Sanjeev Bhaskar got his first taste of a traditional British curry house - and of the traditional British attitudes sometimes on the menu alongside the chicken tikka masala - when he was a business studies student at Hatfield Polytechnic. He'd gone out with a group of mates to an Indian restaurant. The menus had been passed round, the lagers and poppadums ordered. Then attention turned to the one non-white person in the room who wasn't a waiter.

'It is one of the most uncomfortable experiences I've had in a restaurant,' recalls Bhaskar. 'Somebody said to me: "Well you'll obviously order the hottest thing on the menu." And I felt tricked into ordering it. Obviously, in my mind it was me in an Indian restaurant. But to everyone else I was an Indian in an Indian restaurant. And at that point I suddenly became aware of who I was and how unpleasant it all was.'

It had never occurred to Bhaskar before that the heat of a curry was an indication of anything other than how long it had been on the boil. It hadn't really sunk in - despite, as we shall see, having endured a pretty tough time at school - that to many of those around him he wasn't just another bloke, another student. He was foreign, different.

The curry-house incident - or a mirror image of it - cropped up 15 years later as one of the best-known scenes in Goodness Gracious Me, the show that made Bhaskar's name. In a famous sketch (in fact mostly written by two other people) a group of Indian diners 'go out for an English', burping and farting their way through an evening in an English restaurant in Bombay and asking a nonplussed and harassed waiter: 'What's the blandest thing on the menu?'

Bhaskar, 43, realised long before he arrived at the Hatfield tandoori restaurant that living as an Indian in Britain is like 'wearing bifocals'. He emerged squinting into adulthood with 'a sense of being at once part of society but also staring in at it'.

It's when you hear stories from his past that you realise why. At Bhaskar's infant school, there were three Asian children. In the playground, the boys and girls did what all girls and boys of that age do: they played kiss-chase. Except that special rules applied to the children of immigrant parents.

'The worst moment in my life was when I was seven years old and I discovered that there was a thing such as racism. You don't know you're different until someone lets you know. And in a slightly kind of weepy, here-comes-the-violins way, one of the games that I remember in school - kiss-chase - was one where I was allowed to chase, but I wasn't allowed to kiss.' He smiles. 'Of course, they're all regretting it now ...'

Bhaskar knew early on that in public he had to keep his differences to a minimum. But unfortunately for him, he was bright, well-read and spoke unlike anyone else at school - with neither the estuary English of the white kids or what he calls the 'cod Indian' inflection of the other Asian ones.

He says he picked up his received pronunciation from reading Shakespeare and in his mind attaching the most cultured voices to the characters. 'I'm sure I went through a stage when I resented being Indian because in every other manner, in terms of cultural reference points and vocabulary and all the rest of it, I was way ahead of everybody else - so the one thing that set me back was being Indian. And I couldn't do anything about it.'

Bhaskar has been tracing his family's roots - and telling a much bigger story - for a BBC2 series and an accompanying book looking at an India that stands on the brink of superpower status while simultaneously struggling to provide for its people.

He grew up in Hounslow, a depressing suburb near Heathrow airport. His parents, who had arrived in Britain in the late 1950s, had a maisonette above the launderette they owned, and his father supplemented his income with work at a local Nestlé coffee factory. There wasn't a lot of money sloshing around in Hounslow in the late Sixties and early Seventies - though food was never short in Bhaskar's 'lower-middle class' household. There was no central heating in the maisonette and double glazing, of a sort, was achieved by permanent layers of polythene sheeting which his parents had attached to the windows of several of the rooms. (Another of the rooms, the one above 'an almighty drying machine' was always tropical.)

The home was insulated from the British outside in more ways than one. It felt very Indian. In the classroom, however, Bhaskar played down his ethnicity at every opportunity.

'If, for example, the teacher asked the class: "What did you eat for dinner last night?" I would make it up and say fish fingers and peas and chips and all the other exotic things that English cuisine had to offer at that time.' In fact, he'd been eating his mother's 'beautiful Indian food' - a vegetable curry, a dhal, chapatis, perhaps - but to admit that would have 'made me sound foreign and set me apart from the last eight people who'd said chicken and mushroom pie'.

His father's recipes wouldn't have reassured his English pals, either - though they might have recognised more of his ingredients. Bhaskar's dad didn't cook often - but if he did, it might well be a curry made from Spam. 'When my parents first came here, they really didn't know what to eat. British food did seem very alien to them and very bland. But they managed to find places that sold black pepper and garlic - rarities in those days - and they needed something that would cook through really quickly. So my father used luncheon meat, in these little twirly cans. It would have been quite exotic to him.'

