Whenever I have heard Pushpesh Pant speaks about food, whether in three hours Till today From under the shade of a tree in radio episodes or beautiful nursery, I always portray her with gulab jamun, a core of middle-vak. It is as if he is chewing on metaphor and syrup at the same time, Swad LagkeThis is not a complaint. This is a special talent to talk, such as the work of remembering the task of tasting. Every corner of this book is filtered through desire, rumor, and the body once in 4 pm in 1972.
The great trick of the pants is that he does not try to prove a thesis (which he accepts quickly), he feels the absence of the reader around which his city always existed. You can feel the smoke of a missing kebab stall, the sweetness of a jalebi that you can’t find now, the way someone said once, “This is the real nihari” – And no one says this.
This is not history as chronology. This is history in the form of relics.
Pant opposes academic impulse to level food in a stable “object of study”. Instead, he considers it like an incredible storyteller who is part witness, Bhaag Fabulist. He runs the reader through the Mughal Darbars, the subsequent partition of the refugee kitchen, and in the 1980s with the same tone in the government guest houses Buffets: Curious, never decisive. This is a tone that I feel strangely moral. He does not lie. He just does not pretend to know more than that.
“Who’s to say what is authentic now?” The real question of the book is. And when the book refuses to solidify the meaning, the writing of the pants seems unimaginable by specific non-tale standards. A low writer may have line the dishes, wrapped them in context, and add footnote like garnish. Pant gives you a mark. He craves you. And then he tells you that history, especially food history, is made of that.
This is the place where the revisionist quality of the book emerges, not to refuse to give them rights in the first place, but in the first place. From king’s table to street food “Right” is not history. It runs in its past. Pant’s loyalty is not with court, collection or textbook. They are forgotten with confectionery. The refugee daughter -in -law, who invented a new biryani who had her. It is rumored that it especially served the cook of Nihari United Emperor. All unnecessary. All valid.
The interesting thing is how political that attitude is. Pants do not need to say, “The food is political.” He shows you a city revived by displacement, war, plague, economic migration, caste. And he shows it through a single sentence: “We must also remember that many of the so -called traditions of Delhi’s food are hardly over 175 years of age.” This is a statement that destroys the imagination of some eternal, static culinary identity. This tells you that Delhi has been in speed like its food, forever.
Even Mughal Nostalgia is handled with eyelids. The pants clearly respect the Imperial Kitchen, but he is more interested in whatever came after the breakdown of the empire. He is interested in the creation of taste, the way food prepares for new economies, new arrival, new needs. In that sense, he is doing some radical: moving the center of Delhi’s food story away from the empire and towards Entropi.
The real hero of this book is change.
You can see how Pant writes about sweets. Ghantevala’s Sohan Halwa is more than just sweets, it is a ghost. It is a way to think what happens when the heritage stops food. Pant’s apathy is forensic. Memory, in this book, is always being poke, mistrust is being done, laughing. “Memory plays strange tricks because you get old and see the old prey again, remember them very differently,” they write. This is the closest thing for a thesis. This is to say that food is a memory device, and the memory is incredible on the purpose.
What is here, formally. It frees the pants from the burden of being correct. He does not need to prove which dish came before, who made it, or where cardamom was sour. He only needs you to believe that someone once cared enough to make it in the first place. And someone else remembered it differently. The city’s foodscape, then, becomes a series of layered misconceptions. This is the history mentioned in gossip, grief, hunger and spices.
The way the pants considers “Delhi” as a signator, there is also something about it. The word “authentic” loses all structural integrity. There is no stable origin. Only copying, translation and habit. He quotes generously from cook, vendors, family members, friends. “The street food we eat today is not more honest than today that the Royals are not more honest than the food that Royals have taken?” He asks. The question is rhetoric, but provoked is real. What if the smooth paratha on your plate tonight can say more than Shahj Jahn’s feasts about Delhi?
Let’s stop there. That sentence “more honest” is working to lift heavily. What does honesty mean in the context of food? Holyness? Original? Intention? The paratha you eat in Moolchand today is no less authentic than your grandfather, it is a different version of the same desire. Which is probably the deepest claim of the book: this taste is a theory of history. And when the taste changes, it does everything else.
To talk about food, the pants remind us, it is also to talk about intervals – which is now eaten, or is no longer made in the same way. One of more persecuted threads From king’s table to street food He has a unspecified passion with disappearance. Foodway they are how people remember themselves, and when they disappear, there is a special version of history. The pants never mourn these disadvantages. But he surrounds them. He writes around the missing eateries, the way no one talks about old friends. No decision. Just absent, noted.
We find a map with the missing neighborhood, a route that doubles back to itself. We also get the ethnology of hunger. What people in Delhi craved in different moments in time. What did they remember. He insisted on regeneration.
This request is important. Foodscape of Delhi, as Pant sees it, is not a stable heritage. This is a continuous improvement. He gives an example of how Mugli’s dishes were rebuilt by Punjabi refugees. Was once slow, the court became a formal fast, fierce and practical. Nihari, Korma and Qorma changed their hands. Changed oils. Changed meanings. The migrants from Rawalpindi and Lahore had different needs, different tongues. They did not preserve Mughal cuisine, they mutated them. This is a Pakistani history in the form of living resistance in the kitchen.
We then collectively reach a conclusion: food as adaptation. No apathy. No restoration. Not alive at all, but a type of semi-conscious synthesis. His prose reflects this morality. It picks up phrases from old Urdu poets. It refers to colonial gazettes. It quotes hawkers. These are also speculation.
It can create for an uneven reading experience. There are moments where the digestives are piled up. The description of a long lost kachori becomes a historical on one side, which leads to a personal memory, which leads to a speculation about Persian effects and you think the chapter is more manure than the essay. But also, I will argue, doing my work. Pants are essentially allowing things to rot. Breakdown. Merge. This is the same when the food is left alone, and what the language does when released from a thesis.
Nevertheless, the absence of significant friction may feel like a missing opportunity. For all its prosperity, the book rarely addresses power. The mention of caste is only gleancingly. The classroom appears more often, but often as a background. And while Pant definitely knows about these forces, their inclination is to inspect, not intervene. This reluctance seems to be generational, perhaps beauty. It seems that his eye is trained on continuity, not to break. But sometimes, I wanted him to push hard and ask who is to tell the stories of the food of this city, and which disappears between the bite.
The book also has an irony – Pant is an inner formula and an outsider for its content. He is a trained academic, but he mistrusts academics. He is a Delhiwala, but one who reached the city as a student of the hills. His apathy is earned, not found in inherited. And this makes him unique to write such a book.
What is on the tongue after a long time after the meal is over. Which stories repeat themselves in different tones. What recipes revive after years under new names. This, I think, the book has a radical heart. This is not about preserving the Pak past of Delhi. It is about showing how in past distortion, in new combinations, to be mixed.
So what does this book make? A field guide for Edible Memory? Perhaps. By the end, you do not know much about the history of Delhi’s food. But you know how it would have felt to eat your way through it. You know how the city can smell the humid day in the 1960s. You know why someone once said in the Bengali market, “What is the taste of love when it breaks your heart.” You know that history can also be eaten and that its affertaste is often more vivid than the event.
And perhaps this is enough. Or maybe it’s all.
Pranvi Sharma writes on books and culture. She lives in New Delhi.
