1In the introductory paragraph of his article, ‘The Gastro-politics in Hindu South Asia’, the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai states that

in its tangible and material forms food presupposes and reifies technological arrangements, relations of production and exchange, conditions of field and market, and relations of production and exchange. (494)

2Food as a commodity can be consumed, exchanged, and produced. When used as a metaphor food is also closely linked to identity, especially in today’s transnational world of migrants and diasporas.

3For the indentured Indian laborers of the ‘old diaspora’, however, brought over in the nineteenth century by the British to work in Mauritius, Fiji, Guyana, Trinidad, among other British colonies, food remained the material link to the homeland. It was a tangible way to keep alive the memory of home and to pass that memory on to subsequent generations. As Vijay Mishra informs us, food also served as a bridge connecting Indians to other ethnic groups in the diaspora:

… it is food that helped create both a relatively homogenous indenture culture and a point of contact between Indians and Afro-Caribbeans. Indeed the very production of a larger pan- Indian plantation diaspora is linked to cuisine. (Mishra 2007: 91)

4The post-60s Indian migrants of the ‘new diaspora’, those who migrated to the UK, Canada, and the US, were mainly economic migrants (Mishra 2002: 235-236). For them, food became a way to assert their identity in the adopted homeland while maintaining ties with their country of origin.

5Like Mishra who discusses how food united different ethnic groups in the diaspora, David Parker, in his essay on the role of Chinese takeaways in a multicultural United Kingdom, asserts: ‘Ethnic cuisine is read as hopeful sign of intercultural accommodation’. Then, quoting the critic Pierre van den Berghe, he adds that ethnic food restaurants are the

most rewarding and easiest bridge across ethnic lines. It is a form of internal tourism […]. What more accessible and friendly arena of interethnic contact could be devised than the ethnic restaurant? (77)

6While ethnic food becomes a way for the dominant classes to superficially celebrate multiculturalism, these very foods are sometimes used by the migrant diasporic communities as a means of self-identification. As David Bell and Gill Valentine put it: ‘… nation, nationality and nationalism are enacted through food’ (114).

7These connections between food, identity, nation, and diaspora are reiterated by the critic Garcia Canclini who argues that globalization on the economic front has destroyed national boundaries as people connect as consumers rather than citizens:

The definition of a nation, for example, is given less at this stage by its territorial limits or its political history. It survives, rather, as an interpretive community of consumers, whose traditional—alimentary, linguistic- habits induce them to relate in a peculiar way with the objects and information that circulate in international networks. (43)

8He adds that these consumer patterns become the primary means of identification among peoples transnationally (44). Rüdiger Kunow asserts, however, that as Indian peoples and products, including food, become part of the circulation of goods under globalization, there is a fear that this desire for Indian food, like the desire for India during the colonial period, will turn into a form of neo-colonialism (153-54). Often it is the diasporic Indian who commodifies India for the Westerner. Thus, food in the Indian diaspora, as it is portrayed in the films that we are about to study, becomes the primary transnational link, a means of retaining memories of the homeland while also evoking India for the non-Indians in the West, of highlighting issues of identity, mixtures, in-betweeness, hybridization, or of selling India to the West.

9For the critic Samir Gandesha the masala metaphor is problematic because even though it celebrates difference, the celebration is hollow because masala also reinforces notions of neo-imperialism through the exoticization of India. It was the spice trade, Gandesha reminds us, that led to colonialism: ‘Doesn’t the stroll down the block to an Indian restaurant manifest the repetition compulsion of the archaic quest for spices?’ he muses (14). Although Gandesha’s point is well taken, ‘the stroll down the block to an Indian restaurant’ need not be an assertion of imperial power, but could merely be prompted by nostalgia for home or a love for Indian cuisine.

