On 29 June, Prof Vasu Reddy, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Pretoria, and Prof Relebohile Moletsane, J. L. Dube Chair in Rural Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, presented their research at the Critical Food Studies virtual seminar, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Their research, titled ‘In Search of the Perfect Curry: A Gender Perspective on Durban Curry in Two Contemporary Cookbooks’, was published in a special edition of Gender Questions and adds to the field of critical food studies – a relatively new and transdisciplinary area that focuses on how ‘our social, cultural, and existential experiences are […] directly influenced by our relationships to food’ (Lewis & Reddy, 2021).

In their article, Reddy and Moletsane look at the meaning of curry in two contemporary cookbooks, Durban Curry: So Much of Flavour (2014) and Durban Curry: Up2Date (2019). In their descriptive and discursive approach, cookbooks are seen to ‘tell stories that reveal much about the authors’ interpretation of their communities’ and how they see ‘society and culture’, according to Reddy. Using a linguistic interlude, the authors mention that the word curry is derived from the South Indian Tamil word kari which is a ‘spice sauce poured over rice’ (Reddy & Moletsane, 2021: 5). The British would later coin the blanket term ‘curry’ to describe the multiplicity of saucy and spicy dishes emanating throughout the Indian diaspora. In saying this, the authors contend that ‘curry is an effect of travel, migration and […] our knotted histories that foreground its ambivalence and intricate relations of exchange and transformation’ (Reddy & Moletsane 2021)

Prof Reddy described how the presentation, and the publication, was designed  ‘with a strong humanist lens reflecting on gender’. Food, and the cooking thereof, is ‘contingent on gendered performances of attention and care while masking persistent gendered inequalities’ (Reddy & Moletsane, 2021: 6). Prof Moletsane mentioned that ‘central to food is the construction of relations between men and women, as well as in building and projecting the role of women in manoeuvring the meanings of food’. Arriving at this argument, the authors look at the gendered nature of Zuleikha Mayat’s Indian Delights ([1961] 1998). In Mayat’s words, the book was designed for ‘the South African Indian housewife’ and that ‘the new homemaker must be aware that the health of her family is in her hands’ (Reddy & Moletsane, 2021: 4). As such, this ‘performative labour’, the authors argue, falls ‘disproportionately on women’. For Reddy and Moletsane, Indian Delights is twofold. It is ‘emblematic’ in that it offers a ‘surface level’ methodology for cooking Indian food; and it is symbolic in proposing who should be cooking the food, how and for whom (2021: 8).

A significant point of departure between Zuleikha Mayat’s Indian Delights and the contemporary Durban Curry books is that the former represents ‘“Indianness” as an identity in an insular, closed, and exclusive fashion’ (Reddy & Moletsane, 2021: 4). While, in their review of the contemporary Durban cookbooks, Reddy and Moletsane state that the use of ‘Durban’ in the texts is used metaphorically for ‘region, place, location, and a kind of melting pot’. They add further that these texts ‘foreground the hybridity of regional-specific identities, recipes, techniques, consumption, and taste patterns in a post-democratic, post-apartheid context” (2021: 4). They argue that the recipes in these contemporary texts present curry symbolically, and are ‘far removed’ from prescriptive ethnocentric and Indian identities. However, Reddy acknowledges that despite the titles of these books, the ‘text really has evolved over the decades to attract and appeal to both Indians and non-Indians’. The authors suggest that one such reason for this is that ‘South African society has evolved in so many different ways’, and the curry has become intertwined within the broader societal fabric of dissent.

Is there a ‘perfect curry’? To this, the authors answer with an unmitigated no. Rather, the supposed ‘perfection’ indeed lies in the rich diversity of curry. As such, Reddy and Moletsane argue that the narrative around curry presented in Durban Curry: So Much of Flavour (2014) and Durban Curry: Up2Date (2019) is incomplete and requires further analysis to decode how curry has evolved beyond Kwa-Zulu Natal and has expanded in other parts of South Africa.

Lewis, D. and Reddy, V. 2021. ‘Guest Editors' Introduction: Special Issue on Critical Food Studies in South Africa: Feminist Perspectives’, Gender Questions 9 (1): 1–4. https://doi.org/10.25159/2412-8457/8436.

Reddy, V. and Moletsane, R. 2021. ‘In Search of the Perfect Curry: A Gender Perspective on Durban Curry in Two Contemporary Cookbooks’, Gender Questions 9 (1): 1–27. https://doi.org/10.25159/2412-8457/7427