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TTT

Interviewee: Madhur Jaffrey Session #1

Interviewer: Judith Weinraub Greenwich Village, New York

Date: December 2, 2010

Q: This is Judith Weinraub. It is December 2, 2010, and I’m with Madhur Jaffrey in her

apartment in Greenwich Village in New York.

Good afternoon.

Jaffrey: Good afternoon.

Q: Why don’t we start with your telling me where and when you were born and

something about your very large family.

Jaffrey: I was born in Delhi. Our house was a big house, a joint family house with my

grandfather’s children and grandchildren, most of them living together in that one big

house. It was on the Jamuna River. We called it the Jamuna River at that time, not

Yamuna, which is the Sanskritized name.

I was born at home, because in those days women generally gave birth at home.

So know the room where I was born. It faced the river, which I loved the idea of much

later as I thought about it. The custom then was that my grandmother would come. As

soon as the child was born, they would bring a little jar of honey and she would hold the

infant and write on its tongue “Om,” which means “I am,” in honey with the little finger.

So that was certainly something that happened to me.

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Q: In the lineup in the family, you were—

Jaffrey: Among my father’s kids, I was the fifth child, so there was one more to come.

The fifth position in a household that had two boys and two girls was actually so

wonderful, because I was left alone. My father, all his expectations fulfilled with the first

four, just, I think, decided that he could enjoy me and not have great expectations of me,

which did a world of wonders, I think, for me.

So I grew up partly in Delhi, but at the age of about two, I think, my father went

to Kanpur, which is in Uttar Pradesh.

Q: To manage a key factory?

Jaffrey: A key factory.

Q: How did that happen?

Jaffrey: There were members of the large family to which we belonged, the larger

family, my grandfather’s cousins and brothers. Amongst them, there was an uncle,

[unclear], my father’s cousin, who owned a string of factories of all sorts, and one was a

key factory in Kanpur. He needed a manager, and my father was the one who was picked

and went to do this.

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So I was born in a Hindu family with all these Hindu customs, including the

[unclear], my tongue, and all the prayers and everything else that Hindus are very much a

part of. The men participated in all that religion, but to a point. They weren’t deeply into

the religion. They left it to the women to carry on the tradition, and they sort of stayed

one foot in, one foot out of strict observances. They were part of every ceremony, but

they were asked to come in. It isn’t that they remembered and said, “We have to do this.”

This is what I remember of my grandfather’s kids and my grandfather. They let the

women carry on the business of religion and they participated, but only to a degree.

Now I’m in Kanpur and my father’s left two of his kids to study in Delhi, the

boys, the older boys, and they were going to be supervised by an uncle, which was quite

the normal thing to do at that time. The schools were better in Delhi and the boys could

continue their education. They were both older. So they stayed and they went to a

school which still exists today; it’s called Modern School, still one of Delhi’s best

schools.

Then the girls—and I was the third and there was no other at that time—for the

older two, my father was looking for a school, and eventually—I think I write about this

in my book as well—eventually decided on a convent, a Catholic convent with nuns

doing the education.

So by this time we had three major influences in my life religion-wise. My father

and mother were Hindu, so there was that very much, and my mother certainly did all the

festivals and all the prayers, so we were very familiar with that aspect of our lives. Then

all the men had traditionally worked in the Mughal courts, so they were very familiar

with Persian.

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Q: Historically.

Jaffrey: Historically. Then Urdu, because Delhi, if you know, was a city of Hindus and

Muslims. The emperor was always a Muslim, and you worked in [unclear] Muslim

languages and Muslim etiquette and Muslim way of dressing and the purdah system. So

all this was also a part of our lives.

I remember interviewing my aunts very early on, and they said that my youngest

two aunts were the first two women to go to college in the family, and they went to the

same college my grandfather went and my father and uncles went and my brothers went,

which is another prominent college in Delhi, called St. Stephen’s. So these two aunts

would go to college and they lived in the inner city at that time, because the family is an

old family from Delhi.

Q: Inner city meaning Old Delhi?

Jaffrey: Old Delhi. So they lived in Old Delhi. In those days, my aunts used to tell the

story that they would go out of their house and there were sheets that were held up on

both sides so they wouldn’t be seen. So it was like the purdah system, which they

followed because it was a Muslim society pretty much at that time. Even though the

British were there, the tradition of the purdah had carried on to a certain degree, even

though my grandfather was totally against it, but it was carried on, observed in the streets.

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So they would walk that way to a carriage, a phaeton, which would be waiting on a

slightly bigger lane, and they would get into it. It would have curtains.

Then they would go to college and they were the only two girls at St. Stephen’s at

that time. So two chairs would be set up in the front near the teacher, and they would sit

there and the boys would cover the rest of the classroom. When they had to play tennis,

which they both loved to do, they had to play with each other. [laughter]

So that was kind of the background. So there was that Islamic background that

the men really—it wasn’t just on the surface; it went far below the surface. They had

many Muslim friends. It was nothing. There was no distinguishing.

Q: Tell me why your family worked for the Mughal court. Did it have to do with their

sense of being scribes?

Jaffrey: I think so.

Q: Can you explain what that—

Jaffrey: Yes. So I come from a community which we think was founded maybe a

thousand year—around the start of the A.D.s. Well, that’s two thousand. Sorry. Two

thousand years ago, around then. I don’t know how it started. I can only imagine that

they felt there were some people who wanted to read and write but not necessarily

religion. The caste system was set up that the priests were the readers and writers, and

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then there were warriors, and then there were the traders and businessmen, and then there

were sort of lower castes and the outcasts.

So this was the old caste system that had been set up, and I’m sure some of my

ancestors wanted to be involved with the intellectual pursuits, as it were, but not be

priests necessarily. Though some of them were of the royal classes or semi-royal classes,

aristocratic classes, at any rate, they felt that they should be able to read and write

everything they wanted. So somehow the other caste grew. That was called the caste,

and these were the scribes, the caste of scribes. This is what we belonged to, and I think

it could well be that when the Mughal courts needed historians or people to keep records

or do the taxes, then these people were called in because they were already fully

acquainted with how to do so.

I think also we always learned the language of the rulers. That seems to have

been the history of the family, and maybe because they needed to read and write and have

a job. So they had been in the courts and had risen to the point even of being finance

ministers and high up in the Mughal court, so the running of the Mughal court, as far as

reading and writing was concerned, was a lot left to [unclear], and my family was

certainly very much a part of that and we were from Delhi. So the history of the family

then is really a Delhi history, very much so.

So now where were we?

Jaffrey: So the girls were in Delhi.

Jaffrey: In Delhi, and they were in Kanpur.

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Q: You were in Kanpur.

Jaffrey: Then my father decided to add this other element, this Christian element, to this

Hindu-Muslim element, because they themselves had gone to—St. Stephen’s was set up

certainly by Christians of various sorts, so their background was this, that education is

best from the British. They have a good system of education and we should avail

ourselves of it, and whatever is possible, that’s what we should do. So even though my

father believed in fighting for the independence of India, and he was very much fighting

for independence, but where education was concerned, he was not going to compromise,

and he decided that this was the best school and it would give him educated, sophisticated

young ladies as daughters, and he was attracted to it and that’s where we went.

I remember going to the kindergarten in my little St. Mary’s Convent in Kanpur

and not knowing a word of English. My mother didn’t speak any English. My father

spoke English. The men spoke English; the women didn’t speak English. They were

hardly educated. My mother had gone up to the eighth grade, but after she died, I found

all these awards that she’d got. You know, that’s how it was at that time.

