Do you remember a time when chefs talked about fusion cooking? This was supposed to be food that combined Indian dishes with any kind of foreign influence. So, if you put Boursin cheese on a paratha, this was fusion. Or if you rubbed Indian spices on a lamb chop, this too was fusion.

It all seems quite tame now but, at the time, it would get chefs very agitated. Some would say things like ‘fusion is confusion’ and get self-righteous about it. In a sense our chefs were reflecting global prejudices of the 1960s and 1970s. Any French chef who used an unfamiliar spice had to explain himself to the critics.

But by the 1980s all that had changed. Joel Robuchon borrowed freely from Spanish cuisine. Jean Andre Charial installed a tandoor at his three-star restaurant. And even the grand master Michel Guerard came back from China and started making rice flour dim sum-style pancakes with Chinese mushrooms.

Indian chefs missed these global developments, of course. Just as they missed the reality: What they called fusion was happening all around them on the streets of India.

Indian Chinese food is the ultimate fusion cuisine using Chinese soya sauce with Indian masalas. Even the modern chicken tikka (murgh malai kabab) is based on generous application of processed cheese in the cooking process. And on the streets, nobody cared about whether fusion was confusion. Amul butter (not Indian white butter) became the backbone of pav bhaji. People started........

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