Perspective: Keep Cool and Curry On
Last month, Washington Post humor columnist Gene Weingarten claimed that Indian cuisine was “insanely based entirely on one spice.” His cluelessness didn’t stop there—he went on to describe that one spice as “curry”!
As I see it, we can explain this foolishness in two ways. First, it is possible that Weingarten was indeed that ignorant of Indian cuisine; and that all his editors and fact-checkers were too. This, ironically, would be funnier (and sadder) than the actual column.
[Left] “May your rice be clumpy, roti dry, your chilies unforgivable, your chai cold, and your papadams soft.”—journalist Shireen Ahmed curses Washington Post humor columnist Gene Weingarten.
What is more likely is that Weingarten was writing in character—as a “whining infantile ignorant d---head,” to quote his later apology. Fair enough. Larry David and Woody Allen have gotten about a century of cumulative mileage out of this funny-foolish-self-deprecating act, but only because they are good at it.
Weingarten’s crime is that he is bad at what he does—when he tries to be funny, he is unfunny. For example, when he describes the taste of Old Bay seasoning like “dandruff from corpses” mixed with “the rust from around the toilet fixtures at a New Jersey rest stop” and “dried ostrich guano.” This is a strained and heaving description. Too much punchline is chasing too little joke. And then there is the childish. To defend his dislike of blue cheese, Weingarten says only that it rhymes with “eeuuu cheese.” Weingarten is working too hard to be funny. Well, FDR gave us Social Security so people like Weingarten would not have to work this hard.
Sometimes, when the folks we love most are being unfunny, we laugh to humor them. Otherwise, the best policy is indifference. But the internet is sapping our capacity to feel indifferent.
Hence the effort to cancel Gene Weingarten, led by Padma Lakshmi, the ex-model and current chef. Lakshmi’s rebuttal, also published in the Post, takes a different direction: humorlessness. There is some tedious sermonizing at the beginning about how laughter is a “balm...reminding us of our common humanity.” I disagree—comedy is how we distract ourselves from the frequent absence of such humanity. Lakshmi also laments that Weingarten’s column was inappropriate because the pandemic “particularly devastated India.” Would it somehow have been more appropriate prior to the pandemic?
There is also a lengthy aside on the iniquity of the term “curry,” because it is British in origin and has sometimes been a racial epithet. This is unnecessary for two reasons. First, immigrants and second-generation Desis sometimes have an exaggerated sense of their culture’s fragility. They confuse their own genuine marginalization with the situation of all Desis everywhere. The 1.6 billion Desis south of the Himalayas are going to keep living deliciously regardless of what their food is called abroad. Of course, calling sambar and maacher jhol by alien words may be tactless, but it doesn’t make either less tasty.
Second, the British were not the first colonizers to disdain Indian cooking. Babur once wrote that “no good flesh, no grapes or muskmelons, no good fruits, no ice or cold water, no good bread or food” could be found in India. He was a man of strong gastronomic convictions. Half of his memoirs are about war, and the other half are about pomegranates. Yet ironically it was Babur who created modern Indian food by fusing Central Asian dishes with South Asian ingredients. The gut-busting result, the Mughlai cuisine, is fit for kings, if not some newspaper columnists.
Indians are a thoroughly mixed people. We have been invaded and traded with for eternity. This has made our culture richer and more kaleido- scopic. It has probably also left us poorer and more fractured. Everything is partially from elsewhere—especially the food. If we understand this, we can take the vicious categories of “ours” and “theirs” with healthy skepticism, and leave behind the superstition that culture is ours to own.
We can treat other people’s public faux pas as amusing rather than dangerous and recover a sense of confidence in doing so. We can refuse to hold any allegiances in the ongoing squabble between the humorless and the unfunny. In fact, we can allow ourselves a good laugh about both of them.
Cheyn Shah is a freelance writer, journalist and historian. He is currently a Fulbright scholar researching Iranian history and culture.
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