the British had tried to re-create their homeland while they were in India, so they tried to recapture something of their life in India after returning home. Indian dishes were first served in the Norris Street Coffee House on Haymarket in 1733, but the first purely Indian restaurant was the Hindoostanee Coffee House. It was opened in 1809 at 34 George Street by an intriguing character named Sake Dean Mahomed (1759–1851), an Indian who served in the British Army and married an Irishwoman. It closed in 1833. In 1824 the Oriental Club was founded in the West End as a meeting place for ex-Company men. Its initial fare was French, but in 1839 it started serving curry. Today the Club continues the tradition by featuring a ‘curry of the day’ on its menu.
The first British cookbook to contain a recipe for curry was Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747). Her first recipe was essentially an aromatic stew flavoured with peppercorns and coriander seeds, but in the edition of 1796 curry (powder) and cayenne pepper were added. From then on, curry recipes featured prominently in cookbooks throughout the English-speaking world, including the colonies. The first commercial curry powder was sold in 1784 by Sorlie’s Perfumery Warehouse, and by 1860 curry paste, mulligatawny paste and chutney were being sold on a mass scale by Fortnum & Mason and Crosse & Blackwell. The one ingredient common to all these substances was turmeric powder. Other ingredients (in approximate order of frequency) were coriander seeds, cumin seeds, mustard seeds, fenugreek, black pepper, chillies, curry leaves and sometimes ginger, cinnamon, cloves and cardamom.
Another group of Indians who came to Britain were seamen, or lascars, recruited by the East India Company to serve on their ships, many of whom had jumped ship or were stranded in London. By the mid-nineteenth century there were more than 40,000 south Asians in Britain, and by the early twentieth century the number had grown to around 70,000, three-quarters of them lascars, the rest students. Many were from the Sylhet region, which had traditionally supplied cooks to the Portuguese and British, and some opened restaurants.
By 1920 there were a handful of Indian restaurants in London, including the Salut e Hind in Holborn and the Shafi in Gerard Street, and cafés in the East End, near the docks. In 1926 Edward Palmer, great-grandson of a Hyderabadi princess and an English lieutenant general, opened Veeraswamy’s at 99 Regent Street, where it still operates. Palmer’s restaurant tried to replicate the atmosphere of a British club in India, and the menu listed vindaloos, Madras curries, dopiazas, coloured pulaos and other popular dishes.
The Second World War was followed by a surge in immigration from Commonwealth countries, especially the Caribbean and the subcontinent, as people came to work in industry as part of the post-war reconstruction efforts. The creation of Bangladesh in 1971 generated a new wave, and these immigrants were joined the following year by South Asians expelled from East Africa. Immigration laws largely restricted further primary immigration, although family members of those already in the country were allowed to enter. According to the census of 2001, there were 2.3 million South Asians in the United Kingdom (including those of the second and third generations), 4 per cent of the total population; approximately half were of Indian origin, 750,000 Pakistani and 283,000 Bangladeshi.
To serve this growing population, companies such as Noon, Pathak’s (later Patak’s) and S&A Foods began to manufacture Indian spice mixtures and sauces, chutneys, pickles and other Indian products. Many immigrants opened restaurants, an industry that requires relatively little capital and a lot of inexpensive labour. Every large town and city in the UK has Indian restaurants, the most famous districts being London’s Brick Lane and Birmingham’s Broad Street. Their menus became standardized and served a hotchpotch of dishes from different regions. Curry became so popular that for a time it replaced fish and chips as the most popular takeaway food in Britain, only to lose its place again to fish and chips and Chinese food.8
The earliest Asian Indian immigrants arrived in America soon after the founding of the Jamestown colony in 1607. Some were sailors on the ships of the British East India Company; others were servants to wealthy British nabobs (some of whom moved to America after making their fortune in India).9 Still others arrived as slaves, captured by Dutch or British traders. In the early eighteenth century ‘East Indians’ even outnumbered Native Americans in the Virginia census, and intermarriage was common between the two groups.
In the 1880s Bengali Muslim pedlars began coming to the United States to sell embroidered silks and other ‘exotic’ goods to a public that had a craving for all things Indian.10 Their operations were centred in the New Orleans neighbourhood of Treme, and some married local African American women. Another group of Bengalis were seamen who after the Second World War jumped ship in American ports, especially New York. Many settled in Harlem, where they married Puerto Rican and African American women and opened halal butchers and small Indian restaurants.
Owing to immigration laws that excluded most non-whites, the country’s Indian population remained very small: only around 3,000 people in 1930, many of them students living in New York City. By the end of the 1920s New York had half a dozen Indian restaurants, which were known for their fiery curries. The first significant wave of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent took place between 1900 and 1910, when more than 3,000 farmworkers, mainly Sikhs from the Punjab, came to the northwest coast and Canada. Anti-Asian sentiment drove them south to Sacramento Valley in California, where they became successful farmers. After racial exclusion laws in 1917 ended immigration by ‘non-whites’, many married local Mexican women. Their community came to total 400 couples, and they became known as ‘Mexican Hindus’.11 Their cuisine combined elements of Mexican and Punjabi food. Rasul’s El Ranchero in Yuba City, the last restaurant serving their dishes – including ‘Hindu pizza’ – closed in 2009.
