-->
Tram tracks glint in the afternoon sun as they bend with the
curve of a famous road in South Calcutta that on one end leads to a crematorium
and on the other, to a bridge built in honor of an honest engineer slain by gangsters. In far away
Shinjuku, a suburb of Tokyo, a venerable restaurant in operation since 1901,
serves a famous dish—a Japanese version of curry, that it calls Indo-Karii,
since 1927. What do the two have
in common? The street was named
after Rash Behari Bose*, the famous Indian revolutionary during the British colonial
times. The dish Karii is a
derivative of the Indian curry dishes that Mr. Rash Behari introduced to his
father-in-law, Mr. Soma Aizo, the affluent owner of the Nakamura-Ya restaurant,
while he was in exile in Japan.
It also explains the mystery of why this is called Karii,
when the rest of the world calls it curry—because it was a Bengali, who
pronounced it as such, that introduced it. And it would be fair to say that Indian curry, which enjoys household
familiarity in Japan, owes part of its legacy to Mr. Bose, who—appalled by the
British introduced milquetoast curries of the early 1900s in Japan—set matters
straight and laid down the law in this land of the rising sun, insofar at least
in matters concerning curry. In
the 1920s he convinced his father-in-law to offer a line of Indian dishes,
became an executive in the restaurant, and set up a supply chain for receiving
the ingredients.
Bose was a multitalented guy with vision. What we would call today in corporate parlance
an out-of-the-box thinker, a big picture guy, an ideation maverick, an
evangelist for a free India, a bit of a wild duck (don’t shoot yours), a man to
whom you could ascribe a powerpoint full of consultant strength epithets. Before his escape to Japan at the age
of around 30, Bose was already one of the founders of the Ghadar Party, and a
mastermind behind the assassination attempt on the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge in
1912. Hardinge was riding an
elephant in Chandni Chowk with his wife, attending a ceremony and the attempt
failed as a homemade bomb missed its mark, killing Hardinge’s attendant instead. As a result of all of this, Bose ended
up being hotly pursued by the British, and in 1915, he escaped to Japan and
switched to curry. Chicken he was
not. Influential pan-Asian
political forces in Japan reached out and helped carve out a home in Japan for
Bose. There is an old photograph
of Rash Behari Bose at a dinner with his Japanese benefactor on one side and
the future prime minister of Japan on the the other. He became a Japanese citizen in 1923. He repaid this
largesse with curry.
Nakamura-Ya still exists and is famous throughout Japan for
its curry dishes. Bose married the
owner’s daughter and had two children in the early 1920s. The restaurant’s website carries old
photographs of the Indian son-in-law (scroll thru http://www.nakamuraya.co.jp/photo/index.html)
and his wife in an Indian saree, draped Bengali style.
Lord Hardinge survived the assassination attempt and writes
about the episode in his autobiography, “My Indian Memoirs”. The memoir smells of the
professionalism of the colonial British, his work ethic and unshakable
conviction , yet also shows an absolute form of insensitivity towards Indians,
viewed always in wholesale form, rarely as individuals, unless of course they
were royalty. Hardinge makes an oblique mention of Rash Behari Bose, who took
the evening train back to his residence in Dehra Dun after the failed assassination
attempt, and upon reaching Dehra Dun, immediately presided at a meeting condemning
the attack on Hardinge and passing a motion against it.
Rash Behari’s son was a Japanese soldier who died in WWII
fighting the battle at Okinawa and his daughter, who lived into the 21st
century took reigns of the restaurant.
Rash Behari himself died in 1945 and two days after his death in Tokyo,
his house was destroyed by Allied bombing. In the 1940s he (along with Nair-San, another fascinating
expat also responsible for the first Indian restaurant in Japan in 1949) was
instrumental in the setting up of the mercenary Indian National Army, which was
then handed over in turnkey fashion to Subhas Bose. The Milwaukee Journal of Feb 19, 1942 heads a news item with
“Indian Traitor Active Again”, giving an account of Rash Behari aligning with
the Axis forces, as this “stock 56 year old Bengalese”.
The next time I am in Japan, which will be in January, I
hope to visit Nakamura-Ya. I hope
that it would have reopened, for it was shut down for renovations. As for Bose, the Ghadar Party is gone
and so is the army he founded. But
his Indo-Karii remains. I bet you
that its recipe calls for the addition of a spoon of sugar. Because, I believe, the Chandannagore
born Bose was a Ghoti.
* postscript: possibly Rash Behari Avenue was named after Rash Behari Ghosh (another famous politician from the early 1900s and not Bose).
* postscript: possibly Rash Behari Avenue was named after Rash Behari Ghosh (another famous politician from the early 1900s and not Bose).
