It took a pandemic to make humankind rediscover its umbilical affection for food. (Now that Rutger Bregman has elevated the collective noun ‘humankind’, I am delighted to reclaim it after its long exile on the charge of being a symbol of excessive political correctness!) Faced with an extended, exhausting spell of enforced unsociability, our social genes sought out their survival in the kitchen.
Almost as if on a cue, food became the new driver of conversation on social media, that ultimate purveyor of our civilisational concerns. Its channels were spilling over, like a Chinese banquet, with food memories, images and recipes. It was as if all of us on a cue were overcome by the need to communicate with one another through the medium of food. Social distancing didn’t allow us to share tables, so we turned to social media to share the day-to-day bounties of our tables. And those of us with children realised how easily—and diabolically!—the joys of spending quality time with children can translate into spending longer hours in the kitchen!
Talking about online food stardom, I will not forget easily how Dalgona Coffee, which is nothing but the whipped up ‘shaadiwallah’ coffee we all know too well, acquired a trumped-up social cachet during our own lockdown. It was impossible to miss the coffee whenever you logged on to Facebook or Instagram. Everyone—and her aunt—seemed to be making Dalgona Coffee!
Such stars kept being born and reborn day after day. One of them, as Emily Laurence wrote in Good Food, was banana bread. Sharing its recipe became a “transnational craze”, a behaviour that we may consider irrational in ‘normal’ times. As Claire Chambers, Professor of Global Literature at the University of York, U.K., and editor of Desi Delicacies, writes in her introduction to this volume of ‘Food Writing from Muslim South Asia’, “Food is not only for nutrition but also for comfort. With more leisure time yawning in front of us, many people turned to baking to quieten their nerves, quieten their nerves, and fill their bellies.”
The timing of Desi Delicacies, a heart-warming quilt of fact and fiction, could not have been more appropriate. Never before has the world been more hungry for stories woven around food. With the pandemic and political disruption dominating headlines, food offers a delicious, if momentary, escape from reality.
Momentary, because the pandemic brought joblessness and hunger in its wake, and the restaurant sector has been the worst hit, seeing its business plummet, revive briefly, before being locked down in vast swaths of Europe and America. The people employed in the food supply chain and delivery businesses, meanwhile, are the “unsung heroes”, as Chambers describes them, who get food to stores and to our homes daily without fail, although they rank next only to frontline hospital workers in the pecking order of exposure to infection.
My extended discussion on the pandemic contextualises the genesis of this cogently structured volume. It owes its birth to the culinary creativity spurred by the extended period of collective isolation. My only regret is that it does not capture the diversity of the Muslim experience in India, although Rana Safvi does a magisterial job of rescuing ‘Mughlai’ cuisine from the popular notion, thanks to the rise of post-Partition Punjabi restaurants, that it’s all about dunking in tomato puree and dairy cream. And of course, powdered spices are a no-no.
Pinpointing the differences in the ways of cooking the two signature ‘Mughlai’ gravy dishes—the qorma, which entered the Indian Muslim diet only in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and the lighter qaliya—Safvi says tomatoes, turmeric and coriander (the latter two are best for each other) are never used in a qorma, which gets its flavour profile from the effort that goes into braising the finely chopped onions in ghee or oil with yoghurt and whole spices. In a qaliya, finely chopped onions get replaced by onion paste, which is cooked with turmeric to form the base masala for the gravy.
Befittingly, Safvi concludes her essay with an observation that Lucknow’s much-quoted chronicler Abdul Halim Sharar (1860-1925) made more than a century ago in his ageless classic, Guzishtha Lucknow, “The most important activity in human life is eating. As any nation or community progresses, its diet is the most salient guide to it.”
Tabish Khair, an Indian scholar teaching in Norway, starts his essay with anthropologist and cultural theorist Mary Douglas’s contention that food, whether it can be eaten or not in a particular social context, is a primary marker of identity. In the Muslim marriages he attended growing up in his small town, Douglas’s correlation of food with identity was evident in the separate kitchens and dining areas—one that prepared the food for the primarily non-vegetarian Muslim guests and the other devoted entirely to the service of the vegetarian Hindus. “The ‘syncretism’ or pluralist nature of weddings in my immediate family was fraught by sometimes indelible lines of difference,” comments Khair.
