Art 5. Vol 5. 2026
On homesickness, identity, and the cities that feed us
There is a specific smell that stops a Malayali in the middle of a Delhi street. Curry leaves hitting hot coconut oil. Curry leaves popping. It travels further than any WhatsApp message from home, and it works faster than any therapy.
Me & My Partner thought about this after walking into Malabar Restaurant in Sukhdev Vihar, which serves Kerala food in a city whose default setting for “south Indian” is Idli, Dosa and our new Kannadiga Star ‘Benne’. Somewhere between the order and the first spicy bite, I realised I was not just on a date but I was looking at a political history served on banana leaf.
Delhi My Capital
Delhi has never been short of people who arrived from somewhere else. But the Malayali arrival has its own flavour. In the 1960s, when Delhi was a city of refugees and hardship, the Malayali community was just putting down roots, and the Central Secretariat, The Air Force and the city’s hospitals were already full of Malayali presence. They came as stenographers, clerks and nurses.
The nurses became the community’s backbone. Until recently, almost 80 per cent of the nurses in Delhi hospitals were Malayalis. If you have ever been admitted to a Delhi hospital and been looked after by someone who called you “mone” or “molé”, you have already been touched by Kerala’s migration politics. Their presence was so strong that an urban village like Sarai Julena became a mini Kerala.
That is a remarkable thing to do to a city and we have seen it before. If you are a student of IR or a keen observer of everything you may know about ‘Chinatowns’, these places acts as a cultural meeting point for Chinese people in different countries.
Food as Passport
Here is what a Kerala restaurant in Delhi actually sells other than the banana leaf Biriyani my partner made me try : permission to stop translating yourself.
All day, the Malayali in Delhi performs a small act of adaptation. The name gets shortened because nobody can manage it. The accent gets softened. “Where are you from?” gets answered with “Kerala” and followed by “oh, God’s own country!” or “so you must know the other Malayali I met once.” You are the ambassador of a state of thirty-five million people and a flourishing film industry.
Then you sit down to a plate of appam and stew, and for forty minutes nobody asks you to explain anything. The waiter understands your Malayalam, and the table next to you is having an argument about a cousin’s wedding. You are, briefly, unremarkable. Do not underestimate how luxurious that is.
The Great Delhi Misunderstanding
Delhi, to its credit, tries. It has learned that south Indian food is not one cuisine, that sambar in Kerala is not sambar in Karnataka, and that coconut is a food group and not a garnish. It has learned this slowly, the way it learns everything, by eating its way toward understanding.
But the funniest part of every cross-cultural encounter is the heat. Delhi assumes that all southern food is plain & blant. Kerala, meanwhile, assumes that Delhi’s food is designed by people who have never met a spice they did not drown in butter. Both are partly right. Both are mostly delicious. This is, if you squint, the entire history of Indian federalism: two regions looking at each other’s plates, deeply suspicious, and then secretly asking for a taste.
What Home Becomes
The writer M. Mukundan captured this half-belonging in his novel about Malayalis in Delhi, which won the JCB Prize for Literature in 2021 in translation and was praised as a portrait of Malayali migrant lives in the capital during a turbulent period. You can live in a city for forty years and still be a guest in it. You can also, just as quietly, become unable to live anywhere else.
The Malayali in Delhi eventually lives in two geographies at once. There is the Delhi of metro cards and monsoon traffic, and there is the Kerala of the mind, which gets greener and more perfect every year you are away. Home becomes a thing you visit twice a year with too many suitcases, and a thing you rebuild every evening in a kitchen in a rented flat.
A country is not held together by its constitution alone. It is held together by thousands of small acts of settling in: a nurse in a ward, a brave man in forces, a family frying fish in a Delhi kitchen, and a restaurant owner who decides, against all common sense, that this city needs proper Kerala food.
The Last Bite
So here is my theory of national integration, tested at one table in Sukhdev Vihar. India does not become one country by everyone becoming the same. It becomes one country when a person from Kollamcan find a taste of home in the capital, and a person from the capital can eat it and ask for more.
Do visit the Restaurant, order the Kothu parotta. Ask for extra Papadam. Learn one word of Malayalam. The cities that feed us are the ones we eventually belong to.
Sources
- Deccan Herald, “Nursing more ambitions” — https://www.deccanherald.com/archives/nursing-more-ambitions-2544903
- The Patriot, on Malayali nurses and Sarai Julena — https://thepatriot.in/?p=11866
- Bookmate listing, M. Mukundan’s Delhi (1960s Delhi and Malayali community) — https://tr.bookmate.com/books/phCZli1f
- Penguin/BGB listing, JCB Prize for Literature 2021 — https://bgb-online.de/delhi/16a46496769
- Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, on Kerala nurse migration — https://eth.mpg.de/6397670/projects
- Scroll.in, on Malayali nurses and migration — https://scroll.in/article/1079192/scroll_in
This piece is dedicated to Vishu. Thanks for sharing your little piece of Kollam with me.