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Empire, Food and the Diaspora: Indian
Restaurants in Britain
Ravi Arvind Palata
a State University of New York at Binghamton, USA
Published online: 06 May 2015.
To cite this article: Ravi Arvind Palat (2015): Empire, Food and the Diaspora: Indian Restaurants in
Britain, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2015.1019603
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2015.1019603
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Empire, Food and the Diaspora: Indian Restaurants
in Britain
RAVI ARVIND PALAT, State University of New York at Binghamton, USA
Despite being called ‘Indian restaurants’, the family-run curry houses that are characteristic
of high streets in Britain are primarily run by Bangladeshi and Pakistani migrants. This
article links the evolution of these restaurants in Britain to colonial history, migration after
Independence and contemporary political changes. It analyses the popularity of curry houses
alongside the continuing racism meted out to the wait staff and patrons by white Britons in the
context of colonial history, migration patterns and the changing industrial fortunes of India
and Britain in the post-World War II era. The emergence of wealthy and highly-credentialed
Indians and British-born Asians has led to the rise of upmarket eateries and to a sharp
bifurcation in diasporic communities.
Keywords: Food; class; diaspora; Britain; Indian restaurants; Bangladesh; Pakistan; racism
In an episode of the 1998 BBC comedy show, Goodness Gracious Me, ‘going for an English’
is part of the post-cinema Friday night routine for three Indian men and two women in
Mumbai.
1
Parodying the English ‘going for an Indian’, the diners ask for the ‘blandest thing
on the menu’, and when the waiter suggests ‘steak and kidney pee’, one of the women protests
that she would not be able to go to the toilet for a week! Her friend tells her that is the very
point of ‘going for an English’. This humorous interplay underlines the popularity of Indian
food in Britain, consumed twice as often as the quintessentially English fish and chips.
2
The
same year, the British band, Fat Les, released a single called ‘Vindaloo’, named after the Goan
dish popular with pub-goers after a night out with ‘the lads’, and lampooning football chants
for the FIFA World Cup. Unfortunately, it was adopted as a chant in its own right by English
fans when they clashed with Tunisian supporters after a match between their national teams in
Marseilles, smashing cars, ransacking restaurants and breaking windows.
3
The machismo
associated with Indian food—‘bring me the hottest thing on the menu’—that is caricatured in
the Goodness Gracious Me episode is also what associates curry with football hooliganism.
These two vignettes silhouette two key aspects of Indian food in Britain. First, in the last
thirty-odd years, Indian restaurants have become so pervasive that Robin Cook, a former
foreign secretary, proclaimed chicken tikka masala to be ‘a true British national dish’. By this
An earlier version of this article was presented at the Centre for the Study of the Indian Diaspora, University of
Hyderabad, on 14 February 2013 and I thank the audience there, especially Amit Mishra, and the two
anonymous reviewers of South Asia for very thoughtful and constructive comments and suggestions.
1
Elizabeth Buettner, ‘Chicken Tikka Masala, Flock Wallpaper, and “Real” Home Cooking: Assessing Britain’s
“Indian” Restaurant Traditions’, in Food & History, Vol. 7, no. 2 (2009), pp. 2034.
2
Stephen A. Fielding, ‘Currying Flavor: Authenticity, Cultural Capital, and the Rise of Indian Food in the
United Kingdom’, in Russell Cobb (ed.), The Paradox of Authenticity in a Globalized World (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 37.
3
Jo Monroe, Star of India: The Spicy Adventures of Curry (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2005), p. 2.
Ó2015 South Asian Studies Association of Australia
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Cook implied that British culture was open to outside influences—with masala being added to
the Indian chicken tikka to cater to the British palate. Though this was not an inspired dish—
allegedly being created by an angry chef by hastily adding Campbell’s tomato soup, cream
and some spices to a chicken tikka that an ignorant British customer claimed was too dry—its
popularity was taken to indicate that British culture was not defined by what Paul Gilroy
called ‘ethnic absolutism’, a shift from ‘white-ness’ to one that was more accommodating of
minorities,
4
or, as British Prime Minister David Cameron said during the 2013 British Curry
Awards ceremony: ‘To all those who think being British depends on skin colour, wake up and
smell the curry’.
5
In 2002, The Guardian estimated that Indian food accounted for almost two-thirds of all
the money spent eating outside the home in Britain.
6
That same year, Spice Business, a trade
magazine, estimated that each week, some 2.5 million customers ate at one of the ten thousand
restaurants in Britain run by immigrants from South Asia and their descendants; they
employed eighty thousand workers and accounted for £3.5 billion turnover. At the same time,
supermarkets sold an additional £600 million worth of Indian food, two-thirds of which was
ready-made curries.
7
By the turn of the twenty-first century, Indian food accounted for higher
monetary turnover in Britain than shipbuilding, steel and coal combined.
8
The curry house has
become a characteristic feature of high streets in Britain, but unlike other high-street food
outlets that are usually products of large corporations, curry houses are mainly family-run
enterprises, even if their offerings are industrialised and they share a standard menu of
virtually identical dishes.
9
Second, the rapid growth of Indian restaurants was both because they offered cheap,
filling, tasty food—cheaper than and consumed twice as often as fish and chips—and because
the standardised menus of these restaurants did not highlight vegetables, unlike on the
subcontinent, but were adapted to meet the British demand for meat, vegetables and starch.
10
As the charity, Immigration Advisory Service, advised the British government in 2008, this
meant that ‘for many low-income families the only chance they have of eating out is to go for
a curry’.
11
In fact, Indian restaurants were not associated (at least until very recently) with
haute cuisine; of the 1,300 London restaurants listed in the 2013 edition of the Michelin
Guide, only forty were Indian—and London reputedly has more Indian restaurants than Delhi
and Mumbai combined!
12
Moreover, surveys suggest that white Britons associate traditional
4
Elizabeth Buettner, ‘“Going for an Indian”: South Asian Restaurants and the Limits of Multiculturalism in
Britain’, in Journal of Modern History, Vol. LXXX, no. 4 (Dec. 2008), p. 870; and Lizzie Collingham, Curry: A
Tale of Cooks and Conquerors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 2.
5
Huma Yusuf, ‘The Threat to British Curry’, The New York Times (1 Dec. 2013).
6
Geraldine Bedell, ‘It’s Curry But Not as We Know It’, The Guardian (12 May 2002) [http://www.theguardian.
com/lifeandstyle/2002/may/12/foodanddrink.shopping2, accessed 6 Feb. 2015].
7
Homa Khaleeli, ‘The Curry Crisis’, The Guardian (8 Jan. 2012). She notes that other estimates of eating out
are lower—the Curry Club put Indian restaurant turnover in 2002 at £2.5 billion, and Horizon FS, the food
industry analysts, at a mere £700 million.
8
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Imagining the New Britain (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 3; and Virinder S. Kalra,
‘The Political Economy of the Samosa’, in South Asia Research, Vol. XXIV, no. 1 (May 2004), p. 24.
9
Ben Highmore, ‘The Taj Mahal in the High Street: The Indian Restaurant as Diasporic Popular Culture in
Britain’, in Food, Culture & Society, Vol. 12, no. 2 (June 2009), p. 175.
