In Sumitra and Anees: Tales and Recipes from a Khichdi Family, journalist Seema Chishti tells the story of her parents’ interfaith marriage through the home they made together. Her mother, Sumitra, was a Hindu from Karnataka; her father, Anees, was a Muslim from Uttar Pradesh. Their marriage and shared kitchen become, in Chishti’s telling, a personal example of life across religious boundaries—and a way to argue that the possibility of such closeness is being constrained.
Who were Sumitra and Anees?
Sumitra was a Kshatriya Hindu from Mysore, Karnataka, and Anees was a Syed Muslim from Deoria, Uttar Pradesh, according to the book’s bibliographic description. Pooja Pillai’s 2022 review in The Indian Express reports that Sumitra was born in 1933 and Anees in 1940. Both lived and worked in Delhi, where they met as contributors to the weekly Mainstream. Their friendship developed into love; the review says they married in a nikah ceremony in Delhi.
That account gives the book its grounding: this is not only an argument about interfaith marriage as a political idea, but a daughter’s account of two people building a life together. The marriage is the beginning of the story, while the home and its everyday habits show what that life looked like.
What is Sumitra and Anees about?
Published by HarperCollins in 2022, Sumitra and Anees: Tales and Recipes from a Khichdi Family combines family memoir, political reflection and recipes. The book’s bibliographic listing describes it as 200 pages; Pillai’s review gives 189 pages, so pagination varies between listings or editions. Its ISBN is 9789354894275. Find the book’s bibliographic listing on Google Books.
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Chishti frames her parents’ household as evidence of a kind of pluralism that was lived in ordinary settings, not merely asserted as an ideal. In the introduction, as quoted in Pillai’s review, she writes: “Only because it is important to speak today of the world that was possible in India, where the idea of India was not just an ‘idea’ idea, but a lived reality. Even if part of the larger, sometimes ugly and broken, mosaic of what constituted how India lived, Anees and Sumitra’s kitchen, home, life and ideals are an important testament.”
Family memory and political change
The memoir places the couple’s early difficulties alongside the political changes Chishti believes altered the atmosphere around them. Pillai’s review quotes her reflecting: “Whether it was the Emergency or the tremors of the demolition of the Babri Masjid that changed India, Anees and Sumitra realised slowly that the hurdles they thought they had faced when they got together were simply genteel objections compared to what the country was now experiencing.” This is Chishti’s interpretation of their lives and the country around them, rather than a separate measure of how all interfaith couples experienced those events.
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The kitchen as a record of exchange
The recipes make cultural exchange tangible. Pillai’s review names three kinds of rasam, dal-palak, kadhi, Karnataka-style fried mutton and shami kabab. Together, the dishes point to culinary traditions from two families and regions meeting in one kitchen. In this structure, food is not an appendix to the family story: it is one of the ways the book records a shared life.
What does Chishti mean by saying the idea is being “choked”?
In the Scroll.in excerpt published May 10, 2022, Chishti argues that interfaith marriage matters beyond the number of couples who marry across religious lines. She sees such relationships as visible contact across a boundary, capable of challenging assumptions about communities and weakening political appeals that depend on keeping them apart. The phrase “that idea is being choked” expresses her political judgment about pressures on that possibility; it should be read as the essay’s argument, not as a standalone statistical finding.
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Chishti cites the National Health and Family Survey 2015–16 as reporting that 2.5% of marriages were interfaith, compared with 13% that were inter-caste. These are figures from the survey period as cited in her 2022 essay, not a current estimate. The numbers describe how uncommon interfaith marriage was in that cited dataset; they do not, by themselves, establish the broader political effects Chishti attributes to it.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How to read the book’s memoir, politics and recipes
| Part of the book | What it offers |
|---|---|
| Family story and political context | The first three sections, as described in Pillai’s review, tell the family story and place it alongside Chishti’s reflections on pluralism and political change. |
| Recipes | The fourth section gathers dishes associated with the two families and regions, presenting the shared kitchen as a record of daily cultural exchange. |
The Indian Express podcast listing for July 24, 2022, notes that Chishti discussed the book, its connection to her mother’s cookbook and the politics of diversity with host Sandip Roy; the listing does not provide a full transcript. For the complete account, see Chishti’s Scroll.in excerpt and Pillai’s review in The Indian Express.
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