Colleen Taylor Sen

The Global Food Historian

Interviewed by: Priya Bala

On a wintry morning at The Park Hotel in Delhi, Colleen Taylor Sen enjoys a street food-inspired breakfast of masala puris and jalebi. Street food is, in fact, a subject that holds great interest for this food historian and author, who was in Delhi as a special invitee to attend the Tasting India Symposium, a global food advocacy initiative that showcases the many facets of India's gastronomy and works to popularise it across the world.

On a previous trip, Colleen was game enough to go on a pav bhaji-tasting expedition in Bombay. "The taste and satisfaction was inversely proportionate to how fancy the place was," she remembers with a smile. "Now, I notice that Indians, too, are having misgivings about eating street food, like some Western visitors are." She, though, is clearly adventurous when it comes to tasting chaat, kulhad chai and lassi on the street.

Her fondness for Indian street food apart, Colleen's understanding and knowledge of the vast and varied canvas that is Indian food makes her a leading authority on the subject, especially on the history and evolution of Indian food. Years of research resulted in Feasts and Fasts: A History of Food in India in which she goes back to the Vedas to attempt to understand from where some of our ways of eating emerged. The book throws light on some of the disputed aspects of food habits in India. Where, for instance, did vegetarianism stem from? Colleen cites the Vedas to show that Vedic Aryans believed in sacrificing animals and that the meat of these animals was eaten afterwards. "I read as many references as possible to food in the Vedas- in translation, of course- while researching for this book," she says.

Feasts and Fasts also delves into the influence the historical events of the medieval era and colonial rule had on Indian food practices, serving up quaint dishes and intriguing traditions that emerged from these periods.

Colleen, who now lives in Chicago, is Canadian born and went to the University of Toronto and later to Columbia University. It was during her student days that she met her husband Ashish Sen; it was also the beginning of her strong connection with Indian cuisine. Her mother-in-law, Arati Sen, wrote on food for Desh, in Bengal, and that contributed to Colleen's understanding of Indian and Bengali food as well.

"On my early visits to India I was fascinated with the ingredients, the fruit and the vegetables that were available here," she says. "Indigenous ingredients determine how people eat in a particular place." The humble and ubiquitous eggplant, native to India, and various other vegetables and fruits caught her attention and she continued to study and research these. Feasts and Fasts includes captivating accounts about the origins of ghee, kebabs, tandoor-cooked rotis and even soma, an alcoholic beverage our ancestors had concocted.

Her first book on Indian food was Food Culture in India, published in 2006. Curry: A Global History followed in 2009 in which she explores the curry universe beyond India and Great Britain, all the way to the Caribbean, South Africa and beyond. "From the 1830s to nearly a decade after that, over a million Indians went to work in plantations in the Caribbean, South Africa, Fiji, Mauritius and South East Asia. And I find the curries they and their descendants created especially interesting, since they had to substitute local ingredients for Indian ones, making way for a whole new cuisine," she says.

Pakoras, Paneer and Pappadum is a book she wrote to help diners in North America navigate the menu in an Indian restaurant. She has also brought out an encyclopedia of food and culture, titled Street Food Around the World, a book she worked on with Bruce Kraig. With her long years of rigorous research to which she brings an academic diligence, Colleen has a splendid overview of not just Indian food, but global cuisine movements as well. "Indian food is not adequately represented outside the country," says Colleen. She has travelled widely in India and has explored the various regional cuisines. "Elsewhere, there is no regional differentiation of Indian," she says, adding how hard it is to pinpoint or describe this cuisine in a simple way because it is so diverse and varied.

Certainly, her committed work in the field and her critically acclaimed books such as Feasts and Fasts will help to bridge that gap and showcase the vibrant palette that is Indian food to the world at large.