10
South Indians who did not quite take to the British ‘meat and two veg’ meals created their own distinct
culinary circuits in London as early as the 1950s, though this is ignored in most standard accounts of Indian
food. See Parvathi Raman, ‘Me in Place, and the Place in Me: A Migrant’s Tale of Food, Home and Belonging’,
in Food, Culture & Society, Vol. XIV, no. 2 (June 2011), pp. 1714.
11
Quoted in Fielding, ‘Currying Flavor’, p. 41.
12
Stuart Crainer, ‘Cinnamon Club Rules’, in Business Strategy Review, Vol. XXIV, no. 2 (May 2013), p. 37;
and Fielding, ‘Currying Flavor’, p. 38.
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dishes—roast beef, shepherd’s pie, fish pie, beef Wellington, liver and bacon, and the like—
with family life. By contrast, ‘ethnic food’ is seen as something to be consumed with friends
13
by ‘going for an Indian’—hence, the ready adoption of ‘vindaloo’ as a chant by English
football fans.
The parody of the pervasive British practice of ‘going for an Indian’ in Goodness Gracious
Me indicates, however, that the popularity of Indian food did not lead to the easy assimilation
of immigrants from South Asia. After a night at the pub, when young men rolled into a curry
house, they tended to treat the waiters with disrespect and racist taunts were routine fare for
restaurant workers. In a celebrated case in 1986, Satpal Ram and a group of friends were
dining in a restaurant in Birmingham when six inebriated white diners trooped in. Insulting the
workers and the Indian music being played, they also picked a fight with Ram and his friends.
In the ensuing struggle, Ram was cut with a piece of broken glass and he, in turn, stabbed a
Clark Pearce. When Pearce was taken to a hospital, in a fit of drunken bravado, he refused
treatment only to succumb later to his injuries. Even though Ram claimed he was
outnumbered, feared for his life and acted in self-defence, and witnesses corroborated his
testimony, he was convicted, jailed and only freed in 2002.
14
In part, this racism was related to the history of post-World War II growth in Britain and
the spread of ‘Indian’ restaurants, their location and the clientele they catered to, as we shall
see in the next section. The growth and spread of Indian restaurants in Britain is also an
elegant barometer with which to chart the changing place of both Britain and India in the
world economy, as well as the role of migrant labour from the subcontinent in Britain. Despite
a long colonial history, food from the subcontinent was not widely accepted in Britain. As late
as the 1960s, residents of a Birmingham neighbourhood petitioned the city council for rent
reductions because they claimed the smell of curry wafting from nearby South Asian row
houses was too offensive.
15
These objections were connected to the growth in immigration
from the subcontinent and to these immigrants taking unskilled and low-paying jobs in the
country’s post-World War II economic expansion. By 1952, British manufacturing output had
surpassed pre-war levels and the air was rife with talk of a New Elizabethan Age.
16
Further
expansion was predicated on inflows of migrants from former colonies.
These migrants also set up restaurants, both to cater to their compatriots and to the wider
population, especially around college campuses. The hollowing out of British manufacturing
during the 1970s spurred further growth of these restaurants as displaced workers opened
curry houses, while the size of the community led to the creation of a genuinely diasporic
cuisine—the ‘balti’.
17
So prominent were these restaurants that local governments advertised
their ‘Balti triangles’, ‘Balti quarters’ or ‘curry capitals’ as tourist attractions.
18
In no other
country have Indian restaurants gained a similar prominence. This underlines, as Virinder S.
Kalra observes, ‘how South Asians have shifted from cheap industrial labour to cheaper
service sector labour in the space of a generation’.
19
If curry houses became popular and the
cheapness of their dishes attracted a wide clientele, this very characteristic continued to
symbolise the low status of South Asians in the racial hierarchy and ‘sanction’ the rude
13
Fielding, ‘Currying Flavor’, p. 44.
14
Buettner, ‘Chicken Tikka Masala’, p. 210.
15
Fielding, ‘Currying Flavor’, p. 37.
16
Nicholas Comfort, Surrender: How British Industry Gave Up the Ghost, 19522012 (London: Biteback
Publishing, 2012).
17
Balti, meaning ‘bucket’, refers to a wok-like cooking vessel (karahi).
18
Buettner, ‘“Going for an Indian”’, p. 860.
19
Kalra, ‘The Political Economy of the Samosa’, p. 24.
Empire, Food and the Diaspora 3
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treatment of owners and wait staff. Interestingly, Gaye Tuchman and Harry Gene Levine
suggest one of the reasons Eastern European Jews in New York in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries ate at Chinese restaurants was because they were above the Chinese
in the racial hierarchy and so could behave rudely to them!
20
At the same time, the industrial decline of Britain was matched by the rise of India: there
are now more millionaires in India than in Britain,
21
and an Indian conglomerate, Tata, has
become the largest private-sector employer in the UK.
22
The growing prosperity of Indian
migrants, and of British-born South Asians, led to the bifurcation of Indian restaurants—with
top-end restaurants being set up at the opposite end of the price spectrum from the curry
houses; these more highly-credentialed and wealthier South Asians had no wish to associate
with their poorer compatriots. The recent growth of upmarket restaurants marks a sharp class
divide within the South Asian diaspora, institutionalised in two duelling trade associations—
the Guild of Bangladeshi Restaurateurs and the Elite Indian Restaurant Association.
23
Two caveats are in order here: despite ‘curry’ being synonymous with Indian food, it is
now well known that there are few dishes on the subcontinent that are actually called ‘curry’
in any of the indigenous languages.
24
The venerable Hobson-Jobson traces the word back to
the Tamil word kari, which refers to meat or vegetables served with a spicy sauce. The
anonymous female author of Modern Domestic Cookery, published in 1851, wrote that ‘Curry,
which was formerly a dish almost exclusively for the table of those who had made a long
residence in India, is so completely naturalized, that few dinners are thought complete unless
one is on the table’.
25
In this context, it is interesting to note that in 1904, when Mahomed
Futymed opened a restaurant in Piccadilly, a review of it in The Caterer noted: ‘As to the
cuisine it should give satisfaction, for Mahomed’s curries are not only appetising but by no
means inordinately hot, which is one of the characteristics of the typical English curry’.
26
That
‘curry’ as a synonym for ‘Indian’ food is a relatively recent phenomenon is also shown by a
review of an Indian restaurant opened in San Francisco by David Brown and his ‘handsome
blonde’ wife in 1947, which stated that just as no one would expect a Frenchman to douse all
food in brandy, or an American in ketchup, it would be silly to expect every Indian dish to
consist of a meat plus curry powder.
27
Even as recently as 1974, Madhur Jaffrey wrote that to
call all dishes ‘curry’ is as demeaning to Indian cuisine as it is to call all Chinese dishes ‘chop
suey’. Yet, by 2003, she was insouciantly publishing a book titled The Ultimate Curry Bible!
28
20
Gaye Tuchman and Harry Gene Levine, ‘New York Jews and Chinese Food: The Social Construction of an
Ethnic Pattern’, in Barbara G. Shortridge and James R. Shortridge (eds), The Taste of American Place: A Reader
on Regional and Ethnic Foods (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), pp. 1701.
21
Gideon Rachman, ‘India is Part of an Upside-Down World’, Financial Times (24 Sept. 2012), p. 61.
22
‘Tata for Now’, The Economist (10 Sept. 2011), p. 61.
