Articles
Cadbury Weds Mishti:
Fusion, Taste and Selling ‘Authenticity’
2021 Volume 11 Pages 47-60
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2021 Volume 11 Pages 47-60
This essay is an ethnography of ‘Cadbury Mishti’1 – a new taxonomic category generated by the promotional campaign jointly run by a Chocolate giant and the Branding Solutions Team owned by Eastern India’s largest Media house. Since 2011, sweetshops from Kolkata and other districts had been invited to participate in a three to four-month long competition to create chocolate-based delicacies. Sweets in Bengal are primarily made from chhana (coagulated milk separated from whey water) and kheer (desiccated milk). Through an ethnographic engagement with the process of making of ‘Cadbury Mishti’ I demonstrate how ‘inter-referentiality’ of place, and cultural sameness created through kin-ties go into the making of ‘fusion food’ in today’s India. This process is remarkably unique. Here the technology remains local and the core narrative of ‘authenticity’ is hinged on the celebration of craftsmanship.
These days, one of the most sought after sweets in wedding feasts across Kolkata2 is baked rosogolla – a signature item of Balaram Mullick – a sweetshop in Kolkata known for introducing baking techniques to prepare innovative sweets. Baked rosogolla takes its name from a baked layer of reduced milk that is added to the rosogolla. The reduced milk is baked to perfection in order to have a creamy, caramelised coating on top of soft, spongy-textured, pingpong ball-shaped, processed chhana. Chhana is the foremost among the milk derivatives which are the base ingredients of sweets in Eastern India and West Bengal. Items like baked rosogolla celebrate an inspired marriage between local ingredients and special cooking techniques from confectionery shops. Baked rosogolla can easily be categorised with another group of ‘fusion’ wonders from sweetmakers. While assimilating cooking techniques from the baking industry, sweetshops in Kolkata have been instrumental in the rise of this new category – ‘Cadbury Mishti’. Cadbury, as I will discuss in the following sections, is known for its brand of chocolates. In recent years, Cadbury through its advertisements and packaging has been positioning its chocolates as meetha, the Hindi equivalent for dessert. It has also partnered with a leading media house to organise an annual competition where local sweet makers (who would otherwise have made sweets only from milk and milk- derivative bases) are encouraged to experiment with integrating Cadbury's chocolate products in their sweets. This competition has been responsible for a new genre of sweets available at a slightly higher price in sweetshops across Kolkata. Popularly referred to as Cadbury sweets, or in Bangla, Cadbury Mishti, they have become popular and permanent fixtures in sweetshop showcases. How do we understand and locate Cadbury Mishti in the sweetscape of Bengal?
The introduction of ‘Western’ foods into ‘everyday’ ‘Bengali middle class’ diet was partly fuelled by the changes brought about by economic liberalisation, providing a sea change in consumer cultures across India. Cadbury Mishti could be hailed as yet another food item that gained entry into urban middle-class homes in 2000, like pasta, burgers, and pizza etc. In her work on Bengali middle-class households, Donner draws our attention to the introduction of ‘Western’ food items in the weekly diet of a household. Donner (2008) recounts that even by 1996, food items such as ‘a variety of pasta, frozen pizzas, tomato products’ would fly off the shelves from the local stores in Calcutta (renamed Kolkata in 2001) – a testimony to the new adjustments and additions to the ‘Bengali’ staple diet of rice and fish. She argues that though the staple diet of rice and fish remained unchanged, the introduction of these new foods brought a transformative change in both domestic cooking and outdoor dining cultures. In her ethnographic work on McDonalds and junk food, Anjali Bhatia shows how children became targets of this ever expanding consumer culture directed towards the middle class (Bhatia 2018). She points to Fernandes’s (2006) work for whom the ‘symbolic representation of the benefits of the India’s embrace of globalisation’ are evident in ‘the lifestyles of the new middle classes’ (Bhatia 2018:131). Ray and Srinivas (2012) in their work observe that though ‘globalization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries’ have become synonymous with ‘Americanization’3, ‘transmigrating middle classes’ seem to share a certain pattern (Ray and Srinivas 2012: 8). Without losing sight of the middle-classness of globalisation, I propose to extend how within Indian food studies one can emphasise ‘the weight of localized bodies caught in globalized motion’ (Ray and Srinivas 2012: 17).
Bhatia in her work on McDonalds in India refers to a ‘consumption-oriented global modernity’ (Bhatia 2018: 133). In this consumption-oriented global modernity, Bhatia demonstrates how children of middle-class households are drawn into the consumerist ethos. However, a biography of the menu of McDonalds reveals the ‘symbolic economy of globalisation’ or trends of ‘glocal’ food (Zukin 1995). McDonalds claims the ‘McAloo Tikki Burger’ – a burger with a filling of patties made from potato mix - is ‘a truly “glocal” burger with local tastes and flavours put together using McDonald’s globally renowned processes and techniques’.4 Presently the McAloo Tikki burger is no more exclusive to Indian outlets. It can be easily found globally. The role of the mass media – especially via newspaper food columns and cable TV channels with celebrity chef led shows – has been pivotal in shifting the food-related popular discourse towards glocality in general, and fusion food in particular.
