Vegetables™

How empire turns shared culture into private property

This piece was first published on Brown History under the title ‘A British Chain Tried to Trademark Our Word for Vegetables. Yes, Seriously’.

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The cover of the book in question.

On an otherwise ordinary day in late 2025, the food writer Yasmin Khan opened an email that no one writing about vegetables should ever have to see. A solicitor’s letter, sent to her via her publisher, accused her of infringing a trademark. The word in question was sabzi — the everyday Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Persian, Dari, Pashto term for cooked vegetables, spoken casually by more than a billion people.

But in the United Kingdom, sabzi had become someone’s property. A restaurant owner in Cornwall — who, like Khan, shares Iranian heritage, but is also related by marriage to former British Prime Minister Clement Attlee — had successfully trademarked the word in 2022 and was now demanding that Khan change the title of her cookbook, hand over sales data, and pay damages.

Aggressive messages on social media followed, and Khan noted a striking pattern in who was sending them: “they were all women, all white, and all from Cornwall.” And then came the surreal crescendo: the Duchy of Cornwall, one of the oldest feudal estates in the country and a source of income for Prince William, stepped in to assert support for the trademark on behalf of the deli owner, who was the estate’s tenant. As Khan captured so sharply, “When a private estate providing income to the crown becomes involved in a legal dispute over the ownership of an Asian word for veg, the legacy of the entitlement at the heart of British colonialism is laid bare.”

Public pressure eventually forced the trademark to be withdrawn, but before all that happened, the colonial structure of all this was revealed: a Western bureaucratic system treating a communal inheritance as an unclaimed asset, because to the state, sabzi was not a cultural commons — it was a word that hadn’t been registered.

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Ever since I read about the case, I couldn’t stop thinking about it; it began with surprise, then became satire, and eventually turned into anger. It wasn’t just about food or diaspora outrage, but because it struck at something I had already been grappling with for months in my own research: what counts as knowledge, and who gets to decide?

While travelling across India for my work — sitting in monasteries in Sikkim, listening to caretakers at dargahs, speaking to priests in Kumaoni temples — I’ve realised how much of South Asian knowledge survives without documentation.

At a monastery in Sikkim, a young Bhutia monk narrated a Guru Rinpoche miracle as casually as one might describe a family story. When I asked if the story appeared in an inscription or manuscript, he looked puzzled. “Why would it?” he said. “We remember it.”

Along the Coromandel Coast, the caretaker of the Nagore Dargah told me how the well behind the shrine is believed to hold water from the holy Zamzam. When I tried tracing this belief to a written text, I found nothing definitive, but just a passing mention in a penny paperback I picked up at the site. It existed the way many things do here: orally, communally, unselfconsciously.

Western education trains you to treat written knowledge as superior — citations, footnotes, provenance, and textual “rigour” — but the subcontinent often gives you a nonchalant shrug and a fascinating story, and insists that the story is enough. Writing, when it happens at all, is a backup plan rather than the foundation of truth. Because for millennia, this region was not built on written authority. It was built on sound.

The Vedas themselves are not ‘scriptures’ in the Western sense; they are called śruti, which literally means “that which is heard.” Knowledge lived in breath, cadence, lineage, and memory. It was not invented but received. Writing was never the guarantor of truth; recitation was, and even when texts existed, they were fluid, adaptable, and improvisable.

A. K. Ramanujan, in his Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation, argued that Indian epics survive through “tellings” rather than fixed “texts” — a living universe where you can’t even use the term “variant” because that presupposes a singular “invariant” text. “There is no single Ramayana,” Ramanujan exclaimed, using the example of one of the two primary epics of Hinduism, “but rather many Ramayanas.”

Relatedly, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak reminds us in Can the Subaltern Speak? that colonial modernity commits “epistemic violence” when it refuses to recognise these forms of knowledge transmission as legitimate at all; what Foucault, in Power/Knowledge calls “subjugated knowledges … naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity.”

Consider even the mythology of writing itself in the subcontinent: The Mahabharata, the longest epic poem in the world, was first composed in speech by Vyasa, and only then hastily copied down by Ganesha, so hastily that, it is said (no pun intended), he snapped off his own tusk to use as a pen. If documentation were the point, surely someone would have arranged better stationery. But, clearly, that was never the point: the authority of the text lay in its sound, its rhythm, its recitation; not in ink.

And that is partly why the sabzi episode felt so jarring. A communal word — alive in kitchens across half the planet — collided with a legal system that recognises only what is written, stamped, and filed. Millions of people saying sabzi daily held less weight than one person in Cornwall who filled out the correct form in the correct office. As food writer Rukmini Iyer wrote, Yasmin Khan was sued for “the equivalent of her calling a book ‘fish and chips’, by a trademark owner who has somehow managed to trademark a wordmark with as little distinctiveness as ‘fish and chips.’”