23
Robina Dam, ‘Fancy Going Out for a Bangladeshi?’, The Times (25 April 1996) [www.lexisnexis.com,
accessed 7 July 2014].
24
The phrase ‘typical English curry’ is suggestive because the earliest surviving English cookbook, compiled in
1390 during the reign of Richard II, was titled The Forme of Cury and included two ‘receipts’ for curry powders.
The word probably derived from the French cuire, meaning ‘to cook’. Cecilia Leong-Salobir, Food Culture in
Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 4, 41; Susan Zlotnik, ‘Domesticating
Imperialism: Curry and Cookbooks in Victorian England’, in Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Vol.
XVI, nos. 2/3 (1996), p. 58; see also Sami Zubaida, ‘The Idea of “Indian Food”: Between the Colonial and the
Global’, in Food & History, Vol. 7, no. 1 (2009), pp. 1989.
25
Zlotnik, ‘Domesticating Imperialism’, p. 60.
26
Quoted in Panikos Panayi, Spicing Up Britain: The Multicultural History of British Food (London: Reaktion
Books, 2008), p. 92 (italics in original).
27
Laresh Jayasankar, ‘Indian Restaurants in San Francisco and America: A Case Study in Translating Diversity,
19652005’, in Food & History, Vol. V, no. 2 (2007), p. 230.
28
Colleen Taylor Sen, Curry: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), p. 10.
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As Susan Zlotnik puts it: ‘Curry, which began as an English fabrication of Indian food, was
domesticated by middle-class Victorian women in the first half of the nineteenth century and
then “commodified” and returned to India as the gift of its “civilizer” in the second half’.
29
If ‘curry’ is a colonial appropriation of Indian cooking styles, ‘Indian’ restaurants in
Britain are largely run by Bangladeshis and Pakistanis who call their restaurants ‘Indian’
because India, rather their own countries, is associated with the romance of the exotic.
30
Iqbal
Wahhab, a Bangladeshi restaurateur, told a reporter in 2002: ‘Bangladesh is a land associated
with floods and cyclones, whereas India is associated with romance, the Raj, Taj Mahal,
mystique’.
31
More recently, the association of Pakistan with militant Islam has made it
unattractive to name restaurants after that country or its more prominent cities.
32
Since restaurant menus of most of these establishments are identical, the Bangladeshi or
Pakistani interpretation of a slew of standard dishes—butter chicken, biriyani,rogan josh,
Madras chicken curry, dal makhani, etc.—have come to stand in for the food of an area that is
larger than Europe, in effect to define ‘Indian’ food. While Sidney Mintz has persuasively
argued that cuisine is always local and never national, criticism of Indian restaurants in Britain
and elsewhere has focused on the inauthenticity of their dishes.
33
Conceptions of authenticity
are so mired in contradictions and ambiguities, especially in a region as culturally diverse as
the subcontinent, that they are impossible to resolve, all the more so as talented chefs
continually bring their own innovations to dishes.
End of Empire and the Spread of Curry Houses
Although curries were recorded as having been served at the Norris Street Coffee House in
Haymarket in 1733, and recipes for Indian curries, pilau, ‘Mullagatawny or Currie-soup’,
‘mutton kebobbed’, and many other dishes appeared in eighteenth-century cookbooks such as
Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747), Ann Shackleford’s The Modern
Art of Cookery Improved (1767) and John Farley’s The London Art of Cookery (1783), the first
recorded instance of an Indian restaurant opening in England was Sake Dean Mohamed’s
elaborately-furnished Hindostanee Coffee House in London’s Portman Square in 1809.
Targeting wealthy English with a taste for India, in keeping with cookbooks on ‘foreign food’,
which stressed ‘authenticity’ rather than the cheapness or tastiness of a dish, Mahomed
promised that the taste of his food would transport his customers to their favourite Indian
haunts.
34
An announcement in The Times on 27 April 1811 clearly identified his preferred
clientele—not the poor seamen and labourers from the subcontinent, but the landed gentry:
29
Zlotnik, ‘Domesticating Imperialism’, p. 64.
30
When people from the subcontinent first opened restaurants in Britain, India was not yet partitioned into two
separate states—India and Pakistan. Later, Bangladesh seceded from Pakistan. Here, I use India to stand both for
people from India as well as for restaurants run by people from the subcontinent, though, where possible, I try to
identify their origins.
31
Bedell, ‘It’s Curry But Not as We Know It’.
32
Buettner, ‘“Going for an Indian”’, pp. 871, 912; Collingham, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors,
p. 243.
33
Sidney Mintz, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Power, and the Past (Boston, MA:
Beacon, 1997), pp. 10624.
34
Sen, Curry: A Global History, pp. 3742; Troy Bickham, ‘Eating the Empire: Intersections of Food, Cookery
and Imperialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Past & Present, no. 198 (Feb. 2008), pp. 99101;
Collingham, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, pp. 12931; Leong-Salobir, Food Culture in Colonial
Asia, p. 53; Panayi, Spicing Up Britain, p. 92; and J.A.G Roberts, China to Chinatown: Chinese Food in the
West (London: Reaktion, 2002), p. 205.
Empire, Food and the Diaspora 5
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Hindostanee coffee-house, No. 34 George-street, Portman square—Mahomed, East
Indian, informs the Nobility and the Gentry, he has fitted up the above house, neatly
and elegantly, for the entertainment of Indian gentlemen, where they may enjoy the
Hoakha, with real Chilm tobacco, and Indian dishes, in the highest perfection, and
allowed by the greatest epicures to be unequalled to any curries ever made in
England.
35
After the Hindostanee Coffee House closed in 1833—perhaps because the nobility and the
gentry could afford to bring their own chefs from India—there were several short-lived
ventures, but the rate of mortality of these restaurants was very high due to popular rejection
of Indian, or indeed any ‘foreign’, food.
36
Old India hands however retained a fondness for
Indian food, and by the 1850s, tins of mulligatawny soup were being sold, with David
Livingstone even taking a supply of them on his explorations to Africa.
37
In the nineteenth century, as more and more English women arrived in India, there was a
greater separation between the ruling English and the Indians they governed. This was
underlined by cookbooks written in India by Englishwomen which were adaptations of
English food to Indian conditions, but omitted recipes for Indian dishes that had hitherto been
commonplace on English tables. Even when Indian recipes were included, it was done so
grudgingly. Flora Annie Steele, in her The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, published
in 1898, wrote: ‘The following native dishes have been added by request. It may be mentioned
incidentally that most native recipes are inordinately greasy and sweet and that your native
cooks invariably know how to make them fairly well’ (p. 70). However, there was no such
reluctance to include Indian recipes in cookbooks published in England.
Rather than catering to a white public like the Hindostanee Coffee House and its imitators,
far more significant for the evolution of the curry houses that came to dominate British high
streets from the late twentieth century onwards were the boarding houses and cafes established
by former sailors and other migrants to cater to the needs of others from their communities—
mainly Sylhetis (from present-day Bangladesh) who had been disproportionately recruited
into the maritime fleet since the nineteenth century. The boarding houses and cafes in Brick
Lane, Commercial Road, New Lane and Sandy Row became community centres and support
networks for the Sylheti community. Many of them had learnt to cook on the ships, but unlike
Mahomed’s enterprise, their cooking was confined to cheap meals using limited means.
