Ramaswami Harindranath
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF METROPOLITAN
AND VERNACULAR LIFESTYLES IN INDIA
Abstract
Using English-language and Tamil cookery shows on Indian television as
examples, this article examines the complex cultural terrain traversed by
contemporary Indian lifestyle TV, and argues that the gastro-politics inherent in
such programming is indicative of the ways in which such shows appeal to and
develop diverse social imaginaries in a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multicultural
society such as India. The article argues that these shows both enact the creative
tensions intrinsic to contemporary neo-liberal forms of cultural nationalism and
demonstrate the constitutive co-presence of the global, the national and the
vernacular in contemporary Indian culture.
Television across Asia has recently seen an explosive rise in the number of lifestyle TV
and makeover shows, ranging from advice on health and beauty, cookery and travel to
home renovations. Emerging as a corollary to the liberalisation of economies in Asia,
such shows contribute to and reveal the rise in consumer lifestyles, in keeping with a
global trend. As Lewis and Martin (2010: 319) observe, ‘lifestyle shows in Asia are
playing a significant role in promoting certain lifestyle behaviours and, concomitantly,
social identities, offering not just consumer advice but lifestyle guidance in a period of
shifting cultural and social mores’. As such, these shows appear to bear out Hartley’s
observation regarding the pedagogic aspect of much of television: that its hegemonic
potential includes its significant role in the process of socialising citizens. It is even
possible, in some instances, to extend Couldry’s (2008) analysis of reality TV’s links to
forms of behaviour in the neo-liberal workplace to lifestyle programming’s connections
with the performance of citizenship and social identity. This would be consistent with
concerns regarding global media and Western hegemony, expressed in the literature
on media and cultural imperialism. Nevertheless, it is possible to re-examine concerns
such as Miller’s (2007: 50) that lifestyle television is ‘US subjectivity on export’ in
light of particular lifestyle TV programming in Asia. In other words, are the sharp
rise in lifestyle programming and the concomitant growth in middle-class consumer
spending in different parts of Asia indicative of American or Western hegemony? Or
does the burgeoning number of lifestyle programs reveal a more complex narrative?
In making her case for a response on the basis of ‘cultural intelligence’ to a world
that has come to be recognised as being characterised by ‘complexity’, Ang (2011:
782) refers to those processes and flows and mobilities:
that traverse individual localities, stitching them into global processes which
involve more than just occasionally lifting some people out of them. What these
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processes bring about is not the simple absorption of the local into the global,
but the more complex and unavoidable enmeshment of the global in the local,
and the local in the global, thus unsettling (though not dissolving) the very
distinction between the two terms.
As the sample from the Indian cookery programs that I will discuss here suggests,
Ang’s argument is largely borne out regarding the terrain of lifestyle television in India.
The question that animates the discussion in this article concerns what these shows,
the consumer values that are manifest in them and the audiences they address reveal
in terms of the complex social imaginaries, ranging from the global and transnational
to the vernacular and the traditional, that together constitute the complexity of
contemporary Indian culture. What cultural agendas are enacted in these shows? The
cookery programs discussed here were chosen to indicate the distinctions between the
apparent polarities of the global/Western and the vernacular. These shows include, on
the one hand, a combination of Western cuisines using ingredients which were, until
recently, unavailable in India – and even now are available in only the most exclusive
delicatessens located in air-conditioned malls in the country’s ultra-rich urban locations
– to lessons on cooking traditional Tamil food, given in simple cooking demonstrations
with local ingredients available in any street market, which are nevertheless heavily
laden with notions of Tamil mores and customs. Bearing in mind that these shows
are globally available in the Tamil diaspora, it is possible to locate in Indian cookery
shows the ‘cultural complexity’ referred to by Ang (2011), particularly the ways in
which the local is enmeshed in the global, and vice versa.
