Two Indian scholars made headlines recently about winning a $200,000 settlement in the US in a racial discrimination lawsuit. As dust settles on the sensational settlement, they tell Firstpost’s Bhanu Pratap what exactly happened and why they filed the lawsuit. Were they so touchy about somebody not liking the smell of palak paneer, the famed Indian household dish?
They tell Firstpost that it was never about food. That it happened on a US campus and the person making “pungent” remarks was British, who got institutional backing from American betrayed the same racist mindset Indians have heard and read stories from their grandparents and books detailing colonialism.
The palak-paneer incident
What began as a disagreement over reheating a lunchbox has, for two Indian scholars, come to symbolise something far older and deeper than a campus dispute. “This was never about food,” Aditya Prakash and his fiancée Urmi Bhattacheryya say, reflecting on the episode that led to a civil rights lawsuit and a $200,000 settlement with a US university. Instead, they argue, it exposes what they describe as a lingering “Dogs and Indians” mindset — a hierarchy of culture and belonging they believe still shapes how Indian identity is received in Western institutional spaces.
Speaking to Firstpost, the two scholars — who had filed the lawsuit after a row over the “smell” of palak paneer heated in a departmental microwave — said the incident was less about a single remark and more about dignity, power and the subtle ways in which culture can be marked as out of place. They describe the episode as part of a broader pattern of what they call “olfactory discrimination”, where food associated with South Asia is treated not as neutral, but as intrusive — a stigma they link to older colonial attitudes that have never fully disappeared.
For them, the case that unfolded in laboratories, faculty meetings and eventually legal filings was not a fight over a lunch break, but over the right to carry one’s culture into shared spaces without apology.
This occurs even as Western academia continues to build knowledge and careers by researching marginalised communities in India, without extending the same respect to those cultures when Indians carry them into Western spaces, they said.
‘A racist slur’: When food stops being neutral
The incident occurred on 5 September 2023, about a year after Prakash joined the university. He was reheating his lunch—palak paneer—in a departmental microwave when a female staff member approached him, objected to the “smell,” and asked him not to use the microwave to heat his food.
Prakash told Firstpost’s Bhanu Pratap that the language used to describe his food is “commonly deployed as a racist slur against Indians.”
“This is a very particular phenomenon in the West, where the smell—or the so-called perceived smell—of food stops being neutral the moment it is associated with the Global South, especially South Asia,” he said.
‘I tried to reason’: Attempting to resolve quietly
Prakash said his first instinct was to address the matter directly and calmly.
“I told her I did not appreciate the comments she made about my food. I tried to reason with her. She is from Yorkshire, from Britain, and I said that given the number of Indians, Pakistanis, and other South Asians, she would have some familiarity with this kind of food. But even if she did not, basic respect for another person’s food, whether Indian or otherwise, is simply human decency,” he said.
According to Prakash, the staff member denied making any inappropriate remarks.
“She asked, ‘What comments?’ So I told her she had called my food ‘pungent’. Each time, I kept saying that I would be done in a minute.”
He said he consciously tried to de-escalate the situation, aware of the broader challenges South Asian students often face.
“Food is just food. I was thinking about what happens to South Asians—especially Indians—who face this kind of behaviour every day. Someone has to say it’s not OK. This was never about taking someone to task.”
‘Food just smells’
Prakash stressed that there is no objective hierarchy when it comes to food smells.
“There is no scale where one kind of food smells worse than another. Food just smells, and these ideas are culturally determined. At its core, this is about mutual respect. In the West, food has been used against us in a very specific way, reinforced through stereotypes in popular culture—from The Simpsons to the character of Apu.”
He initially believed the remarks may have stemmed from ignorance rather than malice.
“Even then, I felt it might have come from ignorance. That is why I spoke directly to her and said food is just food, and that I would be done in a minute,” Prakash said.
However, the situation escalated when the staff member insisted he should not heat his food in that microwave because it was close to where she sat.
“That is where it became deeply problematic. Questions of food and shared space are also questions of power. The fact that she was white and British altered the context significantly,” Prakash said.
‘Dogs and Indians not allowed’ in a modern US university
The incident, he said, evoked painful historical stigmas rooted in colonial discrimination.
