Madhur Jaffrey
Madhur Jaffrey CBE is an actress, cookbook and travel writer, and television personality. She is recognized for bringing Indian cuisine to the western hemisphere with her debut cookbook, An Invitation to Indian Cooking, which was inducted into the James Beard Foundation's Cookbook Hall of Fame in 2006. She has written over a dozen cookbooks and appeared on several related television programmes, the most notable of which was Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cookery, which premiered in the UK in 1982. She was the food consultant at the now-closed Dawat, which was considered by many food critics to be among the best Indian restaurants in New York City.
Jaffrey was instrumental in bringing together filmmakers James Ivory and Ismail Merchant, and acted in several of their films, such as Shakespeare Wallah, for which she won the Silver Bear for Best Actress award at the 15th Berlin International Film Festival. She has appeared in dramas on radio, stage and television.
In 2004, she was named an honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire in recognition of her services to cultural relations between the United Kingdom, India and the United States, through her achievements in film, television and cookery. In 2022, she was awarded the Padma Bhushan from the Government of India, which is the third highest civilian award.
Her childhood memoir of India during the final years of the British Raj, Climbing the Mango Trees, was published in 2006.
Early life
Jaffrey was born in Civil Lines, Delhi, into a Mathur Kayastha Hindu joint family. She is the fifth of six children of Lala Raj Bans Bahadur and his wife, Kashmiran Rani.When Jaffrey was about two years old, her father accepted a position in a family-run concern, Ganesh Flour Mills, and moved to Kanpur. There, Jaffrey attended St. Mary's Convent School. In kindergarten at the age of five, she played the role of the brown mouse in a musical version of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The family lived in Kanpur for eight years, moving back to Delhi in 1944.
In Delhi, Jaffrey attended Queen Mary's Higher Secondary School where her history teacher, Mrs McKelvie, encouraged her to participate in school plays. Jaffrey played Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream followed by the lead role in Robin Hood and His Merry Men. Her brothers, Brij Bans Bahadur and Krishen Bans Bahadur, much older than her, went to St. Stephen's College, Delhi. Every winter, St. Stephen's students put on a Shakespeare play that Jaffrey watched from the front row.
A supporter of Mahatma Gandhi's demand for Indian independence from British rule, Jaffrey spent some time each day spinning khadi, delivering large spools of thread to a collection center in Delhi.
File:Gandhi spinning Noakhali 1946.jpg|left|thumb|upright|Mahatma Gandhi wearing a Noakhali hat while spinning khadi at Birla House, November 1947.
In 1947, Jaffrey experienced the effects of the partition of India. At school, her classmates divided on the issue: the Muslim girls supported it while the Hindus opposed it. On 15 August she watched the transfer of power at India Gate and got a glimpse of Jawaharlal Nehru and Lord Mountbatten coming down Rajpath in an open horse carriage. The massive migration that began almost immediately afterwards caused riots and killing in Delhi. The male members of her family guarded their house with hunting guns. At school, all her Muslim classmates left without a farewell. In 1948, a few days before Mahatma Gandhi was shot dead, she attended one of his prayer meetings at Birla House and sang bhajans. She heard the news of his assassination on the radio, followed by Jawaharlal Nehru's address later that night, "the light has gone out of our lives, and there is darkness everywhere." She saw Gandhi's funeral procession and witnessed his cremation.
At home, Jaffrey's family primarily ate food prepared by servants but supervised by the women of the family. They occasionally indulged in Mughlai cuisine bought in the bylanes of Old Delhi, like bedmi aloo, seekh kebab, shami kebab, rumali roti and bakarkhani. Refugees from Punjab who settled in Delhi after partition brought their own style of cooking. Moti Mahal, a dhaba in Daryaganj, introduced tandoori chicken and went on to invent butter chicken and dal makhani. Jaffrey found Punjabi food's simplicity and freshness enticing and routinely picked up some tandoori chicken from Moti Mahal for family picnics.
At school, the subject of domestic science included learning dishes like blancmange, whose bland taste drove Jaffrey to dismiss the lessons as preparing "British invalid foods from circa 1930". However, for her practical examination, her class was asked to make a dish from an assortment of potatoes, tomatoes, onions, garlic, ginger and Indian spices in a pot over wood to be lit with matches. Jaffrey did her best but guessed that she failed the subject of domestic science altogether.
Jaffrey regularly answered requests from the nearby All India Radio station for parts in radio plays or children's programs. As she was paid a small fee for each session, she considered this her first professional work.
File:Akashvani Bhavan in New Delhi.jpg|thumb|All India Radio station at Akashvani Bhavan in New Delhi.
Meanwhile, her father had moved to Daurala as general manager of Daurala Sugar Works, a factory owned by family friends, the Shri Ram family. Jaffrey and most of the family remained behind in Delhi to avoid disrupting the children's education. Her elder sisters were at boarding school in Nainital. In the letters that they exchanged with their siblings and cousins at Delhi, they addressed each other only by their initials. This tradition cemented over time so that Jaffrey became M for her circle of close friends and family.
