Nuances of SA Indian food

We are living in ridiculous times that require we remain reasonable, do our part to fight injustice while consuming absurd news of cruel politicians. How do we remain sane and take care of our hearts, ourselves and our communities in this crazy world? Usually, I seek refuge in cooking and eating with loved ones, in nature adventures, in comedy and in reading the writing of others, especially about food. 

I recently read an article in Goya Journal about decolonising the word “curry” and how we talk about Indian food. It triggered me because I felt like it implied that words like curry or curried can be replaced by other words used by Indians in India, without considering the word curry in the diaspora and rest of the world has taken on a flavour of its own. I don’t think that we can decolonise the phrase “Durban curries” for example. It's too far gone for that now. 

Curry is a word that came with British colonisation and spread throughout the British empire. People like me — born in Durban, SA, the city that had the most Indians outside of India at one point  are descendents of indentured slaves. There’ve been several documented waves of Indians/South Asians arriving in South Africa from the 1600s at the Cape as slaves along with Indonesians, Southeast Asians and East Africans. Later the indentured Indians to KwaZulu-Natal from the 1860s to 1910s, and after that many waves of freer, wealthier Indian traders and businesspeople arrived in the country. 

The British colonised India and SA. There are parallel slavery and indentured histories in Guyana, Belize, Trinidad & Tobago, Jamaica, Fiji, Malaysia, Mauritius and more. Each with its Indian influence in the food and culture merged with African, Southeast Asian and European flavours in different ways to create Caribbean and SA food, for example. 

The majority of South Africans of Indian descent, like me, have never been to India, neither have their parents or grandparents. And there are many more South Africans who don’t identify as Indian who have Indian ancestry and were classified or culturally assimilated into different groups — from Tyla to Zulaikha Patel to Bianca Naidoo (wife of the late Riky Rick) to FW De Klerk and Simon Van de Stel… Indian blood runs through the veins of this country. 

I thought I had a deeply rooted love for Indian food. But as time passed, I realised that what I call “Indian food” and what I long for when I am feeling blue is “SA Indian food”, not Indian food from India. Local Indian restaurants serve north Indian food mostly, where the dishes are foreign to me and far from what I was raised on. Though there are similarities with flatbreads, dhals and some of the same ingredients, it is still a world away. 

Curry, like English, does not belong to the British. We have seasoned everything here with our own mix masala, in ways that make no sense to India either. We are nuanced. In the Indian and African diasporas, from the global south to the global north, we make and eat curries and curried dishes. The risk in trying to decolonise “curry” is to continue a different form of colonial thinking and not consider us as part of the discussion - Indians of Africa, Africans of the Caribbean, descendents of people that originate in one place and end up in another, with mixed heritage and different narratives that are not easily understood.

Some of my fondest memories from my childhood were spent at kitchen tables and kitchen counters where I was given tasks like peeling vegetables or grating them. No matter the worldly chaos, this provided some calm. Sometimes I was made to write down recipes while they were narrated to me. This made me feel useful, in touch with my roots, a skilled and a necessary cog of the family machinery. At my mother’s brother Pat and his wife Radha’s house at their kitchen counter, I loved and still love sitting in front of the stove while the food cooks and we catch up. Making carrot salad seemed like an unimportant job for kids then but now I am grateful I had that experience of grating, peeling and chopping, a kind of soothing, rhythmic healing in preparing a meal together. 

I never thought of what we ate as unique or specifically South African. We call it Indian - sometimes we have bread and butter with sugarbeans curry, “doll” curry, mutton curry, chicken curry, green beans curry, potato curry and there is always, yoghurt (which we don’t call raita) and carrot salad, which is the one thing I have never seen anywhere else except in South Africa. Our cold carrot salad is a staple on South African spreads. It is often overlooked but this carrot salad dressed in vinegar or lemon juice and salt with raw onion, green chillie, coriander, cucumber or variations thereof (starting with the basic grated carrot and vinegar) appears only in South Africa in the way it does. It’s a sign - how you know you’re eating South African Indian food and not Indian from India food… There’s a carrot salad like this. 

Ingredients

3 large carrots

2 radishes

half a cucumber

2 medium green chillies

1 onion

handful coriander

100ml vinegar

Juice of one lemon

1 tsp salt

Instructions

Prepare the vegetables by washing them in cold water. 

Peel and grate the carrots. 

Dice the radish, onion, cucumber, coriander and chillies

To make the dressing - mix vinegar, lemon juice and salt. 

Mix until the salt is dissolved then pour over the salad and serve

Tip: Use apple cider vinegar to turn this into a treat for your microbiomes. 

Parusha Naidoo is an artist, cookbook author and Wanted's food columnist.