Nothing is Indian! Everything is Indian!

Episode 12
Everything is Everything
[Speaker 2]

More than many other countries, India is a great melting pot. We are the place where
many, many people, ideas, religions, cultures, species came together. As you are only
half Bengali, I shall risk extreme responses when I say to you that there are some people
who believe that the geographical indicator for the Rasgulla should be in Orissa and not
in Bengal and that this idea was brought there by the Portuguese.

So the Rasgulla is not quintessentially Bengali according to some and you know, it is a
subject of much debate.

[Speaker 1]

Sugar is poison, colonialism is bad, now we know why. Carry on. Welcome to Everything
is Everything.

I'm Amit, this is my good friend Ajay. Ajay man, what's happening?

[Speaker 2]

Everything is good. Tell me about this Indian look.

[Speaker 1]

Okay, so first of all, I will argue and say it's not an Indian look. I was wearing t-shirt and
jeans in the last episode, I've been wearing shirt pants. To me, they are all
quintessentially Indian and even this particular dress, is it really Indian?

I mean, one argument is everything is Indian. Another argument is actually nothing is

quintessentially Indian in the sense, stitched clothing came from outside. You know, I'm
wearing a Patiala salwar, which like the elegant churidars of a fine prime minister who
looks just like you, you know, Middle Eastern origin and so on and so forth.

And I would actually say the same thing about language, you know, in the sense that I
often tell people and I argue that hey, I speak in English and that's okay. But that doesn't
mean I'm some deracinated westernized person. I say English is an Indian language, you
know, and not only is English an Indian language, you could simultaneously make the
opposite argument and say English is not even an English language.

Because it's a delightful kichdi, you look at the influences that come into English, you
know, it borrows from Roman, it borrows from Greek, from Persian, from Anglo-Saxon,
from Hindustani. The word Jagannath comes from Jagannath and indeed the show, one
could argue, is like a Jagannath blazing its way through the forests of YouTube. But
leaving that aside, it's good to be back.

[Speaker 2]

I mean, surely you're pushing that too far. There are things that are quintessentially
about a place. I mean, surely Chicken Tandoori belongs in Ludhiana.

[Speaker 1]

We will talk about Chicken Tandoori. It absolutely doesn't belong to Ludhiana. Hello
there.

And we will talk about that. But first, I want to refer to this interesting piece of news I
saw the other day, which was about salmon sushi. Where is salmon sushi from?

[Speaker 2]

There's plenty of salmon in the Pacific, so Japan.

[Speaker 1]

Right. So salmon sushi we think of as something quintessentially Japanese. If you're

having sushi, that's like the default thing that I'll tend to order.

I love it. Right. But the truth is that salmon sushi as a concept did not exist in the 1980s.

So what happened in the 1980s was that Norway, who, you know, used to, what's the
word for, you don't grow salmon, harvest a lot of salmon. They used to harvest a lot of
salmon, had an excess of it. Right.

And they couldn't find a way to store it. There was way too much. They wanted to look at
export markets.

So they sent a gentleman named Bjorn Erik Olsen. I hope I'm pronouncing the name
right. Apologies to my Norwegian viewers.

If I'm not, I do my best. I pronounce even Indian and English words wrong, which are
actually the same as we discussed. So Bjorn Erik Olsen goes to Japan and he meets all
the fishery companies.

Right. And he tries to tell them that, hey, why don't you buy salmon from us? And all of
that.

And there are a bunch of problems. First, that is not exactly what the Japanese are used
to. One of the objections was, hey, it's not red enough.

It's like too pink or whatever. It's not red enough for us. Another objection was that in
Japan, the local salmon that had been fished was associated with parasites.

So, you know, what was Norway to do? Apparently, they ran some kind of advertising
campaign to convince people our waters are completely pure. It just wasn't working.

The salmon situation was going out of hand. Now, no doubt I exaggerate. But as a
storyteller, I must imagine what was happening in salmon, that there was no place to
store it in the traditional warehouses.