10This essay will examine food as a material and metaphorical object in four films made by filmmakers of Indian origin living and working in Canada, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States: Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala (1991), Srinivas Krishna’s Masala (1991), Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach (1995) and Vijay Singh’s One Dollar Curry (2004).1 We will conduct a comparative analysis of the films, exploring the variations in the representation of the identities of Indians and their relation to ‘home’ in films set in Europe and North America—the US and Canada. We will analyze how the masala of Nair’s Mississippi Masala is different from the masala of Krishna’s Masala. How the curry prepared in Masala differs from the curry in Singh’s One Dollar Curry. How the social milieu of the diasporic Indian living in the American South who arrived there from Uganda, Africa via London compares with the portrayal of the Canadian Indian community living in the suburbs of Toronto. How the curry in Vijay Singh’s One Dollar Curry manipulates and exploits French stereotypes of India in twenty-first century Paris. Finally, how food, symbolized by bhaji, a linguistic corruption of the Indian snack bhajia, used in the British Asian diaspora and in the title of Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach, unites and divides different generations of British Asian women while also depicting the racism of the dominant white community towards Asians in Britain.

11In Mira’s Nair’s Mississippi Masala, masala becomes a form of self-representation for the protagonist Mina (Sarita Choudhry) born in Uganda, now working and living with her parents in an extended family-owned motel in Greenwood, Mississippi in the southern United States. She uses masala or a ‘bunch of hot spices’ to describe herself to Demetrius (Denzel Washington), an African-American who owns a rug-cleaning business. While for Mina masala is a means of self-identification, Demetrius emphasizes Mina’s exotic beauty when he calls her ‘hot and spicy’ while gently touching her shoulder and making a sizzling sound. Demetrius’s friend and business partner Tyrone (Charles S. Dutton), attracted to Mina’s ‘exotic’ looks refers to her as a Mexican, further highlighting her otherness. Like the white motel owners who confuse the Asian Indian Gujarati motel owners with Native American Indians, Tyrone confuses Mexican and Indian. For him they are both ‘other’ and thus interchangeable. Nair raises the important question of the interchangeability of the ‘other’ by having both a dominant white character and the minority African-American character respond to Mina from within their realm of experience with exotic ‘otherness’. One can find similar analogies in the sphere of food when the ‘other’ is homogenized such as when some Chinese restaurants include pan-Asian dishes in their menus to attract customers, or when Indian restaurants in the diaspora cater to the tastes of the clientele of their adopted country, both minority and dominant, by offering them dishes as ‘mild’ ‘medium’ and ‘hot’, or by exoticizing the names of the dishes they offer on their menu. The Asian American critic Sau-Ling Wong refers to this phenomenon as ’” food pornography”: making a living by exploiting the “exotic” aspects of one’s ethnic foodways’ (55).2

12By self-identifying as masala, Mina explains her complex origins as a Ugandan Indian who had never been to India. For critic Jigna Desai, however, Mina ‘identifies herself as masala to make herself more attractive and desirable to Demetrius’. While Desai is correct when she states that despite Mina’s attempts to explain her origins what the film highlights is her ‘sexual desirability and consumability’ (90). Desai is on less solid ground, however, in her assessment of Mina’s motives for describing herself as a masala since it is Demetrius who attaches physical attributes to the term. Moreover, Mina could very simply be stating, as Kunow suggests, a ‘composite identity can no longer be contained in the Indianness to which the rest of the family clings so desperately’. He continues, ‘since traditions of any kind are in the film exposed as constricting, being “masala” can be understood as empowering subject position’ (160). Binita Mehta reiterates that for Mina, ‘masala is a social construction, a means of explaining her Indian/ Ugandan/American identities, an amalgamation of her Indian roots, as well as her immigrant past’ (198).

