It started with a comment about a graduate student’s lunch, a creamy Indian dish called palak paneer made with spinach and cheese, that he was heating in an office microwave in the anthropology department at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
“Oof, that’s pungent,” the student, Aditya Prakash, recalled an administrative assistant telling him. Mr. Prakash, an Indian citizen who was studying for a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology, said the administrative assistant then told him there was a rule against microwaving strong-smelling food in the office.
Mr. Prakash said it was the kind of remark that made many Indians in the West afraid to open their lunches in public spaces. When he told the administrative assistant that he did not appreciate her comment, she started shouting at him, he said. Two days later, he and four other students, including his partner, Urmi Bhattacheryya, who was also studying for a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology, responded by heating Indian food in the same microwave.
Thus began what Mr. Prakash and Ms. Bhattacheryya described in a federal civil rights lawsuit as a “pattern of escalating retaliation” that ended with the revocation of their doctoral funding.
This month, Ms. Bhattacheryya said, the university finalized an agreement to pay her and Mr. Prakash a total of $200,000 to settle the lawsuit, which they filed in U.S. District Court in Denver in September. Mr. Prakash and Ms. Bhattacheryya also received their master’s degrees as part of the settlement. The couple, who are engaged, have been living in India since October.
The University of Colorado, Boulder, denied liability in the case and said that federal privacy laws for students and employees prevented it from addressing the specifics.
“When these allegations arose in 2023, we took them seriously and adhered to established, robust processes to address them, as we do with all claims of discrimination and harassment,” it said in a statement. The university said that the anthropology department had “worked to rebuild trust among students, faculty and staff.” It added that the department’s leaders had met with graduate students, faculty and staff members “to listen and discuss changes that best support the department’s efforts to foster an inclusive and supportive environment for all.”
Mr. Prakash said he initially tried to downplay the administrative assistant’s comments on Sept. 5, 2023, about his palak paneer and the rule against microwaving strong-smelling food.
“Food is just food,” Mr. Prakash said he told her. “I’ll be out in a minute.” But when he sat down to eat, he said, “I felt the food sort of turned to ash in my mouth.”
Mr. Prakash later spoke about the incident in a class discussion about cultural relativism that Ms. Bhattacheryya was leading as a teaching assistant. When he received a departmentwide email suggesting that members avoid preparing food with “strong or lingering smells,” he replied to everyone in the department, saying that the suggestion was discriminatory and asking why it had been OK for an employee to heat chili in a crockpot in the office.
Someone in the department told Mr. Prakash that it would also be wrong to heat broccoli in the microwave, he recalled: “My rejoinder to that was, ‘How many groups of people do you know that face racism on a daily basis because they eat broccoli?’”
Over the next year, he and Ms. Bhattacheryya said in their lawsuit, their faculty advisers dropped them without warning or explanation. They were reassigned to advisers outside their disciplines. They were told they were making insufficient progress toward their degrees and were no longer eligible to be teaching assistants, they said. The university cited them for “poor performance” and their failure to complete certain course requirements. They were denied credit transfers and ultimately lost their doctoral funding, they said.
“We were 4.0 G.P.A. students,” Mr. Prakash said, “and the department at every level started trying to sabotage us and started trying to paint us as somehow maladjusted.”
Complaints about food smells have long been used to suggest that certain people are inferior, said Krishnendu Ray, a food studies scholar at New York University. In the United States, Italian immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were derided as smelling like garlic and wine, he said. Generations of American schoolchildren have heard comments about the smell of their food when opening lunchboxes packed by their immigrant parents.
“In some ways, this kind of thing happens whenever there is an encounter across class, race and ethnicity,” Professor Ray said.
When he was a ninth grader living in Italy, Mr. Prakash said, his classmates would tease him and refuse to sit with him when he opened his lunchbox with Indian food made by his mother. When he heard the comment about his lunch years later in graduate school, he felt the same kind of sting, he said.
“I felt very diminished, because I was not marked by my identity in any way,” he said. “Up until this point, I was just another Ph.D. scholar.”
Michael Levenson covers breaking news for The Times from New York.
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