I remember first meeting J Inder Singh ‘Jiggs’ Kalra at an aphrodisiac food festival he had organised at the late Aangan restaurant in the Hyatt Regency. It was in the twilight of the 1990s — Delhi was still the Republic of Butter Chicken, and although Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who had just become Prime Minister, was famous for his evolved palate, we could count restaurants of note on our fingertips. And if they did get written about by lowly mortals like me, the reviews would appear in one distant page of the emerging city supplements.
Jiggs Kalra, with his portly frame, authoritative voice and fiery temper, however, was India’s first star culinary writer, who discovered new worlds of food right in our backyard and gentrified street food much before it became the fashionable thing to do.
The other well-regarded food writer of his time, Behram Contractor, who was better known as the satirist Busybee, was content writing about Mumbai and putting its hole-in-the-wall eateries on the map of the elite. Another ‘food influencer’ of the time, Camellia Panjabi, also from Mumbai, was busy opening iconic restaurants for the Taj Group, although she left her imprint on the gastronomic lexicon of the country in the form of the best-selling 50 Great Curries of India .
Jiggs, on the other hand, driven by his prodigious appetite for a deeper understanding of Indian cuisine, walked the food streets of India and discovered old-world masters such as Tunday in Lucknow and Ram Babu, Agra’s famous paranthewala.
He egged on chefs to get creative and bolster the Indian repertoire with dishes like tandoori salmon (Vajpayee’s favourite) and spun stories to popularise these inventions, the most famous of them being that of the toothless nawab for whom the kakori kebab had been created. He turned their inventors — at a time when they were barely seen outside kitchens — into rock stars, by promoting them in his columns, and on television. Many of the chefs he partnered with — from Arvind Saraswat and Richard Graham to Manjit Gill, Manu Mehta, NP Singh and SPS Chaudhury (who collaborated with him on his ageless book, Prashad) — attained fame and glory along with him.
An Army officer’s son, Jiggs went to Mayo College, Ajmer, and his juniors (it was Bharat Kapur, founder-editor of First City magazine, who narrated this story to me) remember how he was held up by the teachers as an old student worthy of emulation by the new generation. A favourite of Khushwant Singh during his stint as editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India , Jiggs was a part of what must have been Indian journalism’s most talented batch of trainees — his compatriots were Bachi Karkaria, his flat-mate (based in Dubai since 1984) Bikram Vohra, Anikendra Nath ‘Badshah’ Sen and Ramesh Chandran.
- It was in 1998, when I had started my foray into food writing, that I met Jiggs Kalra for the very first time. It was at a food festival at The Park, and to say that I was overawed would be an understatement. It was the first time in my career that I was meeting Colossus himself! Unsure of how to address him, I hesitantly asked him what I should call him. “Call me Jiggs,” he chuckled, with the slightest hint of a slur. “Unless,” he continued with a twinkle in his eye, “You are planning to give me some gaali ”. Not by word or deed did he give away that he had never heard of me, and for an aspiring food writer, I felt one among equals. I’m sure he’s drinking his fill of Amrit where he is, trying to decode the exact recipe!
He covered the 1971 War from the Western Sector for the Weekly (that was when Mayo teachers started singing his praises), but he became a name to be reckoned with only as a food writer. His friends remember how they would look forward to accompanying him to food reviews. And he would recall the names of many subsequently famous (or infamous) people — from Farrokh Bulsara (before he became Freddie Mercury) to Vijay Mallya — who would be at parties that Bikram and he would throw at their bachelor’s pad on Mount Pleasant Road in Mumbai. Here, Army-supply rum (Old Monk) made up for the ordinariness of the food.
I was last with an active Jiggs when he had gone to Agra to oversee the meals that Vajpayee and General Pervez Musharraf had during their fruitless summit in 2001. A few days after his return, he called me and I could barely recognise his voice. He was slurring and spoke with great difficulty. All I could understand was that he had suffered a paralytic stroke.
The stroke may have made him wheelchair-bound and affected his speech, but it did not bind his spirit. He suffered it gallantly and his mind kept ticking away. Whenever I would meet him at his son Zorawar’s successful restaurants, he would, as if by magic, recover his speech and have instructive stories to narrate, about a dish here, or an ingredient there. That’s the Jiggs that I will always remember. Feisty till the end — and truly, as his guru Khushwant Singh once described him, the ‘Czar of Indian Cuisine’.
The writer is an independent food and beverages writer. He is also the founder-director of the Tasting India Symposium.
