ideally, the biryani that brings us all together

Saniya Jafri

This Exposition is a brief ironic comment on the ongoing degradation, commodification, and colonisation of food and its many dimensions — recipes, ingredients, context — and a reflection on the territorial definitions that shape identity, in this case of South Asians and the Global South, once bound together as a people and still united in the brieftopian world of the Author’s Greatest Biryani: an amalgamative dish of political and cultural reproductions, drenched in time, where old and new contest identity. Through a conversational, autoethnographic lens, the exposition blends historical, colonial, and territorial reflections, using Biryani as both departure point and metaphor for shared identity and dislocation. Visual collages — archival, familial, and sourced — act as probes connecting memory, culture, and belonging. Ultimately, the work offers the Author’s Greatest Biryani as a living document of generational knowledge and a utopian gesture, inviting both insiders and outsiders to gather around a dish transcending borders and time.

i. setting the scene//preparation

the Greatest Migration and the Death of a Society

ii. themes of memory & tradition//spices

the Makings and the Marrings of the Society,

then Colonised and the Coloniser

iii. identity formation & transformation//cooking

the End of the Greatest Colonial Rule
and the Struggle for a Brave New Society

iv. intersections of the personal & collective//layering

the Ordered Disorder of the Biryanis of Karachi,
and the Indian Subcontinent

v as the Author’s note

the Wilful Skepticism of my Memories of the Biryani

vi as the Author’s secret//serving & sharing

the Performative Steps towards the Creation of the Greatest Biryani

The Author will begin this narrative at its apparent end and supposed beginning — 1947 in Karachi,

which is the destination, the endpoint and the beginning of the Author's Greatest Biryani.

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