Anoothi Vishal

The Obsession With Micro-Cuisines Is Insular and Chauvinistic

In the race to be more exotic and unique than the other, we are missing the threads that bind us.

“It’s great you are doing so much for your community,” says the well-meaning socialite and cookbook author in Mumbai, “I wish to do the same,” she adds, as I cringe internally. We are conversing over some Kayasth khana, the traditional and now disappearing food of a community of medieval scribes that I happen to have been born into and about whose syncretic culture (and cuisine) I wrote a book two years ago. To be honest, it’s a culture and lifestyle that I am quite proud of but not for the reasons people assume.

Each time I write or speak about or cook and host an evening around the cuisine, it is with an intent to highlight the fact that food really is without boundaries, as is a people’s culture. We can’t put anything in boxes and say, “This is mine, this is yours”.

Food history teaches us that nothing is exclusivist, nothing exists in isolation. For instance, the cuisine of the Kayasths is part of a larger Ganga-Jamuni composite culture where every dying dish and elusive platter shows myriads of influences from the Mughal to the colonial, medieval to the modern, from Lucknow and Agra to Delhi and Bikaner, influences that have seeped in from everywhere across religions, castes, regions and centuries. That’s the only reason the cuisine interests me – that I am must record it for ‘my community’ does not drive my interest. That’s the only reason it should really interest anyone intellectually – beyond whatever delicious morsels they find on the table. After all, there must be more thought to food than just biting into a sublime shami kebab!

Still, the only thing the socialite takes away from dinner – where I explain all this and more – is “how much you are doing for your community”. She is not alone. Culinary chauvinism in India is on the rise even if we may be blind to it.

India’s dining culture is at its most inward-looking moment today, more than it has ever been since Partition or perhaps ever in the subcontinent’s history. A look at the way young, metropolitan, millennial India is consuming “new Indian” food within restaurants and what our top chefs are being inspired by is perhaps a fair indication of prevailing urban tastes and aspirations, to say nothing of larger sensibilities.

A lot of the new or modern Indian food, trendy in our best and most upscale restaurants today, is about a rediscovery of the “old Indian”. Apart from the recent craze for Kayasth khana in the midst of which I am firmly caught, there’s Assamese, Naga, Goan, Bihari, Oriya, Puneri, Banarsi, Uttarakhandi, Saraswat, Marwari, Sindhi, Bengai, Parsi, Anglo-Indian, Chettiyar, Moplah, Maratha, Suriani, Bohri…the list goes on.

This is not a random count at all – in the last year alone, I have sampled all these and several more. There have been dishes from small regions and communities cooked by home cooks sometimes in partnerships with restaurants, sometimes as “pop-up”meals made accessible to a larger pool of diners in cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore through social media outreach, and sometimes as exclusive “experiences” marketed by start-ups and global corporates.

Also read: Mapping the Cultural Geography of Goan Gastronomy

It’s possible to look at this emerging eating out culture as both an “Indian renaissance” – a rediscovery of traditional hyper-local cuisines, cooking methods and ingredients – or just plain navel gazing. But of that later.

India’s elite culinary cultures have always been marked by a certain adaptiveness, by how quickly cooks and chefs have historically incorporated globally diverse thoughts, techniques and ingredients into existing recipes to tweak them or marry them with spices and other local ingredients to produce dishes that have since become legendary.

The texture that a galauti kebab bears, for instance, is likely to have been influenced by the French paté technique; many of our slow cooked meat dishes like Dilli’s ishtew and Calcutta’s kosha mangsho perhaps owe their origins to the European stew; Mughal food certainly had Persian influences; the post-Partition Punjabi-influenced restaurant food was created through an import of the tandoor popular till then used only in Afghan-bordering areas and then there is Indian-Chinese, Jain-Thai and chatpata Japanese! We know all about these.

Then there are the more recent influences too on how urban, affluent India consumed. Till not too long ago, the entire genre of “modern Indian” food within restaurants could be seen as being influenced by French gastronomy – plated food, using high-end French ingredients or referencing French-Italian dishes and techniques. Dishes like burrata with chilli dressing, salmon tikka, duck-stuffed kulchas, foie gras-galauti kebab, khandavi ravioli, flambéed mishti doi and so on.

