I was out of India for a mere few years and the old country had changed in a hurry, in contrast to my lifetime there when nothing ever seemed to change. Even the names of cities had changed: Chennai (Madras) and Mumbai (Bombay) and Udagamandalam (Ooty) … When I heard people, my people, talking about “Chennai” it felt like a big joke that I was not in.
We went to a restaurant at a nearby hotel. There were big hotels? When were they built? Chinese food. In Madras Chennai?
Until I went to work in Calcutta Kolkata, which was after graduating from college, I don’t think I had ever had Chinese food. I would have remembered, as much as I remember having had “North Indian” food or Gujarati food. There was no Chinese restaurant in the industrial township where I grew up. I do not recall having Chinese food in Madras.
The Chinese food in Kolkata was divine. But, I never had Chinese food in a restaurant. There were vendors in plenty on the sidewalks and near parks, and they made some of the tastiest foods that I had in my short stay in that chaotic city.
There is one guy I recall in particular who made fresh, hot, vegetable stir fries and chow mein on the street, not far from the Oberoi Hotel and near Park Street. As I recall him now, almost forty years later, one of his arms was shorter than the other, but he worked the wok at lightning speeds. I would eat and then wander over to Victoria Memorial, where while people-watching I pondered about what I would rather do instead of a career in engineering.
Now, we were having Chinese food in Chennai?
And everybody wanted a dish called Gobi Manchurian. What? Gobi Manchurian?
I could barely have a bite, however, because by then I had lost the ability to enjoy red hot chili peppers in dishes.
There was no Wikipedia back then, and I am sure there were lots of explanations offered. Now, Wikipedia has a short and helpful note on Gobi Manchurian:
The word "Manchurian" means native or inhabitant of Manchuria (in northeast China); the dish, however, is a creation of Chinese restaurants in India, and bears little resemblance to traditional Manchu cuisine or Northeastern Chinese cuisine.[4] It is said to have been invented in 1975 by Nelson Wang, a cook at the Cricket Club of India in Mumbai, when a customer asked him to create a new dish, different from what was available on the menu.[5] Wang described his invention process as starting from the basic ingredients of an Indian dish, namely chopped garlic, ginger, and green chilis, but next, instead of adding garam masala, he put in soy sauce, followed by cornstarch and the chicken itself.[6] The dish is popular across South Asia.[7] A popular vegetarian variant replaces chicken with cauliflower,[3] and is commonly known as gobi manchurian. Other vegetarian variants include mushroom, baby corn, and veggie ball as the main ingredient.
In The American Scholar, Amitav Ghosh writes about the influence of Chinese culture on Indian life and, yet, for most of his life, “China seemed to be a vast, uniform blankness.”
It seems to me now that my blankness in relation to China was not the result of a lack of curiosity, or opportunity, or anything circumstantial. I am convinced that it was the product of an inner barrier that has been implanted in the minds of not just Indians but also Americans, Europeans, and many other people across the world, through certain patterns of global history.
Me too!
Back in India, I think, I am confident, that I knew a lot more about the US or USSR or even New Zealand compared to what I knew about China, despite the fact that India and China share a lengthy border and have had long and rich historical ties.
Ghosh is a few years older than me, but we are fellow-travelers on this topic. He writes that “the West looms so large that it obscures everything else.”:
The presence of the West is inescapable across the Indian subcontinent, whether it concerns language, clothing, sports, material objects, or art. It has long been a default assumption, among Indians as well as many westerners, that the transformation of social, cultural, and material life that occurred in the region over the period of colonization was largely due to the process of westernization.
And, of course, the recognition of the influence of the Middle East—historically, and the contemporary economic ties with millions of Indians working throughout the region and remitting valuable foreign exchange.
China was not explicitly acknowledged, recognized, nor studied. But, its influences are everywhere as Ghosh notes, and I have blogged about too. From even how the wok is called a “Cheenaa Chatti” in Tamil, which translates to Chinese pot. White sugar is called cheeni/jeeni in Tamil even though people might not be aware of the Chinese connection in the manufacturing of white sugar in Calcutta. Gobi Manchurian is one of the many in a long-running list.
All the influence in culture does not mean that India and China are not BFFs, just like India and Pakistan are not the best of friends despite everything that they share.
Increasingly, China is becoming India’s biggest headache, even more than Pakistan is. The tension since the war that the two countries fought in 1962, a war in which India was humiliated, continues on. India’s Prime Minister, who is practically assured of a major victory in the elections that are underway, has been unable to win China over. The NYT reports that China is a thorn in his side:
Tens of thousands of troops from both India and China remain on a war footing high in the Himalayas four years after the deadly skirmishes broke out in the disputed Eastern Ladakh region, where both countries have been building up their military presence. Nearly two dozen rounds of negotiations have failed to bring disengagement.
The political pundit Thomas Friedman used memorable buzzwords that easily captured the world’s attention, even though he was often wrong. In his “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention,” Friedman wrote in a NYT column: “No two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other.”
It was not merely about McDonald’s. Friedman and others were proposing that globalization would bring about peace and prosperity. And, to be honest, it seemed possible back in the 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, the internet and the birth of the worldwide web, and a seemingly endless economic growth.
Fast forward to now. It has been two years-plus of war that a country, Russia, where McDonald’s was welcomed with long lines after the collapse of USSR, began its war against its neighbor where people were excited about McDonald’s and everything else that the West offered them.
Whether it is McDonald’s or Gobi Manchurian, food that becomes part of one’s culture does not mean end of hostilities. The common love for pita and hummus has not brought about peace in the Middle East, right? As long as we fail to see the human in the other, and as long as we covet land that belongs—rightly or wrongly—to others, we will continue on with wars even when we like the other’s foods.
So sadly true!