38
The oldest surviving Indian restaurant—Veeraswamy’s in Regent Street, London, founded
in 1926 by Edward Palmer, whose family had been associated with India for four
generations—catered to a well-heeled clientele and former colonials. In it, Palmer created the
ambience of the Raj, where ex-colonials could re-enact their lives in India, calling waiters
‘bearers’ and being called ‘Sahib’ in return. Or, as a restaurant guide published in 1928 put it:
Veeraswamy’s was a place for former colonials who had ‘been out East...to eat again a real
35
Quoted in Highmore, ‘The Taj Mahal in the High Street’, p. 177.
36
Mahomed himself declared bankruptcy in 1812. See Michael H. Fisher, The First Indian Author in English:
Dean Mahomed (17591851) in India, Ireland, and England (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996),
pp. 25761.
37
Modhumita Roy, ‘Some Like It Hot: Class, Gender and Empire in the Making of Mulligatawny Soup’, in
Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. XLV, no. 32 (7 Aug. 2010), pp. 66, 69.
38
Humayun Ansari, ‘Mapping the Colonial: South Asians in Britain, 18571947’, in N. Ali, Virinder Kalra and
S. Sayyid (eds), A Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2006), p. 152;
Collingham, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, pp. 2178; Highmore, ‘The Taj Mahal in the High
Street’, pp. 17981; and John Pottier, ‘Savoring “the Authentic”: The Emergence of a Bangladeshi Cuisine in
East London’, in Food, Culture & Society, Vol. XVII, no. 1 (Mar. 2014), pp. 112.
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curry and remember the days when they were important functionaries on salary instead of
“retired” on pensions’.
39
Palmer recruited waiters and chefs from India, many of whom went
on to start their own restaurants. He also imported spices and chutneys from India for sale
under the Nizam brand and also wrote a much-reprinted cookbook that captured the essence of
Anglo-Indian cooking.
Perhaps much more significant was the large number of small restaurants established to
cater to seamen and other poorer migrants from India. By 1946, there were twenty Indian
high-street restaurants in London and many more in working-class areas; in Stepney alone, a
poor working-class district in the London borough of Tower Hamlets, there were 32
restaurants run by ‘coloured men’.
40
Yet, despite these pioneering ventures, it was only after the end of World War II that
Indian restaurants began to establish themselves more widely in Britain.
41
Jack Goody
attributes the changed reception of Chinese and Indian food to the greater exposure returning
troops had had to foreign food during the war and to the massive expansion of higher
education after hostilities ended. Since Chinese and Indian food was less meat-intensive and
the restaurants were staffed by family labour and poorly-paid immigrant workers, they offered
cheap and tasty alternatives to eating on university campuses and were often open late after
the pubs had closed.
42
The end of empire and post-war reconstruction also marked a substantial rise in
immigration from the subcontinent to Britain. In the 1951 census, some 43,000 people from
the subcontinent were living in Britain; fifty years later, there were over two million.
43
Reconstruction and economic expansion in Britain had led to increased demands for labour;
migration from the subcontinent peaked between the mid 1950s and the mid 1970s, but when
the manufacturing sector in England began to decline after 1981, the entry of unskilled
migrants was largely restricted to family reunifications.
44
After World War II, Bangladeshi
45
and Pakistani migrants set up most of the ‘Indian’
restaurants in Britain. By some counts between 85 and 90 percent of the Indian restaurants in
39
Quoted in Buettner, ‘“Going for an Indian”’, p. 873; see also Collingham, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and
Conquerors, pp. 1534; Roberts, China to Chinatown, p. 206; and Sen, Curry: A Global History, pp. 445.
40
Ansari, ‘Mapping the Colonial’, p. 153; Collingham, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, p. 153; Sen,
Curry: A Global History, pp. 446; Highmore, ‘The Taj Mahal in the High Street’, p. 183; Pottier, ‘Savoring
“the Authentic”’, p. 12; and Rozina Visram, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London: Pluto Press,
2002), pp. 2568.
41
The Good Food Guide of 1955 reported that there were only nine Indian restaurants in London and four
outside the capital, although that is almost certainly an underestimate. See Madhur Jaffrey, ‘Very Muddy to
Very Modern’, Financial Times (21 Jan. 2005) [http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2c501f66-6bc6-11d9-94dc-
00000e2511c8.html, accessed 5 Feb. 2015].
42
Jack Goody, ‘The Globalisation of Chinese Food’, in Jack Goody (ed.), Food and Love: A Cultural History of
East and West (London: Verso, 1998).
43
In 1951, there were 31,000 Indians, 10,000 Pakistanis and 2,000 people from what would later become
Bangladesh living in Britain. In 2001, there were one million Indians, 750,000 Pakistanis and 280,000
Bangladeshis. Almost 30 percent of the Indians came from East Africa and smaller numbers from the diasporic
communities in Guyana, Trinidad, Singapore and Fiji. See Ceri Peach, ‘Demographics of BrAsian Settlement,
19512001’, in Naseen Ali, Virinder Kalra and S. Sayyid (eds), A Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain
(London: C. Hurst & Co., 2006), p. 168.
44
Collingham, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, p. 22.
45
For simplicity, immigrants from East Pakistan are referred to in this paper as Bangladeshis despite the country
only coming into existence in 1971.
Empire, Food and the Diaspora 7
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Britain were run by Bangladeshis,
46
especially by immigrants from Sylhet, prompting A.A.
Gill to term them ‘Banglish’.
47
When Sylhet became part of East Pakistan after Partition, the
people who lived there lost their primary source of livelihood because the main port, Calcutta
(now Kolkata), was in India. As post-war reconstruction in Britain led to an enormous demand
for labour, the Sylhetis settled in London pressured Pakistan to grant passports to their family
members so they could take advantage of labour vouchers being issued by the British
government; thus began the flow of Bangladeshi immigrants.
48
People from Mirpur in
Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir began arriving in Britain in the mid 1950s and 1960s when
construction of the Mangala dam displaced many thousands of them; they now account for
some 70 percent of all Pakistani migrants in the country.
49
Within Britain, while Bangladeshi-
run restaurants dominate in the south—one-third of all Bangladeshis in Britain live in
London’s Tower Hamlets housing project—Pakistani and Kashmiri migrants dominate in the
north. Restaurants in Bradford and Manchester are largely Pakistani, while those in Glasgow
are almost entirely run by Kashmiris.
50
The dominance of Pakistanis and Punjabis in
restaurants in the north is due to the collapse of the manufacturing industry there, where many
of them had been formerly employed.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, as a few Indian restaurants were being established by
new migrants, they had problems finding the proper ingredients, especially in a Britain under
post-war rationing. This was all the more acute in the case of vegetables and dairy products
for vegetarians, while strict Muslims could only buy meat from kosher butchers.
51
Unlike
post-war Chinese immigrants to Britain who moved directly into the catering business, only a
small number of Sylhetis initially moved into the restaurant business. In the 1950s and 1960s,
Jewish proprietors began selling their fish-and-chip shops which were bought by Chinese,
Greek-Cypriot and Sylheti migrants. Successful fish-and-chip shops tended to be located in
working-class neighbourhoods or near university campuses. They often stayed open after 11
pm after the night shift ended to attract customers and after the pubs closed, even though this
meant dealing with drunken or abusive customers. Initially, the new Sylheti owners offered
the same food as traditional fish-and-chip shops with the addition of a few curry dishes.