As Spanish gastronomy emerged as a new global super power, we began to see a new wave of “modern Indian” peppered with El Buli-derivative molecular gastronomy. Ghastly smokes and spheres and endless copies of molecular chaat, yoghurt spheres, chilli-cilantro “caviar”, gajar ka halwa pressed wafer-thin, charcoal imbued paneer tikka and liquid nitrogen-wrought smoking desserts fuelled an upmarket restaurant trend that has now trickled down to low brow establishments and refuses to die.

However, the difference between these and the food emerging today is that while the older lot were essentially chef-led revolutions (whether it was the highly-paid rakabdars of Lucknow or chef Gaggan Anand in Bangkok, who influenced eating fashions of the day) and thus elitist, today’s “new Indian” is more democratic.

Credit: Nicu Buculei/Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

Instead of being a restaurant creation or food patronised only by the affluent, India’s newest new Indian movement is being driven by ordinary food enthusiasts – and who isn’t one these days – aided by the power of social media.

There is no dearth of Youtube videos on how to cook the perfect Dindigul biryani painlessly, food groups discussing seasonal fruits, veggies and millets, nutritionists and historians galore dispensing Ayurvedic knowledge, and Twitter outrage on whether the rosagulla belongs to Bengal or Odisha. In short, regional and community-specific Indian food has never got so much attention as now. ‘Authenticity’ is the mantra and that is a tricky concept, at once contestable and parochial.

This trend of going back to “roots” for culinary inspiration and aspiration neatly coalesces with a similar dominant global culinary trend where top chefs are fashioning chic food from the wholesomeness of their childhood memories or celebrating local produce and traditions even as they reinvent these. Chefs like Rene Redzepi, who started off the entire “New Nordic” wave, or Massimo Bottura, who put Modena on the map, are hugely influential even in Indian restaurant kitchens.

Through Lucknowi Food, Remembering a Time When India’s Composite Culture Thrived

Filled with over 150 recipes, ‘The Lucknow Cookbook’ also focuses on the architecture and craft of the city – but fails to give adequate history of its cuisines.

The Lucknow that I grew up in – from the mid-1980s to late-1990s – was one that had already lost much of its nawabi and colonial privilege but continued to retain much of that culture of syncretism that we dub as “Ganga-Jamuni”.

I was still in school at La Martiniere during those tumultuous years when Mandal, Kamandal were born. The old Lucknowi society with its gentler, elite, all-accepting rhythms would change forever after the advent of these phenomena, as would all of India. But just then, while these social and political forces were still new, Nakhlau retained its inherent cosmopolitanism and composite spirit, albeit already fraying.

In the run-up to the Babri Masjid demolition, ‘Vasudevan uncle’, a railway employee from distant Kerala who moonlighted as a sought-after private math tutor and whose class I had joined, would insist that we teens always greet him (and one another) with not “Namaste” but a loud “Jai Shri Ram” each time we went to class.

Caste or religion had never before intruded upon our Lucknowi upbringing and even through the tumultuous years as all that we previously knew was being rent, various aunties continued to feed us chashni-sweet shahi tukda with crisp fried bread (so unlike “double ka meetha” at fancy restaurants that is entirely without texture) and everything from pooris to pulao at various meals through the year.

Lucknow’s famous Tunday mian with his galawat ke kabab had not become as much the touristy phenomenon as it is now. His hole in the wall shop in Chowk may have been frequented by young men from Colvin Taluqdars’ College, daily wage labourers or occasional gourmands but the kebabs’s reputation was far from what it seems today. For me, nothing could compare to the shami kebab of my Kayasth home, save perhaps for the tiffin snack that my classmate Fauzia Sarvar, a distant cousin of the actor Aamir Khan (she told us excitedly when Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak released) brought to school – cold shamis sandwiched in white bread, lined with a spicy green coriander chutney.

