Gut Reactions
Rosogulla is just the latest star in a controversy. Food
has always been a bone of contention, a political hot potato, a means to curry
favour
Fans of the BBC series Yes Minister will
remember the key role played by a sausage. It came in the hour-long special
“Party Games” which concluded the third series. It involved a European Union
(EU) directive on sausage specifications. The UK’s sausages contain so little
meat and so much fat, organ meats and other fillers that they fall short of the
EU rules and will have to be called “Emulsified High-Fat Offal Tubes”. The
minister, Jim Hacker, is apprehensive since he knows that it will be unpopular
with the public (who have little idea of what goes in sausages).
At a key moment, Hacker decides to deliver a rousing
speech defying the EU and defending the “great British sausage”. His popularity
soars especially when, as part of a carefully set-up, behind-the-scenes deal,
the EU agrees to accept the term “British sausage”. This victory comes just as
the prime minister resigns and gives Hacker the push he needs to grab the
position. The Minister is now Prime Minister — all thanks to a sausage.
Yes Minister was
always very insightful about how politics functions, and this was a lesson in
the value of food in political messaging. Politicians know that reaching into
the kitchen always helps in delivering a message that, literally, connects at a
gut level. This goes back to ancient times, as can be seen from the Roman
leader who pacified citizens with promises of “bread and circuses” (food and
entertainment), the French king Henri IV who declared he wanted every family to
have a chicken in the pot or the British who used the metaphor of the Roast
Beef of England to signify the prosperity of their Empire.
Indian politicians gave their own twist to this. Most
notably Mahatma Gandhi made not eating a form of political protest and, when he
did eat, might not have been above sending a message. While negotiating with
Viceroy Lord Irwin, for example, after the success of the Salt March — food,
again — he had his English follower Miraben come and serve him dahi and dates.
When the Viceroy expressed curiosity, Gandhi happily offered him a taste and
noted, in a remark that would resonate with the deeply religious Irwin, that
this was “the Prophet’s food”.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi also seems to have used
not eating — for example, fasting during his dinner at the White House — to
help build his image of impressive self-discipline. Lalu Prasad Yadav showed
his mastery of political sloganeering, if not foretelling, by quipping “jab tak
rahega samosa main aloo, tab tak rahega Bihar main Lalu”.
The Hindu nationalist movement built itself on cow
protection and its appeal to the many meanings of milk in India.
For an example of food in negative imaging, there’s
that constant use of pasta to disparage Sonia Gandhi’s Italian origins.
Bone to Pick With
Food metaphors connect with everyone, since everyone
must eat and most people have been hungry and know how hunger can charge their
emotions at a primal level. Perhaps this explains why food is being drawn into
battles that pit countries, communities and regions against each other. Take a
familiar food, add an accusation of appropriation, infuse with the indignation
of alteration, mix it up with anger at someone else profiting and you have a
potent dish to feed old resentments.
This is what has driven the wars over the origin of
hummus and falafel. Both have become symbols of Israeli cuisine, made by
Israeli restaurateurs across the world and packaged and sold by entrepreneurs
with Israeli roots — to the bitter resentment of Palestinians who see this as
yet another way to steal their heritage. Further to the north, Turkey’s
long-standing insecurity of where it stands, Asian or European, Muslim or
secular, has come out in battles over food like coffee, kebabs and baklava,
fighting over their origins and the best way to make them with Greece, Syria
and other neighbours.
Similar battles have taken place across the world.
Peru and Chile have battled over the origin of pisco, the potent grape spirit
that both countries make. Australia and New Zealand have fought over who
invented the pavlova, the meringue and fruit dessert. Nigeria, Senegal and
Gambia got drawn into a dispute over the origin and right recipe for jollof
rice, the spicy dish that these countries share with other West African nations
like Liberia, Ghana, Cameroon and Sierra Leone. It is a subject perfect for
social media agitation, and Twitter users in these countries duly stoked the
cooking fires.