Eventually, a few regulars began to adventurously try curry dishes, and from these beginnings,
‘going out for an Indian’ became a national trait in Britain as pub-goers discovered that a hot
vindaloo went down well after a few pints.
52
Nevertheless most of the clientele of the curry houses were people from the subcontinent,
mainly Pakistanis and Indians employed on the buses and in manufacturing. Often, the owners
46
Buettner, ‘“Going for an Indian”’, p. 871; Buettner, ‘Chicken Tikka Masala’, p. 208; Panayi, Spicing Up
Britain, p. 173; and Sean Carey, ‘Curry Capital: The Restaurant Sector in London’s Brick Lane’, ICS Working
Paper (London: Institute of Community Studies, 2004), p. 1.
47
Fielding, ‘Currying Flavor’, p. 47.
48
Caroline Adams, ‘Across Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers’, in Oral History, Vol. 19, no. 1 (Spring 1991),
pp. 2935.
49
Sean McLoughlin, ‘Writing a BrAsian City: “Race”, Culture and Religion in Accounts of Postcolonial
Bradford’, in Naseen Ali, Virinder Kalra and S. Sayyid (eds), A Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain
(London: C. Hurst & Co., 2006), p. 129; and Virinder S. Kalra, From Textile Mills to Taxi Ranks: Experiences
of Migration, Labour, and Social Change (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 6572.
50
Ziauddin Sardar, Balti Britain: A Journey through the British Asian Experience (London: Granta Books,
2008), pp. 41, 337; and Nicola Frost, ‘Green Curry: Politics and Place-Making on Brick Lane’, in Food, Culture
& Society, Vol. XIV, no. 2 (June 2011), p. 226.
51
Panayi, Spicing Up Britain, p. 143; and Raman, ‘Me in Place, and the Place in Me’, pp. 1723.
52
Buettner, ‘“Going for an Indian”’, p. 875; Collingham, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, pp. 22334;
Highmore, ‘The Taj Mahal in the High Street’, p. 182; Panayi, Spicing Up Britain, p. 168; Zubaida, ‘The Idea of
“Indian Food”’, p. 204; and Pottier, ‘Savoring “the Authentic”’, p. 12.
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were themselves former workers in these sectors and sought mainly to provide ‘home cooking’
as well as solidarity and support networks for their compatriots.
53
To cater to South Indians,
the first Indian High Commissioner, V.K. Krishna Menon, set up the India Club in The Strand
in 1946, and it spun off some South Indian cafes.
54
All these restaurants served a dual role—
before 7 pm, they served a clientele largely from their own community and were also
community centres for celebratory functions like weddings and birthdays. During the
Bangladeshi War of Independence, restaurants run by East Pakistanis became meeting sites
for the East Pakistan Liberation Front, the Bangladesh Youth Committee and the Bangladesh
Action Front.
55
The large majority of restaurant owners had had no previous experience of catering and the
restaurants were almost entirely all-male enterprises. A 1997 Labour Force Survey indicated
that more than 60 percent of Bangladeshi men in Britain worked in restaurants, compared to
40 percent of Chinese males and only 2 percent of Indians. Women’s roles in most
Bangladeshi- and Pakistani-run establishments were limited to behind-the-scenes food
preparation.
56
In general, since the food served in these restaurants was based on their owners’
perceptions of what was likely to attract a large clientele, they copied menus from successful
restaurants. As Colleen Taylor Sen observes, the sixteen most popular curries that Pat
Chapman lists in his The Curry Bible published in 1997 are not substantially different from
those published in the Indian Cookery Book of 1880.
57
These menus were the Sylhetis’
interpretation of north Indian dishes, prepared cheaply, taking shortcuts, omitting ingredients
or substituting cheaper ingredients for more expensive ones so that the curries were
increasingly alike with rich spicy sauces that lacked any pretence of subtlety. Accordingly, in
1976, Madhur Jaffrey advised her British readers to prepare their Indian dishes at home, rather
than eat in these ‘second-class establishments’,
58
while in 1983, the Curry Magazine wrote:
You are as certain to get the standard menu in the standard restaurant, as you are to get
a postage stamp from a post office whether you are in the coves of Cornwall or the
Highlands of Scotland.
59
By the 1950s and 1960s, as people from the Caribbean and South Asia came to Britain in
large numbers—Avtar Brah notes that just as ‘the colonies had been a source of cheap raw
materials, now they became a source of cheap labour’—both communities were subjected to
racist attacks.
60
Criticism of West Indians centred on their supposed immorality—their music
assailed ‘white’ ears and their bodies assailed the bodies of white women—and this was
paralleled by resentment of the smell of curry from restaurants run by South Asians. English
workers in factories refused to work with Indians and Pakistanis on account of the smell of
53
Buettner, ‘“Going for an Indian”’, pp. 8745.
54
Raman, ‘Me in Place, and the Place in Me’, pp.1745.
55
Highmore, ‘The Taj Mahal in the High Street’, p. 18.
56
Carey, ‘Curry Capital’, p. 2; Shinder S. Thandi, ‘Brown Economy: Enterprise and Employment’, in Naseen
Ali, Virinder Kalra and S. Sayyid (eds), A Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain (London: C. Hurst &
Co., 2006), p. 217; Buettner, ‘Chicken Tikka Masala’, p. 208; and Highmore, ‘The Taj Mahal in the High
Street’, p. 183.
57
Sen, Curry: A Global History, p. 47.
58
Madhur Jaffrey, An Invitation to Indian Cooking (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), pp. 112, quoted in
Buettner, ‘“Going for an Indian”’, pp. 8823.
59
‘The Indian Restaurant and Its Menu’, in Curry Magazine, Vol. 4 (1983), p. 12, quoted in Buettner, ‘“Going
for an Indian”’, p. 882.
60
Avtar Brah, ‘The “Asian” in Britain’, in Naseen Ali, Virinder Kalra and S. Sayyid (eds), A Postcolonial
People: South Asians in Britain (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2006), p. 36.
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garlic on their breath; managers typically defused these tensions by segregating the two groups
of workers. People also complained about cruelty to animals in Muslims’ ritual halal slaughter
practices. And there were complaints that the dietary restrictions of migrants from the
subcontinent placed undue burdens on the National Health Service: a British author of a series
of Indian cookery books complained in 1955 of ‘the impression, difficult to eradicate that
curry eating is bad for you: that it causes dyspepsia, makes you evil-tempered, and tends to
shorten your life’.
61
Curry as ‘British’ Food
Nevertheless, despite such resentment, the popularity of curry houses continued to expand.
From about three hundred Indian restaurants in 1960, numbers quadrupled to 1,200 in 1970,
and then rose exponentially to three thousand in 1980, to 6,600 by 1990 when immigration
from Bangladesh peaked, and to about nine thousand by the early 2000s.
62
With the growing
popularity of these restaurants, curry moved out to the pubs that began holding a ‘curry night’
or two every week. Yet, at the same time, because many of the restaurants were copies of each
other, there was also overcrowding in the market; in 1997, while 125 new Indian restaurants
opened in Britain, at least three hundred closed down.
63
The sharp rise in the numbers of Indian restaurants was due to several reasons: the
imperialist nostalgia of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain; the decline in the British manufacturing
industry; and the influx of migrants of Indian origin from East Africa since the 1970s. In the
unstable boom and bust of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, Lizzie Collingham argues that people
sought stability and ‘echoes of empire’, which could be found in curry.