Mutton tunday. Credit: Twitter

There were parantha-achar picnics at Haathi Park and Kukrail, cream rolls from a Hazratganj store, nuqti laddoos from Ritz (that I preferred to Ram Asrey’s mithai; nuqti being very fine boondi, deriving its name from “nuqta”, the dot in the urdu script), matra at Aminabad, fried crisp, served only with slivers of ginger and a squeeze of lime (no self-respecting Lucknowiite would dunk everything in dahi-saunth), biryani from shops around the K.D. Singh Babu Stadium, kali mirch chicken from stalls near the Charbagh railway station (these shops selling the fowl were set up by post-Partition immigrants) and even fried fish sold by a Bengali gentlemen at a shop in my neighbourhood market. These were the foods when we ate out.

It was a happy childhood. I didn’t think of it as particularly “inclusive” – though, of course it was. It didn’t matter to us who came from which part of India, ate what food, had what religion or whether food had a religion. Instead of the aggression and loud machismo we see all around, there was a gentler rhythm to life.

This is the Lucknow I sought to find in The Lucknow Cookbook by Chand Sur and Sunita Kohli, a personal memoir and collection of recipes belonging to Kohli’s mother and their family friends. In fact, I sought to find the portrait of an even older city where the genteelness and civility remained intact and unthreatened and art, culture and cuisine reached their zenith in an inward-looking society. Sometimes nostalgia is a way of reconnecting with something that we are on the verge of losing.

Chand Sur and Sunita Kohli
The Lucknow Cookbook
Aleph Book Company, 2017

The Lucknow Cookbook offers us that little reminder of a past where India’s composite culture thrived and was not under the kind of siege that we see it under today – For this alone, it deserves to get our whole-hearted support. Then, there are also more than 150 recipes belonging to Kohli’s mother, who was known apparently for her “Continental” style dishes and in general as a good cook. These are family heirlooms that have been collected and preserved through the means of this book and given how lax most Indian families are in recording their culinary heritage, again this can only be a laudable effort.

Is The “Lucknow” Cookbook, really about Lucknow? Kohli seems most passionate when she talks about the architecture and craft of the city in passing, as examples of its great Ganga-Jamuni heritage. These little asides are the best bits about the book for me. If this was meant as a personal memoir, I wish she had paused just a bit longer on these references. I also wish she had journeyed back to give us portraits in greater detail of all the pedigreed Lucknowallahs she and her family seem to have known intimately: Darshi and Ram Advani (of Ram Advani Booksellers), Moti and Gulu Thadani (of Mayfair Cinema), old taluqdars, former chief justices et al. What was the food on their tables? What was that one-star dish of their homes? For vanished-Lucknow’s nostalgia-trippers, such an account may have had its value.

More importantly, if the attempt was to do a grand book on Lucknow and its cuisines (of the many different communities that have inhabited the city) as the title aspires to, then Kohli could have done with better research. What was the food of these different communities, how were similar dishes treated differently or different dishes treated similarly in their homes? How exactly did different influences come together to give us the star “Lucknowi” dishes that we know today? Were the galawat ke kebab influenced by the pate technique of the French? Did the idea of nimish travel from the countryside into refined Lucknowi kitchens because of the taluqdars, or landowners, whose food transformed rustic Avadh ingredients and influences into high culinary art? What were the jaw-dropping treats concocted by the rakabdars, highly-paid cooks, who used culinary arts to entertain a redundant aristocracy and British masters? What has been the impact of the hakims and their secret smells and potions on Lucknow’s fragrant food and so on.

Even more grating than the lack of this research is just dodgy claims to historicity of dishes which a good editor should have questioned. The samosa in its “present form” originated in Lucknow as did the chaat, says Kohli is one definitive sweeping statement attributed to no one. We don’t know for sure and these claims are unlikely.

Sunita Kohli. Credit: Author website

The kakori kebab originated in the kitchen of the “nawab” of Kakori (there was no nawab of Kakori) is a tall story that even Wikipedia has discredited. The kebab is a common snack in the small town of Kakori, where oral traditions attribute it to shops outside a dargah. The do piyaza is Lucknowi even though the mythic mulla do piyaza has been popularly described as a courtier to Akbar, which would make Lucknowi provenance suspect. There is no harm in repeating popular stories around food if they are delicious, but it is necessary to warn readers to take everything with a pinch of salt rather than pass them off as “history”.