Q: So with her at home, you were speaking Hindustani?

Jaffrey: Hindi and Hindustani. We would speak in Hindustani because, as you know,

both Urdu and Hindi, but when my mother read us stories in bed, which she did, she read

us things like detective stories she would read, she loved them, and they were all in

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Hindi. They were her Hindi books and novels that she read to us. So really that was

Hindi, that wasn’t Hindustani, but when we spoke, it was Hindustani with mixtures of

Urdu and Hindi, but when she read to us, it was Hindi.

So I grew up in this kind of atmosphere in Kanpur, but also really the house was

literally in a compound which had the factory, it had my father’s office, it had our house

with fourteen or fifteen gardens, big gardens around it, then the house of the—was it

under my father? I can’t even remember his position, but he had his big house and his

compound, and there were a lot of workers’ houses, not worker-workers, but

management people, their houses also, and the factory. The whole thing was walled in.

So we were in this walled-in world with gates.

Q: Your mother was the woman in charge at that point?

Jaffrey: Absolutely. Absolutely. And she loved it because she wasn’t under the

influence of her mother-in-law and my father’s sisters. They were just on their own and

it was apparently a very happy time for them. But there would be every now and then,

like we have now, we used to call them riots. They were Hindu-Muslim conflagrations;

that’s the only word. But they were outside the walls. We were totally protected.

Q: This was before Partition?

Jaffrey: This is much before Partition. I’m talking about the thirties now. So we would

hear this and we would be sitting behind our walls, nice and comfortable and protected

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from this havoc that is always taking place every now and then, would flare up, you

know.

Then there was the Christian side. This was a Catholic convent, and it didn’t

recognize anything but Catholics and Protestants, so we were put in the Protestant corner.

So we didn’t have to go to chapel in the morning and didn’t have catechism in the

morning. We just were called Protestants and lumped with them. At that time I didn’t

think much about it and I thought, “Fine.” Everybody was trading pictures, holy pictures,

and we were trading holy pictures of Jesus and Mary. I liked the ones with the nice

colors and they were puffed up a little bit, so they were slightly three-dimensional.

The foods that we were eating at that time in school, we had the [unclear] man

that used to come with a tin and his things. His food was so, so—all candy of various

sorts, but there was like a wonderful brittle that he had which we all absolutely loved, and

there was a pink and white coconut candy that he had that we absolutely loved. So there

were things that were half Indian, half British, that were vetted by the nuns. So this

Muslim guy, I remember, used to have this box like a little trunk, and he would open it up

and then there was all this Bali sugar I remember. Oh, so delicious, so delicious. So he

would have all these candies that we would buy.

But the food would come from home, because this whole Hindu idea that anybody

else’s food is dirty and you can’t eat it, you have to have your own food, that followed us,

you know, all the way through till the late forties, I would guess.

Q: So you brought your food?

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Jaffrey: We didn’t bring it. The car would drop us, then go back, bring the bearer with

the food in a different carrier, and then he would lay it out on—there were tables in the

back, sort of a side veranda, and he would lay out the tablecloth and put the plates and

knives and forks down and lay out all the food for us, and it was usually Indian food.

Sometimes we had cheese sandwiches or something like that. Generally it was Indian

food, kabobs and rice and things like that. Then we would eat and he would wrap it all

up and take it home.

Then we would get home by about—I think school ended around three o’clock.

We would get home by three-thirty or four and be hungry again, so my mother would

very often be having a nap, and she would leave food for us in an oven, and we would

just go in and have bits of that. That’s when my sister invented this thing in which they

would cut off a slice of bread that was really thick at the end, and take out the inner white

stuff from the bread and just leave the crust, the deep crust, and then we would take

whatever my mother had left, meat or potatoes, and stuff it inside and put lots of pickle

on the top. [laughs] And have that, and we all loved that. Oh, there would be chapatis

that were left over, and we’d roll the same stuff inside and have that. So that would be

our snack.

Then dinner could be anything. It could be Indian, it could be Western, it could

be mixed. Very often we started with a soup and then we had either Western food or

Indian food, and then we always had a sort of English pudding or a tart of some sort, but

made by [unclear], who made it in an Indian way. I don’t think he’d ever been abroad.

So they had their own style of cooking, and they were called [unclear].

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Q: They would cook with your mother? Your mother would supervise?

Jaffrey: No. In the house in Kanpur, we had only a large pantry attached to the house,

where you could wash up, where there was a hot oven and various storage areas, but then

there was a long walkway, covered walkway, that went to the kitchen. It seemed very

long, far away, and had the walls of the compound. And there was the real kitchen. My

mother would go there and start our dishes. Like if there was a chicken curry, she would

get all the masalas browned and the chicken browned, and then she would let them finish

the cooking. But we generally didn’t see that, because we were in the house doing our

homework. I remember occasionally seeing my mother cooking. I have one memory of

her cooking in that kitchen and making a chicken curry. That’s why I remember it.

But generally speaking, the servants took care of it and she supervised it, but

basically she was in the house, because when my father came home from work, he would

have his tea and relax and then he would turn on the news. We had a big Philips radio, I

remember, and he would listen to the news and drink his scotch and soda, which my

grandfather did, my father did, I did, and listen to the news.

So it became very interesting during the war, because one of my father’s cousins

had married a German woman and had ended up in Germany during the war, and we

found that he was broadcasting for the Nazis, so that was really sort of a shock, but my

father listened to him every day and listened to whatever was coming from the other side.

So there was that and there was sort of the British side of it. We were all getting the

news, the BBC, which we heard all the time, so we were getting, in a way, more than one

angle.

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Another thing that was happening, you’d heard about the INA, the Indian

National Army. So they had joined together in Burma and were marching, I think, with

the Japanese help, towards India to free India from the British. So there were conflicting

things going on in India at that particular time, where World War II was concerned. I

know we were all preparing for the worst. My father had the windows blackened. We

had trenches dug up. We were all ready for anyone to come and attack us, but we didn’t

know who was coming. [laughs] Was it the Japanese who were coming to free India or

what? But that was a very interesting time.

There was petrol rationing, so the car was out, and my father got a horse and

carriage, and we would go to school with the horse and carriage. There was a German

guy that was working with the factory, some technical aspect of the factory. He was

interred. Is that the word, interned? Interned. Interred is down there. [laughs] Interned.

But he had a dog, German shepherd, so he didn’t know what to do with the dog, and my

father offered to take the dog. So we had our first dog. That was our first dog. Then we

had other dogs. Wolfie, as he was called, led us into this new world of dogs, which we

knew little about.

Q: Did the rationing affect your food at all?

Jaffrey: The rationing? Yes. Everything was rationed, including gas. So things like

grains were rationed, but we grew so much also, you see. Our garden didn’t produce

grain, but produced everything else. We had our own cow and milk. We had all our own

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vegetables. We had onion, potatoes, garlic, all that stuff. We didn’t have chickens; we

bought meat from outside. So grain for us was the problem.

But the biggest problem was petrol. For that we had to give up the car during that

period. My father was a great—I mean, he always changed the cars and got the latest

American or English car. I remember riding in a rumble seat in the car, and he always

had that. He was a car person.

Q: He was gorgeous. Those pictures of him are extraordinary.

Jaffrey: Yes, he was a good-looking man and he was a man about town a little bit. He

played bridge, he played tennis, badminton, and he smoked. [laughs] And drank scotch

and dressed nattily. He was a good dresser and so on.

