THIS book fills a gaping void in the literature on Indias food and its food culture and does so most admirably. It has excellent colour photographs reproduced with the high standards that Roli Books maintains. There are some 46 recipes, besides. The text does not suffer by comparison. For, its writing, evidently, has been a labour of love to the author.
Born in Tel Aviv in 1965 to parents who escaped the Holocaust, Sephi Bergerson grew up in Israel and served in the army before moving to New York to become a photographer. He returned to Israel in 1989 and opened his own studio in Tel Aviv, rising to become president of the Professional Photographers Association. In 2002, he moved to India to pursue the career of a documentary photographer. He lives in New Delhi with his family.
Street food is even more neglected than the humble restaurant which many food columnists ignore. It is disgusting to find write-ups of the latest concoction by the chef of a five-star hotel. It provides a soft story. Hard work is not required. To whom do they cater?
Digging out the restaurant of old, which has served exquisite food for decades, requires probing inquiries, footwork and good taste. This is not inverted snobbery. Ask M.F. Husain and he will tell you the best such joints in Mumbai alone. On the walls of one he has written out his autograph. It is the only survivor of U.P. restaurants which serves authentic nihari Noor Mohammadi. Not far, at Pydhoni, is a restaurant right outside a mosque whose mincemeat curry its patrons have enjoyed for decades. The quality has remained constant.
Street food is of a different genre, as its very name suggests. But then it need not be off a cart or on the pavement. The cook who is allowed use of a bench or a plank outside a shop gives the same kind of food.
Delhi not New Delhi is a heaven for lovers of street food. One of the most distinguished of them was President Zakir Husain. Air travel was rare then. He travelled often by train and particularly relished snacks served on railway platforms.
The author has written an intelligent introduction to the book. It stands out because it has none of the pretences and silly jargon of the arriviste columnist who holds forth on food week after week.
Bergerson explains how he came to write this book. Time and opportunity to travel to other cities revealed new works and new variety in street food. Having kachori on the ghats near the river Ganga in Varanasi was nothing like having it in Old Delhi, or anywhere else for that matter. Mumbais vada pav was not the aloo chop of Raipur. Even bread pakora had so many variations.
In time, I became almost obsessed with the language of the streets and this amazing phenomenon started opening up to me. The places where I ate grew more and more important as I started developing a taste for certain dishes. Whenever in Mumbai, for example, I could not go a day without the simple sweet three-rupee nimbu-pani, that simplest of lemonades at the railway station, and would almost religiously go to Nariman Point for a veg sandwich. Oh, how tasty simple bread with vegetables can be!
As I went deeper into the subject, I began to feel that a book would be the ultimate product of the photographic process. While magazines, newspapers and galleries are indeed fantastic places to exhibit ones work, once a book is born it has a life of its own and shows the photographers wider view and definition of the subject.
A foreigners insights can help the native capture nuances he had overlooked. What is obvious in the eyes of an Indian who knows the culture can easily elude a foreigner who is not aware of its intricacies and does not know what to expect and where to put the emphasis.
On the other hand, this can become an advantage as certain things that are so much part of daily life escapes the attention of the local and yet can be eye-catching and amazing for an outsider. Street food is a fantastic example of being an omnipresent feature of urban India that has largely escaped the attention of photographers here.
It is not unjust to this admirable book to point out a few injustices. The Chowpatty it depicts in photographs omits its best feature. The photographs are of small fry; the recent arrivals. Not of the big ones who served generations of patrons and were themselves handed down the outfit from father to son over the years.
Khayali Ram was one. A bigoted Minister went about cleaning the place and wreaked havoc with the lives of men who had plied their trade for years. Chowpatty has not been the same since. Some find it disgustingly clean. That is an affectation perhaps. The Ministers drive for cleanliness could have preserved Chowpattys character.
Sadly, some joints of old have deteriorated over the years. This book does a service to a neglected part of Indian culture. Delhi and Mumbai do not monopolise its pages. Chennai, Kolkata and others are not ignored.
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