Economic Times, 11 Aug, 2007
A friend’s grandmother once told him a story about Partition. She had been a young bride then, living in a Hindu family in Haryana, and every night the men would go out and the women didn’t know what they were doing. One night they came back with a heap of plates and utensils and gave them to the women: “Use them in the kitchen,” they said. But when the women looked at the utensils they found them unusable in a vegetarian Hindu kitchen: large knives for carving meat, two handled choppers for mincing it and large plates for communal eating, all looted from Muslim homes.
Food images like this often crop up in Partition narratives. This is perhaps not surprising; in times of turmoil our minds often return to the elementals of food and sex. The food images can be seen as the counterparts to the many Partition stories of rape.
Like Saadat Hassan Manto’s story ‘Jelly’, one of the shortest he wrote, just three paragraphs and one shocking image. A man who sells ice is stabbed dead and his body is taken away, but his blood remains mixing with the melting ice: “A mother and child rode past the spot in a tonga. The child noticed the coagulated blood on the road, tugged at his mother’s sleeve and said, ‘Look mummy, jelly’.”
As might be expected in such times of communal division, many of the food stories involve being forced to eat food abhorrent to one’s community. In Remembering Partition, Gyanendra Pandey tells of interviewing Babu Khan, a Muslim man in a village near Chandigarh who for a while was forced to become Babu Singh: “They told us to eat ‘meat’,” he went on to say, using the euphemism for pork that other villagers had also used. We ate it. We had to, to save out lives. I still get scared thinking about it all.” The Gandhian social worker Sucheta Kripalani gives the opposite story, but with a more dubious ending. Her group had rescued a high caste Hindu family, who had been forced to become Muslims, and the family’s patriarch had fallen at her feet in gratitude and called her Ma. “Ironically, a day after reaching the camp, there was some trouble. The old man refused to have food from the common kitchen and said that since he belonged to a high caste, he could not eat food touched by all and sundry! I pointed out to him that for nearly a month he had been converted to Islam and was eating food touched by Muslims and here he was objecting to food served by his co-religionists! His cool reply was: ‘That was my apat kalin dharma (my conduct in distress); now when I am in my own community, I follow its rules.’ That is caste logic!”
Not all the food effects of Partition were tragic. The churning of populations did take many different community cooking traditions to different parts of the country and abroad. Refugees and immigrants across the world have always found the food business the easiest to enter first, partly because they have to cook for themselves anyway, and there is also a ready market among their fellow refugees. Then as the locals hear about the food, they stop by to sample it, perhaps from sympathy or curiosity, and nearly always because it is cheap.
Punjabi food is the obvious example, of course, spreading through dhabas and shops. In her autobiography, Climbing the Mango Trees, Madhur Jaffrey writes of how after Partition in Delhi, “most grocer’s now carried big wheels of paneer.” In Mumbai, Sikh refugees in a camp in the Koliwada area used their cooking technique for freshwater fish on the local seafood and came up with Prawns and Pomfret Koliwada. Karachi sweetshops across the country sell the doubtful delights of glutinous Karachi halwa. Sindhi food has mysteriously lagged behind Punjabi food, but there are restaurants like Mumbai’s Kailash Parbhat where you can get sai-bhaji, and pakhwan dhal, and bhee (lotus stem) can be bought on the roadsides in suburbs like Khar, which are now posh, but then were the cheapest places for the refugees to buy houses.
Above all, there is tandoori food which popular legend has it came to Delhi with refugees from the North-West Frontier who brought their tandoors along with them and, starting with Moti Mahal restaurant, proceeded to make it the most popular Indian restaurant food. It’s probably too hard to piece together the whole story now, but I think it could be a bit more nuanced than that. To start with, Ranjit Rai, who summed up years of research in his book Tandoor: The Great Indian Barbeque, notes that tandoor type clay ovens has long been used in North India; he points to archaeological evidence in sites ranging from Hissar in Haryana to Saran in Bihar.
In her book, Jaffrey notes how pre-Partition, it was rare for Delhiites to eat food made outside home, other than a few things like mithai and seekh kebabs. Kayasth Hindu families like hers might be, as they were sometimes derogatorily called, sharabi-kebabis, but they still, and perhaps all the more, enforced taboos against food made in ways they couldn’t see, but were assumed to be unsanitary. But Sikhs had no problems with communal eating — as Rai points out, their Gurus had specifically advocated concepts like langars and sanjha chulhas (common ovens) because they were both economical and broke barriers of caste.
This also helped deal with fears of impurity and soon the barriers were broken and people were going out for tandoori food. Against the anguish of Partition, a plateful of tandoori chicken might not seem much, but it’s good that all its enduring legacies have not been bitter.
|