So that life abruptly came to an end a little after the war had started. I’m trying to

think. I was about twelve, so it must have been 1943, ’44, something like that, that my

father decided to give up that job and we all went back. My grandfather was getting ill

and he wanted everyone around him. My father was, I don’t know, very obedient and

part of the joint family system where you go where your father wants you to be and not

make your own decisions. My grandfather made all decisions for my father, major

decisions like what land to buy to move out. My father made none of them, to my regret.

But anyway, so we went back to Delhi and we all hated it. We were so used to

our little quiet, wonderful, contained life. But it turned out that Delhi was a huge

cosmopolitan city and we saw then, of course, and we got closer and closer to Partition.

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Then I go back and I have no school to go to. I have a find a school. So my

sisters were sent to a convent in Nanital, in the hills, so they were there in a school

convent called Ramni, so it was a continuation of the same nuns, same order that was up

there in Nanital. But I was considered a little young to just be sent up there. I had a

younger sister by that time, so the two of us went back to Delhi and were put in a school

called Queen Mary School, which was a missionary school, and was a missionary school

for [unclear] girls, really, from the inner city. So it had been set up that way, and anyone

else could go there as well, but again, the system of education was supposedly better than

—I tried a convent, and the convent had an English section and an Indian section, and I

was put in the Indian section and I hated it to such a degree and I felt, “They’re stupid

here. Nobody knows anything. The teachers know nothing. The girls know nothing.

Only the dumb people are put here.”

Q: What language was it taught in?

Jaffrey: It was taught in English, but it was dumbed down in the Indian section to such a

degree that I totally rebelled. It was like segregation, you know, really, and I could afford

to rebel. My father said, “All right. You don’t want to stay, we take you out.” And then

I was put in this Queen Mary’s, which was the missionary school.

But the trouble was that I think I moved there when I was eleven and a half or

twelve, and until thirteen everything was taught in Urdu or Hindi, and I knew neither. I

didn’t know how to write either one of them. It was really like starting in class one. I

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was so used to being the head of the class and not having to worry about not doing well,

and suddenly I couldn’t read the alphabet, you know. It was awful.

Q: This was Urdu or Hindi?

Jaffrey: I had to choose. So it was a very, very difficult decision. My heart was in Urdu

because I loved the sound of Urdu, but something very practical in me said, “Let’s do

Hindi. I should learn Hindi,” and I did Hindi. But it was an alien—you know when you

speak Hindustani, so unlike what you listen on the radio to, it’s just a totally different

language, and the vocabulary I didn’t know, certainly the grammar. I didn’t know the

vocabulary and I didn’t know how to read and write.

So I learned. I learned it. It was very hard, very hard, but I did it and it was only

for about a year and a half or two years, because then the whole thing changed. In high

school it all changed to English, and then it was okay. We still had Hindi as a subject,

but every other subject was in the English language, rather than having geography in

Hindi and history in Hindi. So I just had that hard struggle, but it was very good for me

because I mastered Hindi and I’ll never, ever say that that was hard, because it was such a

good thing. I would never have learned it otherwise.

Q: What were the family meals like when you came back?

Jaffrey: The house, which is no longer there, my grandfather’s house, there was a main

house in the center. The back was the river. Either side were two courtyards, and beyond

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the courtyards was sort of brick annexes running from the river to inland. They were

high up. The road was much further down because of flooding and things like that, so we

were really off the ground quite a bit. But one annex was where one of my uncles lived,

and there were guest rooms all along, and my grandfather, he was a barrister, his office,

and other guest rooms. On the other wide, on the north side, there was the long, long,

long dining room and pantries and kitchen. So you would have to go from the main

house through the courtyard, which is open, so when it was raining, you ran to the dining

room.

It depended. Every day people could have what they wanted. It was sort of hotel-

like in that sense. If you wanted a fried egg—most people had eggs in the morning.

Q: This is breakfast.

Jaffrey: Yes, I’m starting at breakfast. So any kind of egg you wanted, toast. As

children, we had milk. We weren’t allowed tea or coffee or anything like that. The older

people had tea, but we always had glasses of milk. So that was usually breakfast.

Lunch, if we were home, it probably was a weekend, that’s when we were home,

and it would be usually a wonderful lunch, always some kind of meat, which was always

goat, always three or four vegetables, and some kind of dal, lots of little yogurt-y things,

salady-y things, pickles, which my grandmother made, all kinds of different kinds of

pickles, and always, always, always fruit, winter or summer. Dessert, there was always

fruit, and if it was summer, there’d be mangos or cantaloupes, different things.

According to the season, there would just be a ton of fruit for everybody to eat.

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Q: And in winter?

Jaffrey: Oranges. It was always the more Western fruit, oranges, apples, bananas.

Bananas are not Western, but things that people know over here. I didn’t really like the

winter fruit. Guavas, that was a nice fruit that we always had in the winter, which I

loved. But it was more boring fruits. The best fruit for me was the summer, the mangos,

the lychees, the [unclear], all that. But whatever there was, there was always a ton of

fruit, great fruit of various sorts.

Q: This was laid out for you to take on a buffet?

Jaffrey: Well, it depended. The food was brought to the table, the main dishes, and it

was a long table that had been extended three times by adding on other tables, because

there were usually about thirty of us eating, and the kids sat at one end, the river end. We

were always on that side. My grandfather sat facing the river, always at the head of the

table on the other side. It sort of deteriorated and became benches at the end, and at the

head of the table was proper chairs. My grandfather apparently bought a lot of the stuff

at auctions, at various auctions. He was a great man for going to auctions and buying

stuff, so the furniture was basically from auction houses of various sorts.

The food for the main course would all be laid out, but everything would repeat

itself, meat three times at least, big bowls of it, so everyone helped themselves and it was

pass on. Chapatis would come fresh again and again and again. Everything would be

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replenished as it was finished. In the winter there would be a lot of game, because the

men went hunting, so there’d be deer and goose and duck and quail and partridge.

Q: Did you get up and get your food?

Jaffrey: No, it was just passed along. It was put along the table in the center of each of

the three or four tables, however many there were.

Q: And even the children could take what they wanted?

Jaffrey: Yes, whatever they wanted. Sometimes their mothers served them. The

mothers were allowed to do that. They could serve their own kids if they wanted to, but I

don’t remember my mother ever doing that. We always served ourselves. I know other

mothers did, because they wanted their kids to get choice pieces of this and that,

controlling it. [laughs]

Then at the end, sometimes before the ladies of the house would peel, if it was

mangos, they would peel a whole ton of mangos and put them in the fridge, and then the

whole thing would come out again on plates. Or if there were fewer people, then they

might peel and pass on the fruit, but somebody always did that.

Q: And your lunches at school, were they still brought to you?

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Jaffrey: By the time I was a teenager, we took our lunches in little tiffin carriers. I used

to bicycle to school, and I would have my tiffin carrier hanging from my bike and I

would take it. We would sit with all our friends and eat together. Everyone would bring

their tiffin carriers and we would share, Hindus, Muslims, no problem at that time, till

just before ’47.

Then it became a major problem and a fearful problem, because suddenly nobody

was getting along. It can happen. I think Partition is the worst thing that can happen to a

nation, the worst. It brings out the worst in people and it just leaves nobody happy, I

think.

Q: At school you had Muslims?

Jaffrey: Half the class was Muslim, at least, and suddenly from being very good friends

with everybody, we were not. Nobody wanted to talk to the other side. And I remember

such a feeling of aloneness, feeling that, “I’m in the middle. I think like nobody thinks.