Spam, perhaps, but no beef. Bhaskar was brought up a Hindu, and his religion sees the cow as sacred. Even today he does his best to not eat it. 'There are occasions when I've had beef, but I generally tend to avoid it, as a nod towards my parents' culture.

'I asked my uncle in India why Hindus don't eat beef and he said: "The cow gives you milk, cheese, butter and cream and the bull tills your land so it is disrespectful to kill them and eat them." And that seems a really nice thought.'

It's not that beef is seen as somehow dirty, as, say, pork is among observant Jews? 'No, it was just that we don't do it, we don't eat beef. In a way it was kind of what defined us - the things that made us distinct was our language and our food, and part of that was that we don't eat beef.'

There was another British food in Bhaskar's childhood diet, and that was chips - though only because the Speed Queen Coin Wash launderette was next door to a fish and chip shop, run a by a couple known then and now to Bhaskar as Auntie Phyllis and Uncle Gordon.

'Living above the shop and not having a garden, I would wander next door out the back. Auntie Phyllis and Uncle Gordon would sit me on a high stool behind the counter, give me a pen and a few big sheets of paper that they used to wrap up the chips, and I'd draw, read comics or talk to people coming in. And they'd give me a few chips, a bit of fish.'

But, Spam and chips aside, Bhaskar kept his home life - his sari-wearing mother and his father who'd fled Lahore at partition, via a refugee camp in New Delhi - deliberately hidden. Only a couple of friends from primary school were ever given a glimpse of his secret world, and only once each. He can still remember their names - Nicholas Kennedy and Mark Hutchins. But he was uncomfortable inviting people home - there were different things on the wall, different foods on the table. 'It was all very awkward, because, firstly, we lived above a shop and that was awkward; secondly, my dad did shift work so I didn't know if he'd be asleep. But also my mum wore a sari and spoke with an accent and stuff like that. There was a sense of embarrassment - I absolutely knew that I was not a social representation of my parents.

'I was far too embarrassed to share the experience of Indian food at school. As a kid, you're desperate to fit in, to assimilate in some way, and everything about me stood out.' He was too brown and foreign for most of the white children - and the fact that he did have some friends among the English kids meant he wasn't Indian enough for the Asian pupils.

Facing suspicion from both sides, he probably didn't do much to help his cause. 'In one of my less glittering moments, I was threatened by a kid at school who said "I'll kick your head in". I remember getting really frustrated, and unfortunately what came out was: "So why does fighting have to be the basis of you being better than me? Why don't we have a maths test?".' Presumably, the boy thumped him at this point? 'Yes.'

A few years later, when Bhaskar was at the local comprehensive, the threats were more sinister. The National Front was at its zenith - and Bhaskar's patch of west London suburbia, which by now had now become solidly Asian, was one of the places the racist party was concentrating its efforts. In 1979, they'd attempted to hold an election meeting just three or four miles away in Southall, and been met by an angry group of protesters from the Anti-Nazi League. In the ensuing violence, the ANL demonstrator Blair Peach was killed by police.

The NF was also taking its battle to the school gates - the gates, in fact, of Bhaskar's own school, where they sought recruits, and helped spread fear among the 30 per cent of pupils who were Asian. 'There was a sudden awareness in our school and in the area that there was a division [between white and Asians]. The atmosphere at the time was absolutely horrendous because every other day we would hear rumours of an NF march or some skinheads waiting for us in the estate opposite.' Perhaps the rumours were just that. 'We never knew. I was always good at avoiding those things.' There were, however, 'fights at school along race lines'.

There were moments of near comedy, too. One Sikh student had vaguely heard about the NF's policy of so-called voluntary repatriation. 'We told him that they were going to pay people to go home. And he said: "What, Hounslow?" And we said "well, yes". So he went and signed up with them.' The NF recruitment officer's reaction is not recorded.

These days, Bhaskar is, of course, married to Meera Syal, his co-star in Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars at Number 42. They live in a large house in South Woodford, a very unstarry area to the east of London, with their 20-month-old son Shaan and Meera's 14-year-old daughter, Milli. Bhaskar is not active in the kitchen, and one senses a little guilt over this - though not quite enough for him to actually start chopping any vegetables or putting anything in the oven.

