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Sanjeev Kapoor in the studio at his 24-hour TV channel in Mumbai. Photograph: Olivia Arthur for the Observer

From the Gate of India, overlooking the Arabian Sea, the city of Mumbai stretches back 20 miles, a

thickening spread of choked roads, slums, commercial districts and, as you head north along the shoreline,

large suburbs of villas, apartment blocks, chic eateries, schools, brightly lit markets selling cheap clothes, the

occasional mall and office blocks.

Sanjeev Kapoor, India's best-known chef, has his office in Andheri West, one of the sprawling suburbs.

Kapoor's pioneering Khana Khazana, started 18 years ago, is the longest-running TV cooking show in

Asia, and he has just launched India's first 24-hour Hindi-language cooking channel with 40 shows.

This success has brought awards, government advisory contracts, jobs with foreign airlines and an appearance

on CNN alongside Heston Blumenthal, Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver and Wolfgang Puck as one of the

top five celebritychefsin the world.

Kapoor like the McDonald's and the malls and the office workers is in part a product of the new "Shining

India", the India of the near double-digit economic growth, information technology and a new sense of being an

emerging power. The big break for Kapoor, now 46, came in 1993, as economic reforms and satellite television

transformed the Indian social, political and media landscape after decades of socialism. A successful hotel chef

in Mumbai, he was asked to host a cooking show on the best-known of the new TV channels. He chose to

make a homely but attractive dish of cheese-filled spinach dumplings and a complicated stuffed chicken breast

with saffron and orange liqueur. The former shaam savera is now established as his signature dish. No

one remembers the chicken.

But as much as the cooking, it was the medium that Kapoor mastered so rapidly. Television is what gets you

noticed, Kapoor explains early in our interview when I've finished my dosa and he's finished switching his new

channel's data banks. Its power was made clear to him, he says, when he went searching with his wife for dried

soya grains in Mumbai many years ago and found all the shops had sold out. Only then did he remember that

he had cooked a dish with them earlier in the week. His television channel is doing very well, he says, and

quotes numbers which, as ever in India, are eye-popping. Of 120m households with cable or satellite in India,

more than half are Hindi speaking (rather than English speaking), and Kapoor's channel is being watched byaround 12%. A quick back-of-the-envelope scribble shows that this means around 8m homes.

Kapoor will bring to the UK: Mastering the Art of Indian Cooking.

"Indian cooking is in-your-face food," says Kapoor. "But maybe some subtlety is coming in now." He launches

into a brief history of recent evolutions in Indian cuisine. He has an interesting perspective, not least because

his television show, for which he has cooked three dishes a week for 18 years, has played a significant role in

changing what is being cooked in several hundred million kitchens.

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"This is a hot, tropical country," says Kapoor. "Sixty years ago there were no refrigerators. Food was cooked in

the morning and had to last all day. So the principles of pickling were used: spices, fats, salt, preservation in

sugar, all to keep it safe and edible when you couldn't keep it cold. Now that is beginning to change. Our

vegetables are beginning to look like vegetables when they are cooked."

Sanjeev Kapoor meets his public at the market in Mumbai. Photograph: Olivia Arthur for the Observer

In India, food still plays a significant role in establishing status. Take the local English- language news

magazine Outlook. The cover story earlier this month was headlined "Eat Street" and was essentially a

rediscovery of the joys of street food. "No more humble fare, the rich variety is wooing ever more patrons," the

magazine tells its largely middle class readers who now, for the first time, are able to look at cheap roadsidecooking as something if not exotic, then deliciously authentic. The following issue featured recipes for the

aspiring chef. They included a "surf and turf" with beef fillet and prawns.

Beef, of course, is traditionally banned for Hindus, and high-quality cuts are almost impossible to procure in

India unless you have the supply chain of a 5-star hotel. And prawns, unless they are straight from the sea,

involve risking a patchy refrigeration chain. Other recipes were for chocolate mousse though all chocolate is

imported and impossibly expensive and black pepper chicken with a sauce made with red wine (the cheapest

bottle of local plonk costs six times a labourer's daily pay) and a tin of tomatoes.

Tomatoes another ingredient introduced, like chillis, around 400 years ago are readily available, but

canned, and only found in high-class grocery shops in major cities where, shipped in from America or Europe,

they cost a fortune. These recipes are, of course, aspirational. Only the smallest fraction ofOutlookreaders

have the skill, kitchen or cash to follow such recipes. They are there in the magazine like the features on

watches or cars or the hundreds of full-page advertisements selling new apartments where the water is clean,

the power never goes off, the flat-screen TV (perhaps showing Kapoor's food channel) hangs on a clean white

wall and there's a view of a golf course.

Part of that dream exists, of course for those with money. There is somewhere between five and 10 times

more wealth in India now than there was 20 years ago. Roughly two-thirds of the country has seen only

incremental benefits, if any at all, during this period, which means that the cash is concentrated at the top. One

of the things those at the top are now spending their money on is food.

On the TV screen in Kapoor's office, a starlet is standing with contestants at a stove. Programming is all about

participation: there are local versions ofReady Steady Cookand a show devoted to foreign cuisine. For a long

time the latter was "continental", which meant anything vaguely European but adapted for an Indian palate.This is dying now, says Kapoor, and the "Indian pasta" penne with tomatoes, chilli, coriander and masala

spices, for example is taking over.

The key for Kapoor is not just the change in people's taste but the change in their cooking habits. The irony in

India is that those interested in cooking are those who have the least need to do it. Most Indian middle class

homes have both a full-time maid and cook. This means complicated architecture for new apartments, with two

kitchens built into many designs: an open American kitchen for the owner and a closed-off Indian kitchen for

the staff.

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