64
This nostalgia was
also fuelled by Raj-themed TV series like Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown, M.M. Kaye’s
The Far Pavilions and E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. As Salman Rushdie memorably
put it:
The recrudescence of imperialist ideology and the popularity of Raj fictions put one in
mind of the phantom twitchings of an amputated limb. Britain is in danger of entering
a condition of cultural psychosis, in which it begins once again to strut and posture
like a great power while in fact its power diminishes every year. The jewel in the
crown is made, these days, of paste.
65
In the 1970s and 1980s, as the textile mills of Bradford and the motor, metal and
engineering industries of Birmingham declined, migrant workers made redundant turned to
catering and other forms of self-employment. From the booming economic times of the early
1950s when Britain accounted for one quarter of manufacturing exports worldwide, increasing
competition, stagflation and militant trade union activity led to an evisceration of
manufacturing. During the 1970s, the share of foreign-made cars in the British market
increased from 14.4 percent to 56.7 percent; Prime Minister Thatcher had effectively
transformed the automobile industry into an offshore platform for Japanese manufacturers
61
Quoted in Buettner, ‘“Going for an Indian”’, p. 874.
62
Ibid., pp. 87980; Buettner, ‘Chicken Tikka Masala’, p. 208; Panayi, Spicing Up Britain, p. 172; and
Fielding, ‘Currying Flavor’, p. 37. Other estimates put the number of Indian restaurants in Britain in 1970 at two
thousand. See Collingham, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, p. 233.
63
Panayi, Spicing Up Britain, p. 162.
64
Collingham, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, p. 239.
65
Salman Rushdie, ‘Outside the Whale’, in Granta, No. 11 (1984) [http://www.granta.com/Archive/11/Outside-
the-Whale/Page-1, accessed 5 Feb. 2015].
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who set up their new plants on greenfield sites, rather than in the north.
66
All this set the stage
for the race riots of the 1970s and 1980s and to the growth of the National Front. Equally
importantly, as automobile ownership increased and the government repealed laws that
allowed manufacturers to set retail prices, large supermarket chains began to replace small
food outlets—butchers, greengrocers, wine and spirits outlets, bakeries—with very adverse
consequences for other high-street merchants. This increase in high-street vacancies provided
an opportunity for South Asian workers made redundant by the plant closings to move into
suburban high streets and revitalise them by opening restaurants. As automobile ownership
allowed preference rather than proximity to be the criterion for choosing which restaurant to
eat at, clustering Indian restaurants was a winning strategy because patrons could be more or
less guaranteed a table. Indeed, to combat recession, local newspapers and tourist offices
began to promote these cities as ‘curry capitals’ that provided the ‘flavours of Asia’, or as
offering a ‘curry trail’, or promoting Manchester’s ‘curry mile’.
67
By the 1990s, the decline of
London’s clothing industry, which in the mid 1980s had employed over ten thousand people,
led to a big growth of Indian restaurants in London’s East End around Brick Lane, Hanbury
Street and Osborn Street. Today, this area has the largest cluster of curry restaurants and has
been the home of the International Curry Festival since 2006.
68
Three restaurants in
Birmingham even claimed to have invented a new type of Indian cuisine—balti—in the 1970s
and 1980s.
69
Balti is a type of curry developed by northern Pakistani migrants in Birmingham in the
1970s and 1980s. Though there is an area called Baltistan north of Peshawar in Pakistan,
three restaurateurs in Birmingham—Rashid Mahmud of Adil Restaurant, Chaudhry Ajaib
of Al-Faisal’s and Afzal Butt of Imran’s restaurant—claim to have invented the dish
whichappearstohavebeenfirstmentionedin print in a local community newspaper,
Balsall Heathan, in 1982. In reality, balti is marinated or pre-cooked meat added to a
sauce typically made of fresh coriander, garlic, ginger, onions, tomatoes and some other
spices—with the spices being fried before the addition of the sauce. What is perhaps most
surprising is that Birmingham has completely embraced this dish from a minority
community as its own, ‘a Brummie thing’.
70
Equally surprisingly, growing chillies has become a veritable cottage industry in Britain,
despite an inhospitable climate for the plant. Across Britain, there are chilli festivals,
including at Scone Palace in Perth, where Scottish kings were once crowned. Miranda Pellew,
proprietor of Brighton’s Chilli Pepper Pete’s, says that there are now ‘chilli connoisseurs’
66
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 59. Between
1973 and 1979, the growth in productivity in the manufacturing sector dropped from 4.1 percent to 1 percent. In
1979, as inflation hovered around the 30 percent mark, the number of days lost due to strikes peaked at
29,474,000. At the same time, hostile takeovers and asset-stripping of struggling companies further undermined
competitiveness. See Comfort, Surrender: How British Industry Gave Up the Ghost.
67
Giles A. Barrett and David McEvoy, ‘The Evolution of Manchester’s Curry Mile: From Suburban Shopping
Street to Ethnic Destination’, in David H. Kaplan and Wei Li (eds), Landscapes of the Ethnic Economy
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), pp. 193208.
68
Carey, ‘Curry Capital’, pp. 157; and Frost, ‘Green Curry’, pp. 22542.
69
Buettner, ‘“Going for an Indian”’, pp. 88690; Buettner, ‘Chicken Tikka Masala’, p. 209; Collingham,
Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, pp. 236, 39; Sardar, Balti Britain; and Sen, Curry: A Global History,
p. 49.
70
Buettner, ‘“Going for an Indian”’, pp. 8889; Sardar, Balti Britain, pp. 1336; Collingham, Curry: A Tale of
Cooks and Conquerors, p. 257; Panayi, Spicing Up Britain, pp. 33, 175; and Sen, Curry: A Global Historyy,
p. 49.
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who can differentiate between different flavours of chillies—a far cry from the early and mid
twentieth century when British food was known for its blandness!
71
If, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Indian restaurateurs had difficulty sourcing
ingredients, the rapid expansion of the sector has been accompanied by the rise of suppliers of
Indian foodstuffs. Patak’s, the makers of curry pastes and pickles, is a classic rags-to-riches
story. Laxmishankar and Shantagaury Pathak arrived in Britain from Kenya in 1955 with four
sons and two daughters and only £5 between them, and began selling samosas from their
kitchen. They eventually built up a multi-million-pound business, which supplied 75 percent
of Indian restaurants and was the best known brand of Indian food in Britain. The family sold
its business in 2007 to Associated British Foods, reportedly for over £100 million.
72
Perween
Warsi, a migrant from India, created a food empire also based on the samosa.Samosas are
particularly suited to mass production, with machines capable of producing up to ten thousand
samosas per hour, which, in turn, generated a demand for such machines by other samosa
makers.
73
Other leading firms include Tilda, established in 1972 by Rashmi Thakvar, a
refugee from Uganda. His firm controls over 50 percent of the market for rice. Kwality Ices,
set up in 1972 by Ibrahim Kanamia, an immigrant from Gujarat, is a major producer of kulfi;
Raj Foods, owned by Raj and Shobhna Radia, produces ready-made meals; and firms like
Bestways, Natco and Sutewalla specialise in importing food from the subcontinent.