I’m not on this side, I’m not on that side. What side am I on? Who am I?” I was twelve,

thirteen, so it was a bad time anyway, and then to have this inflicted on one made it even

harder, because you felt really, “Where do I belong?” I wasn’t a Muslim and I didn’t

agree with the Hindus either. So that was how that was.

Q: Then during the fighting, did you continue to go to school?

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Jaffrey: We continued to go to school except on certain days when there was too much

violence and everyone stayed home. Nobody went anywhere. I remember my father and

uncles, all the men taking guns and their hunting rifles—it’s all they had—and parading

the whole area that all our houses were in. We were in what used to be an orchard once,

and it was all family houses.

This parading and at one time somebody came and said, “The gangs are coming

from the other side,” and we could hear them. Everybody moved like a mob, you know.

Terrible fear, what would happen to the men. But it passed. It passed. Then at one point

there was another mob somewhere else, and my uncle said, “I have to go.”

We said, “Don’t go. Please don’t go. You’ll be killed.”

He said, “No, my friend is trapped there.” He had a friend who was a doctor, and

the doctor was trapped and the mob was coming. He somehow got through, but his

friend was shot dead. I mean, that happened everywhere. It happened everywhere,

people killing people just because they were of another religion, you know.

Q: And the food supplies were interfered with?

Jaffrey: You couldn’t go out and shop, so people had what they had and made do, made

do. Usually in our kind of house, so much is put away. There’s a ton of grain, a lot of

vegetables are grown, and even if you don’t have fresh vegetables, you have onions,

garlic, ginger, pickles, you know, dals. You can always eat. I never felt a shortage

during that period.

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Q: During and after Partition, then what happened in terms of how your life was

constructed?

Jaffrey: Well, it didn’t just end like that, because then followed that million people being

killed, with Hindus going towards India, Muslims going towards Pakistan, and all those

killings on the trains. Trains would arrive with dead people, you know, horrible things

like that on both sides. Both sides did incomprehensible things to each other.

Then half the girls were gone in my class, just gone. Some may have been killed,

some went away. I never saw any, not one of them again. My father’s friends, some of

them stayed, some of them left. My brother’s friends mostly left. I actually talked to one

the last time I was in Pakistan. I actually managed to call one of my brother’s friends. I

found him and he was dying of cancer, but I managed to speak to him.

But my father’s friends, it was so interesting, there was one house on what was

then called Barakhamba Road. I don’t know what that road is called now. It has some

other name. Anyway, it was one of the main roads in New Delhi. He was a very wealthy

man, had a big house there, and they all left. The house was empty and bare for a long,

long time, but there were servants’ quarters at the back, which were taken over by a

family of refugees, and they also were a wealthy family in the Punjab, and they came and

took over. There were five girls, and my sister became very friendly with one of the

girls, of one of the five girls, so it was kind of ironic that a lot of men left this family,

then another family came in the servants’ quarters and one became my sister’s best

friend. Actually, one worked as Mrs. Gandhi’s secretary, was with her till the end when

she died.

Jaffrey - 1 - 22

So people were replaced by other people, and refugees poured into Delhi, poured

into Delhi, changing Delhi. What year did you come?

Q: It was right after the Bangladesh war, so it was in ’73, I think.

Jaffrey: By the fifties, Delhi was like a refugee town. There were refugees everywhere.

Any open area had become an encampment of refugees. There were new markets. Delhi

was growing by leaps and bounds, new extensions here, there, but all suddenly, and

everybody spoke with a different accent. There was the Punjabi accent that people in

Delhi weren’t used to. The whole spirit of Delhi was very elitist, I suppose, at least the

people we knew, of a Hindu-Muslim kind of background, and that all changed. It became

a different city with much more energy. The Punjabis brought lots of fresh energy and

enterprise into the system.

Q: I found that they also brought tandoori.

Jaffrey: Yes.

Q: If you could talk about that and how the food changed in that respect.

Jaffrey: What happened was that we didn’t really go out to eat, because, again, this

whole idea of food being pure and clean and all that, except my father broke the rule all

Jaffrey - 1 - 23

the time for certain Muslim dishes which could be had only behind the Red Fort, you

know.

Q: In a stall or something.

Jaffrey: Yes. Behind the [unclear] there were all these Muslim lovely stalls with certain

kinds of breads which he loved and certain kinds of kabobs which he had grown up with

in the inner city. He’d grown up with all these things. All this thing about dirty food,

this, that, and the other, he broke the rule himself all the time because the driver would go

out with our utensils, our napkins, and they would come back looking like they were

made in the cleanest kitchen, with fresh white napkins on top, and then he thought

everything was fine.

But the food changed because the Punjabis have a much more enterprising spirit

than we did in Delhi. We were rather effete. They opened restaurants.

Q: That was unusual?

Jaffrey: Yes. Restaurants that we would go to, upper-crust restaurants, in Connaught

Place there were restaurants, expensive restaurants that you could go and have Russian

food. [laughs] Things like that. And good Indian food, but Punjabi food. Then Moti

Mahal was a very humble restaurant in [unclear], which sort of connects Old Delhi in a

way to New Delhi, but it’s in Old Delhi, and it wasn’t an upper-crust restaurant at all, but

we all discovered it because it had the great tandoori chicken, and we’d never seen a

Jaffrey - 1 - 24

tandoori in our lives. It was, to us, new, nouvelle cuisine of a certain sort. And we

hadn’t had meat that was like rare. We hadn’t had chickens that were this juicy. We’d

never had anything like that. The naan was something we did not know at all in North

India, and we did not know the khalida, the way it was cooked in the oven over twenty-

four hours. So all this was very new and very exciting.

Q: And all these were at Moti Mahal?

Jaffrey: Yes. Moti Mahal started it, and of course today nobody can think of Indian food

without tandoori chicken, but it was really one restaurant that started it for all of us.

Q: Were you allowed to go?

Jaffrey: Yes, we were allowed to go.

Q: Did you ever bring it back home?

Jaffrey: Yes, we did. We brought it back home, we took it on picnics. It was all

considered okay. It was hot food, so it was considered pretty much okay. Don’t ask me

why.

Q: Safe.

Jaffrey - 1 - 25

Jaffrey: Yes, safe.

Q: But it didn’t change the way you in your homes would have cooked?

Jaffrey: No, no, no. You’d go back and it was all the same. Nothing changed at home.

Absolutely the same dishes, and we wanted them. We wanted them the same way,

because we loved them.

Q: Why don’t we go back to your schooling and how that continued.

Jaffrey: Well, I think what had happened in Kanpur was I had already worked out what I

was good at and what I wasn’t good at. I certainly was not good at math. I was great at

needlework and I was great at anything to do with English, English literature. I was great

at history. I was very good at geography. I couldn’t sing. I knew that early. My sisters

could. I couldn’t. But I certainly could write and I was a good student. Math I always

managed to do, managed to learn enough to ace it, but never liked it, never liked what it

made me do and made me think, and I didn’t want to think that way.

So when I came to Delhi, I continued that. I was again very good at history,

geography, English. Again, I struggled with math. And then discovered in high school

that you could have a choice. You could do either higher math, which was algebra,

geometry, mathematics, or lower math, which was arithmetic and what they called

domestic science. [laughs] We had a teacher from—I don’t know, she seemed to be

from England in the 1930s, who would teach us, for example, how to wash clothes.