A quick overview of discussions on ‘fusion food’ reveals that the idea of fusion food gained momentum in the 1970s among the French chefs. There are debates regarding the origin of the term fusion cuisine and my purpose here is not to offer a historical reading of the term fusion cooking. The idea of ‘fusion food’ in India can be traced to restaurant cultures across metros. Sona Bahadur, a food writer and former editor of BBC Good Food Magazine traces the journey of fusion food in India back to the 1990s. As mentioned earlier, the 1990s also marked the beginning of the liberalisation of the Indian economy. It fuelled great changes in the culinary landscape of India with international food giants making a foray into Indian markets. Fast food giants such as McDonalds set up their first outlet in Delhi as early as 1996. Bahadur (2016) feels that there are two phases of fusion experiments in restaurant spaces. The first phase is between the 1990s and 2000 and the second phase is post 2010. According to her, the first phase is dominated by the token use of ‘foreign’ ingredients such as lemongrass, or balsamic vinegar, while the second phase is anchored in cross-cultural inspirations. Commenting on the first phase, she writes that many of them ‘amounted to culinary crimes’. She observes that people relied on the heavy-handed use of lemongrass, balsamic vinegar and other ingredients unlike today’s subtler ‘fusion food’ which is primarily around cross-culture borrowings. Abhijit Saha, a well-known chef, tells Sona Bahadur that ‘contemporary fusion food’ is more about ‘assimilating, mastering and revolutionising food traditions’. Referring to these shifts, he feels today’s ‘Indian hybrids’ are inspired by regional cuisines in India. As an example, he draws our attention to ‘The Bombay Canteen’s5 menu, the videshi style ‘Baingan Bake’6, which elevates the humble yet delicious Maharashtrian classic bharli vangi7 by preparing it in the style of an eggplant parmigiana’ (Bahadur 2016).
Abhijit Saha’s comment is useful to understand how cooking techniques with local ingredients shape today’s ‘fusion cuisine’ as far as dining out trends are concerned. Kapoor (2014), one of the most widely-known Indian chefs, in the blog post ‘Fusion is here to stay’ argues that fusion cuisine could involve firstly, a mix of cuisines (regional and international), and secondly, it could imply the borrowing of cooking techniques from other cuisines or the blending of ingredients. What is significant in this story of innovation at the cusp of globalisation is a new term that came to be popularised in this celebration of global admixing – ‘fusion’.
What is ‘fusion’ food in today’s India? Building upon Sanjeev Kapoor's and Abhijit Saha's statements, I propose to argue that fusion food is an assemblage of technologies and ingredients which most importantly, is able to establish a continuity between the authentic and the new. By following the biography of ‘Cadbury Mishti’ – a new taxonomical category in today’s urban food map of Kolkata and neighbouring districts – I argue that the concept of ‘inter-referentiality’ (McWilliams 2006) is useful in understanding the making of fusion food. I draw upon three ideas – first, the politics of place; second, cultural sameness through kinship; and finally, the branding of chocolate-flavoured mishti as Cadbury Mishti – to understand how a narrative of authenticity is developed through technological changes, creating a ‘fusion food’ that ticks all the boxes.
The semantics of technology have been at the heart of debates on fusion food. Whose ingredients? Whose technology? Given the role of technology in the development of highbrow cuisine, it is important to ask how ideas of technology lie at the heart of ‘fusion’ experiments in craft-based food items. How do narratives of authenticity effortlessly run parallel to those of innovation? Rather, is there a need to create a seamless narrative of continuity in regard to the authentic? This paper takes a leaf out of my larger ethnographical work on sweet making in Bengal to understand the newly emergent category of ‘Cadbury Mishti’ – the latest avatar of chocolate-flavoured sweets in Bengal.8 Cadbury is one of the leading chocolate brands in India – a company of Kraft foods. Since 2011, Cadbury partnered with ABP One – the branding solutions team of a leading media group of Eastern India, ABP (Anandabazar Patrika) – to launch the campaign ‘Cadbury Mishti Shera Shrishti’ (literally meaning ‘Cadbury Sweets, The Best Creation’). As a part of this campaign, sweetshops from Kolkata and other peri-urban areas participated in a competition to produce sweets using Cadbury chocolate as an ingredient. Sweets in Bengal are synonymous with chhana, a milk intermediate base prepared from coagulation of milk through separation of whey water. Three sweetening agents are crucial for cooking of chhana: sugar, date palm jaggery and sucralose (sugar substitute specially used to make low-calorie /diabetic sweets). Cadbury wanted to introduce and rebrand itself as the fourth important sweetening agent. I argue that by using various cultural motifs like that of marriage, football, cinema and music, the ‘Cadbury Mishti Shera Shrishti’ campaign, introduced a new axis of ‘inter-referentiality’ into the life of Cadbury Mishti as a fusion, both in terms of ingredients and by communicating a mixed cultural lexicon via novel campaigns that borrow from local cultural idioms.
