As in many other places in Asia, the concept of food in Southasia is changing, quickly and dramatically. Do not be taken in by the difficulties faced by the multinational corporations and global fast-food chains in trying to make inroads into Southasian societies. That is a minor digression from the more radical changes in food habits as part of changing lifestyles. I draw your attention to the following developments, which have taken place during the last two decades or so.
First, the culture of food in Southasia is now more clearly split into two parts. For one segment of the population, food is a means of survival, and a matter of back-breaking, daily grind. For the other, food is part of 'high culture' – it carries codes of social conduct and status gain, markers of urbanity and cosmopolitanism, and implicit statements of arrival.
This split was always there, and not merely between the rich and poor. The colonial clubs in what were then called the 'old presidency' towns were the sites where you could sift the 'truly cultured', urbane, settled elite from the newly rich, the upwardly mobile, first-generation city-dwellers. But never was the split so pronounced as it is now. Never would we have found in India, for instance, among the educated middle class, so many who find out from the newspapers and glossies where the rich and trendy go to dine, gossip and display their designer clothes. These recruits to a new food culture seem completely unaware of the 25,000 farmers who have committed suicide in the past decade. Nor do they seem aware of the way farming as a means of sustenance for a majority of Indians is quickly collapsing as a 4000-year-old way of life – instead becoming, for many, a disposable adjunct of urban-industrial life. I have seen, with only slight variations, similar attitudes in other parts of Southasia, China and Thailand.
Second, among an increasing number of Indians the difference that previously existed between everyday food and festive food – the food that one consumed during marriages and other special occasions, sometimes on holidays – is diminishing. With prosperity has come the capacity to afford festive food every day, as well as the tendency to display one's prosperity through the food one consumes or offers to guests. The ultra-elite may have learned to make a status statement through salads, nouvelle cuisine and low-calorie diets, but those who are first-generation entrants into the middle class have not. Data suggest that about half of India's burgeoning middle class falls into the second category.