Book review: Madhushree Ghosh,Khabaar: An Immigrant Journey of Food,Memory,and Family

To Indians, their food relates closely to their identity and Khabaar contains the same message, except that this is about being Bengali, Indian and American, all at the same time. Ghosh’s narrative cannot be classified among the category of cookbooks that showcase either the ever-expanding field of gastronomic inventions, or the culinary heritage of a cherished past. Rather, this book is both a personal and collective voice that weaves meaning through its use of culinary images. Like its title promises, this is about more than food.

In 10 chapters, Ghosh explores what food means to life, to survival, to emotions and certainly to being alive. While Ghosh’s family relates to her ‘home’ in Chittaranjan Park, or C.R. Park in Delhi, one of the hubs in India’s capital known for being home to Bengalis, we learn that this residence accommodated many East Bengali refugees. This resurrects memories of the Partition in 1947 as a most conspicuous moment in the nation’s past and the author’s family history. While Ghosh chooses specific elements from India’s past, she also weaves in commentaries on recent events, including widespread protests against India’s proposals to amend the country’s citizenship laws (p. 136) and related reforms of the NRC, the National Register of Citizens. The related incessant protests at Shaheen Bagh and violence on the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi also feature here.

Her focus is on America, however, as the land of promises, where dreams are supposed to come true. America to South Asian deshis is appealing, as Ghosh documents, but maybe less so when one has lived there for long. The book does put South Asia on America’s culinary map, but not through a celebration of its vivacity, the punch of the culinary flavours or the hybrid fare that white Americans consume. Rather, Ghosh employs the lens of various South Asian businesspeople, presenting Mr and Mrs Mohgan’s story of being street food stall owners in Chapter 3, the family-owned Punjabi Tandoor of the Sainis in Chapter 5 and the accounts of celebrity chef Garima Kothari in Chapter 7.

Documenting how such eateries have their own stories to tell, the book discusses the struggles of South Asian food businesses in the USA, including accounts of physical and emotional abuse during the pandemic. Chapter 7 (pp. 112–30) shows how Garima Kothari’s Nukkad restaurant was forced to shut its gate because of its proximity to New York where the COVID-19 pandemic spread like wildfire (pp. 121–3). Garima’s enterprise might have collapsed, but Ghosh depicts in Chapter 5 how Lucky from the Sainis’ Punjabi Tandoor restaurant switched to home deliveries (p. 85) when the usual crowd around the restaurant was ‘sparse at best’ (p. 71) because of the pandemic. Their ‘takeout store’ is what sustained Ghosh and many more through ‘comfort food, made by people who know what home used to be’ (pp. 85–6), helping them through the pandemic.

Chapters 9 and 10 provide glimpse of how zoom calls and social media not only helped one stay connected but also motivated people to experiment with cuisine, made at home from recipes being circulated (pp. 169–70). Ghosh even reproduced from memory the kitchen garden that she once saw her father tend to, back in C.R. Park in Delhi, created from vegetable waste. This reconstructs her ‘home’ through her gastronomic journey during the pandemic. While she puts actual recipes in her book sparingly, she invites readers to consider how they start conversations, as food creates one’s family, especially ‘when the family one was born into is gone’ (p. 161).

Typical of South Asian immigrants, Ghosh talks about the fervent longing for one’s homeland, the desh, left behind, which for her father is East Bengal, while for herself it is Delhi. Ghosh’s personal narrative recollects the world(s) of Calcutta and Delhi, the habits, the palate, the culinary memories she carried with her as she moved to America, interspersed with steady commentary on the lives of people, connected in various ways to food. Ghosh’s nostalgic longing for home is evident when she speaks of ‘comfort food’, created for those who miss home food that ‘makes you feel you belong’ (p. 73). Nostalgia for the homeland also affected her father, for whom ‘homesickness was a yearning for a long-lost childhood’ (p. 1), while decades later, in San Diego or Maryland, ‘the taan, the pull of the homeland’ (p. 1), is what defines Ghosh’s identity.

Even when the author talks about ‘home’ and an essentially Bengali identity, she is reminded of fusion and flavours, of the palate and the hybrid entity that she had been and has become. It is possibly a penchant to belong that led her, in the first place, to Garima Kothari’s Nukkad eatery that blends Marwari and Bengali cultures (p. 125). In this context, the reader is reminded of the seminal work of Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) on postcolonial thought and the concept of adda, ‘the practice of friends getting together for long, informal, and unrigorous conversations’ (Chakrabarty, 2000: 181). While ‘[t]he tradition of men and women gathering in social spaces to enjoy company and conviviality is surely no monopoly of any particular people’ (Chakrabarty, 2000: 183), there is a widespread claim that ‘the practice is peculiarly Bengali’ (Chakrabarty, 2000: 183) and Ghosh seems happy to endorse this.

While Ghosh rarely gives her readers a recipe, when she attempts to make one of her mother’s, or speaks about the fare served to diners by South Asian-run outlets, on her mind are recipes which give the feeling of home, ‘even if it isn’t how your mother made it’ (p. 73), re-igniting the ‘authenticity’ debate of Tulasi Srinivas (2006). While Ghosh does not write food history, her personal narrative follows the genre that Krishnendu Ray (2004) and Anita Mannur (2010) have explored, finding the deshi heart in the immigrant kitchen. Khabaar is somewhat different, though, as its author has kept her narrative grounded in the challenges of daily reality, repeatedly invoking the ‘Great Pause’ (pp. 162, 166), as she calls the pandemic. This shows how food, cooking, baking, growing an organic kitchen garden and sharing and caring over food have triumphed and managed to keep many people sane throughout trying times, before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.