Shahu Patole. 2024. Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada. Anna He Apoorna Brahma. Translated by Bhushan Korgaonkar. Gurugram, Haryana: Harper Collins India, Paperback, 386 pages, ISBN-13: 978-9356295834
Reviewed by Krishnendu Ray (New York University)
This is Part III of a three-part review. For Part I go to: https://foodanthro.com/2024/08/26/review-essay-caste-and-cookbooks/ for Part II: https://foodanthro.com/2024/09/02/review-essay-caste-and-cookbooks-part-ii/
Cooking, Cleaning and Feeding
The Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada is part memoir, part diatribe against caste oppression, part collection of recipes, that is highly critical of upper caste (Savarna) self-representation and other-representation. Organized into a dozen chapters with titles such as “What About Us?”, “Inclusion and Validation,” “Starvation and Survival,” to “Vegetarian food” (chapter 8), “Chapati, puran poli and more” (chapter 10), ending with a reflection on the 1972 famine in Marathwada. The logic of its organization is often muddled.
It opens with a polemical chapter with the odd title, “Reach shall be universal, and misconceptions shall cease,” that asserts pointedly that in every village in rural India there are in fact two villages, “the main one and the one on its outskirts. This book talks about the food practices of the latter” (2024: xvii). There Patole explains how he had to explain to a team of African journalists that many Hindu castes eat beef, buffalo, and pork. He notes that he experienced the same reaction in Nagaland, when he was working there for three years. “I was instrumental in eradicating these false beliefs about Hindu food practices” he concludes immodestly.
“My book was first published on 10 February 2015 in Marathi. It was more highly reviewed and recognized in the English media as compared to the Marathi media” (2024: xviii). There is a long and rich discussion about the adoption of English by Dalits to get around the obsequiousness built into Indian languages, to replace the honorific form of address for the upper castes, with the more egalitarian English “you” instead of, say the Hindi “aap” or the Bengali “apni”. This adds to that discussion where anglophony allows a certain critical distance from the weight of local community, its discourse, practice and prejudice. “Food doesn’t always carry memories of love, care, or warmth,” writes Vinay Kumar (2020), another Dalit scholar. Sometimes it is a reminder of “harsh realities.” The politics of food and language remind us that caste is community, undermining our easy sentimentalism about imagined communities. To publish something in English can allow some critical distance from the weight of everyday practice of the local community.
Book publishing, TV programs, and social media posts on food have become popular, Patole notes, but marred by an undercurrent of classism and casteism. “Nowadays,” he notes “food blogs, Facebook groups, Instagram stories and YouTube channels are in vogue. This democratization of content has opened up possibilities for Dalits to share their food stories” (2024: 2). As Patole notes:
Through these platforms, [the upper classes] are constantly introducing India’s rich, nourishing and diverse food culture to the world. They don’t tire of boasting about it. However, while beef and pork are talked about unabashedly, without any shame or disgust while introducing foreign delicacies, there is never an utterance about the consumption of similar meats by some of the groups in the Indian subcontinent, especially those who follow Hinduism… why don’t they include non-vegetarian food as part of our primitive, age-old traditions? (Patole 2024: 50).
But “even Dalit writers have not written about their food culture in any noteworthy detail,” he asserts. He sees his work as a form of Dalit affirmation and self-representation. Kumar (2020) writes about the challenges of doing so, “To reimagine Dalit food, born out of hunger, poverty and marginalisation, as a coffee table book would be a disservice to our struggles. Ours is a food culture that has survived in the memory of its people. Food from Dalit communities have never been featured in cookbooks; we have never had a cookbook of our own either. You can find ragi mudde in Military Hotel menus, or at Gowdru Manes, drenched in ghee. But when my mother and her siblings packed leftover mudde from breakfast as lunch for school, they would hide, away from their classmates and far from the school grounds, eating quickly before they could be discovered. Our existence and our life experiences, our memoirs and autobiographies, are works of resistance. Our eating practices too are a protest” (2020: unpaginated). That posits a degree of ambiguity even about writing a Dalit cookbook.