Even more significant is how these shows reveal, perform and maintain specific social
imaginaries that demonstrate the at times contrasting, and at other times co-present,
diversity of cultural narratives and life-worlds that together make up the complexity
of contemporary life in India. Social imaginaries, as proposed by Taylor (2004: 23),
are ‘the ways in which people imagine their social existence, how they fit together
with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that
are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these
expectations’. Crucially, social imaginaries – which are simultaneously normative and
implicit – refer to common understandings and assumptions, shared by members of a
society, which underpin, inform and enable everyday practices. Social imaginaries, in
Taylor’s conception, provide meaning and context to everyday practices and involve,
as Rizvi (2011: 228) points out, ‘a complex, unstructured and contingent mix of the
empirical and the affective’. The following discussion of the sample cookery shows
will demonstrate how lifestyle programming appeals to different social imaginaries
and how, in a culturally diverse society such as India, such shows enact the creative
tensions that animate contemporary forms of cultural nationalism, and attest to the
complexity of cultural, ethnic and religious politics within the nation.
It is important to note in this context the changes in Indian consumer citizenship
before and after independence (Mazzarella, 2003; Lukose, 2009). As Lukose (2009: 8)
argues, the nature of consumer citizenship in India has changed drastically since the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when, as part of the anti-colonial Swadeshi
movement, consumption was politicised and ‘linked to an image of the economy as a
locus of production in the service of the nation’ – a process that imagined the reformist
middle class ‘as comprising consumers whose practices of consumption were tied to
appropriate forms of modern domesticity and a productivist paradigm of citizenship’ (see
also Deshpande, 2003). Such discourses linking practices of consumption to nationalist
projects have been replaced, especially since the adoption of economic liberalisation, by
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a discourse in which the economy ‘is now more consistently imagined as a marketplace
of commodities for consumption, in a shift that also entails a move away from the
idea of the citizen as producer patriot to one of a “cosmopolitan consumer”’ (Lukose
2008: 8). Also significant here, as we shall see, is the complex gastro-politics in
India (Appadurai, 1981, 1988; Narayan, 1995) and the complex politics of vernacular
nationalism and the media (Moorty, 2004).
Considered together with the pull of the global and transnational, such localised,
vernacular, ethnic-linguistic politics demonstrate the complexity of cultural narratives
and processes for which Ang (2011) argues. The two sections that follow provide
discussions of a cookery program broadcast on an English-language channel and
its accompanying website, and three cookery shows on vernacular Tamil language
channels. The examination contains a short description of the main constituents of
the shows, a brief analysis of relevant aspects of the mise-en-scène, camera work and
lighting, the hosts and their modes of address, as a means of shedding light on the
cultural and political significance of these elements in the shows. The intention here
is to supply a snapshot of the rich array of linguistic and cultural diversity manifest in
Indian lifestyle television, and the complex ethnic and political mosaic that is evident
in lifestyle shows in India.
Cosmopolitan tastes: The world in your kitchen
Love Bites is a series of cookery programs on NDTV Good Times, an English-language
channel from the New Delhi TV network of mostly English-language channels catering
to predominantly urban audiences. NDTV Good Times identifies itself as ‘India’s first
lifestyle channel’, and claims that, ‘launched in September 2007, the channel targets a
largely cosmopolitan, socially progressive audience’.1 The channel’s website announces
the series Love Bites thus:
Love Bites with Joey, hosted by supermodel Joey Matthew in a brand new avatar,
is a food show straight from the heart, about food’s most important ingredient
– Love. Joey, born to Malyali parents and raised in Europe & Middle East, has
travelled extensively and dined at some of the finest restaurants in the world.
Her tryst with food began at an early age, and this love for food led her into the
kitchen where she developed a passion for cooking honest and wholesome food.2
The website’s description of the show’s host and her credentials is particularly noteworthy
and revealing of its content and target audience, as well as the social imaginary it
portrays. The ambition of the series is to offer an indigenised form of the global and
what is perceived to be ‘cosmopolitan’, with the latter claim evident in the reference
to the program’s ‘supermodel’ host and cook-presenter, Joey Matthew, having been
raised in Europe and the Middle East, having travelled extensively and having dined
at the ‘finest restaurants in the world’. These international ‘cosmopolitan’ credentials
are not, however, offered in isolation, as markers of her credibility as an expert on
Western cuisine alone. The phrase ‘born to Malyali parents’3 indigenises this expertise,
anchoring it and the celebrity host firmly in a particular tradition of Indian culinary
culture, a move that simultaneously positions Matthew and the series within both a
transnational and a local frame. As a ‘Malyali’, she is ‘one of us’, yet her career as
a jet-setting supermodel who has grown up in Europe and the Middle East makes her
an exotic Other. The show’s host thus embodies the target audience and its cultural
aspirations, and its cultural and economic capital. For an Indian audience, the host and
the program are located in the cultural space of a Westernised and yet Indian elite
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that escapes the confines of the vernacular (its reference to ‘Malyali’ as a mere marker
attesting to her local roots and credentials) but remains resolutely Indian, even if only
in an urban, upper middle-class, Western-oriented and English-speaking way. As I have
pointed out elsewhere (Harindranath, 2012), the aesthetics of Love Bites recalls other
cookery shows such as Nigella Bites in its demonstration of the sensuality of food in
terms of both taste and texture.
