DesiPundit

Smrti takes us through Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, a book by Lizzie Collingaham. She reviews the book that weaves a story around food and our history.

I like the discussion on tea the best. Collingaham reassures, as most of us have always believed, that the quintessentially Indian food is most often a foreign import, like Chilly or accidental inventions, like kebabs. Same is the case with tea. Now the largest producer and a good consumer of tea, India never heard about tea before the British. When tea was planted in Assam and labourers died out of Malaria and abuse from masters, tea was not an Indian thing at all. It took massive marketing strategies - which included distribution of tea in temples, movie screenings to distribute tea and special chinaware and apparently not contaminating and impure to caste – to make tea popular in India.