The idli, the screen, and the politics of who gets to speak
On 8 June 2026, two stories from The Indian Express landed within minutes of each other on the cultural wire. In one, senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor rose to defend the structural integrity of a steamed rice cake against the menace of being dunked in hot chai. In the other, the newspaper's film critic took a Telugu-language production called Peddi to task for promising marginalised voices and delivering what the review called a "saviour in a new mask." Read together, they sketch a fault line running through contemporary Indian public life: who gets to speak for whom, and on whose terms.
India's culture wars rarely announce themselves as such. They arrive as recipe columns, film reviews, and parliamentary repartee — the soft surfaces of a society negotiating the hard politics of region, religion, caste, and class. The two June 8 stories from the Indian Express illustrate how the language of authenticity is being policed in real time, and how easily the defence of a regional foodstuff slides into the same register as the denunciation of a saviour narrative on screen.
Tharoor, the idli, and the limits of refinement
The first story is, on its face, absurd. Tharoor — the Thiruvananthapuram MP whose prose is often parodied for its baroque English — took umbrage at a marketing trend that produced a "dunkable" idli, a variant of the South Indian steamed cake engineered to survive immersion in tea or coffee. According to The Indian Express, his reaction was emphatic: the idli would, in the headline's striking phrase, "dissolve in the hot chai and ruin it."
The story is a small comic set-piece, but the subtext is a defence of regional culinary orthodoxy against the encroachments of pan-Indian, pan-continental, beverage-led breakfast culture. Idlis are, in their canonical form, vehicles for sambar and chutney; their geometry and density are calibrated to that purpose. To make them dunkable is, in Tharoor's framing, to forget what an idli is for. The marketing proposition — convenience, portability, hybridity — is precisely what the traditionalist position refuses.
The irony, of course, is that Tharoor's reputation as a connoisseur of refined English has long made him a target in the very register he is now defending: a regional staple against the homogenising force of a globalised snack culture. The roles are reversed, and the reversal is the story. A man whose name has become shorthand for a certain Anglophone excess is now the tribune of a steamed rice cake. The Indian Express, by publishing the remark in good faith, gives the contradiction its institutional cover.
There is also a class dimension the headline does not surface. The "dunkable" idli is, by definition, an industrial product — engineered for shelf life, branded for urban consumption, priced for a commuter market. The idli Tharoor is defending is, in practice, the homemade idli of a Kerala kitchen. The exchange is not really about a snack. It is about which version of regional life is allowed to wear the name.
Peddi and the grammar of representation
The second item, also published by The Indian Express on 8 June, is a review of a Telugu-language film called Peddi. The review's verdict, captured in the headline, is that the film "tries to be a film about the marginalised" but ends up "giving you the saviour in a new mask." It is a familiar accusation in Indian cinema of the past decade: that films which announce themselves as centred on Dalit, Adivasi, or working-class lives often relocate agency to a more conventional protagonist whose arc is the actual engine of the narrative. The marginalised body is the stage; the saviour is the play.
What makes the review notable is not the diagnosis — Indian film criticism has been making it for years, in Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, and Malayalam — but its appearance in a mainstream English-language daily on the same morning that an MP is policing the boundaries of a breakfast food. The juxtaposition is not editorial intent; it is the news cycle. But the juxtaposition tells a story.
The "saviour in a new mask" formulation is, in effect, a complaint about the Indian remake of a globalised storytelling grammar. The heroic-protagonist structure that Hollywood polished into a formula has, for two decades, been ported into Indian cinema under the cover of "social issue" branding. The critical vocabulary to resist that grammar is now well established in Indian film criticism; the Indian Express is simply surfacing it for a general readership on a weekday morning.
Two registers of the same anxiety
Read together, the two stories describe a society that has become newly attentive to questions of authenticity, voice, and belonging — and that is negotiating those questions in registers as different as a press release for a packaged snack and a feature-length film.
In the Tharoor piece, the contested object is a regional food tradition; the threat is its industrial repackaging for an urban, mobile, hybrid consumer. In the Peddi review, the contested object is the representation of marginalised lives; the threat is the recovery of those lives by a more familiar protagonist whose arc the audience can metabolise. The mechanisms are different. The anxiety is the same: that something real is being hollowed out and re-filled with something more palatable.
The Indian Express is, in both cases, the venue that gives the critique national reach. A regional English daily with wide circulation, it positions itself as the place where these arguments are conducted in a register accessible to a literate middle-class readership — the same readership, not coincidentally, that buys the dunkable idli and books the tickets for films like Peddi. The paper does not arbitrate. It hosts. But hosting is itself a form of power.
The structural point is plain. Cultural arbitration in contemporary India is no longer the monopoly of state cultural institutions, film certification boards, or party spokespersons. It is distributed across newspapers, restaurant menus, OTT review aggregators, and the X timelines of elected officials. The Tharoor of 2026 is as likely to defend an idli as to defend a multilateral institution. The cinema of representation is debated on the same day, in the same paper, in the same column inches. The culture page has become a parliament of its own.
Stakes: who arbitrates authenticity
The forward view is straightforward. As India's consumer market matures and its streaming platforms compete for the same regional-language audiences that the packaged-food industry is courting, the contests over authenticity will intensify rather than dissipate. The question is not whether a dunkable idli will succeed in the market — it almost certainly will, as novelty products do — but whether the critique of such products retains any institutional weight once the products become routine.
In cinema, the stakes are larger. If the Indian film industry continues to greenlight stories of marginalised lives that are told through the eyes of the privileged, the genre of "social issue" cinema will increasingly be read as a marketing layer over a more conventional commercial product. The Peddi review's diagnosis, in other words, will become the conventional wisdom. That is a measure of how high the bar has been set — and how often the bar is cleared in name and missed in execution.
What both stories do not do, and what the Indian Express cannot do on its own, is adjudicate. The paper can print Tharoor's defence of the idli and a critic's denunciation of the saviour narrative. It can host the argument. It cannot settle it. The remaining uncertainty is also worth naming: the sources do not specify how widely the dunkable idli has actually sold, nor how Peddi has performed at the box office, and the public response to Tharoor's intervention is still developing on social platforms outside the Indian Express's reporting footprint. That, in the end, is the limit of the culture page and the beginning of the cultural conversation.
This is a desk piece, not a column. Monexus filed both items as markers of a wider pattern; the wire is still reporting out the underlying commercial and box-office dimensions.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shashi_Tharoor
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idli