Although Hinduism accounts for four categories of people, according to Varna, that is Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra, Patole asserts, there is a fifth one: shudratishudra, or the lowest of the low. “Hinduism divides diets into three types (sattvic, rajasic, tamasic), and in terms of assigned processions there are four. The fifth category was relegated outside formal Hindu society. So, although this category was a part of the Indian social structure, there were no dietary restrictions on its members. However, there were strict rules about their social behavior.” Thus, Ayurvedic principles of matching diet to essence, temperament, and season – in its substance-as-character logic — cannot be more than upper-caste conceptions of what is good to eat for castes Hindus. That limits its capacity to provide a necessary counter to the imperial reach of Western biomedicine. Patole goes on to elaborate on the eating of beef and buffalo, discarded and dead animals, and carrion as cuisine. “In the cultural history of Dalits in Maharashtra, the meat of dead cattle served as the dowry within the Dalit household” (Guru 2009: 13). Over generations Guru shows how the Mahars moved from the valorization of carrion to “hatfatka (meat acquired through hunting) to toliv (the meat of a slaughtered animal)” (Guru 2009: 13).
Guru (2009: 16) cites a folk song, sung by Dalit women, where beef is valorized over sweet laddus, the latter usually associated with upper caste notions of joyous consumption and hospitality. It asserts that a basketful of laddus “cannot be a substitute for even a quarter plate of beef.” That is an apt retort to the discourse of caste conviviality. The oft repeated injunction from the Taittiriya Upanishad “athithi devo bhava” is glossed by caste Hindus as “the guest is akin to god.” But it is operationalized only when the guest is not an untouchable, or at least his status is unknown, as numerous Dalit memoirs attest (see Valmiki 2003: 58-61). (Women rarely figure as recipients of hospitality in these myths, anecdotes, and stories. They are almost always the host). Valmiki writes of one instance of hospitality that turns into hostility:
Brajpal Singh’s brother came out and said, “Come, food is ready. Come, eat.” When I refused, he said, “If you leave without eating, what will they say about us in Barla?”
I rose halfheartedly when he kept on insisting… Deeply afraid, I sat down… The aroma of the hot rotis traveled through my nostrils down to my lungs. For me it was the first time that I had sat down to eat in this manner and in a Taga’s home. He was feeding us very attentively, but I remained apprehensive. Bhikuram had eaten a lot of rotis, but I was finding it hard to eat.
Somehow we finished the meal and came out. Bhikuram sat down on the cot next to the elder’s…someone else had arrived. The elder extended the hookah pipe to him. As he drew on the hookah, the man asked the elder about us. The moment he heard that we had come from Barla, he fired a question, “What is your caste?”
… “We are of the Chuchra caste.”
Both exclaimed together, “Chuchra?” Lifting a heavy stick from beneath the cot, the elder hit Bhikuram on his back… Obscenities began to rain from the elder’s mouth. His eyes were fierce, and his skinny body was harboring the devil. We had dared to eat from their dishes and sit on their cots, a crime in his eyes. I was standing below the porch, frightened. The elder was screaming, and his voice drew a crowd. Many people suggested that we should be tied to a rope and hung from a tree (Valmiki 2003: 59-60).
Athithi devo bhava, indeed.
Patole’s Dalit Kitchens is about Mahar and Mang cooking from the Marathwada region – literally, the dwelling place of the Marathi speaking people – of Maharashtra, one of the 28 Indian (linguistic) states. It is good to remind oneself here that India is a nation-state with something like 270 mother-tongues, that violates the Euro-American dystopic ideal (rarely actualized) of one state, one language. In addition, Marathwada, like much of South Asia, is a dry, monsoon-dependent, agricultural zone. Some of the major crops of this region are groundnut (peanut), jowar (sorghum), bajra (pearl millet), maize, rice paddy, pigeon pea, chickpea, soy bean, sunflower, okra, tamarind, mango, custard apple, among others. So, it is not a surprise that they are everywhere in the cookbook.
One could hypothesize that there are at least 20,000 cuisines in India — that is approximately the number of dialects reported in the most recent census (2011) — which is linked to landscape. There is an apt Hindustani saying, “kosa, kosa per pani badle, char kosa per vani.” Every two miles the water changes, and every four the tongue (as a metonym for taste and language). That gives us a rough socio-geography of Indian food. Patole urges us to multiply that at least by five for the four varnas+outcast categories. Food is what goes in, and classifying language is what comes out. Along with language comes shared social training in disgust and disdain, a repulsive schismogenetic social dynamic (Bateson 1935). That is what socializes something like food which is otherwise inaccessibly subjective. Not all of these subject-into-community transformations are sweet and inclusive. We are what we do not eat, and we are who we do not eat with.