And then there are the invisible guests—members of the mainly Valmiki Dalit caste known by their pejorative collective name, Churha, who show up after dinner to forage for still-edible leftovers (the jootha, colloquially also known as joothan, which can be translated as ‘polluted’ or contaminated). They show up in Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan, published in 1997, and then translated into English in 2003, with the sub-title ‘A Dalit’s Life’.
In a particularly moving passage quoted by Khair, Valmiki wrote: “The little pieces of pooris, bits of sweetmeats, and a little bit of vegetables were enough to make them happy. The joothan was eaten with a lot of relish… Poor things, they had never enjoyed a wedding feast. So, they licked it all up. During the marriage season, our elders narrated in thrilled voices, stories of baratis who had left several months of joothan.”
The left-outs got the leftovers, which became their marker of identity. The notion runs counter to the hypothesis floated by Robertson Smith, one of the founding fathers of anthropology, and quoted by Khair. “Those who sit at meal together are united for all social effects, those who do not eat together are aliens to one another, without fellowship in religion and without reciprocal social duties,” Smith had theorised. Khair counters this logic with the stark reality of jootha. “But what of jootha,” he asks, “where one had fellowship in religion but did not sit at meal together, yet partook in an eating that was intimate and at the same time removed?”
Cultural nuggets are scattered all across the book. In Pakistan, as we learn from the Karachi-based journalist Sanam Maher, the expression ‘burger boy’ is used to disparage anyone who has had an entitled childhood, an easy passage into adulthood, and stays detached from what is going on in the country. It is their equivalent of ‘pappu’, which Imran Khan carried ignominiously on his shoulders till he became prime minister.
“It’s the first time that the burger group will come out to vote,” joked a local politician, Shaikh Rasheed Ahmad, during the 2013 general election, which saw Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf emerge from the sidelines to become his country’s No. 2 political formation. “They are going to join the chapati and saalan folk. They might need to carry their laptops on their heads to protect them from the sun,” the Shaikh had said.
As we live in the time of preponderant death, thanks to the omnipresence of the Corona virus (before I complete this review article, the global death toll will touch two million), I must mention the occasions when a feast follows a funeral in the book. “Feasts honouring the dead no doubt fulfil multiple purposes,” writes Bangladeshi poet and scholar Kaiser Haq. “It is hoped that prayers from well-fed mourners will carry more weight. Sharing a meal is also a life-affirming act and cements social bonds.”
Haq’s memories of the biryani served at her grandmother’s chehlum, the end of the 40-day mourning period, prefaces her reminiscences of the feasting that follows Ramadan fasting in Old Dhaka, and of Chittagong’s tradition of mezbaani in that holy period (she uses the opportunity also to chuckle at the love that the denizens of this port town have for red chillies.)
Tarana Husain Khan, likewise, uses the fortieth-day feast as the backdrop for her fictional ode to Rampur’s Taar Gosht and Khamiri Roti. Describing the scene after the return of the men from the burial, Khan writes, “The cooking pots filled with curry were brought into the courtyard, and the women got back to the business of living, laying out food. The aroma of taar curry and baking rotis enveloped them. Holy texts and prayer beads were put away, the chatter became louder, and life pulled everyone back into the fold. Death receded.”
Here’s a smorgasbord of the sub-continental culinary tales that will prove to be invaluable to our understanding of why what we eat defines who we are. One may be tempted to ask if there’s any homogeneous demographic or psychographic entity that qualifies to be called Muslim South Asia because of the ethnic distinctions that sets one Muslim apart from another, in the same way as no two Hindus are alike in the sub-continental melting pot.
This absence of homogeneity dredges up so many possibilities. A second volume could be a great starter, taking us on a gustatory tour of the many kitchens waiting to be explored in our corner of the world, from Baltistan to Jaffna, from Ahmedabad to Sylhet and Chittagong.
The book, ‘Desi Delicacies: Food Writing from Muslim South Asia’ is edited by Claire Chambers (Picador India, Rs 450).The Mughal dastarkhwan (table), as shown in the spread laid out by Osama Jalai, doesn’t have any of the tomato puree- and cream-laden dishes associated with it in the popular imagination. It has evolved out of the finer influences of the Indo-Islamic culinary tradition showcased in the 15th-century cookbook of the royals, Nimatnama-i-Nasirshahi (Nasir Shah’s Book of Delights), and Humayun’s exposure to Persian haute culture when he was exiled in the court of Shah Tahmasp II.