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143 Eight “Going for an Indian” South Asian Restaurants and the Limits of Multiculturalism in Britain Elizabeth Buettner “Going for an Indian”—or “out for a curry”—has become an increasingly prominent aspect of British social, economic, and cultural life since the 1960s. In assessing the wide appeal of South Asian food and restaurants in April 2001, Britain’s late Foreign Secretary Robin Cook proclaimed that “Chicken Tikka Massala”—one of the cuisine’s mainstays among British diners—had become “a true British national dish, not only because it is the most popular, but because it is a perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs and adapts external influences. Chicken Tikka is an Indian dish. The Massala sauce was added to satisfy the desire of British customers.” Such cultural traffic did not threaten British national identity, Cook stressed; rather, it epitomized “multiculturalism as a positive force for our economy and society” (Robin Cook’s Chicken Tikka Masala Speech, 2001). Estimates reveal that Britain now has nearly 9,000 restaurants and takeaways run by South Asian immigrants and their descendants that employ more than 70,000 people and have an annual turnover exceeding £2 billion (S. Basu 2003: xi; Grove & Grove 2005: 208; Monroe 2005; L. Collingham 2006). The vast majority of their customers are white. Within the wider context of New Labour’s proclamations valuing cultural and ethnic diversity after its electoral victory in 1997, Robin Cook was not alone in celebrating South Asian food, or culinary variety more generally, as a defining feature of Britishness in the early twenty-first century (Back, Keith, Khan, Shukra, and Solomos 2002). Recent scholarly work demonstrates food’s central role in depictions of multicultural diversity in Britain as enjoyable and invigorating , but such assertions would have been inconceivable several decades ago (Cook, Crang & Thorpe 1999; A.K. Sen 2006). The cuisine’s current cultural prominence within national identity follows a history that saw most 144 • Cities, Middle Classes, Public Cultures Britons either ignore or vigorously reject food understood as “Indian,” just as many objected to the arrival and settlement of peoples from the subcontinent . While Indians were present in Britain before the end of empire, their numbers were small and their visibility and impact uneven when compared with their increase after India and Pakistan’s independence in 1947 (Visram 2002; Fisher 2004; A.M. Burton 1998). Substantial immigration from former South Asian colonies, alongside that from the Caribbean and elsewhere, remade Britain in cultural and demographic terms after the Second World War, and the enthusiasm Robin Cook and others would later exhibit has repeatedly proved elusive or decidedly limited (Brown 2006; Brah 1996; Hiro 1993; Layton-Henry 1992). Multiculturalism has never indisputably been deemed “a positive force” for Britain—far more commonly, it has been imagined either as a problem or as a means of tackling a problem. Ethnic minorities and their cultural practices have long been, and to a considerable extent continue to be, widely met by racism, suspicion, and intolerance. For many white Britons, food may well constitute what Uma Narayan and others have described as the nonthreatening, “acceptable face of multiculturalism .” “While curry may have been incorporated . . . into British cuisine, ‘the desire to assimilate and possess what is external to the self’ did not extend to actual people of Indian origin, whose arrival in English society resulted in a national dyspepsia,” she asserts (U. Narayan 1997: 184, 173; also see Hesse 2000; Heldke 2003; Kalra 2004). In a nation where the consumption of “foreign” food has grown exponentially since the 1950s, South Asian cuisine occupies a unique place (Warde 2000; Bell & Valentine 1997). Long considered the “Jewel in the Crown” of the British Empire, India was firmly ensconced in Britain’s cultural consciousness by the late colonial period. In the postcolonial era, preexisting public conceptions evolved in tandem with mass immigration from the subcontinent. Other favored foreign cuisines, particularly Italian and Chinese, that took root in British diets and diningout habits were not widely associated with immigration to any comparable extent, partly because Italian and Chinese communities were smaller and also deemed less culturally problematic in the postwar period (Roberts 2002; Parker 1995; Hardyment 1995; Colpi 1991). West Indians were the only minority group to compete with South Asians in terms of numbers and the level of public attention and anxiety they attracted. But Afro-Caribbean cuisine (as distinct from Caribbean-produced commodities such as sugar) never featured significantly in white British diets, nor did Caribbean restaurants become popular destinations for...

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