Chand Sur. Credit: Twitter

Let’s come to the recipes themselves. I haven’t tried any at home yet, but am tempted to try the “angrezi khana”, old style Continental dishes which were apparently Kohli’s mother’s specials. A quick read through, however, leaves me wishing that the book had more rigour. Basic questions like why is galawat ka kebab called “galawat” ka kebab and what separates it from the shami kebab remain unanswered in the descriptions of dishes provided.

Then, there are astonishing sections such as a section on potatoes – ostensibly because “Lucknow is known for its potato specialities”. I just wish the author or editor had cleared their heads just a little bit on what exactly makes a dish Lucknowi. Is it simply because it was cooked in Kohli’s home? Or is it because it used particular ingredients and spices or cooking techniques common in Avadh but not elsewhere?

God lies in the details. So does the devil. Every single recipe that lists green cardamom, a popular aromat, mentions a literal Hindi translation of it as “hari elaichi”. I don’t know about Kohli’s home, but in Lucknow as in most of Uttar Pradesh, the rightful term is “choti elaichi”. No self-respecting cook familiar with spices will call it “hari elaichi”. Lucknow deserves another book.

Anoothi Vishal is a writer on food and the author of Mrs LC’s Table.

Partition Changed India’s Food Cultures Forever

The older cuisines like Mughlai faded away and in their place came the robust makhni gravy and tandoori dishes

Four generations of the Gujrals: Kundan Lal Gujral with his wife, Prakash Devi, holding their grandson, Monish. Standing next to Prakash Devi is daughter-in-law, Rupa; and Kundan Lal’s mother, Maya Devi. Courtesy: Roli Books

Four generations of the Gujrals: Kundan Lal Gujral (the founder of Moti Mahalwith his wife, Prakash Devi, holding their grandson, Monish. Standing next to Prakash Devi is daughter-in-law, Rupa; and Kundan Lal’s mother, Maya Devi. Courtesy: Roli Books

At the far end of a crammed Daryaganj gulli, bustling with all manner of trade, is a heavy wrought iron gate. Push it ajar and you step into an overgrown garden defining its central courtyard. The Terrace is an old sprawling home that takes you back in time. It’s the last intact kayasth haveli in “Shahar” – “The City” – the once magnificent Shahjahanabad, the only city that really mattered for its residents.

Two years ago, on a peaceful winter afternoon, the sun streaming on to our armchairs in the garden, I met Mrs Rajesh Dayal here for the last time. She had lived here since the 1930s. I was interviewing her for my book on Kayasth cuisine and culture.

“I remember Booby,” she had said earnestly at one point in our rambling conversation. Booby, the cook from the Muslim quarters of Ballimaran, had been quite in demand back then. The Kayasths, great epicures and fond meat-eaters, called him home for family weddings, sangeets, Holi and Diwali gatherings. Booby would get to work, digging up the soft ground in a clearing by the Yamuna, lining the pit with hot charcoal, placing a big, fat degh of meat, spices and vegetables inside this pit and then covering it with earth. It was in this craftily assembled indigenous oven that he would let fabulous dishes like the shabdegh stew overnight – till the meat and turnips that went into the smoky curry were of the same texture, splitting at the touch of a spoon.

“I have never had that kind of shabdegh again. It’s a dish that disappeared,” Dayal’s voice had trembled. Dayal died before the book, Mrs LC’s Table, saw the light of the day. Along with her what passed away were memories of those elusive stews and treats and the men who had cooked these. As for Booby, like many others of his ilk, had been swallowed up by Partition, never to be seen again.

The bloody years post Second World War II up to the Partition of India in 1947 rent Delhi’s older cultural fabric in a decisive way. Cuisine was a minor but still a very significant casualty. What the city lost in terms of its artful, elaborate dishes was replaced by newer, bolder, tomato-laden flavours from western Punjab. As a new immigrant community poured in from across the new border, new tastes and techniques gained ground. Tandoori became the food of Delhi. Mughlai, the older cuisine that had come about as a result of a composite culture of Shahjahanabad, faded.

Some of Shahjahanabad’s fabulous Mughlai treats can still be found: shabdegh, the meat-and-turnips winter delicacy, mutanjan pulao, rich with dried fruits, gola kebab, where the art lay in removing the kebab with such dexterity from its skewer that a whole round of mince fell off on the plate, special Meerut kulfi that shaukeen denizens of shahar preferred, dil ke kebab, pieces of the heart, roasted on the sigri.