In this essay, I engage with one such campaign, ‘Cadbury weds Mishti’, woven around the theme of marriage. This campaign was launched in 2013 with select sweetshops in West Bengal. Sweetshops were invited to create a chocolate flavoured sweet and this newly created item was widely advertised in newspapers and other web-portals and the best sweet was chosen on the basis of votes. Every sweetshop was given a unique number. The customer was to dial that unique number once and each call was counted as a vote. Every customer was entitled to only one vote. In an interview with a web portal on this campaign, Anil Vishwanathan, the Vice President of Cadbury commented, ‘Kolkata is a big mithai9 market and a fusion of chocolate and mithai presents a great opportunity for us to build even stronger relevance here’ (Gupta 2013).
By 2012, the first phase of my field work, the Cadbury Mishti campaign was gaining momentum. Later, in 2015 and 2016, I returned to West Bengal in an attempt to understand the phenomenon of ‘Cadbury Mishti’. As part of this fieldwork, I interviewed owners of the sweetshops that participated in the campaign, and also some sweetshops that did not participate in the campaign. This work also draws upon the audio-visual branding exercises and print advertisements which played an integral role in establishing Cadbury Mishti.
In India, chocolate was synonymous with children and by the 1990s, many reports suggested that Cadbury Diary Milk had reached a stagnation point in sales. Piyush Pandey, the then Creative Director of Ogilvy and Mather came up with an advertisement that changed public perceptions of Cadbury. The advertisement was called ‘the real taste of life’ (asli swaad zindagi ka). In it, a girl leaps with joy when the cricketer tosses a six. She makes her way into the cricket field, dancing. The Hindi lyrics of the jingle ‘Kuchh khas hain hum sabhi mein’ (There is something special in all of us) catches the nation’s attention, writes Swati (Daftuar 2015). This Hindi jingle ends with a line stating that Cadbury is a real taste of life. Not only did this advertisement encourage a new target group – adults: young, middle age and old – to indulge in the new taste but it also described the new taste in their lives. This taste is sweetness. In another advertisement, Cadbury reinvented itself as an everyday dessert – Meethe mein kuch meetha ho jaye (Let us have sweets for dessert). The setting of the advertisement is a family of grandparents, parents and child sitting around the dining table. The child is making faces as the mother serves her vegetables. We hear a male voice asking aaj meethe mein kya hain (What is there for dessert?). The grandmother points to the Cadbury chocolate. The child opens the wrapper and licks the Cadbury. She tells her grandmother, ‘jootha ho gaya’10. Grandmother protests. She challenges her granddaughter that she would love to eat the leftovers. The granddaughter starts to whine. The mother gets a plate with Cadbury Dairy Milk and blocks of chocolate resembling a plate of sweets. Everyone is happy.
Instead of talking about the new flavor or positioning itself as chocolate, Cadbury Diary Milk, through a series of television advertisements, claims its status as a meetha – a sweet that is on a par with the regional sweets. Most of these advertisements target a new audience. The series of campaigns around kuchh meetha ho jaye targets the old, young and children. If Cadbury Dairy Milk was about eating desserts everyday (boosting consumption), with Cadbury Celebrations the company encouraged the audience to use it as a gift for festivities ranging from Eid11, to Diwali12, to Raksha Bandhan13. With this, Cadbury aligned itself with the ritual role of giving sweets as a gift. One of the interesting advertisements was that of a couple bearing a Hindu surname visiting a Muslim household with a box of Cadbury celebrations. The man and woman spot a woman with a tiffin box of sheer qurma (a traditional sweet associated with Eid). They look at their box of Cadbury Celebrations and hesitantly tell the host, ‘this is something different’ to which the host of the family says ‘meetha to meetha hota hain’ (implying this is sweet as well). The advertisement ends with a voiceover, ‘Is Eid kuchh achha ho jaye, kuchh meetha ho jaye (Let us have something nice this Eid, let us have some sweets)’. Cadbury’s self referentiality as a sweet/meetha in these advertisements was a way to find a new cultural lexicon and signify a change of meaning in the lifestyle of urban middle-class households.
What is important here, is how Cadbury transitioned from being a block of chocolate to Cadbury Celebrations, where single portions of chocolate combined with dry fruits and nuts are neatly arranged like a box of sweets. Could this be understood as cultural appropriation? The repositioning of Cadbury is like any other story of global food giants trying to innovate according to social and cultural food habits based on dietary preferences stemming from local religious rules of proscription and prohibition. Most fast food giants across India - such as McDonalds or Kentucky Fried Chicken - have introduced potato and paneer-based dishes and this move is usually read as globalization, Mcdonaldisation and glocalisation. Moving beyond these three frameworks, I propose to see Cadbury’s positioning itself as meetha as a way of Cadbury, without changing its taste, finding a new meaning through the cultural lexicons of India’s relationship with sweets. India is home to various regional traditions of sweet-making. Yet, Cadbury builds an image using the pan-‘Indian’ language of meetha through ‘associational’ ideas of place-making in its advertisements. ‘Place’, in the sense of physical geographies, remains absent in these advertisements. The settings are primarily homes, parks, places that acknowledge religious differences, intergenerational divides, and in a sense, the new urban India. It is this imaginary place-making of India through a ritual landscape that allows Cadbury to find a ‘referential’ semantic turn without any change of taste. Placemaking has been central to anthropological work on food studies globally and the case of India is no different. In the context of Bengal, three important works deserve a special mention. Ray (2015) in her historical scholarship on Culinary Cultures in Colonial India alerts us to the influences the British empire had on the gastronomic culture of Bengal. Her extensive discussion of the British experiments with rice, wheat, manioc or cassava, potato, carrots, barley, and peas point to how ‘foreign’ food became part of the food culture of Bengal. In other words, the introduction of foreign food is not new and predates ‘globalisation’. Globalisation introduces a new dimension to local supply chains. Donner in her work on everyday middle class ‘Bengali’ cites the example of Arambagh, a grocery store which started as a poultry farm but slowly diversifies into stocking frozen meat (Donner 2008). Local food suppliers in this case start to ape global models of frozen foods. The need for Arambagh to diversify is not the mere struggle of a food business responding to the entry of the western foods in grocery stores, but also an example of how food cultures are born through histories of ‘convergence’ (Banerjee-Dube 2016). Banerjee–Dube also points to Cusack’s (2000) work to show that ‘food is neither neutral not innocent but a product of dominant ideologies and power structures’ (Banerjee –Dube 2016: 2).