To that Patole adds and stirs in intra-Dalit antagonisms. He lists the Chambhar, Dhor, Mahar and Mang among the Dalits of Maharashtra in hierarchical order. The first two, “Chambhar and Dhor, did not consume ‘forbidden’ meat. Also, they observed untouchability against the other two castes, Mahar and Mang. Moreover, the Mahars, the third in the rank, kept their distance from the Mangs. Intercaste marriage between them was inconceivable. Even food-sharing followed hierarchical norms, which was only top to bottom” (2024: 12). This is what M.N. Srinivas (1965) characterized as Sanskritization, which is where lower castes take on the social behavior and norms of the upper castes, to move up and distinguish themselves from those lower down the hierarchy. This is also how hegemony works, where lower classes and castes mimic the practices of the upper castes and classes.
According to caste rules, nothing cooked flows up, although uncooked food, grains and produce get pumped up the social hierarchy by outcaste and lower caste labor (otherwise the whole system of exploitation would not work). As a result, Patole asserts “we knew the taste of their food because they would give us their leftovers, but they never knew the taste of our food because of untouchability and disgust.”
It took him three years to write what “no one was writing about,” which is the food of at least 240 million (about 16% of India’s population). He took pen to paper for his children “to tell them what our people used to eat” hinting at patterns of upward mobility. Shyamal Shinde, Patole’s sister, makes some of the sharpest comments in a short YouTube video by BBC on the book (BBC 2024). She is the one who cooks, their mother cooks, his sister-in-law cooks; Shahu eats, cleans and picks. There is a gendered dimension to cooking and feeding that is left unaddressed here. Both the book and the video produced by BBC are framed by the nosy curiosity of the upper castes and violent disdain towards Dalit foods such as the affordable organ meats.
In Joothan the Dalit writer Omprakash Valmiki notes how food-based prejudice was banal. In school he had a teacher named Yogendra Tyagi who kept insisting to Valmiki’s father that he keep his child in school. Nevertheless, “Whenever I made a mistake, instead of thrashing me, he would grab my shirt and pull it towards him… He would ask, ‘How many pieces of pork did you eat? You must have eaten at least half a pound.’ Whenever Master Shahib said things like that, I would begin to cry. My eyes would fill up. The whole class used to laugh at Master Sahib’s comments. The boys would torment me about them. ‘Abey, Chuchre ke, you eat pork’” (2003: 21). At such moments Valmiki would remember that these very same Tyagis would come to their basti (neighborhood) after dark to eat pork and drink liquor.
After about 60 pages of meandering commentary, we get the first recipes in Patole’s book. They are austere: congealed blood and salt (lakuti), salt if you have it; epiglottis (fashi) with salt, turmeric and ginger-garlic (optional); brain with chopped onions, chili and cilantro; grilled lungs with salt. The book is replete with notes on gristle (fardul), tallow (chunchune), congealed blood (lakuti), bakhri (flat bread) mashed in melted animal fat, tongue, udder, testicles, trotters. The first hundred pages dramatically distinguishes outcaste recipes from caste practices. That posture softens, the content filling up with vegetables, market and foraged greens, legumes, jowar (sorghum) and bread, once the argument has been made.
Thus, we have a long section on vegetable foods. “Apart from the occasional meat consumption, Mangs and Mahars would rarely get to relish non-vegetarian dishes… many vegetarian recipes have also been developed by women from these two castes” (2024: 152). We have purslane (hgarya ghol) with red chili powder, crushed peanuts, salt and sorghum powder (with garlic cloves and coriander leaves if available); toor or masur dal with onions, red chili powder, turmeric, coriander leaves, jowar powder (sorghum), and crushed peanuts. In Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian (2020) James Staples shows the range of culinary cultures associated with caste and religion that belies the highly ideological and one-dimensional accentuation of vegetarianism and meat eating at the two poles across the religious and caste hierarchies.