This ambiguous, hybrid cultural space is further manifest in Matthew’s appearance
and manner, in the program’s visual and aural aesthetic, and in the types of food on
display. The show has high production values, in keeping with its transnational discourse
and aspirations, with attractive lighting, fluid camera movement and strategic close-
ups of the cook-presenter and the food. The types of music used include Spanish-style
guitar that accompanies Matthew’s presentation and commentary, and an upbeat, jazzy
tune that is used alongside the montage of images at the beginning of each program.
Each episode opens with Matthew’s affirmation of her credentials:
I am a model. As a model I travel the world. I work very hard. I party even
harder. And I discovered a passion, a passion to cook and a passion to feed people.
This statement, made in English over the series’ signature tune – an English song
with a sparse guitar accompaniment – establishes her main attributes as a jet-setting,
young, cosmopolitan, Westernised woman branching out into cooking. In so doing, it
sets up the content of the programs and the international character of the cuisines on
display. This is followed by a simple jazz tune and a sequence of images of Matthew
drinking champagne, a close-up of wine glasses and Matthew walking past well-stocked
and clean supermarket shelves. The camera tracks Matthew as she walks past shiny
fruit and vegetables heaped on open containers, abundant, vibrant and polished. The
semiotics of this montage of images, sequences and music firmly locates the show in
a cultural terrain that is largely outside that of India, a near-mythical location that is
external to the social imaginaries of most Indians. The impression promoted is one
of expensive up-market cleanliness and exclusivity, addressing the upper middle-class
Indian viewer who shops in up-market malls, thereby establishing the program’s target
audience of the urban, Westernised Indian elite and those aspiring to belong to it. This
is a spatially and socially mobile class of consumers that transcends caste, regional
and linguistic divides, possesses sufficient cultural capital to be comfortable in both
Western and Indian contexts, has enough economic capital to consume ‘foreign’ goods,
and has developed Westernised tastes and lifestyles.
Both the mise-en-scène and Matthew’s own appearance further underscore the
ambiguities of the Westernised and urban Indian cultures and consumer tastes. She is
relatively fair-skinned, her English displays an upper class pan-Indian accent and her
clothes are fashionably Western; however, she also wears a ‘bindi’, thereby Indianising
her appearance. The location, allegedly her own kitchen, includes French windows –
an unusual architectural feature in India – and a well-tended European-looking garden
and lawn. Visible behind her, as she cooks and addresses the camera, are framed
paintings by Indian artists that combine Western styles with Indian motifs – modern but
recognisably Indian. Once again, the show’s semiotics – in this instance, its location –
is indicative of its presumed audience. As viewers, we are invited into the home of a
Westernised, cosmopolitan, young Indian woman. This deliberate mixing of the Indian
and the Western is further emphasised in the menus she prepares, in which Indian
dishes sit alongside ‘watermelon and feta salad’, ‘chicken schnitzel and chunky fries’,
‘bruschetta’, ‘tofu and chocolate tart’ and ‘smoked salmon salad’. The visual idiom
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and aesthetic are Western and glossy, while both the mode of address and the content
invite the viewer to inhabit a specific social imaginary, at once Indian and Western,
in which such culinary code-mixing indicates cosmopolitan values, by consuming the
exotic Other through food and culinary styles as well as the programs themselves.
