‘They don’t want cooking shows to be like sports league’

Food according to Hansal Mehta is one of the strongest places memory lives And Khana Dil Se his way of holding on to his familyrsquos memories ldquoI realised the recipes my mother aunt and fatherinlaw made would slip away if no one held on to themrdquo reflected the filmmakerThe filmmaker known for politically charged dramas like Shahid Scam 1992 and Scoop says food became another way to talk about memory ldquoFood is one of the last places memory livesrdquo he says adding that the pilot episode is an attempt to ldquofind and reinventrdquo his motherrsquos UndhiyuSo Mehta went back to the kitchen for Khana Dil Se just as he had done in the early 1990s when he directed the genredefining cooking show Khana Khazana But this time therersquos a new ingredient mdash Artificial Intelligence AI Agreeing that filmmakersrsquo concerns about AI replacing artistes are legitimate he asserted that AI is not at the forefront of his show ldquoThe families and their recipes are what the show is about AI is a tool that helps me tell that story Working the conventional way means animation budgets period reconstructions and location shoots These costs put this kind of show out of reach for almost everyone AI lets me do that visual work at a fraction of the time and costrdquoHansal Mehta L and Sanjeev Kapoor extreme right on lsquoKhana Khazanarsquo set PicsInstagramEven as we have seen a surge in competitive cooking shows meaningful culinary storytelling is absent from Indian platforms Thatrsquos a void Mehta hopes to fill with his YouTube show ldquo We have travelandeat shows we have competitions we have celebrity chef formats What we donrsquot have are enough shows documenting our recipes Somebody Feed Phil is a wonderful show but itrsquos an outsiderrsquos affectionate gaze and thatrsquos not the same as an insiderrsquos archive India has conservatively a few hundred distinct culinary traditions most of them undocumented in any serious filmed form The platforms might not be wrong that conventional food shows have lost captivity Theyrsquore wrong about why Audiences havenrsquot stopped caring about food Theyrsquove stopped accepting cooking shows that have become more like a sports league than a kitchen The plan is to make something good enough that the question of where it sits primary network streaming somewhere we havenrsquot thought of yet becomes a happy problem rather than a strategic one Irsquove been around long enough to know you canrsquot reverseengineer a hit by deciding the platform first You make the show If itrsquos the show people are talking about the platforms come Irsquod love for ambitious archival slowcooked food television to find its way back to the kind of mainstream audience Khana Khazana once had Therersquos a generation that grew up watching Sanjeev on Sunday mornings and is now raising children of their own I think theyrsquore ready for a food show that takes them and the food seriously againThe show also leans heavily into the politics of food something Mehta says was inspired by Anthony Bourdainrsquos worldview ldquoBourdain was right about nearly everything and food being political was the most important thing he kept saying Take Gosht Nihari We tend to think of nihari as a single dish Lucknowrsquos Delhirsquos or Karachirsquos Itrsquos actually three different preparations across a border that didnrsquot exist when the recipe was written Nihari was perhaps born in 18thcentury Shahjahanabad as labourersrsquo food A pot left on dying embers overnight so it would be ready before fajr prayer The Nawabs of Awadh refined it in Lucknow perfumed it with kewra and rose After Partition it crossed into Karachi in the mouths of refugees and became a national obsession in Pakistan Three cities three versions of a single dish separated by a line on a map Most of the great Indian dishes are workingclass food that the courts later adopted not the other way around Nihari belonged to soldiers and dyers before it belonged to Nawabs Undhiyu was farmersrsquo communal food with multiple Patidar and Koli families contributing vegetables to a single pot buried in a shared field at Uttarayan Butter chicken which will be featured in our third episode was invented by Punjabi refugees in 1947 Delhi who had to figure out what to do with leftover tandoori chicken Almost every dish we celebrate as heritage was at some point a survival strategy