While the dominant scholarship on food studies indicates how ideologies and power have transformed foodways, there has been some lack of scholarly attention to biographies of food substances or single dishes. I read Janeja’s ethnographic work on everyday food in Bengal as an important departure (Janeja 2010). She argues how food is produced in a ‘foodscape’ – a concept she introduces in her ethnography on the making of Bengali food across middle-class households in post-colonial Dhaka and Kolkata. Janeja points to the plurality of actants (person, place and thing) of a normal foodscape (Janeja 2010: 16) and how a sense of place emerges through configurations of relations (Janeja 2010: 51). The actants of a foodscape can shift depending on the nature of food and geographies, but they provide an important axis to understand why placemaking remains central through metonymic associations of Cadbury as meetha. Two significant moments mark Cadbury’s journey to find a place for itself as an Indian sweet: one to position itself as a meetha/sweet, and then to launch a range of products that could be exchanged as part of Hindu and Muslim celebrations as gift. These two metonymic transformations pave the way for entering eastern India, specifically Kolkata through a decade long campaign. If the first phase of transformations of the foodscape is mediated through multimodal engagements and repackaging through the launch of a sweet box, in the next phase, Cadbury changes its taste. In the next section, I follow one of the Cadbury Mishti campaigns of 2013 – ‘Cadbury weds Mishti’.
In 2015, I met Dipanjan Dutta, Deputy General Manager of ABP One, and asked him about the development of the Cadbury Mishti campaign. He recalls that in one of their meetings, the client (Cadbury) pointed out that though Bengal is known for its sweet tooth, their growth had been disproportionately low.14 He adds that ABP One is a team of brand solutions and provides integrated marketing solutions for brands in Bengal and eastern India. This initiative began six years back. Dipanjan says it is important to understand that mishti has a deep-rooted culinary practice and it is the dessert to go for across age groups. As a strategy they felt that it was important not to replace but to explore possibilities of marriage15 and through that, they intended to initiate a habitual change. He says it was important to present the customer with a new taste - a taste of Cadbury and a taste of sweet without one overpowering the other. He proudly adds that due to a sustained interest from the brand, ABP and Cadbury have tried out five different initiatives with sweetshops under various themes. ABP group is the owner of the Anandbazar Patrika, one of the oldest Bengali newspapers, and of The Telegraph, one of the popular English dailies in Eastern India. It also has stakes in audio-visual media. This campaign was launched through all these media outlets in 2011. Each year, the campaign focused on a new theme. Selected shops from Kolkata and neighbouring towns participated in a month-long competition where they created new items from a combination of Cadbury products and traditional ingredients used for sweets. Customers are invited to vote for their favourite sweetshop and chocolate sweet varieties and after counting, the winner is declared with much fanfare.