13Desai is critical of the fact that although Nair does challenge ‘ (white) normative views to image non-white worlds’ in Mississippi Masala, she does not use Mina’s hybridized identity to make a strong political statement, choosing instead to portray ‘diasporic hybridity as a form of myopic and domesticated multiculturalism…’ (90-91). While it is true that Mississippi Masala is not overtly political, by portraying the complexities of relationships between minority communities, and moving beyond the white versus black binary, Nair addresses the complexities of race in America in her film. Although not completely free of stereotypes, Nair provides a nuanced portrayal of the African-American family in the film. Demetrius’s father Willieben (Joe Seneca) is a waiter in a restaurant that caters to a white clientele and his older son Demetrius is a small business owner. The younger son, Dexter (Tico Wells), is a stereotypical portrayal of a young black African American male who does not have a job and spends his time on the streets hanging out with his friends listening to rap music. The family picture is complete with a strong female character, loving Aunt Rose (Yvette Hawkins) who has become a surrogate mother of the family.

14While the metaphorical use of masala is evident, the food depicted in Mississippi Masala is not all Indian. Mina shares a meal of barbequed chicken, macaroni salad, and corn on the cob at Williben’s birthday celebration. Although Demetrius has an ulterior motive in inviting Mina to meet his family—he wants to make his ex-girlfriend Alicia (Natalie Olivier) jealous—Mina charms the family with the story of her Indian-African background. As an African American who had never been to Africa, Dexter finds common ground with Mina, an Indian who had never been to India. He is also curious about Mina’s East African background and Mina provides them with brief history of British colonization and indentured labor that Dexter is able to equate to the African-American experience of slavery. The kitchen too becomes a place of connections when Mina helps Aunt Rose prepare the salad and the two women forge culinary ties that surpass their ethnic differences. Ironically, the film depicts the tensions that existed between the minority Indian community and the African community in Uganda that forced Mina’s parents to move to the US. These tensions persist in their relationship with the African-American community in the US when Mina’s extended family accuses her of dishonoring her family and community. Even Mina’s open-minded father Jay (Roshan Seth), whose best friend in Uganda has been a black African, has trouble accepting Mina and Demetrius’s relationship because he is afraid of the obstacles they would encounter in a society that is not quite ready to accept interracial relationships.

15Mina’s family also makes culinary connections with other minority cultures when Mina and her father Jay share a meal at a Chinese restaurant in Greenwood. The consumption of Chinese food by these twice-displaced migrants to the US also demonstrates the importance of creating alliances across ethnic lines in today’s global, multicultural world. Uma Narayan comments that in ‘ethnically diverse contemporary Western societies’ (79), ethnic groups need to develop relationships with other ethnic groups in order to oppose the ‘mainstream whites’ community since

… gustatory relish for the food of ‘Others’ may help contribute to an appreciation of their presence in the national community, despite ignorance about the cultural contexts of their foods—these pleasures of the palate providing more powerful bonds than knowledge. (80)

16Thus, Mina and her extended family of motel owners in the Southern United States can forge culinary ties with other ethnic minority communities in the US such as the Chinese Americans and African-Americans with whom they might have more in common than with the majority white community. Yet, these ties are separated by class. Although Mina’s extended family are property owners (her father Jay is a lawyer and Mina and her nuclear family live in the motel where Mina also works as an employee) and therefore closer to many in the dominant white community, they are not accepted as equals by them. Class also separates Mina’s family from Demetrius’s African-American family who are working class. While Demetrius as a small business owner is moving up the social ladder, he and Tyrone still clean the motel rooms owned by Mina’s extended Indian family.

17While the masala of Nair’s film encompasses a facile self-identification, the masala in Canadian Indian Srinivas Krishna’s Masala carries a satirical bite both literally and figuratively. Resembling the Bollywood potboiler or the masala film, this metaphor is an integral part of the multiple, intertwined stories that make up the film’s narrative structure—an airplane exploding in mid-air, Indian mythological television serials, gods that emerge from television sets to interact with human beings, television shows that sell no money down real estate, recurring images of planes that fly overhead, toy planes that lose control, Sikh activism, Bollywood song and dance fantasy sequences, racism and violence against South Asians, and a sardonic look at the politics of Canadian multiculturalism.

