Key Highlights
- Were they so touchy about somebody not liking the smell of palak paneer, the famed Indian household dish?They tell Firstpost that it was never about food.
- That it happened on a US campus and the person making “pungent” remarks was British, who got institutional backing from American betrayed the same racist mindset Indians have heard and read stories from their grandparents and books detailing colonialism. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS ADThe palak-paneer incidentWhat began as a disagreement over reheating a lunchbox has, for two Indian scholars, come to symbolise something far older and deeper than a campus dispute.
- “This was never about food,” Aditya Prakash and his fiancée Urmi Bhattacheryya say, reflecting on the episode that led to a civil rights lawsuit and a $200,000 settlement with a US university.
- Instead, they argue, it exposes what they describe as a lingering “Dogs and Indians” mindset — a hierarchy of culture and belonging they believe still shapes how Indian identity is received in Western institutional spaces. Speaking to Firstpost, the two scholars — who had filed the lawsuit after a row over the “smell” of palak paneer heated in a departmental microwave — said the incident was less about a single remark and more about dignity, power and the subtle ways in which culture can be marked as out of place.
- They describe the episode as part of a broader pattern of what they call “olfactory discrimination”, where food associated with South Asia is treated not as neutral, but as intrusive — a stigma they link to older colonial attitudes that have never fully disappeared. More from World West’s ‘rules-based’ lie is exposed: Why Bharat stands to gain from Trumpian disruption India is a ‘dharma democracy’ but this doesn’t make it any less democratic or liberal: Salvatore BabonesFor them, the case that unfolded in tutorials, faculty meetings and eventually legal filings was not a fight over a lunch break, but over the right to carry one’s culture into shared spaces without apology. This occurs even as Western academia continues to build knowledge and careers by researching marginalised communities in India, without extending the same respect to those cultures when Indians carry them into Western spaces, they said.‘A racist slur’: When food stops being neutralThe incident occurred on 5 September 2023, about a year after Prakash joined the university.
