Portable No Fusion
Srimati Basu A friend recently posted on Facebook a picture of a summer meal from the Oh Calcutta restaurant (in their Delhi outlet), featuring their seasonal special: the Kalboishakhi, a deep-green, viscous cocktail of mango panna, spices and vodka. I haven’t had the chance to try it yet, but have posted it on my mental list of the improbable-yet-delicious concoctions that mark new tastes and new selves: nolen gur icecream with warm gur sauce; vodka pani-puris (I do realize that vodka is making too frequent an appearance on this short list); keema do pyaaza pizza; sticky, spicy and disgusting-sounding honey mustard chilli masala French fries. I should confess that am in fact a vocal opponent of “fusion” restaurants and “fusion” food, which (especially in my experience in the US) all too often present a mishmash of incongruent flavors, watered-down seasonings, and confusing juxtapositions. Witness the spam sushi popular in Hawaii, or “Indian pizza” in the Bay area which plops already abhorrent components (the ubiquitous “orange” food of Indian buffets such as navratan curry and aloo gobi) on to sad naan dough. In my cooking, I vastly prefer experiments re-creating classic mythical dishes or the well-kept secrets of regional specialties: a long day’s work over Julia Child’s Boeuf Bourguignon with buttered mushrooms and brown-braised onions was the perfect satisfying finish to having watched the film Julie and Julia. The Basa Gede base sauce we intently learnt at a cooking lesson in Bali opened up a range of local variations on a delicious theme. Unexpectedly finding Gonghura or red sorrel in our local Indian store, we could re-visit my favorite dish from last year’s trip to Hyderabad, Gonghura Mutton (yes, more favorite than even the Biriyanis). My favorite Indian things to cook are deeply embedded in memories of people and the places they are from: a family friend’s fish jhal with tomatoes and mustard (very different from my family formulae of the same); my maternal grandmother’s deviled eggs; a late uncle-in-law’s vindaloo from his old Goan friend; a Kashmiri aunt’s roghan josh. I have been known to have a meltdown or two at a local Indian restaurant’s “mix and match” formula of combining proteins and vegetables with random sauces, e.g. a tofu vindaloo, as if boiling substance x in liquid y is just the same as long-braising depth of flavors. This is not good behavior on the part of an anthropologist. When we swear our Levi-Straussian professional code (just like the one to Hippocrates, only ours is to the recently deceased French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss), we sign on for being enthusiastic champions of evolutionary innovation, no matter how many false starts and odd combinations result. [For example, I am going to grant the KFC Bacon Sandwich with Fried Chicken as “Bread” or the Doughnut “Bun” Burger high points for ingeniousness and low possibilities for widespread cultural adaptation.] Cultural isolation (and its “authentic” difference) is ultimately static, unproductive. Humans encounter all kinds of cultural stimuli, some by curiosity, some by contact, some by coercion. As I often remind my students who despair that the world is being overtaken by trashy monocultures and “losing” authenticity, humans respond actively rather than passively to their cultural stimuli, adapting to the things that seem convenient, commodious or even fun and challenging. The most triumphant example here is of course the hot chili pepper’s origin in the Americas and its rapid and enthusiastic adaptation, indeed efflorescence, in Asia. Tea has traveled with a vector going the other way. The curry powder of Kurrywurst and other related abominations (remember I’m an unrepentant judgmental anthropologist) are imagined as being of Indian rather than British origin. Music, clothing, language and religion travel similarly, and bi-directionally. Last year, a friend (terrific cook, Bengali restaurateur in Pune) and I were enthusiastically airing our mutual dislike of fusion food along the lines of the rant above when her husband (also terrific cook and restaurateur) reminded us of the “authenticity” of the Bengali food we were pompously lauding: the green chilies that Bengalis consider iconic and indispensable can at earliest have come to us through colonial contact, in this case the Portuguese. We could not imagine a formal Bengali meal without tomato chutney, but I remember my grandmother narrating that tomatoes were so new culturally in her childhood that they called them “biliti begun,” foreign eggplant. The basis of sandesh and other chchana-based sweets, pride of Bengalis, is Dutch cheese-processing techniques. The potato of the alur dom was transmitted worldwide by the Spanish, who called it “batata” from the (Haitian) Carib word for sweet potato (and the Arabic word batata carries this along, rather than being the origin). My personal favorite in Bengali cuisine, the posto genre, is an outcome of coerced and indentured opium cultivation in the eighteenth century, I learnt just recently from reading Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies. I could go on about other favorites: dhnyarosh/ bhindi/ okra from Africa; rum from the Caribbean; language and architecture and roasted breads and so much more from Central Asia…. Cultures and identities (and more recently, nations), in other words, live and thrive through each other, fluidly merging their imaginaries and their most intimate of material objects. Our culinary morsels are traces in these transactions: the Hawaiian spam sushi which marks a history of military supplies, and my attempts to recreate Gonghura mutton through a supply chain ending in Lexington, KY, no matter my opinion of their relative tastiness, are mirror images in re-fashioning history and memory. The Californian Julia Child’s interpretation of a French classic which inspired a blog and a movie seems to me to have no greater claim to authenticity than the ubiquitous baked yogurt recipe Bengalis commonly make in the US, which I have anointed “Diasporic bhapa doi” (you all know that one, mix a can of evaporated milk and a can of condensed milk with equal parts of yogurt, and bake); my version comes to me via my Marathi spouse who got it from his aunt in Indiana who got
