More than Masala: Indian Food and Culture through Film

Indian restaurants in the US tend to have their stock menu of tikka masala and butter chicken, mostly reflecting the cuisine of North India and Punjab. While we are avid fans of biryani, palak paneer, seekh kabab, and daal, we think of this film series as an opportunity for us to encourage folks to explore new dishes and food cultures, taking a slightly wider view of the grand diversity of South Asian foodways. There are dozens of different styles of cooking, if not hundreds; certainly there are multiple distinct styles in each of India's 28 states. Cooking varies with landscape, shifts from urban to rural areas, and as with any society there are differences stemming from social status, religion, ethnicity, and language. On top of that there are diasporic and fusion cuisines such as Indo-Carribean and Indo-Chinese. We have generated this list to draw attention to some of this diversity in our own community. 

India has historically been an important crossroad and a meeting place of cultures, so we felt it only right to not restrict ourselves to representing strictly "Indian" cuisine but also include cuisines from neighboring countries and cultures that have historically exchanged with India proper. We invite you to reflect on the Mughal influences on Indian food through exploration of Uyghur and Afghan food, consider the similarities between cuisines of the northeast of India and their Burmese neighbors, and think about how environment and politics both shape cuisines when trying dishes of the Tibetan diaspora.

We hope this series encourages you to explore the South Asian food in our own Bloomington community, and that this list gives you ideas of where to start!