While the diversity of cuisines featuring in each program of the series is indicative
of the wilful transgression of culinary boundaries, a self-evident preference for an
assemblage or mélange to any sense of ‘traditional’ national cuisines, the Indian recipes
retain a sense of authenticity – particularly the Kerala dishes. Matthew declares in one
program: ‘I have memories of sitting on a high stool eating aapams fresh from the
tawa.’ Such asides, and her use of phrases such as ‘mallu grandmother’s house’ and
‘aapa chatti’, are acts of linguistic code-switching that mirror the mixing of culinary
codes in her programs that combine authenticity based on childhood nostalgia with the
promiscuous co-mingling of international cuisines. In other words, these programs –
aimed at the upper middle-class urban elite who have access to the types of supermarkets
and delicatessens located in cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkota, Bangalore and
Chennai – combine ‘tradition’ and ‘translation’. While Morley and Robbins (1995) and
Robins (1991) use that phrase to highlight their conception of the ways in which the
forces of ‘tradition’ are being negotiated through practices of ‘translation’ in diasporic
cultures, Love Bites displays the complex cultural politics involved in indigenising
Western cuisine in India and what that reveals in terms of cultural belonging and social
imaginary. If, in Appadurai’s (1988) analysis of the Indian cookbook, the movement of
regional/vernacular recipes is indicative of the loosening of caste and ethnic boundaries,
in the case of Love Bites the movement of recipes brings the global to the kitchens
of the new urban middle classes in India. Through the demonstration of her culinary
expertise that combines diverse national European and Asian cuisines with apparent
ease, Matthew invites the urban middle-class consumer to experience the global in
their own kitchens.
This demonstration of culinary cosmopolitanism includes a display of culinary
technologies that at once attest to the economic resources that make such acquisition
possible while their use in kitchens demonstrates the possession of certain kinds of cultural
capital that is simultaneously Indian and non-Indian. Appadurai’s (1988) observation is
still relevant, although at a markedly different level in the sense that what were rare
and expensive at the time of his essay have become relatively commonplace, and have
been superseded by other, more ‘advanced’ technologies: ‘the symbiotic differentiation
of both class and cuisine that is flourishing in Indian cities is supported by changes in
the technology and economy of cooking’ (1988: 9). In the place of Appadurai’s food
blender, spice grinder and refrigerator are now ovens and dishwashers, special knives
and the techniques and technologies for making fresh pasta. Along with economic
liberalisation in India, it seems that the notion of the cosmopolitan kitchen has changed
too, keeping pace with the relative ease with which rich, Europeanised consumers are able
to procure ‘foreign’ goods: ‘Everything is now available in India, so why go abroad?’
Love Bites is thus an instance of what could be termed gastro-mobility that traverses
localities, regions and nations, an instance of promiscuous consumption that has come
to epitomise a type of cosmopolitan style and a self-conscious creation of distinction
by a cultural and economic elite for whom international travel is commonplace and
whose palates have acquired the taste of multiple cuisines. The performance of gastro-
cosmopolitanism celebrates the transnational consumption of the economic-cultural elite
in urban India, whose cosmopolitan credentials are manifest in the ease with which
their cuisine incorporates the ‘seductiveness of variety’ (Appadurai, 1988: 18). This
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group transcends traditional boundaries in India, most significantly of caste. Appadurai’s
(1988) observation regarding the ‘movement of recipes’ through the national cookbook
acquires an additional layer of cultural signification here: not only – as in Appadurai’s
analysis of the social world of the Indian cuisine – do these recipes and culinary styles
continue the project of a cosmopolitan national cuisine in India, they also underscore
the effortless transnational cosmopolitanism of the Indian urban elite, who are culturally
in a significantly different space from the majority of other Indians.
Two points are worth noting here. First, as Fernandes (2000) points out, the Indian
nation has come to be aestheticised through commodities that are newly available. As
she argues in her analysis of television and magazine advertisements in India: ‘This
redefinition of the Indian nation centers around the role of the middle classes and
… the articulation of a new cultural standard associated with the hegemonic urban
middle-class lifestyle.’ (2000: 619) Fernandes’ argument regarding the articulation of the
global in the national through media discourses on consumption which depict idealised
versions of the Indian middle classes is particularly pertinent here, as Love Bites can
be seen as a demonstration of precisely such articulations. Second, the series, with its
combination of diverse international cuisines enlisted to sit alongside Indian (Kerala)
recipes, yoking together the global with the national/local, can be seen as a reversal
of Narayan’s (1995) claims regarding ‘culinary imperialism’ and ‘food colonialism’.