On 18 January 2013, most leading news dailies and web portals published a news article about the grand wedding celebrations between Cadbury and Mishti. The advertorial in The Telegraph discussed the wedding preparations in detail. According to this ‘news article’, ‘the big fat Indian wedding will see 19 sweet chains across Calcutta, Barasat, Howrah and Durgapur signing up to create signature sweets fusing Cadbury with mishti’ (Das and Dutta 2013). Actors from the local film industry were roped in to act as kith and kin of the bride. Mishti is also a gendered acronym for sweetness (a common pet name for Bengali girls as well) and sweets are widely perceived as ‘highly gendered foods’. Holtzman (2016) in his work argues that in Japan sweets have traditionally been viewed as a food for women and children compared to alcohol which is associated with men (Holtzman 2016: 133). Similarly, in Bengal, the word mishti is used both for desserts as well as an adjective to indicate pleasant appearance and behaviour of females compared to males. Therefore, it is not a mere coincidence that in this mythical wedding of objects, ‘Mishti’ comes to be associated with the bride compared to the Cadbury chocolate who is perceived as the groom. The obvious association of Mishti as the daughter is so entrenched that Mishti’s gendering happens through the ‘other’ - in this case ‘the hero, the chocolate, Cadbury’. ‘Yes, it’s Mishti’s wedding and guess who the groom is? Everyone’s favourite, the chocolate-boy hero, Mr. Cadbury!’ read the opening lines of a newspaper article (Das and Dutta 2013). On the web portal of this campaign – ‘Cadbury Mishti Shera Shristi’ - a post ‘Mishtir Biye’ (Mishti’s marriage) introduced Mishti as Miss and Cadbury as Mister. The post invited the audience to bless the couple by dialling in for their favourite sweet. A list of noted film and TV personalities from West Bengal appear in the long guest list who had apparently accepted the invitation through R.S.V.P. (Singh 2013). What is significant here is how Mishti’s kin life is mapped. The long list of adaptive kin roles includes brother and sister-in-law, grandfather, father’s sister, father’s younger brother and younger brother’s wife, maternal uncle and aunt, best friend, brother and niece. Interestingly, there is no mention of Mishti’s parents, or grandmother. Mishti is feminized and given the status of a ‘Hindu’ bride who is woven into the kith and kin ties of a Hindu Bengali family and is ready to wed Cadbury. The stereotypes of fair and dark circulate in the public statements and references to the bride and groom. The pressures of the wedding festivity are on the bride’s family and Cadbury is presented as the foreign groom. Throughout the campaign, Mr. Cadbury is the son-in-law (jamai) and there is no reference to any kith and kin of Cadbury.
On 12 January 2013, wedding invitations in the form of three audio visual teasers were released. These wedding invites also introduced the audience to Mishti’s kith and kin. The first wedding invite introduced the audience to Mishti’s dadu (grandfather) who is seen talking to Mishti’s dada (elder brother). He is not happy with the clumsy arrangements. Mishti’s mama (mother’s brother) and mami (mother’s brother’s wife) walk in with two clay pots of sweets and Mami is not too happy with the marigold flowers kept for the gate. She enquires about tuberoses to which Mishti’s brother responds, while taking a bite of Cadbury, that preparations are underway. The advertisement ends with the grandfather extending an invite for Mishti’s wedding. In teaser two, the relatives are busy choosing a Benarasi saree – a saree associated with the Bengali bride’s attire. The advertisement opens with a conch shell sound and with Mishti’s pishi (father’s sister), kakima (father’s younger brother’s wife) and kaku (father’s younger brother) in a saree shop choosing a Benarasi saree for the bride. They too invite the audience for Mishti’s wedding. Kaku asks kakima (aunt) and pishi (paternal aunt) not to rush through the shopping while taking bites from a Cadbury chocolate bar. In the third and final wedding teaser, we come across Mishti’s bondhu (friend), bhai (younger brother), and boudi (elder brother’s wife), who are busy with preparing the tatwa gift trays. Mishti’s friend takes the responsibility of preparing tatwa to impress the groom’s family. There are two kinds of ceremonial exchange of gifts on two designated days. The groom’s family sends in gaye holud tatwa (literally meaning gift exchange along with turmeric paste ceremony) and the bride’s family sends in phool sajya tatwa to mark the consummation of marriage ceremony.
On 16 January, a wedding song was released inviting the audience to bless the couple. In this musical Mishti’s relatives sing and dance and invite the audience to bless (ashirbad) the couple. Ashirbad (literally meaning ceremonial blessing of the prospective bride and groom) is an important part of the Bengali Hindu weddings and no ashirbad is complete without feasting on sweets; ‘ashirbad’ emblazoned sandesh (in Bangla script) is specially produced and sold to mark this occasion. All the kith and kin of Mishti who are introduced to us in the three teasers take part in the song and dance to invite the audience to the wedding. The song predominantly is set to the tune of a shehnai, an instrument played live or in recorded form at most Bengali Hindu weddings. Several other motifs such as the palanquin and topor (headgear of the groom) commonly associated with the wedding festivities are part of this foot-tapping wedding song.
Noted TV and film actors from Tollywood (the Bengali film industry) are roped in to play Mishti’s relatives. The news article in The Telegraph promised that like good relatives they take turns to visit different sweetshops every month. In one of articles, Paran Bandopadhyay, an actor essaying the role of Mishti’s dadu is initially skeptical of the marriage because of the groom’s complexion. Mishti’s marriage reminds him of the marriage between dolls. The projection of Cadbury as a masculine figure and sweets as a female subject has deeper roots in the use of Mishti as an adjective to complement certain feminine attributes. Cadbury is presented in this wedding as the bideshi jamai (the foreign son- in-law). There are constant parallels drawn between tall, dark and handsome and the colour of the chocolate in the remarks of the relatives or their guests. For some, Cadbury became Mr. Cadbury, and for others he is straight out of a Mills and Boon novel.16
A month later, on 13 February 2013, the groom’s 24 feet tall topor was unveiled near the multiplex of the Salt Lake City Centre shopping mall. The topor is a ritual headgear made of sholapith given by the bride’s family to the groom. In this case, the topor is introduced with full fanfare by the actors standing in for Mishti’s father’s sister and brother and a TV personality.