Bengal vs Odisha
In most of these cases the battles generally remain
on social or mainstream media. Where commercial interests are involved, for
example, with packaged hummus, there can be court cases about whether a
copyright to the recipe exists. But the Odisha Police have taken these food
fights to a startling new level with the criminal charges levelled against
columnist and social media activist Abhijit Iyer-Mitra who made derogatory
remarks against Odisha culture, including over the origin of the rosogulla. The
Inspector-General of Odisha Arun Kumar Bothra later said that Mitra was
arrested for his remarks on Sun Temple and Odisha culture, and not rosogolla.
This rosogulla dispute has been simmering for a
while, being recharged by actions like Odisha’s declaration of July 17 as
Rasagola Dibasa (day) or attempts on the part of both Odisha and West Bengal
for Geographical Indication (GI) status for the sweet. This status, which
assigns a place as the origin of a food, has been used to inflame these food
disputes, and it did so here, despite attempts by the GI registry to use
the Yes Minister trick by recognising “Banglar Rasogolla”,
meaning the Bengali version, leaving open the possibility of recognising an
Odiya version as well.
It’s in this situation that Iyer-Mitra, who seems to
be attempting to build a career as a professional provocateur, tweeted “There
is no such thing as a Odia roshogolla.” He also noted that there no good
rosogulla left in Bengal, thanks to the policies of the state’s governments,
but the authorities there didn’t rise to the bait. They did in Odisha. He was
arrested for the second time, after an earlier charge over making fun of the
architecture of the Sun Temple at Konark, which led to Iyer-Mitra having to
make an unconditional apology to a House Committee of the Odisha Assembly.
It’s hard not to see this as something of an
over-reaction, but it also raises the question of what makes the authorities in
Odisha so touchy. And that has to be understood in the context of the region’s
sense of being dominated and exploited by other people, particularly those from
Bengal. This is largely due to geography. Calcutta’s growth through the 18th
and 19th centuries sucked prosperity from all of eastern India and this included
food and the knowledge of how to make it.
Swapna M Banerjee’s Men, Women &
Domestics, a study of how middle-class identity in colonial Bengal was
developed through interactions with servants, has a fascinating story that
shows both how this exploitation worked, and was also subtly subverted by
Odiyas. She notes how Bengali Hindu households faced a dilemma as they grew
more prosperous — the amount and variety of food they had to cook put a strain
on the women who were cooking.
The answer was to hire outside cooks, but caste
became a complication. A lower-caste cook could not be accepted since this
would lead to caste contamination for the eaters. But the traditional solution
for rich families of hiring high-caste Brahmin cooks ran into a shortage of
cooks, not least because few Brahmins wanted to take on the job.
So, Calcutta households looked to Odisha. Some
servants had long come from there — Odiyas had something of a monopoly on jobs
as palanquin bearers across India. In Rudyard Kipling’s Kimwhen the
boy and the lama meet the rani from the hills who becomes their benefactor, she
is being carried on her journeys by Odiya palanquin bearers. Odiya Brahmins
started coming to Calcutta to work as cooks.
Soon demand for Odiya Brahmin cooks was outstripping
supply. This is when one Jagadananda, the head of an association for palanquin
bearers in Calcutta, hit upon a neat idea. With the help of a Brahmin he set up
a school of sorts to turn his low-caste palanquin bearers into high-caste
cooks. Along with basic recipes they were taught “the gotras, dharmashastras,
teaching them the names of a few saints and sages, making them learn some
slokas, getting them used to wearing the paita (sacred thread)...” Soon
Jagadananda was producing hundreds of Odiya “Brahmin”
cooks a year and could boast that “there are not as
many Oriya Brahmins in Orissa as they are in Calcutta”.
The story is a marvellous commentary on caste
restrictions and flexibility, but also shows how culinary links came up between
the two regions. It was essentially an exploitative relation and one that led
to stereotypes of Odiya cooks being unclean, unskilled and lazy (much like most
cooks were labelled across India). It isn’t hard to see the roots of Odiya
resentment in this characterisation.