Delhi (1950–1955)
From 1950 to 1953, Jaffrey attended Miranda House, a women's college, where she gained a B.A. degree in English Honours with a minor in philosophy.She took part in her college's all-women productions of Hamlet and The Importance of Being Earnest.
In 1951, Jaffrey joined the Unity Theatre, an English language repertory company founded by Saeed Jaffrey in New Delhi. She auditioned for the role of the Queen's Reader in Jean Cocteau's play The Eagle Has Two Heads just four days before the opening and was cast in the role.
After graduation from Miranda House in 1953, Jaffrey joined All India Radio, where Saeed Jaffrey was an announcer. She worked as a disc jockey at night. Saeed and Jaffrey fell in love, and dated at Gaylord, a restaurant in Connaught Place.
During this period, Jaffrey met Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a British novelist who had moved to Civil Lines, Delhi, after marriage to Cyrus Jhabvala, an Indian architect, in 1951. Jaffrey answered a casting call by Prawer Jhabvala and worked with her on All India Radio plays. The protagonists of Prawer Jhabvala's first novel, To Whom She Will, a young couple who work at a radio station in Delhi and fall in love, were based on Madhur and Saeed Jaffrey. The novel was published in America the following year as Amrita.
In early 1955, Jaffrey was in the audience at St. Stephen's College, Delhi, for a programme of literary readings by Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson, married English actors who toured internationally in Shakespearean productions. Later that year, the Unity Theatre put on a performance of Tennessee Williams' one-act play, Auto-da-Fé, in which Jaffrey played the rigidly moralistic mother to Saeed's young postal worker, Eloi. The last play that Jaffrey did with Saeed was Othello, in which Saeed was cast as Iago while Jaffrey played Iago's wife Emilia.
Jaffrey decided to pursue acting as a profession. She won a grant from the British government that she could use to pay for education at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
The head of the British Council in India was impressed by her performance in Auto-da-Fé and offered her a scholarship. Armed with these two sources of money, Jaffrey arrived at Southampton on 6 December 1955 on the P&O liner from Bombay.
London (1955–1957)
Jaffrey joined the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art with Diana Rigg, Siân Phillips and Glenda Jackson as her contemporaries. She won a scholarship from RADA after an audition. This supplemented her earlier grant and scholarship. She picked up some minor acting roles on BBC television and radio. Her father sent her a small amount of money periodically, and her total income proved sufficient to live modestly in London. She rented rooms from at least two different landlords before settling down in a bedsit in Brent with a young Jewish family, the Golds, who allowed her to use their kitchen and their utensils to cook her own food. Her landlady, Blanche Gold, was roughly her age. Blanche had one child and was pregnant.Jaffrey found the food served at the RADA canteen along with the Indian restaurants in London unappetising. In an interview with NPR, she recalled the canteen serving "gray" roast beef and overcooked cabbage with watery potatoes: "I would look at it and say, 'How can I eat this?!'" She wrote to her mother, begging her for recipes of the home cooked meals of her childhood. Her mother responded with recipes written in Hindi on onionskin paper in letters sent via airmail. The very first letter was dated 19 March 1956 and included recipes for meat spiced with cinnamon, cardamom and bay, a cauliflower dish, and egg curry with hard-boiled eggs. The first recipe that she tried was jeera aloo. She bought pumpernickel from a neighbourhood Jewish bakery as a substitute for chapatis.
In late 1955, Saeed Jaffrey won a Fulbright scholarship to study drama in America the following year. In spring 1956, he approached Jaffrey's parents in Delhi for her hand in marriage but they refused because they felt that his financial prospects as an actor did not appear sound. Jaffrey got her father's permission to marry Saeed eventually. In summer 1956, Saeed flew to London on his way to America and proposed to Jaffrey. She refused but gave him a tour of RADA where she pointed out English actors, such as Peter O'Toole, whom she thought would soon have a high profile in the profession. Soon afterwards, Saeed boarded the to sail across the Atlantic Ocean from Southampton to New York City.
In 1957 Jaffrey graduated from RADA with honours. Not knowing whether to stay on in London, join a repertory company or go back to India, she wrote to Saeed describing her dilemma. Saeed had just graduated from Catholic University of America's Department of Speech and Drama and had been selected to act in summer stock plays at St. Michael's Playhouse in Winooski, Vermont. Seeing Saeed troubled by Jaffrey's letter, Reverend Gilbert V. Hartke, the department head at Catholic University, arranged for Jaffrey to teach pantomime at St. Michael's Playhouse at Winooski that summer. Father Hartke arranged for her to go to Catholic University on a partial scholarship and work at the Drama School library in order to meet her living expenses. After gaining her American work visa, Jaffrey sailed across the Atlantic on the to join Saeed at Winooski.