There is a constant refrain in the recipes here, “if you have it.” It gestures towards a cucina povera, in sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, a taste of necessity over a taste of abundance (1984). Note how Vinay Kumar (2020) posits above that Dalit cuisine is “born out of hunger, poverty and marginalisation.” Yet, in fact that is exactly how most people – not just Dalits – have cooked most of the time, a little of this, a little of that, use it if you have it, before the textualization of recipes, mediatization of everyday life, and deskilling that drive over-exact formulations (the perfect this for the perfect that). You cook with it, if you have it. Not everything is necessary every time you make something (see Sutton 2021, Trubek 2017 on the art of cooking in two different contexts).
Furthermore, “There was more emphasis on thin watery curries,” Patole notes, because if a couple of people stopped by one could stretch the meal. That is named as the “ghal pani aan kar kalchyavani” method, which is “add water and let them stay, that’s how you made it yesterday” (2024: 286). An example of that principle is a savory accompaniment for rice called yelvanyachi amti, which is cooked gram dal and water saved from boiling it. Oil is added to a hot pan to which crushed garlic is added. Yesur is then added, which is a spice mixture made of red chilies, coconut, salt and spices. “Add coriander if available. Let it come to a boil. The yelvanachi amti is ready” (2024: 248). One can get lost in the multiplying local terminology. Hence, the glossary at the end of the book with over 250 entries is an essential tool in cross-referencing methods, techniques and ingredients. In contrast, it is an impediment that the book lacks an index.
Chapter 10 “Chapati, puran poli and more” is a proliferating delight of tastes, insights and lore. It contains a recipe for puran poli – a rich jaggery sweetened stuffed paratha (2024: 246) – copious in its metaphorization, even in the hands of the somber Dalit leader and constitutional scholar. “Dr. Ambedkar has used puran poli, as the metaphor in order to describe the historical importance or the sequences of the two major revolutions: the French and the Russian Revolutions. The French Revolution for him was like the outer layer of the folded poli; the Russian Revolution was like the puran which is stuffed in the folded poli. Puran (sweet paste) is the core, which defines the puran poli, but these two ingredients are equally important to make a complete sense of poli. One is incomplete without the other” (Guru 2009: 6). Middle class Dalits, Guru notes (2009: 7), often reference the sweetness of Ambedkar’s theory to soften its critical edge with the term, “Baba Sahebanchi wani, Jusi Barphi Pedhywani,” where the discourse of Ambedkar is likened to sweets such as barphi and pedha. Sweetness is deployed here to deny the insurgent nature of Ambedkar’s arguments. In contrast he shows that subaltern Dalits assert that “Baba sahebanchi wani jashi Bhakari Chatani wani,” meaning Ambedkar’s discourse “is like Bhakari (bread) and Chatani (green chili paste) and hence is subversive like hot chili” (2009: 7). Yet, at the heart of hegemonic notions of good taste, is sweetness, even in savory food. In many Indian languages a perfectly balanced dish is said to be sweet, or the hand of a good cook is complimented as sweet.
The chapter closes with a compelling section on measurements. Women measure, Patole says, referencing a gendered domesticity, by nakbhar (about the size of a fingernail), chimtibhar (a pinch), a cupped palm, a fistful, two handfuls, a little more than that which fits in the fold of a kurta top, etc. Jowar and bajra flatbread are broken into tukda (a piece), ghasbahr (a morsel), nitkor (one-eight), chatkor (one-fourth), half, three-fourth, etc. Bread when offered is always done in even numbers, by breaking odd ones or adding a tiny one. Most importantly, measurement at the heart of cooking techniques is in fact an allegory for female bodies that feed others. The devouring of it by others. It would have been fruitful to develop that argument at some point.
About two thirds of the recipes in The Dalit Kitchens are of vegetables, dals, breads, and foraged (or market) greens. We have lots of peanuts as spice, flavor and texture, understandably as this is the region where they are grown. There are sections on folklore and inversions of dominant narratives such as in the Mahabharata, and hierarchies among Dalits. Patole gestures in solidarity towards several subaltern Tamil folktales from other regions. He recovers the story of the sage Vishwamitra fed by Satyavrata after stealing a cow from a family. In another incident, Vishwamitra, a Brahmin, is fed the leg of a dog, in a Chandala household (2024: 95). There is a substantial literature on the eating of sacrificial animals including cows and horses among Vedic Hindus, where vegetarianism among the upper castes was a later invention, perhaps under pressure from Buddhism (Jha 2004).