18Since the use of masala as metaphor in the film has been written about quite extensively,3 this study will examine the literal use of masala in the film’s narrative and analyze how it negotiates the space between the homeland and the diaspora interrogating the role of the ‘authentic’ in the diaspora and consequently, as Desai puts it, questioning the assumption ‘that diasporas and diasporic cultures duplicate homelands and their authentic cultures’ (102). In one scene in the film we see Harry Tikkoo’s (Saeed Jaffrey) family, his two daughters Rita (Sakina Jaffrey) and Sashi (Ronica Sajnani) and son Babu (Raju Ahsan) sharing an Indian meal cooked by his mother Shanti (Zohra Segal). In this scene Harry Tikkoo’s reponse ‘Nothing, the masala is perfect’ to Shanti’s twice-repeated question ‘What is wrong with this curry?’is obviously not the answer she is looking for. For her the masala was not perfect because it was ground with a ‘mortar and a pestle’. In her humorous response, she angrily recites a long list of kitchen gadgets such as electric grinders, juicers, and popcorn makers that her prosperous niece—in–law Bibi Solanki (Madhuri Bhatia) and nephew Lallubhai Solanki (Saeed Jaffrey) own. Clearly, for Shanti, in order to blend into Canadian society and to climb the socio-economic ladder, the old ways of home, of grinding masala with a mortar and pestle, have to be upgraded to the more modern electric grinder. For Shanti the ‘authentic’ is unacceptable in the diaspora. It can only imitate the homeland, it cannot recreate it. For her, electronic gadgets are empowering. Thomas Waugh asserts that grandma needs the machinery ‘for her matriarchal authority in the diasporic world kitchen’ (260). She gets her wish in the film’s final scene where she gleefully supervises cooks in a kitchen filled with consumer electronics cooking up a ‘multicultural culinary treat’ at the Minister of Multiculturalism’s opening of the new museum of Philately of which her son, immigrant Indian, has been appointed its first curator.4 In another incident in the film, we see Babu being taunted by group of racist white teenagers who chase him down the street. As he tries to escape, his stainless steel tiffin carrier, a marker of the Indianness, spills onto the street. Shanti informs Tikkoo, who had picked up the tiffin carrier in the street, that Babu would like a G.I. Joe lunch box to carry to school. Such a lunch box would be symbol of assimilation but also be a show of strength. Like G.I. Joe, Babu will stand up to his racist aggressors. Once again, food, or a food receptacle in this instance, becomes a signifier of difference that attracts negative attention from mainstream society.

19The fetishization of gadgetry in the film has more to do with progress and fitting in than with food preparation per se. Sashi who works for the Minister of Multiculturalism does not want her grandmother to spend hours cooking labor-intensive Indian meals. Rita, the younger daughter feels that eating cooked meals the old fashioned way is a tradition that needs to be maintained. She asks her sister, ‘What do you want? Law of the jungle in the kitchen? Every man for himself?’ The sisters’ opposing views towards Indian food preparation are a reflection on their lives as Indians living in the diaspora. While the older one sees the need to move away from old habits and customs and to assimilate into Canadian society, the younger one wished to maintain the links to home and community. Although the possession of kitchen gadgets such as blenders and juicers would improve Shanti’s social standing and leave her more leisure time that is not her goal. She wants to continue to cook but wants to do it with the latest electronic gadgets that would be evidence of her authority as family matriarch.

20Ironically, in one of the many reversals in the film5, Shanti, who as the elder in the family should be urging the family to hold onto custom and tradition, is the one who rejects tradition, preferring to adapt to the customs and practices of her new home. Even in her conversations with the Lord Krishna on television, she does not ask for a return trip to India but for a better life for her family in Canada. The symbolism of the electric grinder that grinds the masala for a generic curry that does not have the distinctive flavor of the masala ground in a mortar pestle is clear. Grandma has blended her Indianness into the multicultural pot of Canadian society, producing a watered-down curry, or as Waugh puts it: ‘… a fiery masala turns into Tikkoo’s “multi-cultural culinary treat”, a faded yellow, and bitterly stale, machine-ground, supermarket “curry powder”’ (269).

