Taste this: An Indian manifesto

About Taste: Splainer’s new literary imprint, Taste, celebrates all that is exceptional about India—our singular design sensibility, literary voice, and perspective of the world—all of it rendered with deliberate excess. Taste is a book like no other—part art object, part literary magazine, and entirely its own world.

This first book features original essays by some of India’s finest writers, including Aatish Taseer on the ‘hotel aesthetic’ of living rooms, a rare conversation between Vivek Shanbhag and Parul Sehgal on how taste shapes the act of writing itself, and Srinath Perur’s glorious meditation on Boney M. and their enduring Indian afterlife. The book has been designed with extraordinary flair by Kriti Monga and Tania Singh Khosla. The video below gives you a fuller sense of its ambition and achievement:

Editor's note: Below is editor Lakshmi Chaudhry’s introductory essay on the idea of taste and why it matters in a Pinterest-ified world ruled by algorithms. 

PS: Taste is intended as a collectible object. It is a limited edition with just 300 copies in circulation—half of which will hit bookstores soon. You can also sign up to buy it from the publisher Juggernaut over here. 

Written by: Lakshmi Chaudhry

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‘I despise the word “taste”,’ declared my friend, ‘It’s shorthand for elitism of the laziest kind.’ The vehemence was surprising, even a little quaint. As a word, ‘taste’ seemed so stodgy that it had lost all ability to provoke, sort of like ‘classy’. Vocabulary of a bygone age when cultural clout was tied to wealth (preferably inherited). Taste—or at least any serious conversation around it—has long been deemed irredeemably passé by all ends of the political spectrum. The Mar-a-Lago mob of Trumpistas have made a virtue of crassness while the woke have cancelled it as a grubby signifier of all the bad -isms (race, sex, caste, class and so on). Surely, we now live in a cheerful techno-democracy where quality pales in significance to quantity—of views, likes and shares. ‘Taste’ has been replaced by its seemingly friendlier cousin ‘preferences’ and its corollary ‘personalization’.

Google ‘taste’ today and you’ll get a long, unedifying list of cookbooks. Even the Cambridge dictionary meanders through various flavour-related definitions until at last conceding that ‘taste’ may also connote ‘a person’s ability to judge and recognize what is good or suitable, especially relating to such matters as art, style, beauty, and behaviour’. Here, we finally encounter ‘taste’ in its true dimensions—five letters spanning the vast terrain of history and culture, shape-shifting with context, imbued with contentious authority.

In forfeiting this meaning, we have also lost access to a way of understanding ourselves and our world. In the name of political correctness, we have instead bought into the mythos of the algorithm, the obliging genie in the machine that promises to deliver exactly what you want. Taste is no longer ‘developed’ or ‘acquired’ but revealed by a conveyor belt of recommendations, churned out by a screen that tracks our every move to show us what we want to see. Thus goes the theory of the internet. The reality is a bit more inconvenient.

In the guise of predicting our taste, the machine, in fact, moulds it. Technology is the true tastemaker, a benevolent aristocracy of algorithms masquerading as the ‘wisdom of the crowds’. Everything we see or hear is optimized for the greatest number—the most accessible and shareable, with the most reach. Led by the nose, we trot obediently in the machine’s wake, embracing hashtag trends, mood boards and memes as personal expression. Pinterest is an emery board, smoothing the jagged edges of personality and culture into a readymade aesthetic. We all shop for some version of the same beigey bougie bathroom, whether at the Jaquar outlet in Bangalore or Restoration Hardware in Palo Alto. The difference is in the details, such as the price tag.

There is no such thing as ‘bad taste’ in what New Yorker writer Kyle Chaka astutely calls ‘filterworld’. But as he argues in his book of the same name, the price for this sameness parading as egalitarianism lies elsewhere: ‘On the other side of our algorithmic anxiety is a state of numbness … Our natural reaction is to seek out culture that embraces nothingness, that blankets and soothes rather than challenges or surprises, as powerful artwork is meant to do. Our capacity to be moved, or even to be interested and curious, is depleted.’

