Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture

Introduction: Food Matters

Introduction: Food Matters It is difficult, if not impossible, to think of immigrant Indian existence in the United States without at the same time thinking of Indian food. —keya ganguly, states of exception carrie bradshaw: When a girl gets backed up against a wall she can’t afford, she has to consider renting others (sniffing through open window). Do . . . Do I smell curry? realtor: There’s an Indian restaurant downstairs. cb: Delia, I ask you, how can this apartment be $2,800 a month? I pay $750 for something that’s twice the size and it don’t smell like takeout. realtor: You have a rent-controlled apartment. I suggest you stay there. cb: Unfortunately, that’s not an option. Now what other shit holes are you showing me today? —“ring a ding ding,” sex and the city I was looking for some kind of symbol which would represent the success of Indians abroad, something that would symbolize what they have gone through in their long history . . . But look at it metaphorically. Indians have gone abroad, have lived in the most challenging environments in the world and they have done well. Indian coconuts have done very well abroad. Now, what is the coconut famous for? It grows on sandy soil, requires very little water, and requires virtually no maintenance. In other words, send an Indian anywhere, just let them be, with minimum nourishment and watch the tree grow taller and taller until it dominates the landscape. That is what I think the Indian Diaspora is like. —lalit mansingh, “the story of the indian diaspora is compelling and inspiring” On December 12, 2003, Lalit Mansingh, former Indian ambassador to the United States, delivered a speech to a crowd of Indian Americans at the annual awards banquet of the weekly news magazine India Abroad. During his speech, Mansingh spoke in no uncertain terms about the lofty achievements of the Indian diaspora, especially the strand of the diaspora located in the United States. In speaking about the purported resilience of the Indian character, Mansingh suggests the coconut is an apt metaphor for Indians because “it grows on sandy soil, requires very little water, and requires virtually no maintenance” (S16). Here, the co- 2 / culinary fictions conut stands in for all that rings stereotypic about Indian Americans: the notion that the community is uniformly flourishing and has made the better of often hostile environments. Mansingh’s narrative, to be sure, privileges the experiences of upwardly mobile and middle- to upper-class Indian Americans, ignoring the experiences of those Indian Americans who do not flourish in the United States—Indian Americans located on the lower rungs of society’s ladder: the working class, the undocumented, and the disenfranchised. Mansingh’s use of the term “coconut” is intriguing. Typically used to reference assimilatory moves among Indian Americans and South Asian Americans, the term “coconut” is more colloquially used to name individuals who might identify as “white.” With its hints of a racial ontology, the term suggests there are authentic and less authentic ways of being Indian . Looking Indian, being brown on the outside, and having a particular set of tastes and preferences that don’t necessarily correspond to predetermined notions of what it means to be Indian may lead to one being labeled a coconut—white on the inside and brown on the outside. Other communities of color frequently apply culinary metaphors to speak of similar forms of racialized performance. Within the African American community, the favored term is “Oreo”; among East Asian Americans, the terms “banana” and “Twinkie” are analogues to the Oreo, and for Native Americans, the term “apple” serves a similar function. Woven through each of these metaphors is a narrative of ethnic betrayal: the notion that one might be colored brown, black, yellow, or red on the outside , and act in a way to suggest one is “white” on the inside.1 To capture the sentiments of South Asian youth who do not identify with whiteness , but choose instead to mark their alliance with Blackness, KB, a member of the hip-hop Indian group Karmacy, presents the term “rotten coconut,” brown on the outside but black on the inside. Nitasha Sharma argues that such seemingly simplistic metaphors are actually more complicated ; while bananas and coconuts are healthy fruit, connoting positive identification with whiteness, the image of rotten coconut carries a negative stigma. While these metaphors are context-specific, they hint at the dynamic nature of racial categories, deconstructing the idea that race...