So it spilled out in the streets. It was stored in schools. Kids couldn't go to school
because the classrooms were full of salmon.

That's the kind of thing I imagine. You know, law and order went amok because the
police stations were full of salmon. Where do you go to find a policeman?

You could say it's like a salmon maximizer, like, you know, the paperclip maximizer, the
famous thought experiment. So anyway, so Bjorn Erik Olsen tries one final, desperate
tactic. He goes to this Japanese food company called Nishire.

Again, apologies if I'm not pronouncing it right. Goes to this company called Nishire and
offers to sell them something like 5000 or 50,000 tons of salmon, I forget what, at a
really cheap price and says, you offer it as sushi, you sell it as sushi to the market. And
Nishire says, okay, we're getting really cheap fish, why not do that?

Who can say no to cheap fish? And they do exactly that. And it suddenly takes off.

And not only does it take off, it has an interesting effect where it not only helps Norway
deal with their excess salmon and the kids can start going to school again, but it helps
Japan as well. Because this is that inflection point where sushi takes off as a global dish.
Because salmon sushi is the most palatable to Western appetites.

At least that's how the theory goes. You know, it's mild in taste and everything is the
most palatable. And with salmon sushi, you know, it's not just that Norwegian salmon
was saved, but Japanese sushi was popularized.

And this is such an incredible story that when I first heard it, I was like, what, because we
associate sort of salmon sushi with Japan, but it's not the case. And then when I start,
you know, digging a little deeper, I find that there are so many things which are, you
know, like ramen, for example, is also relatively recent. I forget the exact timelines, but
it is not as if it goes back centuries and it's a staple food and all that.

And of course, pretty much all Indian food, but we'll come to that later. So I want to point
out that it's not just the rest of the world, but even in India, you know, we think of
various things as Indian food, but almost everything we think of as Indian food is from
somewhere else, whether it's rajma chawal or tandoori chicken or whatever. I have done
various episodes of the scene and the unseen that talk about different aspects of this.

I'll link them from the show notes. Did a great episode called the Indianness of Indian
food with Vikram Doctor, who in my opinion is the world's best food writer, you know,
that'll be linked from the show notes. Plus with Pushpesh Pant, who's had decades of
experience, eloquent writer about this.

Recently with Krish Ashok and Naren Shanoi and with Ashok, I've recorded once before
as well. And while researching for these episodes, you realize that there is nothing in our
food that actually originated here, right? For example, there was something called the
Columbian Exchange and a lot of things like potato, mirchi, tomato, amrood, etc, etc, all
came from sort of South America.

Pushpesh Pantji has this great book called India, the cooking book or something like that.
We'll link it from the show notes and show you the cover here. And in that he writes
about Vasco da Gama quote, it is estimated that one of his shipments alone consisted of
1500 tons of pepper, 28 tons of ginger, eight tons of cinnamon and seven tons of cloves.

And while India spices attracted Europeans to the area, the traders brought with them
the culinary secrets of leavened bread, baking and noodles. In return, the Indians
introduced the Europeans to the joys of curry, mangoes and chutney. Now in his episode
with me, Vikram or Doc, as we call him, pointed out that even things like gandaful,
marigold, you know, so common in marriages that comes from Mexico, or Mexico, as it
were, whatever you call it.

And, you know, lest you think why are we talking about flowers, you know, in Monsoon
Wedding, I think one of the characters is shown constantly eating it, right? Saffron, you
might think is quintessentially Indian, especially in a symbolic kind of way. But while the
color is very much associated with India since way back when, the actual ingredients,
saffron also comes from outside, is grown in colder northern climates probably reached
us via the Middle East.

And in India, Kashmir is really the only place that has sort of the right temperature to
grow saffron. And I know you love saffron with a little bit of cream, we will talk about that
later. I want to know all about how you got that habit and so on and so forth.

