Western food media has become increasingly obsessed with authenticity over the last fifteen years. People want to eat what and where locals eat. Influencers swear that a restaurant is the ‘real deal’. Cookbooks promise us to give us recipes the way their grandma made them.

People aspire to understand and cook ‘real’ Indian food, wanting to know how to make an Indian meal as ‘authentically’ as possible, dismissing the kormas, dhansaks and brightly coloured rice of their local takeaway. However, what the search for tradition and authenticity misses is, firstly, that food in India is not frozen in amber and, secondly, that Indian people love a takeaway just as much as the British do.

Despite the many differences between the two cultures and cuisines, one striking similarity between Britain and India is their shared love of a Chinese takeaway. Indo-Chinese cooking has fast become one of the most popular types of food in India. You’ll find piles of noodles and fried rice on the streets of Mumbai and Kolkata alongside dosas and idli. MasterChef India judge Ranveer Brar’s recipe for chow mein is his third most watched recipe on YouTube with 10 million views, closely followed by other Indo-Chinese staples.

Lots of the ‘Chinese food’ in India will at first glance look very familiar: fried rice, chow mein, spring rolls. However, while Chinese food may be the common ancestor, the differences between British and Indian palates has taken the cuisine to opposite extremes. In the UK, Chinese chefs made their food mild, sweet and focussed on boneless cuts of meat. Indo-Chinese cooking on the other hand is packed with dried spices, fresh chillies, vegetables and paneer. 

On closer inspection, you’d see that the Indian chow mein is made with handfuls of green finger chillies, chilli powder and garam masala. The ‘Schezwan fried rice’ (Schezwan is the spelling used on Indo-Chinese menus) will be red and glistening from the addition of red chilli sauce or Schezwan chutney. These are spicy, bright red sauces essential to lots of Indo-Chinese cooking. Other Indian favourites like gobi Manchurian, deep-fried darsaan and chilli paneer stray even further from Chinese food, their ties to Chineseness tenuous at best.

As with Chinese cooking in the UK, Indo-Chinese food has its origins in Chinese migration. While there have been Chinese people migrating to India in small numbers for hundreds of years, the first noticeable wave of Chinese migration to India was in the 1830s. During the British Raj, Chinese workers were employed on tea plantations in Assam. By the mid-20th century there were thousands of Assamese Chinese people living in the village of Makum in Assam.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, more Chinese people moved to Tangra, an area near Kolkata. They were mostly employed in tanneries, and it’s thought that the name Tangra could come from the Bengali term for tannery. Tangra is still home to India’s only Chinatown, and is closely associated with the Chinese community in the Indian cultural imagination.

However, in 1962 war broke out between China and India. The Indian government ordered thousands of Assamese Chinese and Chinese people in Kolkata to be interned in a camp over 1000 miles away from their homes. Many were subsequently forcibly deported; the population in Assam and Kolkata never fully recovered. Over the next few years the Indian government began shutting down Chinese tanneries too.

By the 1970s the surviving Chinese community and newer Chinese immigrants started to open restaurants in Kolkata instead of tanneries. Despite the fairly recent hostilities, Chinese food sold well among Indian as well as Chinese customers. It’s unclear exactly how Indo-Chinese cuisine evolved – efforts have only really begun to document it as the Chinese community in Tangra has dwindled. However, Tangra is widely accepted as the birthplace of Indo-Chinese food. Kolkata is now so closely associated with Indo-Chinese cuisine in India that dishes are often called ‘Tangra prawns’ or ‘Tangra chicken’.

Indo-Chinese food really went mainstream in India when ambitious Chinese chefs moved to bigger cities in the 1970s. They began to sell their dishes at popular hotels and upscale restaurants. The greatly mythologised invention of chicken Manchurian by Nelson Wang at China Garden in Mumbai is often pointed to as a key turning point, when Indo-Chinese food leapt from niche curiosity to nationwide staple. Similarly, Camellia Panjabi claims to have first introduced India to the now omnipresent ‘Schezwanese’ cuisine, after tasting real Sichuanese food in Hong Kong.

Indo-Chinese food has begun to take off outside of India as well, particularly in America where Indians have been missing their chilli paneer and gobi Manchurian. There are a few restaurants in the UK which serve up these old favourites, like the Fatt Pundit in London, but for most Indians abroad cooking things from scratch is their best or only option. Luckily, it’s not too hard to recreate the classics at home.

There are some ingredients that are key to making Indo-Chinese food taste right – namely red chilli sauce and Szechuanese chutney. Suhana have recently brought their Indo-Chinese range of sauces and spice mixes to the UK, making it easy to recreate things like chilli paneer or Schezwan fried rice at home. While in the UK when people want to make Chinese takeaways at home they use packaged sauces, in India they generally turn to packets of spices. This is because Indo-Chinese food uses heaps of dried spices, as well as Chinese ingredients like rice vinegar and soy sauce. Spice packets are an easy way to guarantee that your gobi Manchurian has the exact right balance of salt and spice.

For so many Indians, Indo-Chinese food is their comfort food, their one-a-week treat and their favourite thing to make at home. While it’s not Chinese, and not exactly Indian, it’s definitely delicious. So next time you cook some fried rice, consider making it the Indian way – we think you’ll enjoy it.