On 24 February, the curtain came down on this massive wedding as customers registered their blessings for the newly-wedded creations by dialing the aforementioned special zipdial number, one per shop. Provisions were in place to avoid multiple calls from a single caller. Each of these shops were decorated as a miniature mandap (a makeshift structure where the wedding ceremonies are conducted), with the employees in wedding attire.
According to an article in The Telegraph, there was an ‘avalanche’ of blessings in the form of calls and text messages. The celebrations did not stop there. There were comparisons between likes garnered by the engagement of Facebook’s founder and Mishti and Cadbury’s wedding. One article reads, ‘And if Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement of his marriage to Priscilla Chan garnered 1,045,272 likes on the social networking site, Mishti and Cadbury won hands down with 2,297,000 “blessings”!’ (Dutta and Das 2013). Finally the celebrations came to an end on 29 April 2013, when the award winners were announced. Kasturi Sweets (a first-time entry into the competition) from Howrah was the winner. Three establishments – Balaram and Radharaman Mullick, Kolkata, Hindustan Sweets, Kolkata and Ramdas Sweets, Kolkata – received Critics Choice awards. What was interesting in this wedding was how the bideshi bor (foreigner groom) Cadbury is welcomed without any of his kith and kin. None of his relatives invite the audience for the wedding and Mishti’s relatives were the only family who were visible. One of the chief guests and a noted film personality wanted Cadbury to be a ghorjamai (house-husband) so that Mishti does not have to leave Bengal. Cadbury’s kinship with Mishti is another extension of Cadbury’s efforts to find relevance in a market where meetha and mishti occupy centre stage in the socio-cultural life. Through this symbolic marriage, Cadbury repackaged itself as an important ingredient in the sweetmap of Bengal. In this sense, this campaign aligned itself with the new fusion wave where cooking techniques from local cuisines inspired the creation of new dishes. In this case, the local sweet-makers experiment with both thickened milk and coagulated milk to blend in the flavours of cholcolate. In other words, Cadbury enters into the lexicon of 'fusion' both through Cadbury Mishti as an ingredient and through metonymous associations of socio-cultural meanings, as evident in the multimodal campaign of 2013.
Was Cadbury Mishti a seasonal sweet that appeared and disappeared with the campaign? In 2013, Sourjya Kundu, a groom, reportedly opted for ‘Cadbury Talsansh’ (a sweet shaped like the kernel of the Palmyra fruit) as part of the ritualised gift exchange called tatwa. Recounting this, Dutta (2013b) writes that Sourjya is not the only one. Cadbury Mishti has become a favourite in the wedding season. Not only is it preferred as part of the trays of sweets exchanged between the groom and bride’s house but also in pre-wedding festivities. According to a sweetshop owner, customers have suddenly taken a liking to ‘Cadbury Sandesh’. Previously, customers used to caution sweetmakers not to serve ‘black’ coloured sweets in these gift trays. Sudip Mullick, the current owner of Balram Mullick and Radharaman Mullick, reports that with Cadbury Mishti such inhibitions have disappeared (Dutta 2013b). Sudip Mullick launched two products, Nolen Berry and Mrs Cadmish in 2013 as part of the 2013 campaign. They were winners of the 2012 ‘Cadbury Mishti Shera Shristi’ and are known among the sweet lovers for experimenting with ‘fusion’ sweets. The entry of Cadbury Mishti into the coveted tatwa – a gift exchange ceremony – also reveals how Cadbury Mishti has become a ‘premium’ mishti (a category used by Dipanjan to share the journey of Cadbury Mishti in Bengali ‘foodscape’).
Tatwa sweets – as I discuss elsewhere – are expensive as they are custom-made according to the taste and preferences of the clientele (Dey 2015). In Bengali Hindu weddings, the sweets in tatwa are often embossed with best wishes for the bride and groom. It is not uncommon to find ritual symbols of fertility such as fish, or replicas of young and old brides and grooms in traditional wear or replicas of butterflies (symbolic bearer of happiness) as imprints (Dey 2017). At times sweetshops hire skilled craftsmen to design special wooden moulds to cater to the demands of the clients. In other words, tatwa sweets are made to the customer’s taste and priced higher than the everyday sweets. Custom-made tatwa sweet prices can run into a thousand rupees a piece compared to readymade sweets priced at a maximum of hundred rupees per piece. The entry of Cadbury Mishti into tatwa sweets is not exclusive to one sweetshop. Another century old sweetshop, Nalin Chandra Das and Sons, too reaffirms the shifting demands of its clients. Dutta reports that when Debraj Dhur got married he wanted to add a contemporary touch to his wedding gift. He visited Nalin Chandra and Sons and ordered Cadbury Mishti with an embossing of ‘Subho Bibaho’/Happy Marriage. In this article, one the proprietors of Nalin Chandra and Sons comments that the demand for Cadbury Mishti in tatwa sweets has increased by 25%. The increased demand for Cadbury Mishti is evident in the everyday functioning of sweetshops as well (Dutta 2013b).
