Madhur Jaffrey

Madhur Jaffrey CBE (née Bahadur; born 13 August 1933) is an Indian-British-American actress, food and travel writer, and television personality. She is recognized for bringing Indian cuisine to the western hemisphere with her debut cookbook, ''An Invitation to Indian Cooking'' (1973), which was inducted into the James Beard Foundation’s Cookbook Hall of Fame in 2006. She has written over a dozen cookbooks and appeared on several related television programmes, the most notable of which was ''Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cookery'', which premiered in the UK in 1982. She was the food consultant at the now-closed ''Dawat'', which was considered by many food critics to be among the best Indian restaurants in New York City.

She was instrumental in bringing together filmmakers James Ivory and Ismail Merchant and acted in several of their films such as ''Shakespeare Wallah'' (1965), for which she won the Silver Bear for Best Actress award at the 15th Berlin International Film Festival. She has appeared in dramas on radio, stage and television.

In 2004, she was named an honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in recognition of her services to cultural relations between the United Kingdom, India and the United States, through her achievements in film, television and cookery. In 2022, she was awarded the Padma Bhushan from the Government of India, which is the third highest civilian award.

Her childhood memoir of India during the final years of the British Raj, ''Climbing the Mango Trees'', was published in 2006.

Early life

Jaffrey was born in Civil Lines, Delhi, into a Mathur Kayastha Hindu joint family. She is the fifth of six children of Lala Raj Bans Bahadur (1899–1974) and his wife, Kashmiran Rani (1903–1971). Madhur's grandfather, Rai Bahadur Raj Narain (1864–1950), had built a sprawling family compound, named Number 7 Raj Narain Marg, by the Yamuna river amid fruit orchards.

When Jaffrey was about two years old, her father accepted a position in a family-run concern, Ganesh Flour Mills, and moved to Kanpur as the manager of a '' vanaspati ghee'' factory there. In Kanpur, Jaffrey attended St. Mary's Convent School along with her elder sisters, Lalit and Kamal. In kindergarten at the age of five, she played the role of the brown mouse in a musical version of the ''Pied Piper of Hamelin''. The family lived in Kanpur for eight years, until her grandfather's deteriorating health caused a move back to Delhi in 1944.

In Delhi, Jaffrey attended Queen Mary's Higher Secondary School where her history teacher, Mrs McKelvie, encouraged her to participate in school plays. Jaffrey played the role of Titania in William Shakespeare's play ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'' followed by the lead role in ''Robin Hood and His Merry Men''. Madhur's brothers, Brij Bans Bahadur and Krishen Bans Bahadur, who were much older than her, were enrolled in St. Stephen's College, Delhi. Every winter, St. Stephen's students put on a Shakespearean play that Jaffrey would watch avidly from the front row.

A supporter of Mahatma Gandhi's demand for Indian independence from British rule, Jaffrey spent some time each day spinning ''khadi'' and delivered several large spools of thread to a central collection center in Delhi.

In 1947, Jaffrey experienced first-hand the effects of the partition of India. At school, her classmates split into two on the issue of partition; the Muslim girls supported the idea while the Hindus were against it. On August 15 she watched the transfer of power at India Gate and got a clear glimpse of Jawaharlal Nehru and Lord Mountbatten coming down Rajpath in an open horse carriage. The massive multi-directional migration that began almost immediately afterwards caused riots and killing in Delhi. The male members of her family guarded their house with guns that they had previously used only for hunting game. At school, all her Muslim classmates left without a farewell. In 1948, a few days before Mahatma Gandhi was shot dead, she attended one of his prayer meetings at Birla House and sang bhajans. She heard the news of his assassination on the radio, followed by Jawaharlal Nehru's address later that night, "the light has gone out of our lives, and there is darkness everywhere." She saw Gandhi's funeral procession at Rajpath and witnessed his cremation at Rajghat.

At home, Jaffrey's family primarily ate food prepared by servants but supervised by the women of the family. They occasionally indulged in Mughlai cuisine bought in the bylanes of Old Delhi, like '' bedmi aloo'', ''seekh kebab'', ''shami kebab'', ''rumali roti'' and ''bakarkhani''. Refugees from Punjab who settled in Delhi after partition brought their own style of cooking. Moti Mahal, a ''dhaba'' in Daryaganj, introduced ''tandoori chicken'' and then went on to invent butter chicken and ''dal makhani''. Jaffrey found Punjabi food's simplicity and freshness very enticing and routinely picked up tandoori food from Moti Mahal for family picnics.