Jaffrey - 1 - 26

Q: Oh, it was domestic science. [laughs]

Jaffrey: So you take a scrub board and you go like this on the scrub board. I said,

“Okay.” And then cooking, and the cooking was British invalid cookery.

Q: Ai-yi-yi.

Jaffrey: It was really, really awful, but I said, “Okay, I can learn this. I can learn the

corn flour pudding recipe,” and whatever there was. “I can do this.” But very strangely

enough, when it came to the high school exam, we were independent by then, and some

bright-eyed inspector must have said, “Why are we making these girls make this

blancmange and this awful soup and stuff? Why don’t we just give them some Indian

spices and say, ‘Cook’?” Well, I wasn’t ready for that, so I couldn’t make any [unclear]

mashed potatoes. They gave us onion, garlic, ginger, tomatoes, spices, and light a fire.

They gave us wooden matches. I didn’t get too far with that, and I probably failed that,

but won out on the arithmetic and needlework, which I was very good at, which was also

part of this whole domestic science-mathematics package. So I did all right in school.

Q: When did the acting come in?

Jaffrey: Well, I was acting since the convent days. I couldn’t sing, so I couldn’t get the

big parts like my sisters, but I hopped around as a brown mouse and did other things.

Jaffrey - 1 - 27

[laughs] Then the minute I came to Delhi, it became more serious, because they were

doing Shakespeare in school. I remember playing Robin Hood. It was an all-girls’

school, so I got to play Hamlet, I got to play wonderful parts, all the parts that you

wanted to play. I played Titania in Midsummer Night’s Dream in school. This is all

school. So I was acting all the time in school and acting in college, from the beginning.

Q: You knew you were good at it or you enjoyed it?

Jaffrey: I just enjoyed it at that time. I had no sense of it as a serious vocation. I just

enjoyed it thoroughly.

Q: And that was okay with your parents?

Jaffrey: Yes, because I was in school and there was no question of doing it any other

way in school.

Q: How did you get then to the scholarship that took you to RADA [Royal Academy of

Dramatic Art]?

Jaffrey: So then I was in college, Miranda House in Delhi, and then I did my B.A. in

English and acted throughout school, and joined an amateur theatrical company called—

you must have known them. You must have known them.

Jaffrey - 1 - 28

[Interruption]

Q: This is a continuation of my interview with Madhur Jaffrey.

Jaffrey: So when I was a kid, we used to go to see Shakespeare down by St. Stephen’s

College. They always did an annual Shakespeare play, as a kid, I remember even at the

age of three or four. So Shakespeare was very much—we all knew Shakespeare. We

recited Shakespeare, just grew up with Shakespeare. Indian kids, at least when I was

growing up, we all grew up with Shakespeare.

I remember when Dame Sybil Thorndike and her husband, Lewis Casson, came to

India and they were performing at St. Stephens College, here were all these kids

mouthing the words because we knew everything. They said, “We’ve never seen

anybody react this way to Shakespeare. We have not seen it in all our travels.” Because

we were the perfect colony that way, you know. We loved Shakespeare.

Q: Did they have a sort of traveling troupe?

Jaffrey: The two of them were going around together doing Shakespeare. But here was

an audience that really was waiting for them.

Then remember Felicity Kendal and that group? They had their company that

went around doing Shakespeare. And everybody lapped all this up because we

considered Shakespeare ours.

Jaffrey - 1 - 29

I remember my daughters were at school, Nightingale-Bamford, a school in New

York, and I was complaining that they knew so little of Shakespeare, and how can you go

through school and not know Shakespeare, and somebody said, “Why don’t you come

and teach.” So I did, very briefly, and nobody was familiar with Shakespeare, nobody.

How can that happen?

Q: Again, to get you to the scholarship stage—

Jaffrey: So here I am, joined the Unity Theatre.

Q: This is as well as school?

Jaffrey: Doing college and joined the Unity Theatre and doing all kinds of plays like

Christopher—

Q: Marlowe?

Jaffrey: Not Marlowe. Much later, twentieth century. Christopher—anyway, the name

will come to me. Sorry about that.

Anyway, doing modern plays, doing Shaw, doing Sartre, The Eagle has Two

Heads, all kinds of plays, but in the English language. Unity Theatre did everything at

that time in the English language. So, various people had come to see me who worked at

the British Council through the years.

Jaffrey - 1 - 30

Then suddenly I found myself—there was an award that the English government

was giving to Indian artists in different cultural fields. So you could apply as a painter,

you could apply as a sculptor, anything, any of the cultural areas, arts, any of the arts. So

I applied as an actress and I got that award, which is a small amount of money, but I

asked if—in those days you couldn’t take foreign currency. There was no foreign

currency allowed. You couldn’t take it out. So I applied to use it in England, because at

that time there was no drama school in Indian, none. So I asked if I could use it in

England and they said yes. But it wasn’t going to be enough money.

So then I was doing a play, Tennessee Williams’ short one-act, called Auto-da-Fé,

and the head of the British Council came to see me and thought I was good enough to

warrant one of their scholarships. So I had an Indian scholarship, I had that scholarship,

and then I couldn’t get a scholarship until I auditioned, which meant going to RADA to

audition, and I auditioned there and I got another scholarship. So then I was all right. I

had three of these not huge scholarships, but three scholarships, enough to get me going.

Q: You thought of this as a professional—

Jaffrey: Yes, I was now thinking that this is what I wanted to do in life, was act.

Q: Just out of curiosity, what were your brothers and sisters doing?

Jaffrey: My father was in business, so my brothers were in business. My eldest sister

had gone to England and she became a schoolteacher in England and stayed, and

Jaffrey - 1 - 31

eventually rose to the head of the English department in the English school system. So

she was there. My next sister got married and never worked, and my younger sister

joined Swissair and worked at Swissair.

Q: So there was no resistance to having the children—

Jaffrey: No, not for working. My father just felt that I should be in the Foreign Service.

He said, “You should sit for the Foreign Service exam.” He felt I could do it, and he just

saw me was an ambassador to some place, I think, and I did not see myself that way, and

I said I didn’t want to.

Q: But that’s very forward-thinking.

Jaffrey: Of my father, yes. He was. He was really forward-thinking and wanted the best

for his children. He somehow had great hopes for me in areas that I had no interest in.

Q: So you got on a plane? How did you do this?

S: Then I had this scholarship and I was—I don’t know, I must have been twenty-

something, very early twenties, and I was ready to go. I totally knew that this part of my

life was not the fulfilled part of my life, that something else was waiting that would be

the life. I just knew it.

Jaffrey - 1 - 32

So my father took me to Bombay and I remember we spent a night at the Taj

Hotel, which we’d done many times, so my history with the Taj goes back since I was

twelve years old. Then the next day, he put me on a boat. It was one of the P&O liners.

Q: That’s a long ride.

Jaffrey: Twenty-one days at that time, and it went through the Suez Canal, which either

had blown up already, the whole thing with the war. The Suez War of ’57 had either

happened already and was sort of getting sorted out, but we went through the Suez Canal

and I saw Aden for the first time, went through the Red Sea, through the Mediterranean.

It was quite exciting. And then to Southampton and then to London. And I loved it.

Q: Where did you live?

Jaffrey: Eventually I lived in several places and moved because I didn’t like the

landladies. One used to read my letters, and there was another one who did something

else awful. I ended up with a very young couple. They were a Jewish couple in a very

Jewish neighborhood, a young Mr. and Mrs. Gold. They were probably my age or maybe

two years older or something like that, and they had one little baby when I was there, and

while I was there they had another little baby, and I used to babysit for them. That’s

where I made my first Indian food. They included me in everything, and every evening

at ten o’clock they would have tea and I would sit and have tea and biscuits with them.

