Opinion Moveable feasts
The last of the great proselytisers of Indian cuisine has stepped gently into the dark
In the popular imagination, Lord Gulam Noon will be remembered for replacing Yorkshire pudding with chicken tikka masala as the national dish of Britain. He never claimed to have invented this distressingly pink dish, which is unknown in India but comfort food for Britons of all classes, from yobs to peers. But he did popularise and democratise the dish by populating the shelves of Sainsburys and Tesco with it. Born on Mumbai’s Mohammed Ali Road, he took over his family’s sweetshop while in his teens and turned it around before migrating to the UK via the US. There, he sensed an opportunity in supermarkets, which had deodorised, de-tropicalised and de-glamorised ready to eat Indian food until it was as domesticated as boiled beef. The rest was history.
Noon was not a votary of the simple life. Elevated to the peerage, he became collateral damage in the cash-for-peerage scandal that brought disrepute to Tony Blair’s government. He backed Labour strongly but pooh-poohed the idea of a multicultural Britain, insisting that immigrants must integrate. And he was a strong voice against fundamentalism in the UK. He also maintained links with India. Indeed, he was a high-value survivor of the 2008 attack on the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai.
Noon was the last of the innovators who took Indian cuisine to Britain and made a killing. It is an illustrious line that goes back to Dean Mahomet, the man from Patna who took kebabs to London and Brighton in the Victorian era. The last to bow out, before Noon, was Lakhubai Pathak, who made a generation of immigrants at home in London with his pickles, and made the P.V. Narasimha Rao government back home mighty uncomfortable. Noon was the last man standing of the daring lot who internationalised Indian cuisine.
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