74
It is only
in this sector that large corporate capital came to dominate.
Despite the popularity of curry houses, long antisocial hours, low pay for kitchen staff and
waiters—typical of the self-exploitation of labour in family-run establishments—and ridicule
back home in Bangladesh where restaurant workers were called OCs (onion cutters) and DCs
(dish cleaners) made the children of owners reluctant to follow them into the trade. One
former restaurant worker told The Guardian in 2012 that immigrants, being unfamiliar with
the law and speaking little English, had no option but to work in restaurants for low wages.
75
In 2003, a chef in a Midlands Indian takeaway earned only £150 after a gruelling 55-hour
week or about £2 an hour less than the national minimum wage; however, the owner himself
earned only £180 a week, so this was less a case of brutal exploitation than of the realities of
survival in a tough, low-cost business.
76
Even if curry houses such as the Aaragh restaurant chain in Bradford were described as a
‘Yorkshire institution’, workers and owners still suffered racist abuse from their clientele as
parodied in Goodness Gracious Me. Arriving riotously drunk after the pubs closed to ‘soak up
a curry’, many customers routinely insulted workers and owners, assaulted them and
vandalised restaurants. The very devastation caused by the decline of the manufacturing
industry that had led to the growth of curry houses also caused resentment against migrants
from South Asia who were easily distinguishable by their physical characteristics. As well,
71
It is possible that the chilli food craze is not due to the popularity of Indian food. Paul Rozin of the University
of Pennsylvania argues that chillies have become the most craved flavour after chocolate because it is a
‘constrained risk’: eating them can provide the extreme sensation of pain while knowing that it will not hurt the
consumer in the end. He calls chilli-eating ‘benign masochism’, a means to stimulate the body’s pain sensors
without causing harm. Tracy McVeigh, ‘Down on the Chilli Farm: Crop Pioneers Serve a Growing British Food
Craze’, The Guardian (20 April 2013).
72
‘Patak Family Feud is Settled’, BBC News (21 April 2004) [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/mer
seyside/3645775.stm, accessed 16 April 2013]; and Fiona Walsh, ‘Founding Family Sells Patak’s’, The
Guardian (29 May 2007).
73
Kalra, ‘The Political Economy of the Samosa’ p. 10.
74
Collingham, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, pp. 2289; and Panayi, Spicing Up Britain, pp. 145,
208.
75
Khaleeli, ‘The Curry Crisis’.
76
Highmore, ‘The Taj Mahal in the High Street’, p. 183.
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groups claiming gastronomic knowledge and hence cultural superiority routinely accused
these restaurants of serving an inauthentic, down-market parody of Indian food. This is the
world portrayed by the signature novels of the time—Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) and
Zahid Hussain’s Curry Mile (2006).
77
By the 1980s, a new phase in the evolution of Indian restaurants in Britain began as
immigrants of Indian descent from East Africa, wealthier British Asians and richer migrants from
India, especially professionals, began to open upscale restaurants in London’s West End and
elsewhere. Many of the owners and/or chefs of these new establishments were middle- or upper-
class professionals with experience working in restaurants in five-star hotels in India. The
Bombay Brasserie, which was opened in London in 1982 by the Taj hotels group,
78
did not serve
the standard fare of curry houses, but, rather, dishes from specific regions of India—from Goa
and the Punjab, Parsi food, or the street food of Bombay (now Mumbai). Gujarati and South
Indian migrants began to establish vegetarian restaurants. To further distinguish themselves from
the older curry houses, the new establishments steered clear of traditional names such as ‘Taj
Mahal’ or ‘Kohinoor’ and, instead, used regional names like ‘Quilon’ or ‘Olde Goa’. They
emphasised regional dishes, especially from Goa and Kerala, places that had not sent many
migrants to Britain. Some of these restaurants—especially Tamarind and Zaika in London—have
won Michelin stars.
79
Underlining the difference between the newer upscale establishments and
the older curry houses has been the reinvention of peasant dishes, for instance kichari at Zaika as
‘Indian risotto’ incorporating crisp prawns, red onion and coriander.
80
The introduction of new
foods like Indian risotto has raised questions over authenticity in an industry in which a chef’s
claim that his recipes were passed down from generation to generation has been the gold
standard, but, on the other hand, good chefs have always introduced their own innovations.
81
A story in The Guardian reported the intentions of the new owners ‘to take this business
away from Pakis and Banglis who are just jungle peasants with rough habits. We want to
appeal to the people who spend money going to the palaces of Rajasthan, bon vivant
people’.
82
Similarly, the Bangladeshi restaurateur, Iqbal Wahhab, complained that the early
reviews of his Cinnamon Club restaurant compared it to curry houses, when he wanted to be
seen as an up-market London restaurant: ‘I don’t want people to say, “Shall we go to Indian
restaurant one or two. Or the Cinnamon Club?”, but “Shall we go to Le Caprice or Nobu or the
Cinnamon Club”’.
83
The clear class basis for these differences is also captured by the older
curry houses’ response to the new establishments:
These people are all rubbish. They are half castes, the bastard children who don’t know
their own fatherlands, think they know better than us because they speak English. Real
food is here and it is cheap.
84
Owners of some balti restaurants in the west Midlands even accused the new upmarket eateries
of trying to ‘steal’ their customers by selling them ‘Indified European food’!
85
77
Buettner, ‘“Going for an Indian”’, p. 887; Buettner, ‘Chicken Tikka Masala’, pp. 20912; and Highmore,
‘The Taj Mahal in the High Street’, pp. 1834.
78
Bedell, ‘It’s Curry But Not as We Know It’.
79
Ibid.
80
Buettner, ‘Chicken Tikka Masala’, pp. 2135; Panayi, Spicing Up Britain, pp. 1734; Buettner, ‘“Going for
an Indian”’, pp. 8948; and Collingham, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, p. 242.
81
Bedell, ‘It’s Curry But Not as We Know It’.
82
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, ‘Why the Future may not be Orange’, The Guardian (13 July 2001),.
83
Bedell, ‘It’s Curry But Not as We Know It’.
84
Alibhai-Brown, ‘Why the Future may not be Orange’.
85
Ibid.
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Unlike the older curry houses, the decor of the new restaurants was minimalist and utilised
Hindu symbols, again to set them apart from the Sylheti- and Pakistani-run establishments.
Unlike the Bangladeshi and Pakistani immigrants who tended to be more blue-collar workers
and were concentrated in the inner cities with high rates of unemployment, these new
upwardly-mobile Indian immigrants were much more affluent. Some British-born Asians too
had achieved high levels of education and affluence by the mid 1970s.
A more serious threat to the cheaper restaurants was the expansion of Indian food products
in supermarkets—people could buy a chilled meal and cook it at home. As early as 1953,
Vesta foods had produced a dehydrated curry with beef and raisins in a packet. As frozen
foods became more ubiquitous, the spices in frozen curries made them tastier than other types
of frozen food.
86
By one estimate, the sales of Indian food in retail outlets grew by 80 percent
between 1989 and 1993, and their value doubled between 1994 and 1996 to £750 million. In
1997, Tandoori Magazine reported that more Indian meals were being eaten at home than in
restaurants.