“Many of us grew up hearing stories from our grandparents about life before 1947, when public spaces carried signs saying, ‘Dogs and Indians not allowed’. To see something like that being recreated today in the US, in a public university, in an anthropology department—a discipline meant to study culture—is deeply disturbing. That, in a sense, is the one-line description of what happened.”
Both Prakash and Bhattacheryya reiterated that the case was never simply about food.
“It was about dignity, belonging, and the quiet humiliations that many Indians abroad learn to endure,” they said.
Prakash added that Indians are typically ridiculed in the West in two enduring ways.
“One is our accents. Everyone has an accent, but it is deeply unfair to demean someone for how they speak. The other is our food, which is half of one’s being. This is the food I grew up on—the food my mother fed me. There is a historicity to food, and I felt that was being attacked.”
Paratha-sabzi and prejudice: Early lessons in Italy
Prakash recalled encountering similar discrimination earlier in life. “When I was in Italy during my school days, I carried paratha-sabzi for lunch, and other students would sit away from me. That really hurt me. I first encountered this at 14, and then again nearly two decades later, at 32. Time had passed, but the context in the West remained unchanged.”
‘A stain that will never go away’
Following the incident, he said, the matter was escalated internally rather than resolved.
“If there was no ill intent, the simplest response would have been to apologise and move on. Instead, it was escalated. Faculty became involved in a deeply demeaning manner. When other students brought Indian food in solidarity—a very Indian form of civil disobedience—there was no sloganeering, nothing of that sort, yet it was portrayed as a riot.”
The department later banned all students from using the microwave.
“I said in a meeting that this would further stigmatise our food. I said, ‘This is a stain that will never go away.’ Everyone eats, and everyone will feel this impact—from public figures like Kamala Harris to migrant workers.”
Prakash said this marked the moment when discrimination became institutionalised.
“I could not allow my culture, my food, my country to be insulted in an institutional way.”
Fear and quiet suffering among Indians abroad
After the incident, Prakash and Bhattacheryya wrote about it on social media. Responses poured in from across the US, the UK, and India, many from people who had faced similar discrimination. They were also subjected to online trolling and racist abuse.
“People said they were afraid to open their lunchboxes in common spaces. Some said they ate in their cars to avoid scrutiny,” Prakash said.
Bhattacheryya said the responses revealed how deeply normalised such racism remains.
A THREAD ON RACISM: My partner @Wayseller and I, who are Indian PhD students in Anthropology at@CUBoulder
have been facing systemic racism and suppression of our voices within the department. Please read, and retweet. It has been a horrific two weeks for us. (contd. in thread) pic.twitter.com/y8NWX6MMki— Urmi (@Urmi_1990) September 16, 2023
“One set came from Indians sharing similar experiences. The other was vicious racist trolling—comments like ‘All Indians smell’, ‘Go back’, or calling our food ‘dog food’. Terms like ‘curry muncher’ were repeatedly used.”
She said the episode demonstrated how racism operates both overtly and institutionally.
“Over the next two years, it became a pattern of retaliation after retaliation simply because we asserted that our food doesn’t need permission to exist.”
Academic fallout and settlement
Both said their academic careers were directly affected. Advisory committees resigned without explanation, new advisors outside their research fields were imposed, and they lost research funding and teaching roles—developments even university deans described as unprecedented.
“It jeopardised our careers, our grants, and our future prospects,” Bhattacheryya said. “It was also very lonely. Our department was our academic home, and that camaraderie disappeared.”
Despite completing the programme with perfect GPAs and securing multiple grants, both ultimately left the PhD programme.
‘Even powerful institutions can be held accountable’
“This case shows that even powerful institutions can be held accountable,” Prakash said. “Racism against Indians comes at a cost. Many people have faced this for decades, but we wanted to send a clear message to Western institutions that discrimination carries social and economic consequences.”
He stressed that the lawsuit was never about money.
“It was about making a point—that there are consequences to discriminating against Indians for their Indianness.”
Bhattacheryya described the outcome as a moral victory.
“There is accountability here. Public scrutiny forces institutions to realign,” she said, adding that the case highlights what she described as “olfactory racism”—a long-normalised trope used to dehumanise Indians.
The lawsuit was settled in September, a step typically taken to avoid prolonged and costly court proceedings. Under the terms of the settlement, the university agreed to confer degrees on the students while denying all liability. The agreement also bars them from studying or working at the institution in the future.
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