'Meera does all the cooking pretty much. We're very traditional. We thought we were so cutting edge, then we got married and had a child within a year so it only seems fitting that she does all the cooking,' he says. An apologetic laugh. Rightly or wrongly, he senses I might not approve of his lack of effort in this area. So he tries again. 'It's about ... I come from a business marketing background [he was 33 by the time he entered show business] and the most efficient production model really operates when one is doing what one is best at ... otherwise there is wastage.'

In other words, he's not much good at cooking. He admits he's scared of failure. Meanwhile, Meera - who's brilliant at everything from biryanis, to risottos, to chicken and mushroom pies - gets pleasure from making food.

'Yes, the main reason she does everything is that she is a great cook, a far better cook than I am. She knows how to do things quickly and well and she's very creative.' He reflects for a moment.

'These all sound like terrible excuses, of course.' But there's one other reason: Meera's daughter 'is, shall we say, very specific about what she likes' - and her mum knows how best to serve up something she'll eat.

What does baby Shaan eat? 'We introduced him to spicy stuff very early on - particularly garlic. So we got him on rice and dhal. Otherwise it's stuff that babies eat ... fish fingers and chips, peas, sweetcorn and all the rest of it.' Does he have hot flavours? 'Not really, we've kind of kept off chillies and peppers and stuff like that - and obviously salt - but we put in little bits of ginger. It's a good way of educating the palate.'

Does Bhaskar cook anything? 'If I had to pick a signature dish, it'd have to be a chilli, packed full of vegetables but with Indian spices as well - turmeric, cumin, coriander ... the problem is that neither Meera nor Milli like the texture of mince. So I'm kind of buggered because that is my dish.' One senses that this is a signature dish that does not often make it to the table.

Two-and-a-half hours into our four-glass lunch at Benares, a very grand Indian restaurant in Mayfair with a Michelin-starred chef and not a hint of flock wallpaper, several things are clear (even if my head is beginning not to be). It's obvious that Bhaskar and Syal, though a showbiz couple, do not lead a showbiz life. (East Woodford does not very easily lend itself to that.) Though Syal is performing at the National, and Bhaskar has been trotting round India writing a book and filming a documentary, married life seems fairly quiet and ordinary.

Bhaskar is not much of a namedropper - the only two he has mentioned so far are the two school friends who came round to his Hounslow flat when he was at primary school.

Despite this, there is a small roll call of showbiz chums when I ask about eating out.

'The last time I went to an Indian restaurant was with Alan Alda,' he says. 'If I'm taking somebody out to dinner, and they say you choose, I'll probably pick Indian because if they're not Indian, their experience of it may be more limited than mine. So when we went out for dinner with [X-Men star] Hugh Jackman, who's also a mate, we went to an Indian restaurant.' Mel Brooks, too, was taken to a tandoori - or a grand one, at any rate.

In fact, though, if we are being geopolitically accurate, the chances are the restaurants Bhaskar went to with Alda, Jackman and Brooks were not really Indian at all - not in a post-1947 sense anyway, explains Bhaskar. 'Most Indian restaurants here are actually Bangladeshi.' This is, believes Bhaskar, largely due to economic reasons - many of the people who arrived here from the subcontinent with the fewest marketable skills came from Bangladesh, and they're the people who ended up working in the catering trade.

'But the food in an Indian restaurant tends not to be Bangladeshi - it's north Indian style food. Apart from, of course, balti dishes and chicken tikka masala, which were invented in Birmingham.

'Balti means "bucket". If you go to India and ask for a balti you may as well be saying, "I'm going to throw up, could you bring me a receptacle".'

We're back to bad behaviour in curry houses again. A little while back, Bhaskar found himself in a tandoori restaurant in Bradford. One of the other diners was doing what obnoxious drunken people sometimes do in Indian restaurants - the fake Indian accent, the shouting, the jeering. 'And then he recognised me.'

Bhaskar did his best to defuse the situation. He put his arm round the waiter, made it clear that he was deserving of respect. The yob eventually calmed down. Suddenly, Bhaskar was no longer just another brown bloke. He was the famous bloke off the telly. And no one even noticed what curry he'd ordered.

· India with Sanjeev Bhaskar is published by HarperCollins, £20. Benares Restaurant, Berkeley Square, London W1, 020 7629 8886

·To find out more about why Indian food rules the world, visit our Word of Mouth blog