Eating India: Exploring a Nation's Cuisine
Reviewed by Samanth Subramanian
While the old cliché that one can never judge a book by its cover holds true, it is occasionally possible to make some accurate judgements based on how far apart the book’s covers are. In the case of Chitrita Banerji’s Eating India: Exploring a Nation’s Cuisine, the covers are separated by 329 pages – which either indicates that the sheer ambition of this project will have proved foolhardy, or that the book is printed in microscopic print.
Unfortunately for Ms. Banerji and for us, the former deduction holds true, but for unexpected reasons. It is true that for a country like India, with its centuries of shifting histories, its patchwork of ethnicities and cultures, and its very mutable nature, a thorough exploration of its cuisine would occupy several Larousse Gastronomique-sized volumes. But in any book about Indian food, that caveat is forgiven. Where Ms. Banerji lets us down is in her lack of adventurousness and her puzzling reluctance to just go out and eat; she winds up exploring the equivalent of her living room, when the whole subcontinent is at her fingertips.
Eating India divides itself into 14 chapters, each for a particular school of cuisine – and it says something for India’s culinary diversity to discover that, at that rate, it would have taken over a hundred chapters more to exhaust itself. Ms. Banerji’s very first chapter, on the food of her native West Bengal, is a prompt reminder of her immense capabilities. As with her two previous books, both devoted entirely to the food of that state, this chapter allows her to fluidly synthesise personal memory, anecdote, academic history, trivia, recipe and narrative. She writes herself into her story, which is arguably the only effective way to write about food.
In subsequent chapters, with more unfamiliar cuisines, the only way Ms. Banerji could have made her discoveries personal was to eat zealously. This she fails to do, and the pressures of time and flight schedules, which she often mentions, are only a part of the story. It is mystifying, for instance, why she lands in a state and then proceeds to interrogate Bengali friends, or Bengali friends of Bengali friends, about the food of that state. Or why, as a person who evidently loves food so much, she gives us a textbook history lesson in a chapter titled “Road Food on the Highway,” leavened only with a glimpse from her car of construction labourers eating noodles. Or why, in Bangalore, with all South India’s edible riches within her grasp, she heads to a local branch of K. C. Das, a Bengali sweetshop. Eating India feels hasty, lazy, forced and impersonal, and just as those qualities do not make for good food, they also do not make for a good book about food.
Mr. Subramanian is a free-lance journalist and a graduate student at Columbia University.