87
Since the manufacturers of ready-made curry sauces were the same firms that
produced sauces and pastes for restaurants, they were even labelled ‘restaurant style’ and
could be had for as little as £1£2. The Waitrose supermarket chain even offered ‘a complete
Indian dinner’ from its Special Order Service: a customer could place an order several days
ahead and then collect the meal from his or her local store on the specified date and serve it to
guests.
88
Today, Waitrose sells a frozen Goan dish called xacuti and it can be expected that
more frozen regional Indian dishes will be on offer soon.
89
A flood of Indian cookery books also made it possible for people to make Indian dishes
from scratch at home, rather than buy ready-made sauces. Led by Madhur Jaffrey, the actress-
turned-cooking-star who had her own television cooking show, these authors provided a
wealth of recipes for those who wanted to try their hand at making ‘authentic’ Indian dishes.
The class bias of Jaffrey and other authors is apparent in her most successful book, An
Invitation to Indian Cooking (1978), which characterised most cooks in Indian restaurants as
former seamen or untrained villagers who have come to England in the hopes of
making a living somehow...[and serve] a generalized Indian food [in which dishes]
inevitably have the same colour, taste and consistency; the dishes generally come
‘mild, medium, or hot’.
90
Books by British-born Asian authors like Vicky Bhogal’s Cooking Like Mummyji,Real
British Asian Cooking (2003) and A Year of Cooking Like Mummyji:Real British Asian
Cooking for All Seasons (2006) introduced the cooking of the diaspora. They not only showed
how ‘real’ domestically-prepared dishes are very different from their restaurant incarnations,
but are intended for second- and third-generation British Asians with the recipes being
86
Collingham, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, pp. 2389.
87
A 2010 poll of three thousand people by Sharwood’s found that more than two-thirds of Britons regularly
cook ‘exotic’ food at home. On average, respondents spent £20 a month on ingredients to make ‘exotic’ dishes
at home and another £31.44 a month eating out in restaurants. They preferred Chinese food over Indian because
‘it has a wide variety of dishes which mean there is pretty much something for every one, even if you aren’t
usually that brave when it comes to trying new food’. See ‘Chinese Food Beats British, Thai and Even Indian
Curry to become Nation’s Favourite Cuisine’, Daily Mail (9 Feb. 2010). Whether this is a commentary on the
ignorance of the respondents or the Anglicisation of Chinese cuisine in Britain is anyone’s guess!
88
Buettner, ‘Chicken Tikka Masala’, p. 215; and Panayi, Spicing Up Britain, pp. 3, 31, 35, 1857, 91, 201,
69, 146.
89
Bedell, ‘It’s Curry But Not as We Know It’.
90
Quoted in Buettner, ‘Chicken Tikka Masala’, p. 216. See also Highmore, ‘The Taj Mahal in the High Street’,
p. 186.
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‘authentic’, but simple and not very time-consuming to prepare. Manju Malhi, for instance, in
her book, Brit Spice (2002), writes:
Brit-Indi cooking is my way of using British and Indian ingredients in fresh
adventurous, trendy, vibrant, quick and easy dishes—the best of British and the
essence of Indian. It’s about adding a bit of spice to your life, and is a celebration of
two distinct cuisines whose flavours and textures united in harmony. I’ve included
many of my favourite dishes, such as spicy Cheese and Toast, Ten-Minute Chicken
Curry, Fried Mackerel, Coconut and Mustard Chutney, Bread and Butter Pudding with
Papaya and Saffron and, of course, Baked Beans Balti.
91
Books by Bhogal and other British Asian writers also highlight the role of women in the
kitchen, in contrast to the male-dominated world of the curry houses. Ironically, after
criticising the inauthenticity of Indian restaurant food, Bhogal sold her brand (Cooking Like
Mummyji) to the British grocery chain, Tesco, ‘thereby insuring that her recipes would
become industrialized, batch-produced products’.
92
If the easy availability in supermarkets of ingredients for an Indian meal and a flood of
cookbooks made it easier to cook Indian dishes at home, the recession beginning in 2007 also
led more and more people to choose to eat at home, thus causing a crisis for the industry. This
was compounded by a tightening of immigration regulations in March 2011, when the British
government announced that only the top 5 percent of chefs, who must each earn at least
£28,500 annually, would qualify for admission to the United Kingdom. To be admitted,
aspiring chefs also had to be able to speak English and satisfy the criteria laid down by the
National Vocational Qualifications Level Four with a minimum of five years’ experience at
the postgraduate level; in response, elite Indian restaurants created a scholarship fund to lure
British-born migrants to the restaurant trade. However, this avenue was closed to family-run
high-street curry houses that consequently suffered disproportionately. By January 2012, it
was reported that one in four positions in Indian restaurants were unable to be filled, and that
smaller establishments were warning that they would be compelled to use pre-prepared frozen
food. In May, Bradford College in Yorkshire started training a class of fifty British students in
the art of Indian cooking;
93
however, white customers have proved reluctant to eat in
restaurants where they do not see South Asian staff. As Stephen Fielding observes: ‘For white
patrons, authentic Indian restaurants are authorized by the presence of brown bodies,
themselves the “bearers of cultural meaning”’.
94
Conclusion
In short, the career of Indian restaurants in Britain reflects both changes in patterns of
migration and changes in the world economy. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
those few Indian restaurants set up to cater to the wealthy had fleeting lives since their targeted
clientele could import their own Indian domestic staff. What survived were the cheap eateries
catering to seamen and other workers from the subcontinent. After World War II, when British
manufacturing enjoyed a renaissance, people from the subcontinent migrated to Britain in
substantial numbers to occupy the lower rungs of the industrial employment ladder. This led
91
Quoted in Panayi, Spicing Up Britain, pp, 1489.
92
Highmore, ‘The Taj Mahal in the High Street’, p. 187.
93
Fielding, ‘Currying Flavor’, p. 38; and Khaleeli, ‘Curry Crisis’.
94
Fielding, ‘Currying Flavor’, p. 45.
Empire, Food and the Diaspora 15
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to a growth in Indian restaurants, run overwhelmingly by East and West Pakistanis and
catering primarily to the South Asian diaspora and to adventurous but impecunious white
Britons, especially college students.
It was the evisceration of the British manufacturing industry—from accounting for more
than a quarter of the world trade in manufactured goods when Queen Elizabeth II ascended the
throne in 1952, Britain accounted for a scant 2.9 percent in her Diamond Jubilee year
(2012)
95
—that propelled a further expansion of curry houses since the 1970s because these
provided affordable meals to an increasingly-impoverished working class, and helped to
revitalise high streets that had been adversely impacted by the growth of big supermarket
chains. Unlike other cheap food outlets that were dominated by large multinational
corporations, Indian restaurants were primarily small family-run establishments, even though
large corporations emerged as their suppliers. Even if white Britons began to patronise Indian
restaurants from the late 1970s, migrants from South Asia were also victims of race riots, as
social tensions were sharpened by massive unemployment. By the 1990s, as the Indian
economy started registering high growth rates and wealthy Indians and some British-born
South Asians prospered, and with the consequent rise of upper-end eateries, a sharp fracture
emerged between these restaurants and the established high-street curry houses serving a
standardised fare. At the same time, the establishment of a tradition of Indian cooking in
Britain led to the emergence of distinct cooking styles, while chefs in better eateries were
confident enough to create fusion dishes. The empire has struck back!
95
Comfort, Surrender: How British Industry Gave Up the Ghost.
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