When originality, creativity and surprise are exiled—or at least sidelined— there is no space to say I love/hate this/that. In the words of poet Paul Valéry, ‘Tastes are composed of a thousand distastes.’ One necessarily implies the other. But when everything is merely a preference, there is no discernment or (god forbid!) judgement.

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Whether we delight, disdain, love or loathe, we can only know ourselves when we taste—when we experience, we are exposed, in every sense of the word. What then if we were to reject this ‘numbness’? Not ‘think outside the box’ (yawn) but build our own and put whatever we want in it. Lean into curiosity, indulge our imagination, err on the side of excess—and then to say to the world: ‘Here, taste this!’ This, dear reader, is that box. This is Taste.

Thus, where the digital offers fleeting diversions of the now, we instead embrace the fixity of paper and the vertigo of the unexpected—hence the dizzying shifts in design, subject and voice from one essay to another, hurtling from an extravagant love affair with Boney M. to a lyrical meditation on bhasha, from a DDLJ-themed bus tour of Switzerland to opulent living rooms in Gurgaon. If that were not sufficient, we threw in a sumptuous supplement of visual essays by Tania Singh Khosla, who chases the arc of taste as it travels across time and space, from a feast in Guadalupe to bales of cloth piled high in Machalipatnam, on to the spires of St Paul’s Cathedral. Each page is an invitation to curiosity, sensation, judgement.

This anthology—the debut of a new imprint—marks the beginning of a project to uncover/recover the territory of taste. In each annual edition, we plan to stage new spectacles of provocation and revelry—with a cast of brilliant writers, artists and designers. Though, to be clear, our focus is not ‘Indian’ taste. Our stellar list of contributors is from the subcontinent, yes, as are their frames of reference, but they look at questions of art, history, language, travel that span the globe. Who better to speak of taste without the need for geographical qualifiers than Indians? Take, for instance, the moment in the essay ‘Solo Traveller’, when Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan looks at a bridge in Interlaken and sees ‘not just Heidi skipping up the mountain to her grandfather, but also Kajol twirling after her first drink and Hyun Bin playing the piano ... both together and apart.’ A classic Swiss novel, an iconic Bollywood movie and a Korean soap opera captured in the glance of a post-internet Indian who lives, incidentally, in Berlin.

Think then of Taste as a cultural atlas ‘corrected’ for the centre of the world, a globe spun away from Europe and towards the subcontinent, but a mappa mundi nevertheless.

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So many words to explain (justify?) what is, at heart, a great personal extravagance. Here then is the more modest truth about this book. After a decades-long news career spent wading through wars, terrorism, pandemics and genocide, I ached to create something of beauty and meaning in a world greatly short on both. Perhaps, Gaza was the tipping point (too many dead babies). Worn down by the daily fare of the dire, I wanted instead to throw a great feast for the mind and eye—to delight myself as much as you. This is extremism of an entirely different kind.

Taste would have remained a three-martini daydream except that I picked up the phone to call Chiki Sarkar—hoping at best for kindly advice. In a little over an hour, I came away with a co-conspirator, fellow editor and the best kind of friend—the kind who is right by your side on a mad adventure of your making. But we were still missing someone who would build this wondrous box. Someone who would intuit our aspirations and give them unique form—with generosity and genius. Thanks to our great good luck, we found Kriti Monga. Artist, master craftswoman, design maven—no single designation can fully capture her work on this book. It is what makes Taste singular and memorable.

I leave you with this one last thought. Taste is above all sensual. It is to be held, seen, touched—much as this book. Our greatest hope is to make you feel—to inspire in you the same overpowering urge to shout into the wind of bland monotony. And, of course, have a jolly good time doing it.

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(This essay originally appeared in Taste, edited by Lakshmi Chaudhry and published by Juggernaut Books.)