Anglo-Indian Identity through the Culinary Lens

In The Trotter-nama: A Chronicle (1988), I Allan Sealy historicises the evolution of Anglo-Indian cuisine as fusion food. He offers an elaborate description of diverse local and foreign agencies that the Great Trotter, the fountainhead of the Anglo-Indian community in the novel, recruited in his kitchen to introduce a unique culinary tradition. In Vegemite Vindaloo (2006), David McMahon, a diasporic Anglo-Indian, juxtaposes the Australian food Vegemite with the Portuguese and Anglo-Indian curry vindaloo as a culinary metaphor for representing the doubly hyphenated identity of an Australian Anglo-Indian. In The Secret Vindaloo (2014), Keith Butler, an Anglo-Indian in New Zealand, sarcastically writes that vindaloo is a secret recipe to represent the invisibility of Anglo-Indian immigrants in multicultural Australia.

Why did these writers all choose cuisine to represent the Anglo-Indian cultural identity? Using the culinary as a mode of representation is not limited to Anglo-Indian writers. The Kolkata branch of the All India Anglo-Indian Association announced in 2018 that it would organise a winter carnival where members would cook and sell typical Anglo-Indian fare such as pork balichow, sausage curry, yellow rice and meat ball curry. In the same year, the Forum of Anglo-Indian Women in Chennai organised a fair called the “Anglo-Indian Craft and Cuisine.”