21Like the machine-ground masala in Srinivas Krishna’s film, an imitation of the real thing, Parama Roy informs us that in one of her cookbooks the Indian actress and cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey, coincidently the ex-wife of Saeed Jaffrey and mother of Sakina Jaffrey, both actors in Krishna’s Masala, recounts an anecdote about the commodification of ‘curry powder’ by the British during the colonial period. British colonial officials packaged Indian spices to recreate the flavors of India at home in England. Thus, boxed curry powder is a British colonial invention and poor imitation of the real thing.6 Yet, in a more recent cookbook, Quick and Easy Indian Cooking, Jaffrey confesses using a particular brand of packaged curry powder ‘in the interests of speed’ (475). Like Madhur Jaffrey who shuns packaged curry powder, but uses it when convenient, the grandmother in Masala dismisses the traditional mortar and pestle to grind masala, choosing instead to use the machine-made less ‘perfect’ masala so as to better blend into Canadian society.’ Grandma Shanti sees clearly that the masala of the homeland cannot be replicated in the diaspora; it has to be manufactured and produced in the diaspora. She is the most forward looking person in her family knowing that the ‘authentic’ cannot be recreated in the diaspora because it is ever-changing or had never existed in the first place.

22Shanti embraces Western food technology and rejects traditional Indian methods of grinding masala. Explaining his interest in Krishna’s Masala, Mishra asserts:

What is of value to me are the ways in which Masala dislocates memory, makes the return to the primal origins an impossible dream, disallows spectorial identification but emphasizes the ‘auratic’ quality of the reproduced artifact. (244)

23Shanti’s traditional, indigenous mortar and pestle is ‘reproduced’ as the electric grinder. Consequently, economic power that allows the family to buy the electric grinder takes precedence over the physical link to the homeland through the mortar and pestle.

24Grandma Shanti’s masala that makes the curry in Krishna’s Masala has a very different flavor from the curry of Vijay Singh’s One Dollar Curry set in contemporary Paris. The film’s protagonist Nishan (Vikram Chatwal), a newly arrived Sikh-Indian political refugee in Paris, tries to make a living first by selling Kama Sutra oil to Parisians, then rice and dhal (lentils) in buckets on a Paris street corner. Finally, encouraged by his entrepreneurial West Indian friend Fixer (Trevor A. Stephens), who is shocked that Nishan had even contemplated selling food to Parisians in buckets, he opens up a food stand called One Dollar Curry where he sells Indian curry and rice for one euro to the dismay of his fellow vendors, especially a souvlaki vendor who has his stand across from him and who is forced to lower his price to be competitive. He is resentful of Nishan, a new immigrant, who lowers his price to make a sale.7

25As Nishan sells his curry to suit the French palate, Fixer informs Nathalie (Gabrielle Wright), a documentary filmmaker of French, Irish, British, and Mauritian descent, who stops by the stand to try the food, that Nishan was the seventeenth generation of an unbroken line of chefs who cooked for the Indian kings, viceroys, and presidents. Her curiosity piqued and sensing documentary film in the making, she invites him to cook a meal for her friends. Nishan creates an elaborate dinner concocting a fantastic story of his culinary lineage for Nathalie’s guests by stealing the portraits of the father and grandfather of the proprietor of another Indian restaurant in Paris, whose ancestors were well-known chefs, and claiming them to be his own. He performs a puja or religious ceremony before scrolls of old family recipes that were written and handed down through the generations. He introduces the dishes to which he gives royal names such as Gangajal Magarmuch, a crocodile curry originally made for the Mughal emperor Akbar with water from the river Ganges. He even fabricates images of his ancestors, a long line of chefs who cooked for the Indian maharajas, Mughal kings, British viceroys, and Presidents for François, a documentary filmmaker and Nathalie’s boss. At one point François questions the Hindu names of his ancestors, stating that most Indian chefs who cooked for royalty were Muslim. Nishan and Nathalie hastily put together a story of religious conversion while Nishan creates fake documentation manipulating digital computer imaging technology to manufacture photographs of his ancestors.

