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When an Indian doctoral student heated palak paneer in the shared kitchen of a US university, he did not expect to set off a chain of events that would cost him his job, derail his PhD and ultimately lead to a legal battle.
Aditya Prakash was a PhD scholar at the Department of Anthropology, University of Colorado — one of the country’s leading public universities.
The episode occurred in 2023, when a staff member told him that the smell of his palak paneer was “pungent” and asked him not to use the office microwave. Although Aditya pointed out that it is just food and that he would leave after reheating it, the issue didn’t end there.
Attempts to resolve the issue turned into a prolonged conflict as the involved staff member allegedly turned hostile.
When Aditya and his partner, Urmi Bhattacheryya, also a scholar at the same department, challenged the discrimination, the dispute escalated into a wider institutional conflict.
The couple filed a lawsuit at the District Court of Colorado in 2025. The plea alleged that they had suffered substantial economic, physical, mental, and emotional damages in violation of the Civil Rights Act.
They won a USD 200,000 settlement.
What happened
The incident that set off the dispute took place in September 2023. The staff member who referred to the food as pungent also claimed that there was a rule against heating food with strong odours in the microwave.
Aditya was told that he was “lucky” another staff member was not present, implying that he would have otherwise been stopped from using the microwave.
“Indians are discriminated against on the basis of food all the time,” Aditya told TNM, pointing to the slurs and casual mockery that frame Indian cuisine.
“The aesthetics of choice matter here. It does not matter whether they like Indian food. It's their choice. The matter is, can we eat our food on our own time and of our own choice? That is true equality, right?” he added.
At the time of the incident, Aditya was enrolled as a fully funded doctoral student. In the weeks following the incident, he alleged that he was subjected to a series of meetings and accused of creating an unsafe work environment.
Meanwhile, Urmi was allegedly removed from her position as a teaching assistant without any prior warning or explanation from the department.
As weeks passed, the couple say that the pressure mounted. Faculty members who had been assigned as their research guides were replaced without notice, leaving them without proper academic support. Their research funding was revoked and they were given poor performance feedback.
That’s when they decided to move legally.
“At every point, they systematically othered us and shut us out. They were preventing us from proceeding with our research,” Urmi said.
Aditya also recalled his first year as a teaching assistant, when he became a target of aggressive emails from a student.
He says the emails went beyond academic disagreements and were laced with comments about immigrants “overrunning” the country and Christianity being under threat.
“It was alarming. Based on the student's behaviour, it was deemed that police needed to be present during my lecture for the safety of myself and the students," he said.
Anti-immigration sentiments in the US
All of this happened in the backdrop of heightened anti-immigration sentiments in the US and the election of Donald Trump. In the past year, people of colour (POC) communities have increasingly come under threat.
Even before Trump was officially sworn in, Indians were in the spotlight as US right-wing anger turned towards the H-1B visa.
Meant for temporary employment in specialist occupations, the H-1B visa programme is seen to deny Americans jobs in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). Its critics say multibillion-dollar US companies use the visa to hire temporary foreign employees who can be paid less than American citizens.
As per US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) data, 72% of H-1B beneficiaries were of Indian origin in 2023. China came in second with 12%.
In the past months, many have also accused Indians in the US of repeatedly causing noise nuisances when celebrating weddings and festivals and of leaving large amounts of trash in public spaces after such events.