if one wanted to prove the new foundimportance of food writing one could point to the many books on food andcooking, both Indian and foreign, that are coming from publishers, to theincreasingly large sections on food in big bookshops, to the way food writingseems to be moving from a genre to a larger category with sub-genres in it (foodtravel, food science, food anthropology, food fiction, etc.), to the huge numberof food blogs – and to an article by Jaideep Mazumdar in a recent issue ofOpen which argues that the famous and venerable Calcutta Book fair should reallybe called the Calcutta Food fair.
Consider the figures Mazumdarprovides: the Fair’s 650 bookstalls did Rs 1.7 crore turnover last year,and its 20 food stalls did Rs85 lakh sales. On an average that works out to Rs26,000 per book stall and Rs 4 lakh plus per food stall, which he notes isprobably an underestimation since many food stalls were not issuing receipts.they also complain that because of bad locations they actually sold less thanthey could have. next year, predicts Mazumdar, the fair organisers will have togive their views more weight: “because the Kolkata Book fair minus thefood may just become a tepid event.”
the organisers might alsojust consider changing their name to the Kolkata Food Book fair. It’s truethat large numbers of eaters won’t necessarily convert into large numberof readers, but such is the Bengali passion for both eating and reading, it justmight. Bengal has always led the way in food writing in India, from the 19thcentury manuals on household duties written by both Bengali men and women, whichinclude what must be the first modern Indian food writing (Judith Walsh’sHow to be the Goddess of your Home is a fascinating introduction tothese).
Since then Bengali writers have always been happy to write onfood, and there have also been good cookbooks, like those by Renuka DeviChoudhurani, which have been collected and translated as Pumpkin FlowerFritters, which show real zeal in chronicling little known Bengali recipes. Thistradition was followed by the redoubtable Meenakshie Das Gupta, with BanglaRanna, but also with more recent books – for example, in TushitaPatel’s charming Flash in the Pan the most interesting recipes for me werehomely Bengali ones like for Gota Shedho, boiled whole vegetables in urad dal,which she notes are usually seen as too simple to collect.
Some ofthe best writers on Indian food (as opposed to cookbook writers) have come fromBengal like Chitrita Banerji, whose the Hour of the Goddess is perhaps the bestcollection of essays on Indian food, and Nilanjana Roy, who edited the PenguinBook of Indian Writing On Food (with a beautiful Jamini Roy print of a cat and alobster that indicated another area of Bengali interest in food). even most ofthe academic writing on Indian food has been on Bengal, as with KrishnenduRay’s book on diasporic Bengali cooking, or Manpreet Janeja’s studyof everyday food in Dhaka and Kolkata.