The consumption of ‘ethnic food’ in the United States, Narayan argues, is evidence of
a ‘colonial stance’, as consumers ‘display a shallow interest in “exotic” foods, exploit
the food of Others to enhance their own prestige and sophistication, and “eat ethnic”
without any interest in, or concern for, the cultural contexts of the ethnic foods eaten’
(1995: 75). The cuisines portrayed in Love Bites provide evidence of the reversal of
this process, and of the consumption of Western foods with as little concern for or
interest in their cultural contexts. Consumption of the Other is predominantly about the
enhancement and display of cosmopolitan cultural sophistication and economic privilege.
Performing Tamilness: Vernacular cuisines and moral spaces
By way of indicating another social imaginary, one that reveals the dynamics of cultural
nationalism and linguistic and ethnic politics in India, I want to briefly discuss three Tamil
cookery shows Aaha Enna Rusi (Aha, What Taste!), a program on the Chennai-based
Sun TV network featuring Chef Jacob; Arusuvai Neram (Delicious Time), presented by
Menurani (Menu Queen) Chellam; and a variant Aurusuvai Ithu Thani Suvai (Delicious,
This is Unique Taste), presented by Chef Damodharan, both on Jaya TV, a rival Tamil
channel. It is important to recognise that both these television channels – Sun TV and
Jaya TV – have close affiliations with rival political parties in the state of Tamil Nadu
in south India, the DMK and the ADMK respectively, both of which champion Tamil
nationalism on the basis of alleged ethnic and linguistic authenticity of Tamil culture.
The politics of ethnic Tamil identity is therefore a crucial component of vernacular
culture, which has existed in historical tension with the Northern, Hindi India since
the rise of Tamil nationalism in the 1960s. However, as this discussion of the Tamil
shows will reveal, the cultural politics of Tamil nationalism is marked by a tension
between diverse religious and caste communities and the Tamilness to which each of
them subscribes and that each performs. The everyday practice of Tamil culture, in
other words, includes a diversity of social imaginaries riding on important sub-cultural
distinctions.
The show Aaha Enna Rusi (AER) is presented in a magazine format and includes
travel segments in which Chef Jacob cooks in diverse and unusual locations in the
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state of Tamil Nadu. This includes a segment entitled ‘Local Kitchen’ in which he
visits people’s kitchens to describe and interpret their culinary habits and recipes, a
health segment in which a ‘kitchen doctor’ offers advice on weight loss and general
well-being, and a quiz aimed at educating children on Tamil cuisine and culture. The
majority of dishes he prepares showcase the variety of cuisines available in the state of
Tamil Nadu. His website, Chef Jacob’s Kitchen, claims that ‘he continues his intensive
research on ancient cuisines of Tamil Nadu and is the author of several books and
articles on the same’, and contains photographs of him and his team of sous-chefs. Chef
Jacob is a professional chef, as signified by the chef’s hat he wears in the photographs,
who specialises in Tamil and Indian cooking – ‘I want to be known as a chef who
continuously revives forgotten cuisines of India,’ he says.
Compared with Love Bites, AHR is a low-budget production. Although Jacob dons
a chef’s hat and apron in the sequences filmed in his professional kitchen – sartorial
markers that distinguish Jacob from the others in the kitchen and underline his status
as the head chef – the camera is largely static, the lighting is rudimentary and there
is no attempt at glossy, high-end visuals. The sequences filmed outdoors in various
locations, as well as those filmed in people’s homes and in the studio, retain the quality
of amateur videos with low production values. The gestures at novelty are restricted
largely to Jacob’s choice of locations: he fires up his cooker in unlikely places such
as a pedestrian bridge, a railway track and on a small raft floating down a stream. His
mode of address is simple, straightforward and mostly limited to recipes and cookery
advice. He eschews high-flown, ‘pure’ Tamil for the more colloquial dialect, and liberally
uses English terms such as ‘golden’, ‘fine’, ‘onion’, ‘rich’, ‘tasty’ and ‘high flame’.
In sequences with the ‘kitchen doctor’, he plays the role of a cultural translator, often
re-presenting the doctor’s advice in the discourse of Tamil culture and customs. AHR,
in other words, is a celebration of the vernacular and the regional, and an invitation
to participate in and perform Tamilness.
