Around India's First Table serves Rashtrapati Bhavan's history in style

A book on dining and entertaining at Rashtrapati Bhavan has never been attempted before, but in the expert hands of Lizzie Collingham, author of one of the very few authoritative histories of Indian cuisine (Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors), and lifelong food researcher Salma Husain, it has turned out to be a banquet of delicious information packed into pages resplendently illustrated with Dheeraj Paul's photographs of the daily action inside the palace that the Father of the Nation wanted to be turned into a museum or a college.

Fortunately for India, Lord Mountbatten's argument in favour of continuing with what was then the Viceregal Lodge prevailed over the Mahatma's abolitionist argument, so we are fortunate to have an institution that, to paraphrase the words of India's last British viceroy, showcases the grandeur of the history and traditions of the world's largest democracy.

Mountbatten, incidentally, was the first occupant of the palace to make it a rule that at least 50 per cent of the guests at his garden parties and state dinners had to be Indians.

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When Viceroy's House opened on December 23, 1929, and the then Viceroy, Lord Irwin (later Halifax), moved into it for effectively four months from a humbler residence in north Delhi, his officers (and those of his successor, the Earl of Willingdon) exchanged a series of nervous letters with their bosses in London over the spiralling costs of running the establishment, which came with new-fangled technologies of the time and a massive kitchen.

It took the genius of a British accountant to reduce the Viceroy's tour expenditure fund by Rs 25,000 to help the new establishment tide over a looming financial crisis.

Pamela Mountbatten, Louis and Edwina's daughter, described the 340-room edifice sprawling across 200,000 square feet "a complete headache to live in", but it has been an institution that Independent India has gleefully inherited from its colonial masters.

You'll get a sense of that joy of inheritance as you criss-cross decades on a guided tour of the kitchens, dining rooms and banquet halls of Rashtrapati Bhavan in the pages of Around India's First Table (Publications Division, Government of India; Rs 1,185).

It introduces us to the staff who man the kitchens, including veterans such as the venerable Minhaj Ali, who has followed in the footsteps of his grandfather and father to serve Rashtrapati Bhavan for the past 42 years.

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The book starts with the inside story of the preparations for a state banquet for the visiting Emir of Qatar to introduce us to the numerous people, from cooks and halwais to gardeners, butlers and the eight-member Navy band, who keep the Rashtrapati Bhavan ceremonial machine in perfect order under the command of the comptroller and additional comptroller.

And then it takes us on a delicious edible history of Rashtrapati Bhavan.

From President R Venkataraman who introduced idlis and Himachali dishes into the Rashtrapati Bhavan list of staples to President KR Narayanan's wife Usha insisting on serving ada pradhaman, the classic payasam of Kerala, to Pervez Musharraf in 2001, to President Kalam inviting Chennai restaurateur Aruni Jacob in 2007 to lay out the food of the arid Kongunadu region of Tamil Nadu, to President Pranab Mukherjee's championing of Bengali delicacies, especially sweets, this book has a revelation in every page and you'll close it with the feeling that you're actually on the country's "First Table".

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)