Madhur Jaffrey

1955-7

Madhur Jaffrey was born in Civil Lines, Delhi, to Lala Raj Bans Bahadur and Kashmiran Rani. She spent most of her early years in Kanpur and Delhi. She studied at Miranda House, a college in New Delhi, where she received a BA in English Honours in 1953. After graduating, she worked for All India Radio over the next two years, where she met Saeed Jaffrey, who she married in 1958.

Jaffrey moved to England in 1955 to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, having won a grant and a scholarship for her audition. She graduated with honours in 1957. Jaffrey was then given work and a scholarship at Catholic University of America in Washington D.C. There, Jaffrey married Saeed, and they moved to New York in 1958, where they settled and had three daughters. During this period, the Jaffreys hosted lots of dinner parties, and Madhur Jaffrey’s cooking skills improved substantially. They played a role in introducing Ismail Merchant and James Ivory to each other, who went on to establish Merchant Ivory Productions. Madhur Jaffrey later had roles in many of their films. Madhur and Saeed divorced in 1965. The same year, she received the Silver Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival for her performance in Shakespeare Wallah (Merchant Ivory). There, she met Sanford Allen, who she married in 1969.

While living in London, Jaffrey found British food to be extremely bland, and, having never cooked much beforehand, began to teach herself to cook food she grew up eating. She would ask her mother to send her recipes, and she spent a lot of time figuring out how to cook dishes based on her childhood memories of how they tasted. Though she only lived in England for two years, she has been praised to have significantly contributed to the way British cooking developed in the last fifty years. One of her most popular projects was her BBC show ‘Indian Cookery’ launched in 1982. At one point, when one of her recipes called for the use of coriander, the city of Manchester was rumoured to have run out of the herb entirely. Her recipes generally contributed to a shift in the kinds of ingredients, particularly spices, that British supermarkets stocked. The Guardian describes her very simply as ‘the woman who taught Britain how to cook Indian food’. On 11 October 2004, Jaffrey was awarded an honourary CBE (Commander of Order of the British Empire) for her influence on cultural relations between Britain, India and the United States.

Jaffrey has over thirty cookbooks to her name and has received many awards and honours for her writing and her acting. As an author, she has been praised for her compelling style, the attention to detail she pays, and the care with which she conveys in-depth cultural and culinary understanding around her dishes to her readers. She has also written children’s books, as well as three memoirs. In a BBC interview with Witness History, she spoke about her legacy as an actress and TV personality, talking about how important it was for the South Asian community in Britain for her to gain media coverage as an ‘ordinary’ South Asian woman. On top of her CBE, she received the Padma Bhushan honour in 2022, the third-highest civilian award in India. She lives in Sanford in Hillsdale, New York.