The semiotics of Chef Jacob’s sequences in kitchens of different households provides
interesting insights into the diversity encompassed within Tamil cultural nationalism.
Not only do these sequences include kitchens and households from different classes,
and from rural, semi-urban and urban locales, but also, significantly, they portray Hindu,
Christian and Muslim culinary practices and lifestyles. The significance of this in terms
of the show’s cultural politics cannot be over-stated. What is promoted in this show is
Tamil ethnicity and culture through its diversity – religious, caste, regional, urban/rural
– of culinary cultures within the state that, the show implies, demonstrate the variety
intrinsic to Tamil culture. Despite the simplicity of the straight address to the camera
format, the program’s segments, and its showcasing of religious and caste diversity,
display a Tamil culinary, and through that a cultural landscape that is different from
the Brahmin or Hindu depictions.
Appadurai’s (1981: 509) observation on the semiotics of food transactions within
the Hindu households is still relevant:
Gastro-politics for Hindus, then, is rather like what Clifford Geertz has argued
about cockfights for the Balinese: it is ‘deep play’. It is a species of competitive
encounter within a shared framework of rules and meanings in which what is
risked are profound conceptions of self and other, high and low, inside and
outside. In a society in which the self is a complex and unstable entity, rank is
destiny, and exclusiveness is survival, these stakes are high indeed.
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This is particularly so in Brahmin households, where the rules that govern the gastro-
politics of the household are even stronger, and the semiotics even starker: ‘Tamil
Brahmin households are bulwarks of culinary orthodoxy. They are generally scrupulously
vegetarian … Except in a relatively small number of mobile, urban families, food is
served in the kitchen, often in direct view of the cooking area. Since this implies very
direct visual and proxemic access to the most sacred area of the house, food may be
served in a more public space in the house when “guests” are present.’ (Appadurai 1981:
497) By bringing both himself and the camera crew into kitchens, including Hindu ones,
chef Jacob transgresses such gastro-political boundaries that normally govern notions
of purity and impurity in traditional families, in particular Tamil Brahmin households.
The Tamilness in which he invites his viewers to participate is, as a consequence, one
that transcends caste and religious divides.
The discursive and iconographic traits in the two Jaya TV series – Arusuvai Ithu Thani
Suvai (AIT) and Arusuvai Neram (AN) – on the other hand are predominantly Hindu
and Tamil. For instance, in the show Aurusuvai Ithu Thani Suvai, Chef Damodharan
invokes specific Hindu rituals and customs in his presentation of a special program to
celebrate the Hindu festival Deepavali. At the very beginning of the program, he outlines
the custom of nonbu or vratam, a specifically Hindu custom, according to which the
wife/mother goes on a fast for a few days in order to ensure the health of the husband
and children. Based on a mythological figure who rescues her husband from the hands
of Yama, the god of death (who, realising her devotion to her husband, yields to her
entreaties and lets her husband live), this practice appeals to and re-enacts traditional
notions of women’s roles within the household and in broader society. She plays a
key role in the family as the provider of food and nourishment, and thereby health. As
Appadurai (1988: 11) points out, feeding others and consuming food figure prominently
in Hindu philosophical literature (even though cooking itself does not), and ‘food is
principally either a moral or a medical matter in traditional Hindu thought’ – so much
so that it ‘never becomes the basis of an autonomous epicurean or gustatory logic’.
This sub-text linking diet and ingredients to morality and virtue underlies much of
the culinary discourse in both AIT and AN. Both series utilise a simple format, with the
cook addressing a largely static camera. Close-ups and cutaways are used minimally,
and the list of ingredients, intoned by the presenter, appears as slides on the screen.
At times AIT uses a presenter who interviews Chef Damodharan on our behalf, teasing
out the significance – moral, traditional, and culinary – of various ingredients. AN,
on the other hand, has as its host and cook Menurani Chellam, a middle-aged Tamil
woman whose credentials as an expert in traditional Tamil cuisine are established
through her clothes and appearance. She wears the traditional sari, and a big kumkum
‘bindi’ announces her status as a married woman, while her age and the confidence
with which she handles the utensils and addresses the viewer are strongly indicative
of her status as a matriarch who has cooked countless meals in her own kitchen. Her
expertise, therefore, is based on decades of experience cooking traditional Tamil food
for her extended family. Again, the format is simple, with Chellam addressing the
audience from behind a stove and a platform with various cooking appliances and
utensils. Her style of address is direct, friendly, almost matronly, while her language
is colloquial rather than ‘pure’ Tamil. She too mixes culinary advice with occasional
suggestions and asides on the health-giving properties of particular ingredients, and
makes references to Tamil traditions and customs.
