Notes on Jackie Shroff, the internet's favourite home chef

By Aakash Karkare

An investigation into the simple charm of Jackie Shroff's internet presence and the nostalgic warmth of his recipes.

Jackie Shroff's Baingan Bharta

Long before he went viral for referring to his aunt’s unmentionables while flubbing takes for an advertisement for Polio awareness, long before he became Instagram’s favourite home chef, long before he was the coolest star of Hindi cinema, Jackie Shroff occupied a prominent position in my cultural life. Two of my earliest childhood memories are indelibly linked with the icon, who along with Javed Jaffrey is amongst the best exponents of the unfairly maligned (in the North) but undoubtedly superior (in the author’s humble opinion) version of Hindi: Bambaiyya. The first, which could also be amongst my earliest memories of being alive, took place atop a horse on the way to Vaishnodevi when I was 4 or 5 years old. News spread amongst the pilgrims that Jackie Shroff had been spotted making his way up the mountain, walking by himself, without any fanfare. My film buff mother and my extended family did try to rush ahead to catch a glimpse of the star but it was not to be. Much before that incident, in Chandrapur, known for its vast reserves of coal, where we lived for three years while my father was posted there, my mother claimed to have run into Jackie Shroff at a local restaurant. Shroff had refused the food served in the establishment and had instead asked one of the servers to get food for him from home. 

“I want to eat the food you eat,” my mother had recalled Shroff saying, never failing to mention how impressed she was at the great actor’s simplicity despite his Bollywood success. It was homemade pithla (a kind of roasted and spiced besan paste) with bhakri that he had wished to eat, the most simple and nostalgic of Mahrastrian foods, loved by old people (“puraanas” as Shroff calls them) and hated by the young until they grow up and look upon the past with rose-tinted glasses. Later during another one of my father’s postings, in Vienna, homesick for India, I watched Yaadein (one of the few Hindi VHS tapes we had at home) on loop, finding a strange sort of kinship with the long-suffering father played by Shroff in the movie, which also doubled as a three-hour advertisement for Pepsi.

Over the past year, Shroff’s recipes, suffused by the same kind of aforementioned simplicity, for various dishes, not out of place in even the most basic home cook repertoires, ranging from “anda-kadipatta” to “fansi-batata” have been widely consumed and celebrated on social media. Each is narrated in his usual local Bombay dialect of Hindi which is alternately referred to in the comments and in articles as “tapori” or “Bambaiyya” with liberal sprinklings of “bhidu” in the voice over and kadipatta “kanjoosi nahi karneka” in the food. “Anda Kadi Patta”, is the most outre of his recipes, and despite many attempts, I haven’t been able to figure out exactly how it is made, and even the ones made by content creators on YouTube seem to be skipping a step or two. Nevertheless, the dishes' deliciousness and inventive way to cook the most nutritious (but sometimes most boring) of pantry staples cannot be denied. I have also made his version of bhopla sabjee (saunf neeche, mirchi upar, beech me bhopla) and sukha kandha bhindi (which has finally solved the problem of slimy bhindi at least in my household). In none of these recipes does he mention spice, maybe Shroff belongs to the legions of people who like to have their ingredients do all the heavy lifting without the adding of any accouterments, or they would be out of place with his simple, carefree way in which he views the world (qualities that the internet seems to love about him the most).

Since then Shroff has become a meme, a Vogue fashion icon, appeared on podcasts become an Insta influencer. Capitalism has done what it's best at, taken his "cool" and used it to sell products to us all. His style of home cooked recipes has been imitated by political figures including both Modi and Nitin Gadkari, and ranged from celebrities like Deepika Padukone to Bobby Deol. We can almost hear social media agencies asking all the clients they respresent to come up with their versions of Shroff's recipes. Somehow, this has done nothing to diminish Shroff’s appeal and the reasons for that are many.

While making one of his recipes, I was reminded of the Noma episode of David Chang’s show. The problem with recipes on the internet, Chang tells Rene Redzepi, the wunderkind of New Nordic cuisine, is that they are unable to transmit the culture surrounding the food, which is only transmitted from parent to child in a home kitchen or any version thereof of the community setup. Shroff solves the problem. “Hilaane ka nahi” he admonishes while cooking both pumpkin and bhindi (“paani he uss main”). In these statements you have both instruction and culture. Never forget taste, or the primary purpose of bhindi: to not have the consistency of slime. 

Discussing these videos with Kara co-founder Nisha, who couldn’t figure out why they were becoming so popular "most of the dishes are crap" she offered in exasperation, there didn’t seem to be too many answers beyond the usual: the nostalgia contained in them, which is the internet’s favourite emotion; or perhaps a reminder of world that is faraway from the artifice-laden digital world most of us seemed to inhabit.

They also seemed authentic. Shroff cadence did not seemed rehearsed or carefully calibrated. He seemed to have retained his uniqueness even in these present times where everything is hypercurated, everything seems algorithm-ised, few things feel original. But was there something more? They felt different. They sounded different. From other  cooking content. From other reels. They were raw in a way in which few things are. There could be another deeper reason for their vitality, if one permits oneself to make a leap of (poetic) faith. 

We love Jackie Shroff and his recipes, the same reasons we love cats, at least if one is going to use a theory put forth by Silicon Valley VR pioneer Jaron Lanier. The reason cats (as opposed to domesticated dogs) populate the internet, Lanier theorises is that they have retained their tiny lion selves even though humankind has made several attempts to domesticate them. They continue to hunt (even if tiny indoor insects) and attack us who stand several feet taller than them. They remind us of what it was like to live in a world that didn’t seem controlled by some ever-present corporate force. In Shroff’s videos and recipes, there is the promise that if you cook these things, in the specific ways in which he says you should, maybe you could be a bit more like him. More free. Less worried about the things that don’t matter. Whoever you want to be.