Indian restaurants and white fantasy
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South Asian restaurants grew popular in postwar Britain thanks to ex-colonial men and lower to middle-class young men who wished to assert an identity contrary to their situations. For the young men, frequenting cheap curry restaurants was a form of rebellion against the stuffy traditions of their parents' generations and also an attempt to feel a sense of power over another when their lower economic standing demoralized them. ‘“The waiters would all be dressed up in sort of white shirts and dickey bows, and be very servile sort of in nature,” Taylor recalled, “and young people used to think, I suppose, they were a bit important, going to a place where the waiters were very servile” (Buettner 154). British men of the older generation who worked in the subcontinent and had since returned patronized higher class “Indian” restaurants in search of something similar though more tangibly nostalgic, to reminisce on the treatment more so than the food that their middle class socioeconomic status afforded them in India but no longer did back home. “Diners who wanted to be treated like “sahibs” again by attentive “native” servants and cooks had come to the right place. Veeraswamy’s allowed diners who had “been out East... to eat again a real curry and remember the days when they were important functionaries on salary instead of ‘retired’ on pension” (Buettner 149). These British men were grasping for a sense of power in post-colonial times and Indian restaurants became a site to enact their fantasies. It was an assertion of masculinity if social/economic subjugation is considered emasculation. In the process, many of these restaurants run and staffed by men changed to accommodate the tastes of their white customers, while South Asian women were left with the responsibility of preserving the authenticity and culture that their male counterparts had forsaken, specifically within the confines of the domestic realm.