Despite these differences, AER, AIT and AN display common elements: both the
iconography and visual and linguistic tropes invoke Tamil cultural nationalism. In
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the case of AER, this takes a form that overcomes and supersedes caste and religious
distinctions, thereby transgressing boundaries of alleged purity, whereas AIT and AN
offer a more markedly Hindu version of Tamilness. Food, recipes and the practice of
cooking are modalities through which gastro-politics is played out as the politics of
identity. This is particularly significant in the context of Tamil and ethnic Dravidian
separatist politics, which has animated local politics in India for generations (Moorty,
2004; Vaitheespara, 2011). As Moorty has pointed out, Tamil identity politics has
shifted from demands of a separate and autonomous nation based on ethnic difference
to a more cultural form of nationalism that constantly re-casts and reiterates the idea
of the Tamil nation in diverse ways, including in indigenised forms of global cultural
formats, such as reality television and lifestyle television. As she argues, this illustrates
‘Chatterjee’s [1993] assertion that conditions of globality increase rather than diminish
the importance of negotiating national and sub-national contradictions.’ (Moorty, 2004:
552). In light of the earlier discussion of the cultural politics of Love Bites, it is possible
to argue that reassertions of vernacular cultural identities such as Tamil nationalism are
a corollary to the increasing visibility on the Indian television landscape of the pull
towards cosmopolitan and transnational cultures.
Conclusion
Lewis and Martin (2010) and Lewis et al. (2012) underline the importance of lifestyle
television in contemporary cultural and political formations. This discussion of lifestyle
television in India reveals the cultural complexity that Ang (2011) has developed, in the
sense that the two kinds of cookery programs discussed here demonstrate the constitutive
co-presence of the global and the local in the complex, and at times contradictory,
negotiations between the global and the national, the national and the vernacular, and
the vernacular and the global. What this also suggests, in terms of the adoption of
Western televisual formats in postcolonial contexts, is that any easy reading of this as
evidence of media imperialism or of cultural homogenisation is misplaced. Metropolitan
and vernacular Indian lifestyle television seems to offer opportunities for transnational
and vernacular forms of affiliation. However, these need not be mutually exclusive. As
I have argued elsewhere (Harindranath, 2001, 2009), examining patterns of inequality
in the context of global media requires a more nuanced engagement with the complex
ways in which, as this analysis suggests, the global is enacted and consumed at the
level of the national and local, and how this re-presents the neo-liberal nation as a
continuation of the global cultural politics of consumer citizenship. In addition, it is also
necessary to examine the ways in which the vernacular is inscribed in the transnational
pathways – in this instance, of Sun TV’s performance of Tamil culinary nationalism
as consumed by viewers among the global Tamil diaspora. Such programming, and
the different audiences and social imaginaries to which it appeals, are revealing of
the current conjuncture in neo-liberal India where, as mentioned earlier, the cultural
mosaic has become even richer and more clearly marked, and contains aspects that are
transnational, national, regional and vernacular. As revealed in this discussion, gastro-
politics, as manifest in lifestyle cookery shows, reveals the constituent elements of the
complex cultural collage of contemporary Indian culture. This is indicative of the co-
presence of diverse social imaginaries that are transnational or vernacular, modern or
traditional, global and cosmopolitan or ethnically bound – or a combination of these.
It is likely that further research, in particular audience ethnographies and reception
studies, will demonstrate the relative comfort with which some communities, families
or individuals – those possessing the requisite cultural and economic capital – are able
to move between these apparent distinctions.
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Notes
1
See http://goodtimes.ndtv.com/Ndtv-Show-Special.aspx?ID=691.
2
See http://goodtimes.ndtv.com/Ndtv-Show-Special.aspx?ID=669.
3
A ‘Malayali’ is a native of the state of Kerala located in the south-western part of India.
The language spoken in this state is Malayalam.
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