Jaffrey - 1 - 33

It was in their living room that I first saw that wonderful April Fool’s Day thing

with the spaghetti growing on the tree. Have you seen that one ever?

Q: No.

Jaffrey: You haven’t seen that?

Q: No.

Jaffrey: So the news was on, and we used to listen to the ten o’clock news or whatever it

was every night with our tea and our biscuits that they had, and, “This thing that we have

just discovered, that the way to grow the best spaghetti is—,” and then the camera rolls,

and there they are on these trees with the spaghetti hanging, and they said, “To get it to

the same height so it fits into the box, we want each of them to be of the same length so

then they can be packaged more easily.” It was a gorgeous little documentary, and

everybody’s saying, “What? What?” And the next day, of course, they said April Fool’s

Day. But that was the first day they showed it, and they’ve shown it again since. It’s just

such a wonderful little snippet of fun.

So anyway, I was staying with this really, really lovely couple. The husband died

when he was forty. I remember I was doing Medea at the Lyric Theatre in London, and

the wife came to see me and we sort of caught up, Mrs. Gold, Blanche Gold, came to see

me and we talked again.

So I started cooking. The first dish I made was a potato dish in their kitchen.

Jaffrey - 1 - 34

Q: Let’s talk about that. What got you to writing to your mother for help? You were

eating British food, presumably.

Jaffrey: Terrible British food, which was really—lunch was [unclear] and in the canteen,

and it was horrible. It was this gray roast beef sliced thin, with cabbage, watery cabbage

and watery potatoes, and I would just go crazy. I said, “There must be something better

than this.” Any Indian restaurant that I tried was awful. [unclear] had a restaurant. I

think there were very few. I went to the one on Regent Street, whatever its name is. It’ll

come back to me. It was awful, and that had been there since 1926. Veeraswamy. So I

thought, this is nothing like Indian food.

So then I wrote to my mother and I said, “Please help me how to cook. I don’t

know anything. I can’t make tea. I can’t make rice.” So she started sending me letters.

Q: What did you start out with?

Jaffrey: With what I asked for. I asked for a potato dish, I asked for a cauliflower dish,

and I asked for one goat, lamb dish which is made with whole spices, and I knew it was

simple to make, which I loved when I was in India.

Q: How did you know it was simple?

Jaffrey - 1 - 35

Jaffrey: You know, this is the thing. This is what I have realized in retrospect, that

obviously I had a very good palette since birth, and obviously I was recording what I was

eating and had a great sense of how it was made, even though I never watched it being

made, but I could taste. If you eat one thing, cumin, ten times in ten different ways, you

know how it’s been used. You just sense.

Q: Actually, that’s amazing, to take an example like a spice. I think you would know

how it was being used, but many people wouldn’t have the taste memory.

Jaffrey: That’s it. If you have a palette, you’re recording. And if you’re recording, you

have a taste memory. This is a thing that you find out later. There has to be a taste

memory or you wouldn’t be able to bring it back. And my mother’s recipes, which were

like a little bit of this, a little bit of that, I was able to adjust it because I already had a

sense of, “Oh, I think I put too much,” of this or that.

Q: You would try to make it [unclear].

Jaffrey: Yes, and it was easy to adjust and it was easy to remember the taste exactly.

And that’s why I knew it was simple, because the meat hadn’t been browned, this, that,

and the other, and there were just two or three things in it, and it was just so delicious. So

I thought, “I think I should be able to do that.” And I probably heard somebody say it’s a

very easy thing. I don’t know. But that somehow was in the back of my head always, so

I was able, with those rather simple recipes, to make a whole lot of things.

Jaffrey - 1 - 36

Q: Where could you get spices?

Jaffrey: Very close to RADA. There was a place called the Bombay Emporium just off

Euston Street, and I could just go after class and pick up whatever I needed.

Q: And you had enough money to do that?

Jaffrey: Oh, yes. My father couldn’t send me too much money, but whenever he could,

he did, and then I had my scholarships. I was fine. I always live within my means, and I

managed. I even went on holidays to Europe.

Q: What did you do about the cooking equipment?

Jaffrey: Whatever the Golds had, they used. I was living with them and they said, “Use

anything you want,” and I did. They were very sweet about it. Then, you see, I was

making this potato dish, but I couldn’t make any Indian breads. This was, as I said, a

Jewish neighborhood, and they had a great baker. I would go to the bakery and get

pumpernickel bread, which I had never seen before in my life, and I would eat my

pumpernickel bread with the Indian food, and I thought it was delicious. It was delicious.

Q: And now you live in the home of pumpernickel [unclear]. [laughter]

Did you continue to stay with the Golds long?

Jaffrey - 1 - 37

Jaffrey: I stayed with them until I left, till I left RADA. I finished RADA.

Q: So that was two years?

Jaffrey: Two years. And then I came to America, and I stayed with them till I left.

I have the same pencil and the same pen as you. [laughter]

Q: So what made you go to America?

Jaffrey: Well, at that time I was involved with Saeed [Jaffrey], and he also tried to get a

scholarship like I had, but he got one to America and it was at Catholic University. He

ended up there with a drama scholarship.

Q: You knew him in India?

Jaffrey: Yes, we worked at the Unity Theatre. I met him at the Unity Theatre. Then he

was in radio and I worked in radio too. You know, radio was another part of my life,

because as kids, we lived near a radio station, and every time they needed kids, our

family—they had very good expression, those kids from that household, so we were

called. We did radio plays and whatever was needed as kids. Then when Doordarshan,

this big radio station, opened up in New Delhi, we were called there, so all through

school I was doing plays when kids were needed.

Jaffrey - 1 - 38

Q: On India radio?

Jaffrey: On India radio. Then in college, I was working as a disc jockey, you know,

reading—

Q: How did you do that?

Jaffrey: It was just a job and I did it at night. I did the night part of it.

Q: No kidding.

Jaffrey: A bus would come. Not a bus, a car. The radio station would send a car, pick

you up and take you back at night.

Q: Your parents were really amazing.

Jaffrey: Yes, they had no problem because they thought I was safe.

Q: This was a time when you met Ruth Jhabvala?

Jaffrey: Yes. So one of my earliest plays, I think it must have been college, I don’t think

it was high school, could have been high school, either high school or early college, so

Jaffrey - 1 - 39

I’d been doing radio stuff forever. She was casting. I went there on a casting call for this

[unclear], and that’s how I actually talked to Ruth for the first time. I think I may have

seen or met her at the Regal Theatre, which is where I have this memory of a ballet

performance or something like that, and we were all there. I think I saw her and Jhab at

that time.

Q: So there was this tiny Polish-British woman.

Jaffrey: Yes, married to a very funny guy.

Q: A wonderful guy.

Jaffrey: We got to know each other immediately and saw each other. I don’t know why

we started. I think Saeed also. And, actually, Ruth won’t admit it, but her first novel, her

very first novel is about Saeed and me, so you have to read it. It changed its name.

Amrita: Or to Whom She Will. I think that was the original name. It’s really about two

people in a radio station who fall in love, and the girl is from my neighborhood. So you

know where she’s got the idea. She said, “No, no, no, no, no.” So that’s her first novel.

So obviously I knew her before that, before she wrote that.

Q: Did you stay in touch at all while you were in England or after you got to America?