In 1946 immigration laws were relaxed somewhat, and by 1965 around 6,000 Indians, mainly students, had entered the United States. In 1965 the old immigration quota system, which favoured people from ‘white’ countries, was replaced with one based on hemispheric quotas, with preference given to professionals and relatives of current citizens. In 1976 all regional quotas were abolished. Over the next decade hundreds of thousands of Indian professionals emigrated to the United States as part of the famous ‘brain drain’.
By 2007 some 2.8 million people of South Asian origin lived in the United States. Of these, 1.5 million were born in India; the rest came from Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Caribbean and South Africa, or were second-or third-generation Asian Americans. The New York–New Jersey area alone is home to some 600,000 Asian Indians. The culinary needs of these new arrivals were met by grocers, restaurants and entire shopping districts, among them Jackson Heights in Queens, New York; ‘Curry Hill’ on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan; Devon Avenue in Chicago; Pioneer Boulevard in Los Angeles; Journal Square in Jersey City, New Jersey; and Hillcroft Avenue in Houston, Texas. As immigrants moved to the suburbs, so too did these establishments. Indian grocers such as Patel Brothers, headquartered in Chicago, opened branches throughout the country and eventually developed their own manufacturing and distribution networks.
While these stores originally sold spices, rice and other essential ingredients, their offerings have expanded to include ready-to-make and ready-to-serve products, including dishes in plastic pouches (usually vegetarian), frozen starters and appetizers, and fresh or frozen varieties of every bread imaginable. Today virtually every suburb and town has its own Indian grocers, while Indian products can also be found on the shelves of most supermarkets.
In the home, immigrants appear to combine Indian and Western eating patterns. A study by the sociologist Krishnendu Ray of Bengali households in the United States found that a typical breakfast is Western-style, consisting of cereal and milk or toast (as it might be in a middle-class household in India), while lunch eaten outside the home is also Western, although many people do not eat beef. It is dinner that remains in the realm of ‘tradition’, although often with substitutions. It might consist of rice, dal and fish cooked with typical Bengali spices, or rice, croquettes made from turkey mince (instead of goat) and strawberry shortcake instead of a Bengali dessert. ‘It is as if Bengalis have divided up the day into what they characterize as moments of “modernity” and moments of “tradition”, both perceived as good and necessary in their separate places’, wrote Ray.12
Canada’s immigration policy also excluded non-whites until 1962, when the most blatantly racist provisions were overturned. In 1976 a new policy was adopted that based admission on education, employment skills, language abilities and family sponsorship. The Canadian census in 2001 reported more than 900,000 residents of Indian origin, 3.1 per cent of the entire population, including a sizeable number from Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana.
Ties between India and the Arab states in the Gulf and the Middle East have been strong since ancient times, as we have seen. Since the 1970s an estimated 3 million people from the subcontinent have moved to the Gulf States to work, most unskilled or semi-skilled workers. The majority are Muslim and over half are from Kerala. Many establishments exist to serve their needs, ranging from workplace canteens to small, inexpensive restaurants. For tourists and locals there are upscale Indian restaurants in such cities as Doha and Dubai. Kebabs, biryanis and tandoori chicken are popular everywhere. In Mecca, Indian and Pakistani restaurants serve food to pilgrims during the hajj. It is not uncommon for wealthy Arabs to have Indian cooks.
Since the creation of the state of Israel, most Indian Jews have migrated to Israel, which today has an estimated 70,000 residents of Indian origin. Large cities like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem have many Indian restaurants, some of them vegetarian, others serving meat but no dairy products to conform with kosher laws.
FROM VERY ANCIENT TIMES, India was part of a global culinary economy, adopting and absorbing ingredients, dishes, and techniques from virtually every part of the globe – Central Asia, the Middle East, Persia, Africa, China, the Western Hemisphere, Southeast Asia and Europe – and exporting its own culinary treasures and ideologies. This exchange has become even more pronounced in the twenty-first century, as people move freely between continents and boundaries between cuisines are dissolving.
Indian food in its many incarnations has become a world cuisine. One reason is a growing awareness of the virtues of a traditional Indian diet, especially the low consumption of meat, the abundance of fruit and vegetables, the centrality of grains and the use of spices, the medical benefits of which have been confirmed by science. Related is the growing popularity of vegetarianism, perhaps India’s greatest gift to the world, for ethical, humane and health reasons. Food experts have identified a preference for spicier, ‘hotter’ food as one of the main consumer trends of the twenty-first century.