But most of these delicacies live only in faint and fading memories. “There was just one kebabchi outside Jama Masjid who did gola kebabs till about two decades ago. When he stopped, I asked him why and he replied, ‘bibi, ab woh purane log hi nahin rahe. (The old connoisseurs are all gone)’. His new customers only wanted cheaper indiscriminate kebabs,” says Salma Husain, Persian scholar and author of the book The Emperor’s Table on the cuisine of the Mughals.

Delhi’s true Mughlai food was the product of a syncretic culture brought about by the close living together of Shahjahanabad’s four original communities: The Muslim aristocracy, the educated kayasths, part of the court and the baniyas and khatris who owned businesses and banks. It was a cuisine that developed over two-and-a-half centuries, thriving on sustained patronage much after Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last emperor of Hindustan, was exiled. Partition changed all that.

The tandoor (or “tannur”, as it is called in Arabic) is of Central Asian origin, where it is still used to bake bread. That was the tandoor’s initial use in the Punjab too. The culture of sanjha chulha in the villages of the Punjab was centred on a common tandoor, around which women gathered to bake fresh bread but to also exchange the minutiae of their lives.

Hindu refugees from the Punjab carried their clay ovens to the great metropolis of Delhi. Their grit, hardiness and enterprise was apparently no match for the culturally sophisticated but effete Dilliwallah. Businesses changed hands and Delhi’s cuisine became firmly and predominantly tandoori.

In 1947, a refugee from Peshawar, Kundan Lal Gujral, first opened a restaurant called Moti Mahal in Daryaganj, not far from The Terrace. “The building had suffered badly during the rioting; its roof had disappeared and parts of it hung dangerously,” says senior Delhi resident Anil Chandra, one of Moti Mahal’s early patrons, who got to know Gujral.

In this building, Gujral, set up a tandoor and started selling roasted chicken with naan in the style of old Peshawar eateries. “The old residents of Delhi, both Hindu and Muslim, were not chicken eaters and there was some resistance till younger people got exposed to the new flavours,” says Chandra. Dal makhni, tandoori chicken and naan aside, there was soon a demand for curry. At this point, the practical Gujral decided to use leftover tandoori chicken (since refrigeration was expensive) in a rich sauce he concocted with butter, curd, tomatoes. The makhni gravy was born and “Indian” food would never be the same again.

It wasn’t as if the old Mughlai food disappeared entirely from the old city, though. Restaurants like Flora were still famous for their Mughlai delicacies in the early decades post Partition. “These restaurateurs and caterers such as Hakim, who was one of the most famous caterers of old Delhi, chose to stay back after Partition. Some of the kebabchis and kulfi and chaat wallahs who had disappeared in the aftermath of Partition, scared and scattered, also returned,” points out Husain. But business was no longer the same. Much of the old gentry had moved out. Newer tastes were emerging – and newer ways of doing business. The old food businesses shut.

In Delhi, what also disappeared was the Anglo-Indian food. Cutlets, chops and scones were replaced by Indian snacks served up by fancy restaurants in Connaught Place, now owned by Punjabi families. Restaurants like United Coffee House and Kwality had come up as cafes in the early 1940s, catering primarily to Europeans and troops posted in Lutyen’s Delhi around the time of the Second World War. In the aftermath of Partition, as tandoori took over and the Punjabi palate gained ground, the European and Anglo Indian food these places served too changed.

The interior of United Coffee House, Delhi. Photo courtesy: Anoothi Vishal

You can still come across a certain style of “continental” food at Kwality and United Coffee House. But these old-fashioned au gratins and chicken a la kievs that we still spot on their menus are a throwback to the 1960, when a second round of “conti” appeared on fashionable tables.

It wasn’t just Delhi either that saw a change in its food culture, post Partition. Places like Lucknow and Meerut, where Awadh’s composite but inward-looking culture had engendered all sorts of fabulous delicacies for the tables of the aristocracy and rich landlords, also saw a shift. Things like kali mirch chicken appeared in stalls near the railway station with the advent of the migrant dhaba owners.

Intricate older dishes such as the malai paan lay forgotten. Shami kebab, pasande, meat-and-vegetables curries were left confined to a few homes because entertaining declined as many of the rich Muslim landlords migrated.

