Four questions for Arya Lovekar

In the heart of Berlin’s vibrant and multifaceted food scene, South Asian chefs and culinary practitioners play a key role in navigating the complex web of cultural practice and mediation. As part of the Humboldt Internship Program, Arya Lovekar embarked on a journey to explore the ways in which food, as both an everyday necessity and cultural practice, bridges divides within the South Asian diaspora in Berlin. Arya’s research investigates how Indian and South Asian chefs construct cultural identities through food in response to both the diverse Berlin environment and the expectations of their various customer groups. In this conversation, Arya shares experiences, challenges and insights, shedding light on the role of food in cultural representation, identity-building and community cohesion across the diasporic landscape.

Arya Lovekar during a research presentation at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (c) NCS

As a research intern, how do you view your role within the research process in comparison to that of an MA student? Have your responsibilities and your perspective on the university evolved throughout the course of your internship?

As a research intern, I had much more flexibility in my research than as an MA student, where I am more limited by the disciplinary boundaries of my degree program. For the research internship, I was able to use multiple disciplinary lenses where applicable, and I found this very useful when designing the methodology of the project. Meeting other researchers at various levels in their careers has also helped me understand how I and the work I am interested in might fit into a university structure. Working as part of a larger project was a useful guideline, and it helped focus my work.

What inspired you to focus your research on chefs and restaurants in Berlin, and how do you see their role in bridging cultural gaps through food?

My brief time working in an Indian restaurant and the experience of cooking for myself and others as a migrant to Belgium made me think a lot about how food can connect or divide people, within and across communities that are uniquely imagined by every person in the group. I wanted to focus on chefs and restaurants partly because they are methodologically easier to access than people’s food practices in their homes, but also because restaurants are a site for discussing and sharing food with those who may be unfamiliar with it. When restaurants present food to their customers, they are constructing an image of their claimed culture and the wants of their customer base, and this means that it is not only food that is conveyed, but notions of how a people engages in this most mundane and everyday activity of eating. The image of a community can be built for supposed insiders and outsiders in such a setting, and many cultural tensions contribute to the construction of this image, all through food, which is not merely sustenance but an active cultural practice.

What insights have you gained about the diversity of food cultures in Berlin, and how does the city’s pluricultural environment shape the way Indian and South Asian chefs tailor their dishes to different customer groups?

I have learned that diaspora carry their social beliefs with them in a new country and express them through their food, and that there is a contradiction between the diversity and uniformity of food cultures in Berlin. Although there are many food cultures here, each one is often internally uniform, prioritising certain sections of the diaspora even from the same part of the world. As a result, when those not from South Asia eat South Asian food in Berlin, they are learning about a very carefully constructed image of South Asia. This image has been constructed with reference to social divides within South Asian, but also with the aim of sanitising and re-writing South Asia for a ‘Western’ audience, indicating a type of contemporary self-Orientalising. South Asian food benefits from Berlin’s culture of veganism and restaurants that serve South Asian food often underline that vegan and vegetarian food appears frequently in the standard fare from this part of the world.

What question has most frequently shaped your thinking during your research, and how has your perspective on the role of chefs in Berlin evolved throughout your internship?

I have been trying to understand what the ‘right’ way is for a South Asian migrant to construct themselves in the public eye in Berlin. Each migrant I have spoken to has made their own self-image to cater to so many different social tensions, and this aligns with my own experience as a migrant in Belgium and now in Berlin.

I started out seeing chefs in Berlin as somewhat romanticised figures, bringing their heritage with them and starting restaurants out of a love for food and cultural exchange. While I expected to see some deviations from this, I had not realised that much of this narrative comes from the public image of specific restaurants who wish to (truthfully or not) present themselves in this way. I found it more useful to think of the restaurant as a whole as a cultural practitioner, with all the individuals who work there entering this setting with their own reasons for participating in this cultural practice.

I enjoyed my conversations with restaurant managers, cooks, and waiters during this project, as well as with migrants not in the restaurant industry but with interesting relationships with what they perceived as “their” food. I unexpectedly spoke at length with a bookstore owner about the experience of being a migrant and eating with others. I learned that speaking in Hindi will get me further in these con-versations than English will. I learned that some people are more suspicious of people asking
questions as I did, while others are happy to tell me startling things I did not ask about, but nevertheless found fascinating.

It turns out that it is possible to find both connection and great loneliness in these
conversations, and sometimes both at once. I think there is a lot more to learn here, and more very interesting people I hope to talk to about this in the future.

(the questions were asked by Nadja-Christina Schneider)