Two dominant Euro-American forms of theorizations on appetite and power, which associate omnivorousness with practices of elite social groups and vegetarianism with virtuous restraint, do not work here, showing us how big theory coming out of traditional disciplines in western universities are in fact quite provincial, needing reconfiguration and re-grounding. Vegetarianism, which is a particular kind of inter-species relationship, connotes a precise form of violence in South Asia. That muddies its easy association with sustainable and inclusive development. It nevertheless illuminates attention to inter-species relations in many traditions outside the dominant current in the West. Older anthropological theories about purity, pollution and schismogenesis (Bateson 1935, Douglas 1966, Tambiah 1969) in fact provide a better purchase on the material here.
Much of the book is poorly edited and confusing, often mixing metaphors, diatribes, and meandering commentary. The recipes are not designed as tools to cook with. I see this as a problem of the editorial and design team. It is also untheorized, confirming Gopal Guru’s characterization, In the Cracked Mirror (2019), about Dalit languishing in raw empiricism, against the power of theoretical Brahmins. Nevertheless, Dalit Kitchens is one of the most important interventions in the conversation about Indian food in a long time (along with others such as Rege et. al. 2009, Guru 2009, Kumar 2020, Iyengar 2020), as a phenomenology of the oppressed. In it,Patole lobs a grenade into the layered archetypes of Indian cooking over the last century (constructed by Hindu and Muslim elites of a handful of regions of India). In the BBC YouTube video about his book, Patole closes the discussion with: “Why do they still consider us untouchable? Why don’t they consider us equals? That is the question. There is something wrong in society, in their thinking, in the religion.” Ambedkar had asserted that “the main cause which is responsible for the fate of the Untouchables is the Hindu religion and its teachings” (1989: 91). It is tough to dodge that accusation in working through The Dalit Kitchens.
References:
Ambedkar, B. R. 1989. Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, Vol. 5. Edited by Vasant Moon. Bombay: Education Department, Government of Maharashtra.
Bateson, Gregory. 1935. “Culture Contact and Schismogenesis.” Man 35: 178-83.
BBC News. 2024, Aug 2. “The Dalit Kitchen – Documenting the culinary history of a marginalised community,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcJ9_or9UBE
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge.
Guru, Gopal. 2009. Food as a Metaphor for Cultural Hierarchies. Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania. https://casi.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/research/Food%2Bas%2Ba%2BMetaphor%2Bfor%2BCultural%2BHierarchies%2B-%2BGopal%2BGuru%2B%28working%2Bpaper%29.pdf
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Iyengar, Radhika. 2020, Sept 15. “Blood and Beehives: Culinary Ingenuity of the Marginalized,” Goya India https://radhikaiyengar.squarespace.com/work/2020/10/8/blood-and-beehives-culinary-ingenuity-of-the-marginalised
Jha, D. N. 2004. The Myth of the Holy Cow. London: Verso.
Kumar, Vinay. 2020. “Blood Fry & Other Dalit Recipes from My Childhood,” Goya India https://www.goya.in/blog/blood-fry-other-recipes-from-my-dalit-childhood
Patole, Shahu. 2024. Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada. Anna He Apoorna Brahma. Translated by Bhushan Korgaonkar. Gurugram, Haryana: Harper Collins India.
Rege, Sharmila, Sangita Thosar, Deepa Balkisan Tak and Tina Aranha. 2009. Isn’t this plate Indian? Dalit Histories and Memories of Food. University of Pune Press.
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Staples, James. 2020. Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian: The Everyday Politics of Eating Meat in India. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Sutton, David. 2021. Bigger Fish to Fry. New York: Berghahn.
Tambiah, S. J. 1969. “Animals Are Good to Think and Good to Prohibit,” Ethnology, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Oct. 1969), pp. 423-459
Trubek, Amy. 2017. Making Modern Meals: How Americans Cook Today. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Valmiki, Omprakash. 2003. Joothan. An Untouchable’s Life. New York: Columbia University Press.