Jaffrey - 1 - 40

Jaffrey: Not really. We didn’t stay actively in touch, but then after Jim [Ivory] met her,

when he came to do The Householder, I knew Jim and Ismail [Merchant] before. I knew

her. I knew them. Then they were going to do their first film in India, which was The

Householder.

Q: Let’s first get you from the U.S. back. Let’s do New York first.

Jaffrey: Okay. So now where are we?

Q: You and Saeed were in New York?

Jaffrey: No, we were in Washington [D.C.]. He was at Catholic University and I joined

him there and we got married and we came to New York. We lived on 26th Street. I was

just there and I was looking at the house. It’s was called O’Henry’s House on 26th Street,

between Sixth and Broadway. We had three kids very quickly, sort of in a row.

Q: Just to interject a little bit, you say it as though it was perfectly normal for you to

marry a Muslim.

Jaffrey: My father, actually, I asked him before we left, that this was what I was—so I

had Saeed come over and my father looked at him, and afterwards he said—and he used

to chew thirty-two times or almost that much, and you’d ask him a question and he’d

answer and then he would chew and then he’d wait for the next part to come. So anyway,

Jaffrey - 1 - 41

he ended up by saying, “I don’t mind him being an actor, but he looks very pale. I think

he’s not well.” [laughter] So that’s how we left it. So anyway, I think they knew we

were going to get married, and we did.

Q: And the religious problem was not—

Jaffrey: Not with my family, because my father always felt that he was very liberal and

behaved like a very liberal man. I think his objection was that he had no profession that

had steady money. My sister also married a Muslim, but she married a doctor, so that

was okay for my father. [laughter]

Q: I can see that.

Jaffrey: That he was fine with, but me, he said, “She’s a crazy girl and she’s going to do

what she’s going to do.” I think he had no great expectations of me other than he saw

great potential in me, and I think he enjoyed my company because I was such a—

Q: Live wire.

Jaffrey: Live wire, yes. [laughter]

Q: So where and when did you get married?

Jaffrey - 1 - 42

Jaffrey: We got married in 1958, in Washington.

Q: You presumably were comfortable in the kitchen at that point.

Jaffrey: I wasn’t cooking at that time. I started cooking when I came to New York. We

came to New York then.

Q: When was that?

Jaffrey: 1958 we came to New York. We had no money, so I started working as a guide

at the U.N., because I could get a visa for the U.N. and work as a guide, and Saeed was

working with the Indian government, doing public relations with the Indian Tourist

Office. So that’s how we were sustaining ourselves, and then we were taking on off-

Broadway plays of all kinds. Saeed was in a play by Lorca. I think it was Blood

Wedding at the Actors’ Playhouse. I have a picture of me standing in front of the Actors’

Playhouse, very pregnant with my eldest daughter, but it’s only from here. So I think Jim

went to see that play and he had done his first or second little documentary.

Q: But you didn’t know him?

Jaffrey: No, we did not. It was The Sword and the Flute, and it was about a miniature

painting which he was very interested in. He was a collector. He wanted somebody to

Jaffrey - 1 - 43

narrate it, and he thought Saeed would be the perfect person. So that’s how Jim came

into our lives. Ismail was looking for a way to get going. He was terribly ambitious.

Q: He was in Bombay?

Jaffrey: He was in Bombay and he had come as a student to NYU [New York

University], a business student.

Q: I didn’t know that.

Jaffrey: Yes. He was still in school, and dreams were big. He had heard of Saeed,

because we were quite well known in Indian, were known in the sense of amateur theater,

people knew who we were and we had done a lot of stuff together in India, and he wanted

to do something with us. It was as if he was looking to move up the ladder. He said,

“We’ll do a play together.” I remember him on one side, Saeed on the other side,

arguing. I had given birth to my first daughter. They were arguing what they should do

and what they couldn’t do, and Saeed was feeling taken advantage of. Anyway, there

was this big battle going on on either side of me. They were thinking of doing a Sanskrit

play together, then Saeed was dreaming about bringing Sitara Devi to dance in Radio

City Music Hall, you know. I was trying to tell him, “I don’t think this is going to

happen, Ismail.” But nothing stopped him. That was the great thing about Ismail.

So we would invite Ismail. I would cook. Meera was a very little girl at that

time, and I would cook and we would all talk about our plans. Then Jim joined this

Jaffrey - 1 - 44

group as well, because we knew one and we knew the other in different ways. I can’t

remember exactly how it happened, but sometime we said, “You must meet Jim.” We

were talking about doing a film together.

Q: You and Jim? Or you and Saeed and Jim?

Jaffrey: Saeed and me and Jim. The whole idea, Jim had an apartment on East 64th

Street, it was a brownstone. It was an apartment, a brownstone. We’d sit on the floor—

there wasn’t much furniture—and write out the script, because at that time Saeed and I

planned to go back to India, start a traveling company and tour with it. We started

writing this script down. Then when Jim went to do The Householder, which he then

somehow—I can’t remember the sequence. Let me just say it this way. He went to do

The Householder and met the Kendals, because Shashi [Kapoor] was the star in it. Then

he decided the Shakespeare Wallah story came into it.

Meanwhile, Saeed and I had divorced and Jim was mad at Saeed and didn’t want

him in any way in any part of this.

Q: Because of the divorce?

Jaffrey: Yes, the way he’d behaved, etc., etc. So he was going to cut him out of it, this

whole thing, anyway. So the idea of Shakespeare Wallah then began to mature, but he

wanted a role for me. Where was I going to come in with this new story? So then Ruth

was prevailed upon to write this movie star role for me.

Jaffrey - 1 - 45

Q: Who asked Ruth?

Jaffrey: Jim had already gone. You see, The Householder happened before. All this was

going on, but somehow The Householder happened before. He met Ruth, who did the

screenplay for it, and they met the Kendals and they met Shashi and Jennifer. So now

they knew this group and had a diary, so they decided they would use part of that diary

and make another film, because they really were cutting out also Saeed and using these

people that they’d met, whom they liked a lot, and who had a story already written, sort

of.

But how would I get into it? So they persuaded Ruth, and Ruth would not budge.

She said, “No, she can’t play a movie star.” When she knew me, I was very—I still am—

I was thin, wore glasses, and in her mind—

Q: You weren’t blonde. [laughs]

Jaffrey: Not at all a buxom movie star. So Ruth kept saying, “No way. No way. She’s

not. Jim, you don’t understand.”

And Jim kept saying, “You don’t know what she looks like now. Just see her.”

So anyway, with great reluctance, Ruth wrote—you have to ask her about this—

this role for me, and I have to say that she was fine when we met.

Q: This was in what country?

Jaffrey - 1 - 46

Jaffrey: In Delhi, when I went to Delhi for the shooting. She was fine, but when I drove

up to Kasauli, my first shots were in Kasauli, and I was driving up, throwing up along the

way, and arrived. All the crew looked at me and said, “She is going to play a movie

star?” [laughter] I said, “Oh, god, again.”

Q: You were pregnant?

Jaffrey: No, I wasn’t pregnant.

Q: Just throwing up.

Jaffrey: I was just throwing up because of the curves of the road. I always throw up

when I go to hill station. I have done that since I was a kid. But it all worked out.

Q: Then where were you living?

Jaffrey: When? When we were shooting? Then Saeed and I were divorced, and the

kids, I think, were with my parents and my sister in India. I was trying to get a divorce,

which I went to Mexico for, and then I came back. Then we went to do Shakespeare

Wallah after I’d got my divorce.