And even idlis, like Doc was telling me that there is sort of speculation that fermentation
originated in Indonesia, and possibly when that Tamil exchange was happening with
Indonesia, that's when idlis came over. So, even idlis, in that sense, aren't sort of, you
know, Indian to begin with. And the list goes on and on.

You know, one of my friends who used to edit my pieces when I used to write a column
for the Hindu Business Line, Swati Banerjee, she wrote a piece and I think later did a
video, we'll link them from the show notes, where she tried to recreate the Indus Valley
meal, what it would have been like. And the only ingredient we can recognize in what
she made, if I remember correctly, is bangan, you know. And the other day we were
talking about how do you, how can you judge somebody's distance from a Maharashtrian
village, you know.

And if they refer to that particular thing as wangi, then they're really close. Bangan, one
step removed. And then eggplant, another step removed.

And then aubergine and brinjal. Or rather brinjal is in the middle, actually. Eggplant is
right at the end because I think that's what America calls it.

So, you know, and I don't think this is an issue. I think this is absolutely freaking
delightful. Like to me, you could say that all of these came from outside.

I'm like, hey, even, I mean, if you go back long enough, even we came from Africa. So,
I'm, you know, completely sort of delighted about this because I think the best things,
like language, like food, like clothes, are always a khichdi. Though I would not wear
literally a khichdi, but a bit messy perhaps.

But the best things are always a khichdi, a delightful mixture. And, you know, that is a
joy. And therefore, you can make the narrow argument that nothing is really Indian.

So, we shouldn't call anything Indian per se. But my broader argument would be that
everything is Indian. Sub-Lao, we will embrace everything.

[Speaker 2]

More than many other countries, India is a great melting pot. We are the place where
many, many people, ideas, religions, cultures, species came together. As you are only
half Bengali, I shall risk extreme responses when I say to you that there are some people
who believe that the geographical indicator for the Rasgulla should be in Orissa and not
in Bengal.

And that this was, this idea was brought there by the Portuguese. So, the Rasgulla is not
quintessentially Bengali, according to some. And, you know, it is a subject of much
debate.

[Speaker 1]

Sugar is poison. Colonialism is bad. Now we know why.

Carry on. Yeah.

[Speaker 2]

My favorite story about the Colombian exchange is about the potato. And the story runs
like this. James C.

Scott has emphasized how important grain was in the emergence of early states. Grain is
dense in calories and grain is storable. And it can be expropriated and it can be
transported.

So, if you had a pre-grain culture, where you are eating bananas and papayas, there is
nothing that keeps. You just have to, you have last week's supply of papaya and banana.
And if an invading army comes, they can take away one week's worth of banana and
papaya.

And per gram, there is not a whole lot of storable calories. Whereas grain is different.
Grain is a milestone in human history that it can be grabbed, it can be stored and it is
dense in calories.

So, grain is very dangerous. In the great wars of Europe, marauding armies would go
through the landscape, finding people, finding villages and grabbing grain. In this
process, the young Frederick the Great found that villagers did better when they had
potatoes.

So, what was the logic? The potato plant looks like a humble plant for a mind that is
trained to look for the year of corn or wheat growing at the top of the plant. The potato is
growing below the soil.

So, you don't really see that much. And even once harvested, it looks dirty, it looks filthy,
it doesn't look really exciting. So, the invading armies were not conscious about trying to
grab potatoes and further the local people would not harvest the potato from the ground
and keep it in inventory.

They would rather keep picking it up from the plant as and when required. So, Frederick
the Great observed that when the wars took place and great armies went up and down
and destroyed the lives of local people, the presence of potatoes was a very useful thing
and it kept people alive, it helped the peasants to survive. And so, then when he became
the king, he did a lot of agricultural extension surrounding potatoes and in some cases
with remarkable implications for the military outcomes around the wars that he fought
late in his life.

So, this is such an interesting story that a potato starts out in South America and
reshapes the logistics of European armies under the influence of agricultural extension
led by Frederick the Great. There is one funny story when Frederick the Great published
a king's order on potatoes where people were told that you must grow potatoes and the
people were very dismissive. This is an ugly thing, what do you want to do?