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What happened to sabzi is not an anomaly. It belongs to a long pattern in which the West recognises value only after reducing something living, fluid, and inherited into something that can be filed, catalogued, or owned.

The political scientist James C. Scott, in Seeing Like a State, wrote that states force “legibility” onto their citizens and once done, only recognise what is legible to them. You see this clearly in colonial India. The British census, for instance, took an impossibly complex social landscape — regional identities, local jatis and castes, multiple overlapping religious practices — and forced them into rigid enumerated boxes. Once counted, these labels hardened. The state needed fixed categories; lived experience offered only messy continuities. The logic was the same: to know something, you must first render it legible; once legible, you can control it.

European theologians and missionaries from the 16th to the 19th centuries did something similar with Hinduism. As historian Manu Pillai shows in Gods, Guns, and Missionaries, Europeans could not comprehend a religious universe built on stories, plurality, improvisation, and mythic elasticity, so they looked for “the book.” In response, Hindu reformists elevated the Upanishads, dismissed the Puranas, and tried to compress a vast, decentralised world into the shape of an Abrahamic faith. In doing so, they carried out the “Protestantization of Hinduism” — privileging textual purity over lived practice, scripture over shrine, written doctrine over oral imagination.

And this logic didn’t end with the Raj. This isn’t the first time an everyday part of South Asian life has been “discovered” only after someone in the West tried to own it.

Take neem. For most South Asians, neem is the bitter leaf our grandmothers fed us before exams; the twig our grandfathers chewed as a toothbrush; the oil burned in summer to repel mosquitoes; the seed cake farmers tossed into fields. It lives in the background of daily life — ordinary, ubiquitous, almost invisible in its usefulness.

Which is why it was surreal when, in the 1990s, neem found itself at the centre of an international patent dispute. A US timber importer, a certain Robert Larson, noticed the pesticidal properties of neem — properties Indian farmers had used for two thousand years — and refined an extract called Margosan-O. After receiving US regulatory approval, he sold the patent to a multinational corporation, W.R. Grace. Suddenly, something that had been indigenous knowledge for millennia acquired an owner in the US Federal Register; a cultural common fenced off for corporate profit. Indian farmers, activists, and scientists protested; neem twigs appeared in demonstrations against the GATT agreement. Eventually, the US patent was overturned in 2000, but the message was clear: what is shared becomes ownable the moment Western paperwork identifies it. More recently, a German firm tried to market eco-friendly leaf plates — something South Asia had been using long before Germany’s sustainability movement even existed.

In each case, the pattern is the same: Take something oral, communal, and inherited, capture it in a filing system and claim ownership.

But there’s another layer to this story; one that speaks to a deeper cultural impulse. There is something almost predictable about the way South Asian words become “aesthetic” when used in the West. Sabzi in a British deli isn’t just vegetables; it becomes a vibe, a brand identity, the linguistic equivalent of those people who tattoo the Japanese or Chinese or Arabic word for “water” or “hope” on their forearm because the English version feels too … basic.

It’s the same impulse that turned haldi doodh into a “turmeric latte,” or transformed namaste from an everyday greeting into something whispered reverentially at the end of a yoga class by people who have never once had to say it while trying to jump on a roadside rickshaw while holding a bag of groceries. The presumption beneath all this is familiar: that meaning becomes deeper, more soulful, more poetic when borrowed from elsewhere. As if English — much like the cuisine of the land where it originated — is too plain to carry flavour on its own and must therefore import spice and vocabulary.

But unlike a tattoo or a latte or a performative namaste, a trademark doesn’t merely borrow meaning. It attempts to own it.

Thankfully, the diaspora understood this immediately. As Khan noted, Desi WhatsApp immediately rallied in her defence when the case became public. After all, we know what it means to carry culture across borders through memory rather than documentation. When a British chain tries to trademark our word for vegetables, it is not merely absurd — it is a reminder that the things we inherit through story and habit and taste can suddenly be confiscated by those fluent in bureaucracy.

So what do we do now? I think I’ve found a unique solution. If someone in Britain can trademark sabzi, then perhaps it is only fair that I announce my intention to patent ‘fish and chips’ in India. The Indian coast, after all, has always had plenty of fish, and across the subcontinent we have more than enough varieties of chips.

I look forward to the day when my application at the Indian Patent Office is supported by a millennial maharaja — or better yet, a maharani — from one of our many erstwhile princely states, who, much like the Duchy of Cornwall, I am sure would be delighted to lend a little ceremonial heft to the proceedings.

And when British chippies complain, I will simply shrug and ask the only question that truly seems to matter in these things: “I’m sorry, but did you file the paperwork?”