All this has got compounded by the processes in which
a “cuisine” gets labelled as such. This involves documentation and publishing
in cookbooks, propagation through articles and distribution outside the region
through the diaspora, first in household cooking and then restaurants. In all
this, Bengali food has easily taken the lead. It had some of the first
cookbooks published in India. The thriving Bengali media scene reproduced and
popularised recipes and the large and culturally assertive community of
Probashi Bengalis, those living outside Bengal, have helped create an identity
for Bengali cuisine.
Odiya cuisine has got left behind, and it is not
alone in this. As the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai noted in his essay “How to
Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India”, this pattern has
been replicated across India: “Thus Telugu food is being progressively pushed
out of sight by Tamil cuisine, Oriya by Bengali cuisine, Kannada by Marathi,
Rajasthani by Gujarati, and Kashmiri by Punjabi.”
Some of his examples can be questioned — Marathi food
is more overshadowed by Gujarati — but the processes are the same, and so are
the resentments. Maharashtrian resentment over Gujarati domination is another
long simmering issue, as is Kannada resentment over Tamil domination, and again
this takes culinary form in irritation over how the distinctive rice-based
cooking of Udupi is casually classified as “Madrasi”. Udupi restaurants may
have accepted the label in the early years when they were establishing
themselves, but today they are ready to distinguish themselves both in cookbooks
and other food media, and also in restaurants.
Understanding the reasons for the resentments doesn’t
mean condoning how Odisha is dealing with it. Beyond the principle of free
speech, there’s also how counterproductive it is in practice. Odisha has managed
to make a free-speech martyr out of Iyer-Mitra — particularly ironic given his
vituperative attitudes in general — while damaging the state’s own reputation.
Consider how much better the cause of promoting
Odisha’s cuisine could be served if, rather than pick fights with Bengal and
prosecute people like Iyer-Mitra, the state pursued a more positive path. There
is so much it has to offer a food world that is eager for new traditions and
ingredients to discover. The state has such a range, from the seafood of its
coast, to the fish of its brackish estuaries and freshwater rivers, to the
plants of its tribal heartlands and, above all, the temples of Puri that
represent a huge trove of culinary knowledge.
Some years back, a researcher at the Centre for Indigenous
Knowledge Systems in Chennai told me of a project to document Indian rice
varieties in the Puri region. They had learned that one of the temple offerings
involved a regular supply of fresh paddy. For this to exist round the year,
there has to be an exceptionally wide variety of strains that would ripen at
different times, but all carefully grown near the temple. It was an excellent
example of the hidden food riches of Odisha that really require proper
publicity, instead of wasting time prosecuting something as inconsequential as
a tweet.
vikram.doctor@timesgroup.com
TITBITS
While negotiating with Viceroy Lord Irwin, after the
success of the Salt March, Gandhi had his English follower Miraben come and
serve him dahi and dates
French king Henri IV declared he wanted every family
to have a chicken in the pot while the British used the metaphor of the roast
beef of England to signify the prosperity of their empire
Hummus and falafel have become symbols of Israeli
cuisine, made by Israeli restaurateurs across the world and packaged and sold
by entrepreneurs with Israeli roots — to the bitter resentment of Palestinians
who see this as yet another way to steal their heritage
Turkey’s long-standing insecurity of where it stands
— Asian or European, Muslim or secular — has come out in battles over food like
coffee, kebabs and baklava, fighting over their origins and the best way to
make them with Greece, Syria and other neighbours
Peru and Chile have battled over the origin of pisco,
the potent grape spirit that both countries make
Australia and New Zealand have fought over who
invented the pavlova, the meringue and fruit dessert
Nigeria, Senegal and Gambia got drawn into a dispute
over the origin and recipe for jollof rice
Vikram Doctor
ETM 28OCT18
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