Then I was in India with my kids, after Shakespeare Wallah, and Jim and Ismail

said, “We are taking the film to the Berlin Film Festival, so you must all come.” And,

Jaffrey - 1 - 47

you know, Ismail always had this big thing, “Come on! We’re going to a festival!” So

there we were in Berlin, at the Berlin Film Festival for this film.

Why was I telling you this?

Q: Just following where you lived.

Jaffrey: Oh yes. So at that time my parents had rented a place for me just next to my

sister—it was actually attached—in Defense Colony, so I was living with them there at

that time. Then I left and went to the film festival in Berlin, where, of course, things

went very well.

Then they said, “We’re now going to go to the New York Film Festival, Lincoln

Center Film Festival.” So then I came here. I’d already met Sanford [Allen] before, but

nothing major had happened between us, but then we met up again and we decided we

wanted to get married. So then I sent for the kids and they came back. Then we moved

in here in ’67 and we’ve been here since.

Q: During this time that you were making Shakespeare Wallah and afterward, was

anybody cooking? Was Ismail cooking? Were you cooking?

Jaffrey: Ismail was cooking too, but whenever they came to my house, I cooked a semi-

elaborate Indian meal. I was cooking. I was really cooking through that marriage. I was

cooking, learning new things, learning biryanis and pulaos. I was determined to master

everything.

Jaffrey - 1 - 48

Q: How did you learn them?

Jaffrey: Getting recipes from my family, mostly, learned that way. I bought one

cookbook, Mrs. Balbir Singh’s cookbook, which was the only one, and it was very

complicated, but it was helpful. It was very helpful to me. But most of the recipes were

coming from home. I certainly was cooking, and Ismail, always from the earliest days,

he cooked something. He always made a dal, he made a rice, and we got that every time,

actually, dal and rice and then shrimp. He used to make a shrimp with cherry tomatoes.

Then sometimes the dal had slices of lemon in it. It was always tasty. It always tasted

good.

Very often you’d go up there and there’d be nothing and he hadn’t shopped.

“Ismail, are you going to cook?”

He said, “Wait, wait, wait. You sit down.” And then he’d give you a job. “Can

you collate these papers?” or something. “I’ll be just back.” And he would start his

shopping then and come back very quickly, put everything on, and by the time you

finished collating his work or whatever he wanted you to do, there’d be dinner.

Q: And that was New York.

Jaffrey: That was New York.

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Q: Wow. That’s really amazing. At what point did you think you had collected enough

recipes that you wanted to put together your own?

Jaffrey: I never felt that way. That was much later. Even though we were already 1967,

that didn’t happen till ’69.

Q: And that happened because Judith Jones found you?

Jaffrey: No, no, no. Judith was much later. Several things happened. Ismail, who, as I

keep saying, he can sell his little finger if he wanted to, could sell his grandmother if he

wanted to, decided he needed publicity for Shakespeare Wallah, and he did everything.

Most human beings don’t do that with his kind of budget. So he persuaded Craig

Claiborne to do a big piece on me as an actress who likes to cook.

Q: He knew Craig Claiborne?

Jaffrey: He didn’t know anybody. He just found a way to meet him, which was utterly

charming, and found a way to get to meet him.

Q: What was his goal in terms of doing a piece on you?

Jaffrey: All Ismail wanted was publicity. That’s all he wanted. [laughs] So in many

ways Ismail is responsible for starting me off in certain directions. This was another one,

Jaffrey - 1 - 50

the Craig Claiborne connection. Craig Claiborne had probably not written anything on

Indian food before.

It’s a really funny story and I don’t tell it because it’s an awkward story. Craig

Claiborne was going to do this piece. I was living with Sanford in a one-room apartment

on Eleventh Street, and I said, “I can’t have Craig Claiborne come here.” So a friend of

ours across the road had a nicer apartment, so I said to William, “Can I borrow your

apartment? He’s just coming to interview me.”

He said, “Fine, fine. Just use the apartment. Here are the keys.”

So he and his wife gave me the keys, and Craig Claiborne walks up and he comes

in and he’s looking at the kitchen and the bookshelves, seeing the cookbooks on the

shelves, and said, “Oh, these are the books you’re interested in.” Not me.

So then he talked to me, he interviewed me, and I said, “What can I cook for you?

Shall I make this and that?”

He said, “Yes, you can make this, but not today. I’ll come back in a week.”

[laughter]

I said, “Oh, my god.”

So next week I had to ask them again for their house and again go through the

charade. So he took pictures and he did that particular article.

Q: What did you make?

Jaffrey - 1 - 51

Jaffrey: I made stuffed peppers, stuffed with potatoes, which is one of my mother’s

really wonderful dishes. So I made that, and the article came out as a result of that and

one other thing.

So now I had these three kids and I feel they are my responsibility. I have to earn

enough money to send them to school, and being brought up the way I was, they had to

be not just any school, they had to be the best schools. And how was I going to do this?

So we had put them in the local school here, but I was very unhappy with the local

school, so I started writing. I was writing for the Smithsonian, any paper that wanted—I

wrote for The New York Times, I wrote for—gosh, any—

Q: These were articles on Indian food or what?

Jaffrey: No, they were articles on music, on dance, on drama, sculpture, and buildings.

Q: Anything you could—

Jaffrey: Anything that I could get. I was looking up the other day, going through some

of them, and I have an article on the method of preserving paintings, the art of

preservation of paintings. Anything, but it was in the world of the arts.

Then there was a magazine called Holiday magazine. It’s not there anymore.

Pamela Fiori was the secretary. She’s now the editor of Town & Country. My editor was

Patricia Bosworth. So my editor then was Patricia Bosworth, and Pamela Fiori was her

assistant. Pamela went on to be the editor of Food & Wine and now is with Town &

Jaffrey - 1 - 52

Country. Anyway, so she was just a secretary. I wrote my first piece. They said, “Do

something about India and growing up in India and what food was like.” So that was my

first piece on Indian food.

Q: For Town & Country?

Jaffrey: No, no, no. For Holiday magazine. I did that piece, and I used that in the

introduction to my first cookbook, bits of that, and sent it in. Based on that and that first

thing that Craig Claiborne did, I was approached by a freelance editor who said, “Would

you be interested? Nobody’s done an Indian cookbook. Would you be interested?” So I

started putting, vaguely, recipes together. But he soon disappeared.

Q: The idea didn’t scare you?

Jaffrey: No. In fact, I’ll tell you the story. So then it didn’t go anywhere, but somebody

suggested that they had a friend who worked at another publishing house with a P. I

can’t remember the name. It’s all escaping me. Anyway, a big publisher, one of the big

ones. So they took my book and they said, “Send the recipes.” I was sending them

recipes. They were putting it together. Then half they sold and somebody else came in

and it became another company. My editor was fired. I ended up with another editor,

Virginia Kelly, I remember, and she was very excited about the book, but then the whole

company disbanded, and that publication house went dead.

Jaffrey - 1 - 53

So now I have this book which is almost finished. It is finished, and nowhere to

take it. So I went to my friend Ved Mehta, and Ved said that he knew André Schiffrin,

and that I should talk to André Schiffrin. So I spoke to him, and André said, “Judith

Jones in the best person. Why don’t you send it to her. So I will speak to her.”

So I sent it to Knopf, and Judith took one look at it and bought it. It was very,

very quick.

Q: This was An Invitation to Indian Cooking.

Jaffrey: Yes.

[End of interview]