Food as an indicator of moral status in India...

Many, though definitely not all, Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists follow vegetarian or partially vegetarian diets, based on prescriptions from ancient texts discussing the moral ramifications of eating meat. India’s caste system, the social stratification in India that is determined by birth, also plays a role in how people eat. In the strictest interpretations, people of a higher caste eat "pure" food, and people of lower castes eat "impure" food. Members of the lowest caste, the Dalits, often face discrimination in many aspects, including being unable to find jobs in food service. Morality in India, both ancient and modern, is closely tied with people’s food choices.

Despite many long discussions in ancient texts regarding the rules for eating and serving food, food related taboos, and food prescriptions, very little attention was paid to the actual culinary process, the preparation of the foods. Ancient texts mention ingredients and cooked dishes, but there is very little said about the cooking process, the process of turning those ingredients into final dishes.

Our Project...

The vast majority of both of our associations with Indian food comes from what we ate with our families growing up. These experiences at our homes were our first answer to the question of what “Indian Food” really is. When we ventured out into the world, however, we realized that our experiences of Indian food based on our families’ home cooking differed from each other, and from other Indians. Our experience of Indian cuisine dependent on our individual family histories, where in India they come from, and where they and their families live today.

We very quickly realized that “Indian Food” is not a monolith, but instead a collection of various cuisines and dishes that originate from all over the Indian subcontinent. Depending on where in India you are, you may be greeted by cold, snowy mountains, tropical beaches, river regions, or other varying climates which affect what food is able to grow in those areas.

Each region has its own version of what they call Indian food. Examining these separate parts together allows us to define “national cuisine” in the most representative manner possible. For this reason, we decided to analyze recipes by cultural region, allowing each region to represent parts of what makes up the “national cuisine” of India.

There are some limitations to a regional approach to defining a cuisine. In the process of selecting one or two dishes to represent each region, many other dishes from that region will necessarily be left out. This can result in a less nuanced, or more generalized view of the region, and many locals may not agree with the dishes selected to represent their regions.

We are aware that we are “outsiders” to much of Indian cuisine, because we have been raised in the US with limited exposure outside of our respective families’ recipes. Our knowledge is built on our own experiences, research, literature, and other cookbooks that helped us understand much of the regional importance of these dishes. We kept this in mind when selecting dishes from each region.

We feel that the dishes we have decided to highlight in this project represent the region they come from, but we also hope that readers do not assume that these are the only popular dishes in each of these regions. We encourage readers to use this information as a starting place to also explore the variety of dishes that we were unable to highlight here.

After all, there has never truly been a single “Indian cuisine” that can be defined without understanding regional nuances. Appadurai argues that “the idea of an ‘Indian’ cuisine has emerged because of, rather than despite, the increasing articulation of regional and ethnic cuisines” (Appadurai, 1988). India as a country has only existed independent of colonial rule since 1947, and prior to that there was no history of a unified Indian identity, or a unified Indian nation.