Profiling India’s Rachael Ray – By Miranda Kennedy

Every Sunday morning, tens of millions of Indian housewives sit down with their notebooks in front of the TV for an hour with India's first and most famous celebrity chef, Sanjeev Kapoor. Like America's version, Rachael Ray, Kapoor has a baby face and an easy presence in front of the camera (he has been called the "Rachael Ray of India" and has made a guest appearance on her show). Also like her, he has built himself into a veritable brand empire by making food accessible and family-oriented. Kapoor's show, Khana Khazana ("Food Treasure"), has been on the air for 12 years, making it the longest-running TV program in any category on any Indian channel ever. His website gets 5 million pageviews a month and his first book, published in the 1990s, sold 5 million copies in more than half a dozen Indian languages. Later this spring, Kapoor is set to usher India into the realm of 24-hour lifestyle programming when he launches his own food channel on Indian cable.

Many see Kapoor as a symbol of India's move to a more globalized style of cuisine: Along with chapatis and daal, Kapoor ladles up American-style healthy meals like whole wheat pasta with burned garlic. But the truth isn't quite that simple. Kapoor may represent a revolution in Indian food, but in some crucial ways, the transformation is actually quite traditional.

There's no doubt that Kapoor is heralding some major changes in the way India cooks and eats. In India, cuisine has long been defined by regional, religious, and caste specificity. Although the country is dramatically heterogeneous, most families tend to stick to their own regional specialties. Recipes have been passed down through generations of women and rarely transcribed into books. Kapoor's upbringing was different, though, giving him a more diverse food exposure than most Indians get. His father was a banker who was frequently transferred around the country, and though his mother is Punjabi and cooked North Indian food, they had a South Indian cook who often made her own cuisine for the family. Today, many more Indians are interested in approximating Kapoor's experience of cuisine.

"The new India is changing so fast that I have trouble keeping up with what today's audiences want to eat," Kapoor says. "I know that they want to cook much more than what their families cooked. They want to try international cuisines, at restaurants and also at home. They want to spend less time on it, make foods in a microwave."

Sanjeevkapoor.com features sections like "World recipes," "Cuisine of the month," and "Healthy recipes." On the show, Kapoor makes non-Indian food like muffins and chocolate mousse look easy, as he whips them up in his flashy TV kitchen that features the kind of stainless steel electronics that few Indians actually have access to.

He was also India's first visible male chef in a country where women almost always do the cooking at home, and he started a trend that other professional cooks have followed. By becoming the most famous face of cooking in India, Kapoor has helped improve its reputation as undervalued woman's work. Kapoor says that back in 1992 and 1993, advertisers were skeptical about the notion that a male chef could succeed. By now, Kapoor has amply demonstrated that his gender needn't work against him when it comes to attaining credibility in the kitchen. These days he even brings male guests onto the show to demonstrate to them the finer art of rolling chapatis. In fact, some 45 percent of visitors to Kapoor's website are male -- though that says less about how India is changing than it appears to. Many of them are Indian men living overseas, who are more likely to be socially progressive about domestic matters than Indians in India. Women remain solely responsible for the bulk of the housework in the vast majority of families.

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