Aliens of the same world: The Case of Bangla Science Fiction
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay Locating Bangla Science Fiction SF as a genre has always presented problems of definition. Since Gernsback’s “scientifiction”, attempts to define the nature of this genre have been common, so much so that when we refer to District 9 or Avatar as SF, as we did in this seminar, we think we know exactly what we mean. However, when we extend our understanding of SF to include those outside the predominantly Anglo-American (and marginally European) space, I believe we must redefine SF tentatively as an index of cultural transformation which may be understood through what I call the “history of scientificity”. I use the term scientificity as a concept. The colonial era, in which actual political control became the progenitor of a number of myths of science, is an important site for the study of concepts as orienting components – words around which archival and paraxial histories may be constructed. These histories are utilized by the colonizer and the colonized in the context of Bengal in ways that enable different forms of the same discourse: the discourse of legitimacy that gives meaning to the colonial situation. What remains unquestioned in these histories is scientificity itself. The existence of non-relative truths that may be discovered is never under debate. Working on colonial science, one must isolate strands of debate that allow “scientificity” to become enshrined as the principle of political legitimacy for both the colonizer and the colonized while reflecting upon the historicity of the concept itself. SF is a space where the “transcendental” nature of science merges with its subjective “earthy” historical other in fiction; consequently, one must begin a history of scientificity and unravel when and by what means scientificity becomes an orienting component of the “future history” that is SF. This is as much a question in the history and philosophy of science as it is of modernity and the constitution of the modern self in the development of techno-scientific cultures. Since science functions as a constant field of cultural tension in the asymmetry of colonial relations, SF becomes an invaluable means of exploring the nature of cultural identity shaped by colonization. I have selected one specific kind of SF for analysis here – the category of the tall tale. This is because the tall tale most explicitly engages with the criterion of scientificity and reveals the questions which a history of SF must recognize. Games of Truth in SF-Tall Tales The stories of Joseph Jorkens written by Lord Dunsany, Edward Plunkett (1878-1957) and the ones of Ghanada (Ghanashyam Das) written by Premendra Mitra (1904-1988) belong to the category of travel tall tales. Tall tales that base themselves on travel have three basic dimensions. The first is the landscape and people of the travelled land. The second is the object or point of surprise. The third is the character of the storyteller, which defines the tale as a tall tale. The similarities between fantasy, SF, fiction and the tall tale are governed to a large extent by the presentation of the tale. The tall tale becomes a tall tale owing to the relation created between the teller of the tale and the event in which the teller participates. And the fundamental premise of the tall tale is that the tale is always described by the teller as absolutely true, exceeding the boundaries of fiction (which by definition is not-true). Unlike Munchausenesque tall tales, regarded generally as the forerunner of the genre, the similarity between Jorkens and Ghanada emerges in the precision of the narrated tale in scientific terms – including geographical specificity, use of expressions that convey the scientificity and hence seek to attest the truth of the narrated tale, and presentation of ideas and events which in themselves seem logically possible. The veracity of the tale is seldom under doubt due to the events themselves, the doubt emerges from the character of the teller of the tale and the tale itself is then compared to a framework of non-fiction outside the fictional world. All fiction is by definition false, the important part of the tall tale is not that which is clearly false, but that which posits itself as true. Thus if we are to pay attention to the actual source of textual meaning in the tall tale, we must locate it in the probable rather than the incomprehensible, because the latter derives its meaning secondarily from the former. By paying attention only to the locus of improbability, one is likely to miss out on the power effects of the images and ideas taken as true within the fiction. In the context of the adventure stories described here, the two layers of truth that are particularly important are the presentation of the foreigner and the use of science. In the preface to the first volume of Jorkens’s adventures, the narrator explains that one of the purposes of the stories is to “advance the progress of Science, and establish our knowledge upon a firmer basis; yet should they fail to do so, I feel that they may at least be so fortunate as to add strangeness to parts of our planet, just as it was tending to grow too familiar.”. This is a recurring idea in the Jorkens stories: the impact of these stories on scientific knowledge. But the novelty of the scientific idea is supported by the “familiarity” of the taken for granted, whose scientificity is never in question. Thus even if we mark out the story as a tall tale, the experience of the improbable is only tied to the novum, Darko Suvin’s term for the new object or idea that SF introduces, and not to the cultural assumptions within which the novum is placed. Moreover, the experience of the scientific is exclusively linked to the British colonizer, and indigenous experiences of these objects become irrelevant in the “scientific project”. “The tale of the Abu Laheeb” is a prime example of the way in which the scientific project assimilates local knowledge. In this story, Jorkens