What’s on the Menu?

FOOD CAN SET YOU FREE—AND CAGE YOU
Food can be the source of great pleasure— and trap you in great pain
Food can free you from your passions—and make you more ferocious
Food can help you explore who you are—and make you intolerant of those unlike yourself

What you choose to eat can forge you into a revolutionary, set you free.

During the freedom struggle, food became a tool to fashion revolutionaries. The Brahmo Samaj used bread and lemonade to woo high caste youth in the early 19th century to break caste barriers and help create a ‘modern Indian’. Rajnarayan Basu said he ate biscuits and drank sherry as a protest against casteism because the bread and biscuit industry was run by lower castes and by Muslims in Bengal. Nabinchandra Sen (1847-1909) reiter­ates this sentiment in his autobiography. The primary force that made him a Brahmo Samaji was bread. “There was no need of any more logic for a glutton like me to realize or digest the glory of Brahmoism and its truth. Since I came to the city from the village, I believe this great circular thing called bread as the sacred fruit of immortality in the Kali Age.”

Similarly with lemonade, which was produced and sold by Muslims, making it taboo for Hindus to drink it as it would‘ruin’their castes tatus. But BipinChandra Pal(1858-1932) did it anyway and was thrashed by his father. A few weeks later, Pal fell seriously ill, and the doctor suggested lemonade as medicine. “Now to have revenge on my father, I turned my face and resolved amidst a room full of people not to have water touched by a Muslim. My father said that it was alright. There was no ritual restriction on medicine…medicine itself is Narayana. After a lot of pampering like this, making a lot of fuss, at last I had the Muslim made lemonade from my father’s own hand.”

Food can create the difference between the power to rule others and the abject surrender to a physically more robust people.

By the late 19th century, the drive to unify Hindus against the British focused on a particular type of food—meat. Veg versus non-veg became a cultural question for Indian nationalists. Author Jayanta Sengupta points out that those who espoused vegetarian­ism used a material/spiritual dichotomy where the material was associated with the degenerate west and the spiritual with India. Others like Vivekananda used the same dichotomy to argue for a non-vegetarian diet on grounds that meat eating created a differ­ence between the power to rule others and the abject surrender to a physically more robust people.

During the freedom struggle, food became a tool to fashion revolutionaries. Lemonade was produced and sold by Muslims, making it taboo for Hindus to drink it as it would ‘ruin’ their caste status. But Bipin Chandra Pal did it anyway and was thrashed by his father

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While Dayanand Saraswati who started the Arya Samaj was a staunch advocate of vegetarianism, Swami Vivekananda exhorted all Hindus to eat other meats, just not beef. “Forcing of vegetarian­ism upon those who have to earn their bread by labouring day and night is one of the causes of the loss of our national freedom. Japan is an example of what good and nourishing food can do.”

So, shun beef, not meat was Vivekananda’s rallying tool to create a resurgent and bodily strong Hindu who would rip off the British yoke. The cow became an important symbol to unite Hindus; cow worship­ping Hindus would take on the beef-eating Muslims and the British.

But food, when used to create an identity, can make you unfree, and cage you in a spiral of violence and hate.

The very same food motif that roused revolutionary fervour was used to fetter and exclude some groups from the definition of a broader Indian identity. With cows and buffaloes slaughtered for meat in abattoirs run by Muslims, this group became the immedi­ate target of rioters led by the gau-rakshaks in the late nineteenth century—and more recently too.

Of course, there is no beef in the argument that only Muslims eat beef, and Hindus do not. Beef was eaten in ancient times by Hindus including the Brahmins. In the Yajur Veda, cer­emonies require meat of cattle. In the Ayurvedic medicinal text Charaka Samhita, there is a verse: “The flesh of cows, buffaloes and hogs should not be eaten daily.” This implies that they can be eaten occasionally. In the same book, pregnant women are advised to eat beef—it will make the foetus strong. Sacrifices in the Yajur Veda even list the type of cow to be sacrificed—a barren cow to Vishnu and Varuna. The only restriction on a pious Hindu while purchasing meat was it should be offered first to gods, beggars or guests, says R Mitra in Food and Drink in Ancient India.

With cow protection functioning as such a powerful marker of a group’s identity, it is not surprising that Hindu social and re­ligious movements and political parties cottoned on it to refash­ion an ‘Indian’ identity. In his autobiography, I Too Had a Dream, Verghese Kurien narrates a conversation he had with RSS leader MS Golwalkar in the 1960s on why Golwalkar opposed cow slaughter. It was not for religious reasons, said Golwalkar. “What I’m trying to tell you is that I’m not a fool, I’m not a fanatic. I’m just cold-blooded about this. I want to use the cow to bring out our Indianness, so please cooperate with me on this.” The present political ruckus about cow slaughter and the ‘cultural Indianness’ of a poha in contrast to a biryani are all part of an old struggle to define who gets to be called an Indian and who does not, and who gets to decide the issue.