26In One Dollar Curry Nishan is a self-identified chakerbazz, or con-artist who impresses the French with his fabricated gastronomic ancestry. Nishan is no cook, however. In the scene where he prepares dishes with royal names for Nathalie’s friends, we see him sweating profusely in the tiny kitchen with pots bubbling over all around him and open packets of spices and other ingredients strewn around the kitchen. He does not know what he is doing and in a state of panic substitutes pesto sauce for coriander. As we stated earlier in this study, Nishan is an example of a purveyor of food pornography. He is selling an ‘exotic’ Indian cuisine that will satisfy the needs of his French consumers.

27Culinary greatness in the French context is located in the person of the chef and his gastronomic inventions. While the culinary writings of Madhur Jaffrey’s cookbooks emphasize the ‘familial kitchen’ and the ‘maternal figure’ behind the culinary creations, ‘traditions of French gastronomic writing’ are ‘traditionally orchestrated around the masterpieces of the great male chefs…’ (Roy 2002: 485). There is a theatrical quality to Nishan as he prepares Indian food for the French. He gives them what they want, dishes with exotic names fit for royalty. Susan Kalsick suggests that ethnic cuisine in the West adapts to local tastes thus highlighting the performative aspect of ethnic identity as translated through food (Bell and Valentine 1997: 116). In addition to cooking as performance, the film includes an actual performance of Indian classical dance by Nishan’s fiancée Yamini (Smriti Mishra) who visits him in Paris. The film is therefore filled with French stereotypes of India as a land of maharajas, exotic foods and dancers.

28Ultimately, there is no authentic in One Dollar Curry. All is artifice— from Nishan’s cooking skills to the ancestors he magically conjures up thanks to modern technology. Unlike the protagonists of Masala and Mississippi Masala who struggle with their hybridized identities, Nishan is not confused about his identity as a Sikh Indian in Paris. As a political refugee, he wants to find a niche for himself in French society and so packages India for the French with the help of his pedigreed curry.8 Nishan’s interest is less about Indian food, than about making it France and in order to achieve that he resorts to culinary prostitution. The film’s beginning is promising as we witness Nishan’s attempts to convince the French of his culinary skills. The film’s narrative structure, however, falls apart as the plot meanders off in different directions as it tries to include every Indian cliché possible, from a classical Indian dance performance to a Hindu priest who gets into trouble with the law as he tries to cremate Nishan’s friend Fixer who dies unexpectedly.

29In Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach, food plays both a material and a metaphorical role. It takes the tangible form of the Indian snack bhaji. The critic E . Anna Claydon informs us that implicit in the corruption of the Hindi word bhajia into bhaji is the hybridization of the British Indian identity:

… Chadha chooses bhaji as a metaphor for the lives of the women in the film. Consequently, like the meaning of ‘bhaji’ which identifies it with a mixing of cultural indices, the Westernised snack is also representative of the hybridised influences upon the film (149).9

30We first see the bhaji of the film’s title when a group of different generations of Indian women, part of the Saheli group, eat them sitting on the beach in the kitschy resort of Blackpool, near the city of Birmingham, England where they have gone for a day’s outing. The camera pans to stainless steel tiffins filled with parathas, papadums and bhajis. This cross-generational harmony is broken when it is revealed that one of the young girls in the group, Hashida (Sarita Khajuria) is pregnant with a baby she had conceived with her Afro–Caribbean boyfriend. The older women accuse Hashida of disgracing her family and community while younger women rally to her defense. What had started as a harmonious get together ends up with irreconcilable differences between the different generations British Asian women. Food, in this instance, disrupts community and identity.

