Food for Thoughts About Us: India’s Fumbling Gastrodiplomacy

Cuisine is one of the best ways of promoting a country – it’s apolitical, everyone can relate to it, and it easily spreads beyond a nation’s borders. That said, a dish can become political or controversial if there is some contravened cultural taboo regarding the meat choice, or how an animal is kept or slaughtered before being turned into meat; there may be a struggle between countries concerning which of them can claim a particular dish; or when a particular chain of restaurants is being boycotted (for instance, for not closing down in an ostracized country).

Much more obviously, everyone can relate to cuisine in the most simple sense that everyone eats. This is not true for many forms of art, or many aspects of history and culture, which governments usually strive to promote but which not everybody takes interest in. For instance, there may well be more people interested in Chopin’s music in today’s Japan and South Korea than there are in the country of his origin, Poland (which I write with shame, being Polish).

Equally obviously, cuisine easily traverses borders especially in the today’s globalized world, where it is easier to find, or import, ingredients to make a dish from a distant country (even if it will rarely taste exactly as it tasted at home). In a wider sense, cuisine as such is a form of traversing borders. It is hard to imagine Polish cuisine without potatoes or Indian cuisine without chili, and yet from a historical perspective these are fairly new entrants to these two national cuisines, having come to Europe and Asia from South America barely few centuries ago (around the 18th century).

What we now understand as “national” cuisine of any given country was completely different several centuries ago and the countries’ flagship, “traditional” dishes often gained their current form as a mingling of influences from various directions. As I pointed out in some of my previous texts for the Diplomat, the famous chicken tikka masala, an ubiquitous dish in Indian restaurants, was probably devised in the United Kingdom. In today’s world, nearly all cuisine is in fact fusion cuisine.

Thus, a diplomat who seeks to promote their country’s image can always pick cuisine as a safe bet. It will be easy to steer away from any political controversy, and one can build a narrative about how cuisine builds bridges.

India is one of the countries that has benefitted from this – arguably, cuisine is one of the strongest aspects of India’s current international image. It is thus of little surprise that the Indian government recently established a new state award for overseas Indian restaurants. In hindsight, what is surprising is that it happened so late.

Instituted in 2023, the Annapurna Certificate is awarded by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), a state institution that also awards persons who promote various aspects of Indian culture (such as artists, Indologists, etc). The name of the award is apt too – Annapurna is a name of a goddess (and of a mountain named after her, in Nepal), but the name also literally means “filled with food.” Fulfilling the purpose of relating to everyone, the award plaque comes with a Sanskrit motto Annaad bhavanti bhootani: “[All] beings exist thanks to food.”

So far, six restaurants have been awarded in the first iteration: (1) Amber India Restaurant (San Francisco, United States), (2) Balaji Dosai (Kandy, Sri Lanka), (3) Indian Street Food & Co (in Stockholm, Sweden, with a branch in Oslo, Norway), (4) Mumtaz Mahal (Muscat, Oman), (5) Namaste (Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia), and (6) Naans and Curries (San José, Costa Rica).

In some of these instances, if not all, the choices seem to very much tap into the objective of gastrodiplomacy. For example, both the Mumtaz Mahal restaurant in Oman and Indian Street Food & Co in Sweden earlier received a number of awards in the countries where they are based. The chef of the latter, Dheeraj Singh, was asked to cook dishes during the highest-level official visits from India (when the Indian prime minister and president visited Sweden and Denmark). Thus, a man like Singh seems to have been playing a significant role in both promoting Indian cuisine as such and, more specifically, in helping New Delhi use cuisine as part of its diplomacy – even before the new award was established.

All this well and good apart from one major hiccup – in my opinion, the awards haven’t been adequately advertised. Naturally, one finds information about them on ICCR and the relevant diplomatic mission websites, but that is a minimum. The Indian media, such as Times of India, did cover the fact the awards were granted when the announcement took place in October 2023. But I fail to notice higher waves of information spreading across the web.

Much of the news seemed to be a simple listing of the six awarded restaurants (sometimes even to a lesser degree than what I did in this text, even though my objective is to cover the award, not the awardees). Most of the scattered pieces of information I was able to dig up resulted from my own searches, not from coverage by any major Indian outlet following the award or from ICCR’s website. It seems that hardly anyone bothered to cover the story behind the restaurants and their chefs.

There seems to be a lot of untapped potential here. Why did the restaurants and chefs end up in a particular country? Is there a specific reason in each case, perhaps an amusing history of family migration? What makes those restaurants stand apart? Are they best-known for serving specific Indian dishes? Can we know more about why they are the best examples of promoting Indian cuisine? Do famous people dine there? Do these restaurants blend together Indian cuisine with more local fare?

And before someone says that writing about all of this is difficult – no, it’s not.

First, because of the reasons I have already given, popularizing a story about a restaurant may often be easier than covering some other aspects of a country’s image. The ICCR and other Indian government institutions have also been awarding and better highlighting Indologists – and these are often academics who work on millennia-old literature (I say this as an Indologist by formal training, without any malice). Now, if it was possible to arrange interviews with Sanskrit scholars, than what is the challenge in doing the same for a chef?

Second, anyone who has been in contact with any diplomatic mission knows that such institutions do have contacts with the media. They proactively reach out to journalists, and they normally have resources to facilitate coverage.

But first of all, there needs to a hint of a story to feature – some human aspect that the journalist can work with from the start. Rather obviously, a simple list of awarded restaurants isn’t a story.

For instance, a Polish painter, Stefan Norblin, painted interiors in certain Indian palaces during World War II. Several years ago, the artist’s murals in one of the palaces were renovated with the Polish government’s support. And yet, the government didn’t expect to just do this and expect organic coverage and accolades. A government’s narrative is as important as its actual work. And so, the Polish Ministry of Culture also made sure that a whole documentary about the story was made.

As it’s not that Indian public institutions don’t know how to do such featuring – they clearly do, and sometimes achieve excellent results. Even a simple thing like Air India’s new in-flight safety video – a little gem of a short film that blended tradition and modern security requirements – seemed to have been vastly more popular on the internet than the story of Annapurna Certificate awards.

All ingredients for a story about the awarded restaurants and their chefs are certainly stored somewhere – it only remains for the Indian government to prepare a dish from them.