Madhur Jaffrey, ‘the lovely lady who teaches us Indian cookery on television and in books,’ was a Rada-trained actor before becoming a ‘household name’, writes Janet Watts in the Observer Magazine on 9 January 1983. Now she is resuming her acting career in James Ivory’s latest film, Heat and Dust. She plays the wicked old Begum, manipulative mother to the Nawab (played by Shashi Kapoor)who makes ‘a dishonest woman of a ravishing English rose’ (played by Greta Scacchi).
‘I was always a rebel,’ she tells Watts from her New York home. Born into an ‘upper-upper-middle-class’ family, her matriarch grandmother ruled the women in the Delhi household ‘like a boss’. Women and, Jaffrey later realised, men too, were oppressed. ‘Everything in her birthright,’ writes Watts, ‘gave her claustrophobia.’
Her father called her acting a ‘hobby’, she called it ‘the most wonderful escape’, even if ‘I was short and thin and had a big nose.’ After Rada, she went to America, married the actor Saeed Jaffrey and had three daughters. The couple introduced James Ivory to Ismail Merchant and Jaffrey was cast in their 1965 film Shakespeare Wallah. She worried about not looking right. ‘I still do!’ she adds. She won Best Actress at the 1965 Berlin Film Festival.
Afterwards, she asked her mother to send her the ‘now-famous letters’ full of Indian recipes, got divorced and began writing cookery books. Heat and Dust takes her back, not only to her acting days, but to a past of homegrown oppression and western colonialism.
She feels sympathy for the British Raj that has gone, the tourists who are still coming. Jaffrey clarifies: ‘India can suck out all your starch, your crisp European consciousness, and everything you hold dear can seem to slip out into this vast Indian vastness.’
Not for Jaffrey, though. ‘I’m part of the vastness,’ she enthuses, ‘I’m its product. It’s taking nothing away from me; because I am it.’ She feels nourished by it, says Watts, as readers do by her personal tastes of India.’
