By Danielle Mages Amato

What inspired House of India, and why does it unfold in a small Indian restaurant in Akron, Ohio?

Deepak Kumar (DK): I grew up in Michigan, in a smallish suburb of Detroit, not unlike the town in the play. It was a place where a lot of specifically South Asian immigrants, like my parents, settled. So of course there were restaurants. We frequented two of them. Udupi, which was probably the closest model to the restaurant in the play, was family-owned, vegetarian, and kind of gross but very delicious. That’s where our family would go to treat ourselves to food that we couldn’t easily make at home but that was still very obviously South Indian food. And the other was actually called House of India. It was a North Indian restaurant that excited me as a kid because it served dishes we didn’t make at home. When these restaurants and some local Indian grocery stores began shutting down, it felt like a community was disappearing. That happened around the same time my parents moved out of the area. 

So during the pandemic, I returned to Michigan to my parents’ new house, in the new neighborhood they had moved into, feeling like it was home, but not home. And I asked my mom if she would teach me to make the food that she had cooked for me growing up. That became something we did together. Through that, I started to connect with her relationship to her journey here as an immigrant, her relationship to India, her relationship to her parents, to her culture—but all through the frame of food. And we had a lot of conversations about the idea of what it means to be home. 

Can you discuss the concept of fusion in your play? Both with food and with cultures?

DK: I’m really interested in the question: if you’re an immigrant, or even if you’re a person who exists in multiple cultures or multiple traditions, how much of yourself do you feel like you have to give away in order to fit in, to assimilate, to survive in a culture that is not the one that you came from? In America, fusion feels like an inevitability. It’s dramatized explicitly in the play by Jacob making Indian tacos, but I think it’s something every culture experiences from generation to generation. And it doesn’t even have to be about food; it could be about religion, family culture, and family values. There’s something uniquely American about that to me.

Family dynamics and expectations feel like central themes here. What were some of the complexities you wanted to explore about intergenerational immigrant families?

DK: There’s this ancient Indian epic called the Ramayana; it’s a giant poem that is all about duty and family, family and duty. And that story was very much a North Star for this play. As I was exploring what makes a South Asian family unit tick, it became hard for me not to talk about what each character felt was their obligation, their duty, especially as it relates to the shared, collective project of the restaurant. 

Ananya feels obligated to her husband and to this restaurant that she created with her own hands and crafted with love. Jacob feels an obligation to his mentor, to this family, and to his own family as well. For Vikram and Vaidehi, they are grappling with obligations to their mother, with the responsibilities of being a caretaker, but also with the duty to themselves, with the question: how do I live a fulfilled and happy life? These questions play out in the tinderbox of the restaurant, but they also explode outward into bigger conversations about family, community, and personal happiness.

Food seems central to these dynamics. Can you expand on that?

DK: Food is very central to my family. Everyone is always talking about food. You finish breakfast, and everyone’s like, “What’s for lunch?” And you finish lunch, and it becomes: “What’s for tea? What’s for dinner?” Every day! It’s this almost Sisyphean question: what are we going to eat? I think of food as a love language. Certainly for my family, if you’re feeding someone, then you are expressing your admiration and your love and care for them. In the play, when Vikram comes home, Ananya immediately worries he hasn’t been eating well, and she says, “Let me make you something real.” The food in the play is always an expression of love.

One of the fun parts of the play for me was to show how the relationship with making and sharing food is subverted. Jacob is probably the best cook in the group, though he’s not South Asian at all; he’s Thai. And he’s also the person who’s trying to push the restaurant to change. So it’s kind of a provocative question: what gives him the right to have any ownership over this food? Well, if he’s actually the best at making it, maybe that’s good enough? 

What conversations or reactions do you hope the audience has after watching the play?

DK: I hope audiences will look up South Indian food! Maybe they’ve never tried curry leaves, or they’ve never tried making a South Indian dish at home, but I hope they will have some curiosity about it and want to try it themselves. More importantly, I want them to feel like they experienced a full meal. Not just a story specifically about an Indian family, but a real full American family drama. And I want them to remember that they laughed, that there’s joy at the heart of this family and this story.