In 2015, I walked into one of the quiet residential neighbourhoods of Kolkata to buy sweets and spotted three varieties of sweets which were prepared from chocolate products. I decide to buy one of these ‘chocolate mishti’ – a term for sweets with chocolate or cocoa powder. As the shopkeeper crosschecked, ‘Which Cadbury Mishti?’ I pointed to a tiny ball made of chhana with a crisp layer of chocolate embossed with a flower pattern. What has contributed to the production and sale of chocolate sweets in small outlets like these? Do its roots lie in the branding event between ABP group (one of the leading media houses) and Cadbury (one of the leading players in chocolate market) I discuss above? The ‘journey’ of Cadbury from a block of chocolate, to chocolate as a sweet, to a campaign to bring together two variants of sweetness is a huge one since Cadbury’s introduction to India in 1948. What is interesting is how chocolate mishti has become synonymous with Cadbury Mishti and now holds a place alongside other signature sweet items. Secondly, no matter what brands of cocoa powder or chocolate syrup that the sweetshops might be using, it is interesting how ‘Cadbury’ has come to represent any and every chocolate flavour. Thirdly, while the journey to meetha familiarised people with the taste of Cadbury/chocolate in the campaign of Cadbury Mishti, none of the sweet makers start with Cocoa/Chocolate as a base ingredient; rather it is utilized as a flavouring ingredient. One of the artisans from an award-winning sweetshop of the Misthi campaign showed me the process of making ‘Choco Jolbhara’. As he showed us the technique of moulding the sweet, he added that it is important to understand that new flavours are going to produce new textures. If one can retain the texture and experiment with new flavours the customers are going to accept it. Taking a lump of chhana he commented, ‘This is our God (bhagaban). It has a bland taste. It can be adapted. It can be cooked into a paste, boiled and fried. What else do you need to make good sweets? If we lose chhana, and an andaaz (sensibility of identifying good chhana) we will lose a tradition’.
Dipanjan Dutta from ABP also acknowledges that initially sweetshops were reluctant to participate in this campaign. While sweetshops made Cadbury sweets during the contest, it did not feature among the coveted items in the showcases of the sweetshops. After the third year, sweetshops started keeping Cadbury Sweets round the year. ‘Today it is a big game. Cadbury Mishti has become premium mishti, it is used as a “gift” item’. In other words, Cadbury Mishti has a social life - it has an artisanal as well as ritual value in the foodscape of ‘urban’ Bengal. Cadbury Mishti was aimed at the below 35 age group, a catalyst for a change of social habit among the young.
Akin to the fusion experimentation of Cadbury Mishti, there has been in-house experimentation with fruit essences like strawberry, kiwi, mango, and pineapple in sweet shops. In the summer of 2010 when I was conducting pilot studies for my doctoral work, Surjya Modak in Chandannagore had added at least three kinds of flavours to their signature Jalbhara Talshansh Sandesh17: Mango, Chocolate and Strawberry. One of the leading players to innovate taste and technique remains Balaram Mullick and Radharaman Mullick in Kolkata. Sudip Mullick in one of the newspaper articles comments that ‘with his team of food technologists’, he ‘is constantly experimenting with traditional raw materials like chhana, kheer and notun gur (first flush Winter jaggery) and exotic inputs like pure chocolate and liqueur’ (Mukherjee Pandey 2014). Ghosh of Banchharam feels it is important to experiment so that the customers are not bored. The article reports a college student’s joy over Mousse Doi and Chocholate Doi of Banchharam (ibid). She asserts that the cooking techniques associated with the confectionery industry – baking, icing, dusting, layering, unequal heating of moulds – are brought into treating signature ingredients in sweet industry.
What is significant in this journey of Cadbury Mishti is how new flavours and new cooking techniques from the world of baking have shaped the journey of fusion sweets. Similar to Wolfgang Puck’s journey, the ingredients remain local and the cooking techniques are borrowed from baked goods. McWilliams (2006) draws our attention to one of the telling observations from Puck (1986) in The Wolfgang Puck Cookbook. He writes, if a country claims to be a melting pot of cultures, he questions the rigidity with which ‘authenticity’ is marked out when it comes to food. He laments that it took him eight years to break away, to experiment, and he concludes that Americans should be proud of their heritage (Puck 1986). Despite these claims, McWilliams feels that Puck restricts himself to techniques from France while experimenting with ingredients from South America, Italy, and Japan. McWilliams concludes that the ‘technology’ remains French. Viewed through the lens of technology, Cadbury Mishti is a marriage of a new ingredient with local technology and one can feel the difference in its appearance and taste. In one of the award-winning sweetshops, an artisan while adding the chocolate syrup to the cooked paste of chhana, passes me a little bit of chocolate flavoured cooked paste of chhana to feel the texture. As I bite into the mix, he remarks, ‘Each food item has its own taste and feel. Only if we retain the taste and smell of chocolate, Cadbury Mishti will be a hit. You can see, and smell a food item before tasting. There lies the challenge’.
‘Fusion food’ such as Cadbury Mishti is the result of processes shaped by ‘inter-referentiality’ of place, cultural sameness through the creation of kin-ties and finally, the rebranding of all chocolate mishti as Cadbury Mishti. I argue that this journey has to be understood in the broader context of how globalisation of foodways is not merely about aping the West but is also fuelled by the need for global foods to become glocal. If the fast food joints are innovating with local ingredients while retaining their cooking technique, the case of Cadbury Mishti presents an interesting reverse journey, where Cadbury is merely the ingredient and the technology and technique is local.