31There are three other scenes in the film that show the links between food and identity. In the first, two of the older South Asian women in the group Pushpa (Zohra Segal) and Bina (Surender Kochar) are eating chips (French fries). They do not find it very flavorful so Bina pulls out a small bottle of chili powder and sprinkles it over the chips. Smiles light up on their faces as the British chips have been spiced up. In another scene, the same women are having a cup of tea in a restaurant and decide to bring out their boxes of Indian snacks. The waitress comes up to them and nastily informs them that eating Indian food was forbidden in the restaurant. Hashida who had entered the restaurant at that moment witnesses the incident. Pushpa and Bina start verbally abusing her again, with Bina adding, ‘this country has cost us our children’. An infuriated Hashida throws a cup of tea on Pushpa’s kameez then walks over to the waitress and sweeps dishes and silverware onto the restaurant floor. Hashida sees no difference between the waitress’s racist remarks and the narrow-mindedness of her South Asian ‘aunties’. The third scene takes place in an American-style bar, the Manhattan Restaurant Bar and Grill where the women gather after a long day of wandering and adventures in Blackpool. It is ladies night and they are entertained by a group of male strippers. While at first this horrifies some of the older women in the group, they soon recognize the humor in the situation, and unite temporarily in a show of female solidarity.

32In these scenes, Chadha uses food to make several points related to identity of the British Asians in the film. First, to unite British Asian women of different generations, then to focus on the generation gap that exists between the British Asian women who had emigrated to Britain and their children born and raised in Britain, and finally to depict the racist behavior of the white community toward the brown British Asians. This indicates that while food can build community it can also divide it. The older Indian women are old-fashioned and cannot accept change. The younger generation of women, born and bred in Britain, are torn between keeping their parents and elders happy and trying to forge their own identities as British Asians.

33Do these Indian diasporic films share a unified aesthetic? Despite sharing some thematic and stylistic concerns, Indian food and spices work differently in each film, mirroring the spatio-temporal history of the Indian in the Diaspora as well as engaging with the specific socio-political landscape of the nation-state in which these Indian migrants have settled. In all instances it makes clear that there is no home to go back to and the adopted country, the United States, Canada, France, or the Great Britain is their new home. Thus, Mississippi Masala engages with the history and identity of East African Indians as well as their relationship both to the minority and dominant communities in the US. Canada and its model of multiculturalism that the film constantly ridicules is an important backdrop for the film Masala as it grapples with issues of identity and home. One Dollar Curry plays on stereotypes about India in the French imagination, and Bhaji on the Beach deals with gender relations and questions of agency among different generations of British Asian women while also engaging with issues of discrimination faced by the British Asians. Yet, suggests Roy, just like the publication of cookbooks on regional Indian cuisines in India created a sense of ‘India’, food and spices in films and writing of Indian diaspora provide a sense of unity and oneness, ‘a gastronomic analogue for the nation’s dizzying powers of serendipitous and propitious amalgamation’ (484).

34Each film uses food to negotiate questions of identity, to perpetuate or contest the relationship with home, to accentuate the racism faced by Indians in the Diaspora, or to peddle India to the West. The foods and spices of the films’ titles have commercial implications too. Food sells, and the films’ culinary titles entice viewers rendering them more palatable, appealing to their basic instinct for food and nourishment while giving them a glimpse of the hybridized culture (s) in which these foods are produced and consumed. The Western consumer of ethnic food consumes the food without giving much thought as to the conditions in which the food is produced. Food is also sometimes produced, as we have seen in One Dollar Curry, by ‘shrewd ethnic immigrants’ as a means of profiting from the ’” Western” desire for culinary novelty’ (Narayan 1995: 76). Finally, whatever their ultimate messages, the filmmakers of the four films examined here use familiar Indian foods and spices in the films’ titles to draw both the diasporic Indian and the Westerner into the theaters and into a celluloid world of fantasy and make believe.