It's a nightshade vegetable, there are some toxins, if you don't handle it correctly, you
get into trouble. So, there were enough concerns. It was not as well understood as we
understand it today.

So, people were skeptical and nobody wanted to do it. So, that is an apocryphal story or
a true story where Frederick the Great ordered that potatoes should be grown in the
royal gardens and he greatly amped up the protection of those gardens so that poor
people would think that something precious is going on and he instructed the soldiers to
turn a blind eye when people came and stole the potatoes. So, this is the best way to
make something work.

It is to announce that it is illegal. So, now you know why cryptocurrency has such a great
future in India.

[Speaker 1]

A brilliant play of incentives. I have two things to say and each of them involves a great
hero of ours. First great hero you mentioned James C Scott.

So, I'm just going to tell all our viewers or you would call them gentle readers but I'm
going to tell them all do pick up his book Against the Grain, magnificent book, just a
masterpiece, everyone should read it and every other book of his. And the second is
about another of our great heroes Bare Ghulam Ali Khan. So, Bare Ghulam Ali Khan back
in the day was invited to perform at a particular place where he was you know going to
be kept up for two or three days and at the end of the two or three days he would
perform and that's how the gig was going to be.

But they were vegetarian and they insisted on serving vegetarian food. So, he lands up
there and he gets vegetarian food the first day and vegetarian food the second day and
so on and so forth and then when he sings on the third day he is but a shadow of his self.
It is a you know meager performance and everybody is kind of disappointed at such a
great genius and so on and so forth and afterwards the sort of the Raja or whoever the
main host was goes to him and says, Usaad sahib, you know we have heard that when
you do your riyaz, you do it besides the ocean and the sounds of your raga drowns out
the roar of the waves.

So, how come you performed like this today? And Bare Ghulam Ali Khan said, right and I
know that Julius Caesar would, I find that really endearing and I completely share his
desire for meat as it were but Julius Caesar would have objected and I want you to tell us
why.

[Speaker 2]

There is, there's beautiful words put into his mouth by George Bernard Shaw. He is a
barbarian who thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the law of nature.

[Speaker 1]
That's such a beautiful quote and it also is a cautionary tale to all of us that you know let
us not take too much pride in a particular thing that oh this is Indian, this is sanskari or
whatever because you know a lot of what we think are quintessential to us or you know
are who we are, are actually come from outside which is a great thing. They are a kichri,
the world is changing, the world will continue to change but there is a danger also and
that's what I want to talk about next.

[Speaker 2]

So, tell me Hamid, does the world just keep playing a game of recombinant DNA and we
keep inventing newer and newer combinations or does it become something less
exciting?

[Speaker 1]

I wish. The problem is things can also go in the other direction and a great example of
this was given to me by Vikram Docter himself in that episode where he spoke about the
Cavendish banana and this to me has become like a metaphor for the dangers of
homogenization. India gave bananas to the world more or less.

You know we used to export bananas, we have an incredible diversity of bananas. We

are in the best way possible, we are a banana republic. So, we give bananas to the world
which went by the way in the worst way possible to the banana republics of Latin
America.

Now what happened there was that bananas kind of got homogenized and a strain of
banana that became really popular was a Cavendish banana. The Cavendish banana is a
stall yellow banana or golden banana which tastes like shit. It is just boring, monotonous,
dull.

Every other banana we have and there are hundreds of them are better bananas than
that banana. Now after we gave bananas to the world, those buggers turned it into that
ridiculous homogenizing and they brought, sent it back to India. Right now it has certain
advantages.

Economies of scale, it might work, it can you know it can last for many days, all of those
random things are there but the result is and this is a great lament of Doc that our
indigenous bananas are dying out because Cavendish and our indigenous bananas are
dying out and that food diversity is under threat and I know you'll agree that it's an
absolutely sort of terrible thing you know and there are other examples of this.

