Most Mauritians agree that at least at the level of the culinary arts, there has been a meeting of different cuisines – Chinese, Indian, African and European – to give birth to an interesting experiment – a Mauritian cuisine. At least at the level of food, Mauritians have been able to overcome their propensity to stick to their cultural habits and experiment with new foods. Mine frite, briani, dhollpuri, rice and curry, spaghetti, even couscous do not ‘belong’ to any particular group, they have been appropriated by Mauritians who are very eclectic in their food habits.
What is the relationship with ‘art’ you may ask? What follows is an attempt to look at art from the perspective of ‘taste’ in the visual arts, which owes much to the ideas and formulations of Professor W.J.T Mitchell . (This pushes the ‘culinary’ metaphor quite far – so it is advisable to take it with one or more pinch of humour).
In the colonial period ‘art’ could be likened to the European food that the colonisers deeply missed. They were nostalgic about what they had left behind and tried to produce the same here with the means and skills they had at their disposal, something that they achieved with a fair amount of success. What they produced here eventually did resemble the art of their home culture, but it had the slightly stale taste of biscuits that had traveled in ships for weeks, if not months, across the oceans to reach the island.
However they could do nothing about it, since there was nothing else around: what the others (of African, or Asian origin) could have ‘cooked’ as art, would have been simply unacceptable, unpalatable, and that had quickly died away – through repression or social pressure.
Then a rebellious artist – Hervé Masson, decided that he would try something ‘raw’, in the same way that other modernists in Europe were cooking new food with exotic spices – African and Oceanic visual culture (African and Oceanic visual culture excited the visual ‘tastebuds’ in the same way that Classical Greece had served as stimulus for the artists of the Renaissance). Of course, those who had lived on a limited regimen could not stomach this: those who considered themselves as the arbiters of taste where offended, incensed. In the case of Hervé Masson the story is quite tragic: what he ‘cooks’ in Mauritius is too fresh and too ‘raw’, while when he goes to cook the same in Europe it is found to be somewhat stale.
Others follow suit: they learn how to cook the manna from the modernist Gods themselves (either in Europe or in India), and slowly try to inculcate this ‘taste’ in the local population. Mixed reactions. Having suffered from some kind of artistic famine for too long, the local population touches the ‘food’ with the tips of their tongues, but their taste has been limited for too long and suddenly all this diversity (of styles) tastes too alien, too new. The modernist artists persist: this is internationally recognised manna, delicacies that the greatest connoisseurs, the greatest gourmets appreciate worldwide, why not here?
But many are still not sure if that is what ‘good’ is supposed to taste like. By now there is a big debate in some (very limited) quarters: what should ‘good’ art taste like for Mauritians? Can there be a specifically Mauritian artistic ‘cuisine’?
In terms of real food, many prefer fried noodles or briani, or the ubiquitous dholpuri which have different origins but which are uncomplicated, and suit everybody. In the same way visually, what is cooked for tourists – exotic art is often appreciated as being genuine local Mauritian art. And in some astute ways, those who cook for tourists look for local ingredients, something that even the local people respond to, since they recognize it and recognize themselves in it. More than that, it flatters them to live in that mythical image of the paradise painted by the artists of exotic Mauritius.
The story gets even more complicated, but to cut it short: in the last generation, instead of basing themselves on foreign taste, and imposing that as the norm from which to appreciate what is cooked locally, artists are beginning to find out what is it in the local cuisine that people respond to. More than that, some are becoming skilful enough to entice the public to a feast where the image itself swallows the viewer, making him part of a larger whole, a real melting-pot from where he begins to ‘imagine’ the real Mauritian taste.
