Mastanamma: centenarian who became a YouTube cooking sensation

During the past century, the world has experienced a rush of social, industrial and technological change that would make the way we live today completely unrecognisable to the average person born in the early 1900s.

Indian grandmother Karre Mastanamma took all those changes in her stride. She was born in the village of Kopalle at the height of the Raj, when Britain’s George V was still the Emperor of India. A century later, she found fame as YouTube’s oldest star, with more than a million subscribers to her traditional-cooking channel.

The unlikely internet sensation, who has died aged 106, was born in 1912 in Gudivada, in Andhra Pradesh. She didn’t go to school. She claimed that she was married by the age of 11. Her dowry was the princely sum of 11 rupees (£0.12). And by the time she was 22, she was a widow with five children. In a video about her life, Mastanamma recalls that she asked her dying husband how she was supposed to cope without him.

Recognising her strength even then, he told her: “You are very different. You can survive without me.”

It’s clear that the young Mastanamma was no pushover. In the same video, she tells a story of how she tossed a young man who dared to touch her without permission into the river. And then threatened to throw his brother after him when he asked for her help to pull the first unfortunate chap out.

But life without a husband to help support the family was not easy. Four of Mastanamma’s five children died of cholera. Having never worked outside the home, Mastanamma had to work in the fields to survive. It was her skill as a cook that would eventually prove the means of providing her family with a better life.

When Mastanamma’s grandson, K Lakshman opened a restaurant in Guntur, it was obvious that he’d have to have his grandmother as executive chef. She created the restaurant’s menu. It was Lakshman, too, who first saw her potential as a new media star and launched her on YouTube’s Country Foods channel. He told Barcroft TV: “She didn’t understand what was happening when we were filming the videos, but when she started to realise it, she felt happy.”

Mastanamma’s recipes were the antithesis of the microwave meals of the digital age. Using the simplest of tools – she peeled tomatoes and ginger with her fingernails – and local ingredients, she created such memorable dishes as chicken with watermelon – which got nearly 12 million views. Fish was her speciality. Her smoky-flavoured biryani cooked in bamboo merited a mention in The Times of India.

Her videos of humble rustic cooking soon found an international audience. Though it might be tough to find the ingredients for her emu egg curry in Waitrose.

The world was charmed by Mastanamma’s enthusiasm and her toothless smile, her elegance and her energy. Her videos show her effortlessly squatting to cook over an outdoor wood fire despite her years. She’s sharp and funny as she teases her grandchildren. She’s tender as she feeds her grown grandsons and their toddler children with her fingers.

Mastanamma made her final recipe video six months before her death. Her grandson announced her passing with a video of her last rites. She was mourned by her legions of fans on YouTube and Twitter. The poor Indian child born the year the Titanic sank, truly came to represent the possibilities of the 21st century.

Karre Mastanamma, YouTube chef, born 1912, died December 2018