As a reaction to these attacks and to fashion their own cultural and political identity, eating beef and other meat be­came the choice for those who wanted to mould a Muslim identity. Professor Utsa Ray points out that in their novels, the Muslim literati spoke of the difference between the meals of a middle-class Muslim and their Hindu counterparts. In addition to rice, fish and vegetables, meat was a staple for a Bengali Muslim. This “obsession with meat dishes in Muslim cuisine was often a reaction of the Bengali Muslims to the new vegetarian traits of the Bengali Hindu middle- class.”

Food is the source of power, and power can bring you freedom.

“I am Food and I eat food,” is a chant from the Taittiriya Upanishad. Vedic poets understood life and society in terms of the basic struggle of acquiring food. They present the so­cial hierarchy in the human realm as a cosmic food chain where the higher classes are the eaters and the lower ones, the food. Caste is portrayed in the form of a series of mouths.

The early Vedic tradition identifies food as the first born of nta, the active power of truth, which underlies all cosmic, divine and human action. For them, power pertained to the quality of balance between the body and the spirit. The perfect individual in the early Vedic paradigm is a person for whom everything is food, while in the later paradigm, he/she is a person who does not need and is therefore beyond the realm of food. The extent to which one has freed oneself from food was also often viewed as an indicator of holiness.

Jainism’s Digambaras and the Svetambaras had opposing answers to this question of the relationship between food and a liberated (and hence perfect) individual (especially a Tirthankara). Svetambaras think that a liberated individual can experience hun­ger. But for the Digambara, a perfect being like the Tirthankara cannot feel hunger— and this is taken to a logical end in the ritual practice of santhara, fasting unto death. By not eating, one can break the link to the physical world.

Eschewing food can also forge a powerful political weapon— witness Mahatma Gandhi’s fasts that were part of the India’s suc­cessful struggle for freedom.

But it is not always the case that consciously regulating the intake of food can make you stronger and free you. Freedom depends on why you choose to starve. Ascetics use food to tread a path to creating a perfect spiritual shape with a combination of will, discipline, and the mind. A present-day definition of a perfect individual is anchored in achieving a balance between the body and the spirit—think yoga and Ayurvedic diets. Here, the early Vedic paradigm is more evident.

Jainism’s Svetambaras think that a liberated individual can experience hunger. But for the Digambara, a perfect being like the Tirthankara cannot feel hunger— and this is taken to a logical end in the ritual practice of santhara, fasting unto death. By not eating, one can break the link to the physical world

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In contrast, most modern diets of starvation are not about escaping the link to the physical (as in the Digambara paradigm) but are about achieving power through creating a perfect body. Forget the spirit. Airbrushed photos, impossibly slender waists and waif-like models found in magazines, Instagram, and televi­sion drive those with more normal physiques to subject them­selves to an endless struggle with food. Serial dieting to create a ‘perfect’ physical shape has become a torturous and quick descent into guilt-ridden binge eating and anorexia.

And then, there are those millions who due to poverty, wars and natural calamities face starvation daily, not through choice but through circumstances. For these unfortunates, the absence of food cages them into a terrible spiral of starvation, disease, and death. India is home to a quarter of the world’s undernourished and to some 190 million hungry people. Some groups face an acute danger of starvation due to caste-mandated discrimination. Dalit memoirs often bring up eating “poisoned bread” (decomposed and rotten food) and never having tasted a lemon, tea and lentils cooked with turmeric. A Dalit family is given the rejects—the kernel of the mango (they cracked the shell, and used the paste inside to make a roti), the husk of the wheat, millets, and if they were lucky, rice too but the most degraded version.

Food can kill.

Salma Husain in The Emperor’s Table notes that Mughal emperors were served food in utensils made of ruby, turquoise and jade, because these precious stones detected poison immediately by changing colour. In the Ain-e-Akbari, Abul Fazl records that great pre­caution was taken to prevent poisoning. The master of the kitchen (Mir Bakawal), an officer of the rank of 600 horses, made a list of ves­sels and dishes, and stamped it with his personal seal before sending them to the harem where the emperor usually dined. Guarded by mace bearers, the master of the kitchen along with the cooks and the servants carried the dishes to the emperor’s table.

Some poisons like arsenic do not have a strong taste and are easy to camouflage through the use of garlic or lemon in the food.

But food can free you to be who you want to be. ‘Eat, drink and make merry, for tomorrow we die!

There has been a democratisation of fine dining in India. With eager palates and with a bloodhound-like ability to sniff out ‘happening places’, these are the new tribe of food lovers, mostly middle class. Scintillating conversations with and between re­gional Indian cuisines are occurring online, and not only in the restaurant spaces. Created, curated and written by housewives and food enthusiasts who hobnob in the aether with the more corporate entities like a Sanjeev Kapoor and a Tarla Dalal, these blogs bubble with revelations from the kitchens of Shah Jahan, Asaf Jahi cuisine, Saraswat food, Benaras ki Rasoi and so on.

Food can be the source of much pleasure.

But too much rich food can cage you in a diseased body.

Food can give you a place to belong, or it can cage you into a place you don’t want to be.

Food can be a source of exploring your individual freedom, or it can make you curtail others’ freedom.

How you engage with food is up to you. What will you choose— to be caged and cage others or to be set free and free others?

About The Author

Shylashri Shankar

Shylashri Shankar is the author of Turmeric Nation - A Passage Through India's Tastes