Umami is a relatively recent term being brandied about in the world of food these days. Much before this “fifth” taste, described as meaty or brothy, was recognised by the Western world as essential to gastronomy, the Punjabi palate had zeroed in on the tomato (naturally rich in glutamates, which contributes to the sense of umami).

Instead of the refined spicing and yoghurt-based cooking of Mughlai food, robust tomato-onion-garlic gravies bursting with umami began to define every single dish in Punjabi restaurants (which, ironically, dubbed themselves Mughlai). If Partition brought about one definite change in the history of Indian food, it was this idea of generic ‘Indian’ gravies. This generic Indian food, tailored for the Punjabi palate, was entirely restaurant created. In India, where there is such a diversity of cuisines that dishes change their character every 100 km, it is ironical that this Punjabi-restaurant creation became the template for “Indian” food both within and outside the country. Foreigners, with little knowledge of regional Indian food, still identify “Indian” exclusively with these bastardised gravies.

The dominance of this kind of restaurant food – kadhai paneer, balti meat, butter chicken et al – continues till today even within the country, though we seem to be finally rediscovering regional Indian cuisines of late. The indomitable Camillia Panjabi who was responsible for conceptualising so many restaurants at the Taj, the Indian hotel chain, in the 1980s-1990s, says in her book, 50 Great Curries of India: “Attempts to introduce regional Indian dishes in menus always met with customer resistance, in the sense that customers continued to order the Punjabi dishes on the menu. In India, the majority who eat out as part of their lifestyle are Punjabis… Since they form the backbone of the clientele of almost every Indian restaurant in the country, restaurant owners are extremely wary of directing the menu away from Punjabi favourites.”

This culture of eating out may be finally changing with the millennials, but for most of our post-Independent life as a nation, Punjabi food that had first made inroads into Delhi post Partition defined Indian restaurant food.

Partition, of course, brought about other changes too in our food cultures. In Mumbai, as immigrants arrived from cosmopolitan Karachi, they brought with them the widespread culture of snacking in the evenings. “Chaat beyond bhelpuri only appeared with the appearance of the Sindhis, post Partition. They were the great snackers, ” says Panjabi. Chaat, a product of UP’s composite culture, had come to India’s commercial capital in a roundabout way, if we are to believe these accounts.

In Bengal, the hilsa became a source of much rivalry. As migrants from East Bengal brought their own “more refined” way of cooking (as it is widely rated), there was nostalgia for the quality of ilish from the Padma river (in East Bengal, then known as East Pakistan), which is supposed to be better than the fish from the Ganga.

“The quality in Bangladesh is better. In India, the size is also shrinking due to the demand-supply gap. They catch the fish early here and the taste is not so good,” says restaurateur Anjan Chatterjee, whose restaurant chain Oh! Calcutta has a menu that balances East Bengal and West Bengal cuisines.

Chatterjee’s wife belongs to an East Bengal family – he, on the other hand, is a ghoti (from West Bengal), and he acknowledges the superior cooking of the eastern lot. (The culinary rivalry can be as intense as any football one.) While much of the East Bengal food was brought in by the refugees to the common culinary culture of the state, some recipes and foods became elusive.

“There are recipes such as ilish wrapped in a pumpkin leaf, marinated with mango pickle masala, put inside half cooked rice and then steamed that are lost,” says Chatterjee. Dried fish shutki and special pickles from Sylhet, sweets like the malai chamcham and bhapa doi from Comilla and the kormas and kachche gosht ki biryani from the “dawaats” in old Muslim homes in Dhaka are still stuff for nostalgia.

Many of these exquisite dishes may in fact no longer exist in Bangladesh today, where the old Bengali epicurean culture has given way to a newer order. But that’s what large-scale upheavals do. Put us in the churn; some things are lost, others gained – many foods of pre-Partition days are long forgotten, but that cataclysmic event also brought new flavours to India.

Anoothi Vishal is a writer on food and the author of Mrs LC’s Table.

Memories of Dileep Padgaonkar, the True Cosmopolitan

A fond memory of a man who loved the finer things in life and had a strong human side to him.