Cadbury has been successfully branded as meetha, as a gift item that can be exchanged across religious festivals, be it Eid, Diwali or Raksha Bandhan. Cadbury tries to draw upon the socio-cultural meanings of sweetness for its symbolic value. However, no reading of symbolic value is possible without a close reading of how a food such as Cadbury Mishti contributes to placemaking. In this case, Cadbury’s slow and steady journey of adapting itself to place is not imaginary or symbolic but of a lived one. At the heart of its placemaking is the marriage between the craftsmanship of local sweetshops and the repackaging of Cadbury as an ingredient to create a new genre of Cadbury Mishti, a fusion food that does not displace sweets but finds a new meaning for mishti.
Three ideas remain central to the journey of ‘Cadbury Mishti’ in the new wave of fusion food that has taken over the Indian foodscape since 2000. Cadbury through its branding, advertisements and launch of new products ‘blends’ in by acknowledging a distinct tradition and craft of sweet-making. One of the first phases was to find a new cultural significance and cultural association by positioning Cadbury as meetha /sweet. Secondly, Cadbury has managed to maintain its position as an outsider who needs to be welcomed. This is especially evident in the gendered appropriation of Cadbury as the groom in the mythical wedding of Cadbury and Mishti/Sweet in the 2013 campaign. Thirdly, ‘Cadbury Mishti’ as a fusion food is successful by being able to blend in with ‘local’ technologies of cooking without altering the craftsmanship of sweet-making, while creating a new taste. Fusion food in India, I conclude, is the convergence of ingredient experimentation and cooking techniques which include regional food within Indian and non-Indian cuisines. In the case of craft-based food commodities like sweets, it is also about establishing a seamless continuity with the ‘authentic’.
* Department of Sociology, South Asian University, Delhi. Fields of research: Labour Studies, Food Studies, Smells.
This work was supported by the JSPS-ICSSR Grant for a Bilateral Joint Research Project (April 2016-March 2018).
1 Mishti is the Bengali word for sweets. It can imply food items that taste sweet or someone sweet natured. In this case I specifically refer to sweets made in Bengal.
2 Kolkata is the capital city of West Bengal - a state in Eastern India. India is known for its sweet tooth. Sweets are offered to gods and goddesses and also consumed by human beings. In the map of sweets in India, Bengal is associated with three signature sweets – rosogolla (ping pong ball-shaped sweet made from boiling chhana balls in sugar syrup), sandesh (made from a cooked paste of chhana) and mishti doi/sweetened curd.
3 One of the oft used metaphors to refer to Americanisation is the Mcdonaldisation of societies.
4 See https://mcdonaldsblog.in/2021/06/4-fun-facts-you-probably-never-knew-about-the-mcaloo-tikki-burger/; Accessed on 23 August 2021.
5 The Bombay Canteen is an award-winning all-day restaurant and bar in Mumbai founded by Sameer Seth and Yash Banage. It is known for serving regional cuisines with unique twists.
6 Videshi implies foreign, Baingan is the Hindi word for Brinjal.
7 Varli Baingan is a Maharashtrian delicacy. The brinjal is stuffed with a semi-dry spice mix.
8 This ethnographic work is based on field work undertaken in 2010-2012, and in intermittent phases during 2013-2014, and 2015-2016.
9 Mithai is the Hindi word for sweets.
10 The word jootha carries a connotation of pollution. Literally meaning leftovers, once the food is touched it cannot be eaten by others. This shapes the rules of commensality in inter-caste dining practices.
11 Eid/Eid-al-Fitr is one of the most important yearly festivals to mark the end of Ramadan or the month of fasting among Muslims across the world. In India, no Eid celebration is complete without sweets, especially Sewai (a dish made from vermicelli).
12 Diwali is one of the important festivities celebrated among Hindus in India. Depending on region and geography, Lakshmi (Goddess of wealth), or Kali (Goddess of time, doomsday, death sexuality, violence and motherly love) is worshipped across India where people decorate their homes with lights and burst firecrackers. As part of Diwali festivities, sweets are exchanged between families, friends and guests.
13 Raksha Bandhan is a day where a sister ties a sacred thread called Rakhi on her brother’s hand to wish him a long life. Among Hindus in West Bengal, seven different kinds of sweets are offered to the brother. According to sweetshop owners, sweetshops witness peak sales during this day.
14 I am grateful to Dipanjan Dutta for his interview and insight into the Chocolate Mishti campaign.
15 Used as a metaphor here.
16 Remarks by TV personality June Maliah during the inauguration ceremony of the topor (a head gear worn by grooms in Bengali Hindu weddings) which was on display in a shopping mall in Kolkata. See Dutta (2013a).
17 A sweet shaped like the kernel of a Palmyra fruit. Jal means water, bhara implies filling. ‘Jalbhara Talsansh Sandesh’ is a sweet that is made from a cooked paste of chhana and sugar and filled with various liquid fillings ranging from rose-scented water, jaggery, mango pulp, kiwi pulp etc.