At school, the subject of domestic science included learning dishes like blancmange, whose bland taste drove Jaffrey to dismiss the cookery lessons as preparing "British invalid foods from circa 1930". However, at the time of the practical examination, her class was asked to make a dish from an assortment of potatoes, tomatoes, onions, garlic, ginger and Indian spices in a pot over wood to be lit with matches. Jaffrey did her best but guessed that she failed the subject of domestic science altogether.

Jaffrey and her cousins would regularly answer summons from the nearby All India Radio station for parts in radio plays or children's programs. As she was paid a small fee for each session, Jaffrey considered this to be her first professional work.

Meanwhile, Jaffrey's father had moved to Daurala as general manager of Daurala Sugar Works, a factory owned by family friends, the Shri Ram family. Jaffrey, along with her brothers, her younger sister, Veena, and her mother remained behind in Delhi in to avoid disrupting the children's education. During this period, Jaffrey's elder sisters were at boarding school in Nainital. In the letters that they exchanged with their siblings and cousins at Delhi, they addressed each other only by their initials. This tradition cemented over time so that Jaffrey became ''M'' for her circle of close friends and family. Jaffrey's father eventually returned from Daurala and joined Delhi Cloth Mills, a textile factory owned by the Shri Ram family.

Delhi (1950–1955)

From 1950 to 1953 Jaffrey attended Miranda House, a women's college, where she gained a B.A. degree in English Honours with a minor in philosophy.

She took part in her college's all-women productions of ''Hamlet'' and ''The Importance of Being Earnest''. She appeared in ''The Comedy of Errors'' performed by St. Stephen's College.

In 1951, Jaffrey joined the Unity Theatre, an English language repertory company founded by Saeed Jaffrey in New Delhi. She auditioned for the role of the Queen's Reader in Jean Cocteau's play ''The Eagle Has Two Heads'' just four days before the opening but was cast in the role. The next play that she did with Saeed was Christopher Fry's '' A Phoenix Too Frequent''.

After graduation from Miranda House in 1953, Jaffrey joined All India Radio, where Saeed Jaffrey was an announcer. She worked as a disc jockey at night. Saeed and Jaffrey fell in love, and dated at Gaylord, a restaurant in Connaught Place.

During this period, Jaffrey also met Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a British novelist who had moved to Civil Lines, Delhi, after marriage to Cyrus Jhabvala, an Indian architect, in 1951. Jaffrey answered a casting call by Prawer Jhabvala and worked with her on All India Radio plays. The protagonists of Prawer Jhabvala's first novel, ''To Whom She Will'' (1955), a young couple who work at a radio station in Delhi and fall in love, were based on Madhur and Saeed Jaffrey. The novel was published in America the following year as ''Amrita'' (1956).

In early 1955, Jaffrey was in the audience at St. Stephen's College, Delhi, for a programme of literary readings by Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson, married English actors who toured internationally in Shakespearean productions. Later that year, the ''Unity Theatre'' put on a performance of Tennessee Williams' one-act play, ''Auto-da-Fé'', in which Madhur played the rigidly moralistic mother to Saeed's young postal worker, Eloi. The last play that Madhur did with Saeed was ''Othello'' in which Saeed was cast as Iago while Madhur played Iago's wife, Emilia.

Jaffrey decided to pursue acting as a profession. She won a grant from the British government that she could use to pay for education at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA).

The head of the British Council in India was impressed by her performance in ''Auto-da-Fé'' and offered her a scholarship. Armed with these two sources of money, Jaffrey arrived at Southampton on 6 December 1955 on the P&O liner RMS Strathmore from Bombay.

London (1955–1957)

Jaffrey joined the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) with Diana Rigg, Siân Phillips and Glenda Jackson as her contemporaries. She won a scholarship from RADA after an audition. This supplemented her earlier grant and scholarship. She also picked up minor acting roles on BBC
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