Dileep Padgaonkar. Credit: Youtube

The first time I met Dileep uncle was on December 2, 2000. I had got married that day to his nephew – his wife’s sister’s son. At the wedding reception that his wife – Latika aunty to me – and he had helped partially fund, he stood with a glass of beer in his hand on the lawns of the IIC annexe, under the mild winter sun, chatting to my family about yakhni pulao, shami kebab and Bade Gulam Ali Khan.

All this talk of khana and gana must have instantly reassured my deeply conservative Kayasth clan, who were till then vehemently opposed to the marriage primarily because the groom bore a Muslim surname but also perhaps because their hopes of me marrying a pedigreed Kayasth from UP or Dilli had been rudely dashed. The fact that the family I was marrying into was made up of some of India’s leading intellectuals, its brightest minds, did not allay my khandan’s many fears. The two sides hadn’t really met each other before D-day, when the bride and groom had signed on the dotted lines under that wonderful provision, the Special Marriages Act. But now, this talk of a mutual love for food and music was allaying some fears. Possibly.

On his part, Dileep uncle may have been relieved that the nephew was marrying someone “cultured”. The entire marital family, steadfastly liberal, multi-religious and multi-cultural, could hardly be bothered about narrow identities in the way my own folks were then. But Kayasth culture and its food had a special place in Dileep uncle’s heart thanks to Sheila Dhar, who he would often mention. A Dilli Mathur, Sheila Dhar (people who don’t know of her may know Madhur Jaffrey, her cousin) and her husband P.N. Dhar were quite the power couple during Indira Gandhi’s time. Dileep uncle, himself fond of classical music and food, had made his acquaintance with them and held Mrs Dhar and her writings on music (with food metaphors) in high esteem.

The Dhars and their world, of course, were much before my time. In the early 2000s, when I was still in my early 20s, I was hardly interested in darbar politics or the likes of Kayasth khana and gana (I was rebelling against all such things at that point in time). Still, it formed what I now see as my “early education”.

What certainly was an early education were the many talks around art (Raza, Chagall, references to galleries in Paris), around the eating habits of former prime ministers (golden fried prawns from the Taj) and wine (I picked up the pronunciation from “Bordeaux” and “terroir” from Dileep uncle) in his drawing room of his D block, Defence Colony home.

I was still a sub-editor at the Indian Express and a newly-minted food columnist with little international exposure in those pre-Google days when the Indian food scene hadn’t quite taken off. The global exposure that thus came my way, during the Padgaonkars’ Diwali parties, family meals and informal conversations was invaluable. Dileep uncle made me my first Kir Royale (prompting me to quickly look up the cocktail and other classics in a book), offered me my first bite of turron that they had brought back from a trip and made me try a nihari he had cooked one day, seeking my approval. The last seemed like a vote of confidence – quite a boost for someone so young, expected to write authoritatively on a subject like food for one of India’s most credible newspapers at that time.

Dileep uncle belonged to that league of extraordinary people – erudite, liberal, with reams of knowledge on almost any subject from oil politics to poetry, history to cinema, language to art – that I have had the privilege of knowing and listening to, hours at end. With all the irreverence of youth, I was sometimes impatient and occasionally even openly contrarian with this world of ideas where no “homely” type conversations seemed to exist. But the extraordinary thing about these gentlemen was that they were never dismissive, they always took your word seriously and they never used age or wisdom or exposure to talk down to you. At the most, they would challenge you, making sure your mind was ticking away in good order.

One Sunday afternoon, when I landed up for the Maharashtrian lunch that Latika aunty was making at their home, Dileep uncle, who must have been listening to some bandish or thumri, arbitrarily asked me: “So which raag is India’s national song in?” It was perhaps his way of reassuring himself that there wasn’t an idiot in his drawing room! I needed to know what the national song was, then figure out what the correct/original version of the song was, then the raag it was based on, if I claimed any competence at all in Hindustani classical music. To my glowing pride till this day, I was able to answer him correctly.

When I listen to the many vacuous conversations all around me, Dilli society talk on about latest iPhones, cars, restaurants, deals, bloggers or whatever it is that makes the world go round these days, I am always reminded of this extraordinary league of gentlemen – and women – that Dileep uncle was a part of. Fine conversations about the finer things in life, always over fine wine.