For example, Pushpesh Pant ji in his conversation with me ranted about how you go to
any wedding in any part of the country, you'll have one stall which will give you Punjabi
food and then there'll be a chowmein stall and that's it and you look at the incredible
food diversity of our country where you'll find like I had done a food trip with a bunch of
friends of mine, many of whom you know we took a bus, we went to Mysore and
Bangalore and often you'll find that within two square kilometers of a particular place
you have six different kinds of biryani which have emerged from six different cuisines
and have all originated there and they're all different from each other and it is absolutely
delightful. Right, so to find the kind of homogenization that then happens is incredibly
sad and there are also sort of what I call the Pushpesh Pant pet peeves and I want to
read them out.

So it's four P's, you'll notice the alliteration Pushpesh Pant pet peeves and if he wore
Patiala pants like me, two more P's but these are the pet peeves and I love them. One,
there is a tyranny of the tandoor. Two, there is a curse of the curry and he's got a great
sentence where he talks about this where he says that generic word for any gravy based
Indian dish introduced by the British who couldn't discriminate between a korma and a
salan and now repeated idiotically by ourselves.

Right, so there's a tyranny of the tandoor, the curse of the curry and the myth of Mughlai
and you know all of them beautifully alliterative Pushpesh Pant pet peeves and Patiala
pants and that used to be a danger that I worry about except that I worry no more
because what I have found is that in that initial burst of markets coming to a particular
place, you have that drive towards scale and you have the homogenizing influence but
now that markets are deeper and our technology allows a kind of decentralization that
we see around us, I find that actually technology and markets are what will help these
different kinds of foods survive. I've often spoken about this in the context obviously of
stage.in which does a Netflix for Bharat and they have content in Haryanvi, Bhojpuri and
a couple of other dialects and what they do there is that dialects are dying down,
homogenization towards languages but they have sort of reversed that and there is a
long tail, you don't need economies of scale to succeed and therefore there is hope there
that all of these cuisines can indeed survive and there's a beautiful line by Pushpesh I
want to read out.

The well-traveled and well-heeled Indian today is far more discriminating when the
cuisine in question is European, Chinese, Japanese, Arab or Mediterranean. The dazzling
diversity of Indian inheritance remains to be discovered and elsewhere he speaks about
how when we think of countries, we often think of lines on a map and I have long argued
about you know why we shouldn't normalize the nation-state or necessarily take it for
granted and think it is the only kind of organization there is and Pushpesh beautifully
writes, even the post-independence reorganization of Indian states themselves on
linguistic lines by Jawaharlal Nehru has confused us completely and when we think of
maps for different kinds of food now, we trace out of the lines of the states we learnt in
school.

I want to make a different kind of food map of India, one in which zones are demarcated
based on what they traditionally use as a souring agent, tamarind or kokum, dried
mango or vinegar, star fruit or lime or what is the base spice for their gravies, stop quote
and just sort of beautiful language by Pushpeshji, his episode with me was remarkable
and a sentiment I agree with completely that our country is so diverse and all of us
should really you know just dive into its riches you know, we don't need to go on a
vacation elsewhere and say Italian cuisine khaya, pasta khaya, Chinese khaya, no I mean
there's so much variety just around us.

[Speaker 2]

So some things that have bothered me is the tyranny of Basmati rice, there are
thousands of rice cultivars in India and we've just got this overwhelming upper class
focus that by default a nice fluffy Basmati rice and I actually have turned this upside
down, I will never eat Basmati rice, I will take interest in every other rice in the world but
this is one.

[Speaker 1]

See we have to alliterate learning from Pushpeshji, so I would call it the barbarism of
Basmati rice, does that work for you?

[Speaker 2]

Brutality of Basmati.

[Speaker 1]

Brutality as well.

