Episode 4 -

The Dream of Two Kitchens

This episode presents a micro-history of contemporary Indian kitchen design, as told by Manju Sara Rajan, the editor of a prominent design magazine, and Madhav Raman, an award-winning architect in New Delhi. We look at what lies behind the urban, aspirational dream of two kitchens — one visible and one concealed — which has roots in a historical wet and dry kitchen binary. We also look at what interventions open and modular kitchens have made in this history, and what it means for gender and caste politics that still lie at the heart of Indian kitchen design. How do urban Indians negotiate the waves of aromas and the inevitability of oil splatters that come with making Indian food with their desire to showcase their Scandinavian-inspired kitchens in India all at once? We talk about how in urban India, the aspiration is really to have it all.

In this episode of Bad Table Manners, Meher chats with:

• Madhav Raman is an urbanist and the co-founder of the architectural firm Anagram Architects

• Manju Sara Rajan edits Beautiful Homes, a prominent online design magazine, and is a contributing editor for Vogue India

Episode highlights:

The Wet and Dry Kitchen

• Manju talks about the needs for wet and dry kitchens, which can vary regionally. The amount of work that goes into preparation at meal times often necessitates these two kitchens, and sometimes can involve multiple people. Thus, the final stages of cooking are usually done in the dry kitchen, which stays relatively clean, and preparatory “splatter” work is done in the wet kitchen, which most people don’t see.

• The wet and dry binary lines up with caste and class divides. Manju remembers how in her grandmother’s house, women of lower castes entered the house only through the backdoor to gain entry to the kitchen, where they did most of the grinding and cleaning. 

Economic Liberalization and Cosmopolitanism

• Madhav discusses changes in Indian cuisine in the ‘90s, when economic liberalization caused major shifts in ingredient diversity and eating preferences. He also talks about how these shifts touched home kitchens, where “updating” became a sort of national obsession. As cities became more cosmopolitan, many newcomers sought to update their kitchens with electric appliances and tools to fit the needs of the cuisines they brought with them from the region they came from. 

• Before this time, Meher notes, a lot of cooking in India was done on the floor. Liberalization brought the cooking to the countertop and changed the way socialization happened in the kitchen as it shifted labor from communal to individualistic. 

The Front-of-House and Back-of-House Kitchen Split

• Post-liberalization, as people moved to more urban spaces, kitchens became smaller, households became more nuclear, and families did more of the cooking themselves, often hiring part-time cooks, rather than full-time cooks, to help them prep. The kitchen began to shift to a more social space for entertaining than actual cooking, which necessitated separate spaces for the messier prep work.

The Fridge’s Place in the Indian Kitchen

• Refrigerators used to have a place in the dining room, within easy reach as a symbol of modern class leisure.

• Meher cites Invisible fridges and cooling cubbies: How kitchens have been designed for the rich from The Guardian, which discusses the ways in which visible appliances are considered gauche, while concealment is the signifier of status. But this article was written for a North American and European context: How does visibility versus invisibility play out in Indian kitchens?

• Madhav answers that this is evident in the front-of-house/back-of-house kitchen split. In the early 2010s, modular kitchen companies like Ikea began to sell kitchens as products in India. These kitchen designs used in front-of-house kitchens became sleeker, while back-of-house kitchens where the more intensive labor occurred were “spec'd down.” 

The Importance of Vastu-Compliance

• Vastu is the science that represents the intersection of cosmology and architecture, and is still vastly important to contemporary kitchen design. It can dictate where sinks should go, and where the hot and wet points of a kitchen should be. Meher comments that in India, modernity works not in opposition to traditional beliefs, but in dialogue with them.

• Madhav adds that even today, there’s a great requirement for kitchens to be “vastu-compliant”

The Future of Indian Kitchen Design

• India is still very much a home-cooked culture, with less emphasis on street eating. Madhav thinks that future kitchen designs will take time-saving into account more than labor-saving. 

• AI, when it enters Indian kitchens, will be focused more on individualized cooking experiences rather than reducing the labor of cooking, Madhav predicts.

COVID’s Effect on Indian Kitchens

• Manju calls the COVID pandemic one of the biggest upheavals in contemporary design, as the lockdown prevented staff from coming to homes and many people found themselves cooking for the first time. “People are now very much interested in thinking about the kitchen as a space in which they themselves will occupy,” she said.