It seems no amount of monosodium glutamate or lead can come between Maggi and its committed lovers, of which India has legions. The instant noodle has been withdrawn from the shelves after recent lab reports, but many Maggi lovers still hope it’s all just a bad dream, and it will pass.

Maggi was no ordinary snack. After omelette, bread and biscuit, it was perhaps the only foreign food the whole of India took to so heartily. Many say it got popular because it was easy to make and versatile. It indeed was, but the rise of Maggi in India was powered mainly by the post-liberalisation cultural economy. Maggi became an index of a globalising, modernising India. It supplied a pan-national icon the country needed two decades ago when its liberalising economy began bringing hordes of people from rural areas to cities, lifting them above regional identities and local habits.

Maggi tiptoed into middle-class kitchens, hardly making the noise a foreign interloper was supposed to. It took little time to overcome what little resistance there was and became a family member. The noodles and tastemaker never faced the rumours that dog most foreign food in a largely vegetarian middle class. It’s name exuded familiarity — Maggi could be an affable matriarch, a genial domestic help or a naughty kid sister. For many, it even sounded like a wide-eyed NRI cousin intent on learning about the home culture.

But Maggi was deceptively domestic. Though it was self-effacing — it could adapt to endless desi improvisations and had no qualms sitting with pyaaz and aam ka achaar — it was a powerful agent of change. In the great Indian melting pot growling with a totalising zeal, the British bread had to orientalise into a pakora, and biscuit had to pass through a severe identity crisis (it was fully accepted when it lost its trademark crispness and turned limp as Indians gleefully dipped it into hot chai). Maggi too was quite adaptable but it was more than food: it was the promise of modernity when India was raring to break free of traditions. It did not meet the fate of the bread pakora or the limp biscuit because it was a clever arbiter between tradition and modernity. It accepted local additions and changes while steadfastly retaining its own character and taste.

New apron-wearers

While Maggi brought the woman out of the kitchen, it put the man — albeit briefly — into a traditionally female domain. That was the first social change it engineered. The entry of the man into the kitchen marked the rise of the individual, the post-liberalisation globalised subject. Maggi gave him a chance to experiment with gender roles.

It also marked the rise of the Indian single. Private jobs grew, more people opted for higher education in metros and marriages were delayed for reasons of career. Maggi became a fellow traveller for such an individual who lived in a metro, away from the clan, and was open to experimentation.

This individual broke free of traditional food routines and its attendant social codes. He would eat whenever he liked. Liberated from a food culture that previously organised his daily life, he could now eat Maggi during lunch at his desk; a far cry from the man who would bring a four-deck steel tiffin to office and spend an hour eating and sharing it with colleagues amid banter.

Need for speed

Maggi was the very promise of modernity. Its ‘two-minute’ offer caught on not because Indians were looking to save time back in the early ’90s. It appealed to our growing fascination with speed — a key feature of modernity which promised to make lives easier by making them faster.

At that time, trunk calls were giving way to STD PCOs and India was beginning to see new car models. Maggi also embodied other key features of modernity — functionalism and utilitarianism. That’s why it became the staple of the post-liberalisation modern Indian subject. By transcending regional and ethnic diversity, it came the closest to our idea of national food.

Another secret of Maggi’s immense popularity was its special taste. It was the taste of desire. Like many modern commodities, it seemed, its goal was not to fill you up but have you come back for more. Maggi sold not food but hunger, a portable hunger you could carry anywhere. And that was the time when driven by foreign investment India was hungering for growth.

Maggi’s downfall was fated and the lab reports were only the trigger. When people have started questioning the myths of modernity — speed, efficiency and growth — the icons of modernity would naturally take a beating. The discourse of the poisoned food popularised by the global environment movement is fuelled by the discontents of modernity. Indians too will soon start moving from fast food to healthy choices. Maggi was a part of the rite of passage for a nation that started embracing global modernity two decades ago.

( Dharminder Kumaris a Delhi-based journalist )

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