[Speaker 2]

The second thing that we should think about is the interconnection between the cultural
aspect of food, what you've described is food culture, is the philosophy of food and I'm
there 100% but you know different people could choose to disagree but I also want to
put up something more objective which is the health crisis associated with industrial
food. So the homogenizing influence is often driven by big food, by industrial food, by
large companies who want standardization of the customer experience all over the
country and then they freeze on certain fixed things. So the glory of the McDonald's
french fries is one particular Idaho russet potato, everywhere in the world wherever you
get that amazing McDonald's french fry it is one cultivar of potato.

So the homogenization runs with industrial food but it is really an important act of self-
preservation for all of us to question industrialization of food, to question the processed
food which has all kinds of harms. It is impossible to think deeply about the health
system without thinking deeply about the food system and happily these pieces are all
internally consistent that we would plead for more artisanal food, more local food and
that will take us back to what is feasible culturally, technologically within your backyard
and that will be a better world for all of us and then as we move across India in every 50
kilometers, every 100 kilometers we'll get a brand new cuisine which will just be you
know so great and so interesting. Here I want to link to the experiences of architecture,
language and the underlying technological foundation. So let's think about architecture.

Architecture varies all over the world. You can engage in aping somebody else. So when
you transplant a certain look, when a look gets a certain kind of prestige, then powerful
people who want to impress the natives, build imposing structures.

I have an article on where great feats of architecture come from and really it's a mind
job where powerful people want to make the peasants bow to their authority. The more
totalitarian the regime, the greater their interest in imposing structures and the
technology plays a reduced role when you are just in this game of impressing somebody.
If you actually think from first principles, architecture is about local conditions, local
weather, local materials, local craftsmanship and every region develops its own genre of
something that fits, that's appropriate, which uses local materials, that is well placed vis-
a-vis the weather and that really is the right thing to do for that region and of course
there is endless human creativity.

So I don't want to be a luddite, new technology will come. So it's not like architecture is
frozen like a fly in amber. Architecture also reflects the thinking, the problem solving,
reflecting local conditions and the emergence of technology.

I think similarly about food, that food culture should not be a fly in amber, it should
evolve and it should reflect local conditions, local preferences, local problems and that
way there's a thinking process where we are questioning and we are being creative and
we are evolving but we are not you know aping. So it would be nice to think of food
culture in a little more first principles way of what is the wise and sensible thing to do in
terms of convenience, local production, the health considerations and so on. So there's
this analogy between architecture and food in terms of the extent of localness.

But then let's turn to language. There was a great flattening sound all over the world
when mass media came up. So when radio and television and movies came up, the
beautiful heterogeneity of language did shrink at first.

So English was a highly heterogeneous language and for example in America there were
many many different communities which had come over from Europe who were all
different in their own way but with the rise of television and movies it became the case
that there was one single median accent and language which is modern standard
American English and that became the standard language of America though some
people in the south will continue to protest that we don't speak American.

In similar fashion it would be a stretch to call a single homogeneous language of North

India as Hindustani because actually there were many many dialects and strains and you
know in the sense of what you described as a nation state a language is a dialect with a
navy. So in that sense there are just so many languages, there's so much heterogeneity,
there's so much difference and when modern technology came and we got the scale and
also when the Indian state took Hindi promotion upon itself then you started getting a
great flattening sound where suddenly the beautiful heterogeneity of the languages of
North India was sought to be replaced by one single standard and that's Hindi and you
know a scant 75 years ago there was no Hindi there was Hindustani and Hindustani was
diverse and it was a people's language it was not administrative top-down government
imposed language it had its own dynamics so we've got to think about these kinds of
impulses but think about food and think about language exactly as you said about
Netflix. Stage one of electronics is the homogenization of radio and TV which is mass
media but now we've reached that new world of the internet where people can go to
youtube and discover Konkani shows and in fact as has been emphasized to us by many
of our friends there is no one language called Konkani as you go through the coast the
Konkani language is actually many different languages so today's modern technology
actually is the first time since the emergence of radio first abused by Mussolini on a