The “decline” of London’s curry houses invented tradition, authenticity, gastromythology

ABSTRACT

Curry houses are among Britain’s most prominent historical, cultural, and gastronomic links with Asia. Recent developments in the context of Britain’s “declining” curry culture suggest that the industry’s challenges cannot be explained through watertight analyses of immigration controls, the allegedly latent racism of British society, its aggravation by the Brexit discourse, shrinkage of South Asian talent and the turn towards healthy and green consumer choices. There is an elusive force that I recognise as gastromythology – that negotiates between invented traditions and authenticity. In offering gastromythology as a new analytical index in studies of consumption and foodways, I suggest that mythologies – in the sense deployed by Roland Barthes – indispensably shape the mnemonic history of food cultures. Declining or saturating mythologies signal a break away from the cultural conditions that cradled the culinary tradition, in the first place, as is true of curry, especially when seen against a rapidly changing political backdrop.

KEYWORDS:

• Curry
• Brexit
• gastromythology
• London
• India
• Pakistan
• Bangladesh
• Veeraswamy
• Brick Lane

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Alan Bradshaw, Nikhilesh Dholakia, and the reviewers of Consumption, Markets & Culture.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Al Jazeera. (2022). The Great British Curry Crisis, February 10, 2022. https://www.aljazeera.com/program/101-east/2022/2/10/the-great-british-curry-crisis. Accessed: 20/10/2022.

2 An alternate angle reveals that despite suffering heavy losses, London”s curry culture/industry appears to have realigned itself from being concentrated around mainstream Bangladeshi to mid-market Michelin-starred and high-end Indian restaurants, such as Veeraswamy (established back in 1925), alongside the proliferation of mid-market restaurants and chains like Tamarind, Zaika, Benares, Dishoom, Masala Zone, Chutney Mary and Mowgli, which have established their footprints in the heart the city, around Mayfair, Kensington and Charlotte Street. See, McCormack (2022). “Best Indian restaurants in London 2022, from Gymkhana to Tayyabs.” Evening Standard, April 22. https://www.standard.co.uk/reveller/restaurants/best-indian-restaurants-london-2022-soho-north-east-b995070.html. Accessed: 10/08/2022.

3 “Authenticity” has acquired new connotations besides simply being an innocuous marker of truth, realism and legitimacy. As Paul Freathy and Irish Thomas have argued, memories of consumers regarding the past “revolve around mythical, romantic or sanitised versions of history with media and communications playing a critical role in creating the authentic.” See Freathy, Paul, and Iris Thomas. “Marketplace metaphors: communicating authenticity through visual imagery.” Consumption Markets & Culture 18, no. 2 (2015): 178-194: 180. Disseminating notions of what constitutes authenticity may very likely further “the economic, social or the political needs of dominant groups or individuals,” and, therefore, such dissemination is never free of power exercises and power relations. Authenticity that establishes “normative principles around specific agendas” is generally co-produced by consumers who are simultaneously invited “to render alternative or previous perspectives as inauthentic” (Ibid). Another angle that problematizes notions of authenticity around the British curry industry is to approach it through semiotic studies of other histories of immigrant ethnic food cultures, such as Davide Girardelli calls “The Myth of Italian Food in the United States.” Accordingly, the signifier of “Italian food” is performed through a series of stereotypes in a populist construction of diasporic identities. “With the myth of Italian food,” writes Girardelli, “it is possible to observe a complex interplay between exoticism and identification. The myth is attractive because it encompasses elements that are not only far and exotic but also close and somehow familiar.” See, Girardelli (2004). Commodified identities: The myth of Italian food in the United States. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 28(4), 307-324: 320. American Italian restaurants – and British South Asian restaurants, by implication – thrive on the construction of “picturesque and somehow unusual environments … [that] leverages on some basic stereotypes about a supposed … lifestyle present in the consumer”s cognitions” (Ibid).

4 The final sentence of Collins” pioneering detective novel, based on the eight-hundred-year-old “adventures” of the fictional Indian diamond, the moonstone, is as follows: “What will be the next adventures of the Moonstone? Who can tell?” See Collins (1868). The Moonstone. New York: Harper & Brothers. I have replaced the name of the diamond with “curry,” not least because of several gastromythological associations in popular culture of curry and Indian princely households and diamonds like Kohinoor. Additionally, I have also borrowed from the 1979 BBC Radio 4 production of The Moonstone, dramatized by Brian Gear, which edited Collins” closing sentence to: “What will be the next adventure in the life of the cursed curry? Who can tell?” Wilkie Collins” The Moonstone. (1979). BBC Radio 4, October 28. Dramatized by Brian Gear with music composed by Sidney Sager and directed by Brian Miller. Bristol.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Arup K. Chatterjee

Arup K. Chatterjee, Professor, Jindal Global Law School, OP Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana, India

Research Associate/Visiting Scholar, SOAS, University of London

Author, The Great Indian Railway Saga; Indians in London: from the Birth of the East India Company to Independent India; The Great Indian Railways; The Purveyors of Destiny: A Cultural Biography of the Indian Railways