Home is where one’s ‘hearth’ is – in search of the culinary quest | Swaswati Borkataki

I recently participated in a two-day conference on “Culinary Histories and Cultures – Insights from South Asia” at IIT Gandhinagar. The following is a description of the same and the need to hold more such events to understand food, its history, and archaeology and make it more accessible to all.

Food has always been ‘On my mind’, like music – as food, in many ways, can be reflective of one’s mood, as is music, and in many ways, food is music itself, or as encompassing as music. I think of the interlinkages of the two as I relish an amazing morsel of Halwasan and bethink the memories of the wonderful conference on Culinary histories that I recently attended at IIT Gandhinagar.

The wonderfully curated conference was spearheaded by the first keynote by Kurush Dalal, Director of the INSTUCEN School of Archaeology, Bombay, who took us on a journey to different epochs of history, through the marvels of archeology with regard to food, locating food in the similar path along with breathing and sleeping which are the fundamentals of life.

The conference proceeded with topics ranging from fishing and trade between Indus Valley and Umm e Narr of Oman by William Belchar, who was the next keynote, as a range of exciting session papers followed, touring through Ancient, Medieval and Modern periods of history and food: Subsistence of early farming community of South Eastern Rajasthan, cooking techniques through lipid residue analysis at Surkotada, culinary references from Sangam literature, the historical and cultural significance of Yarkhandi Pulao in Ladakh, Indigenous culinary skills of the Malayali tribes of Tamil Nadu, Anecdotes from Medieval Sufi literature (which again was delivered beautifully by the third keynote, Prof. Raziuddin Aquil), Pantipavaans and Ucchista Bhojyas, Culinary cosmopolitanism, Gaudiya Vaishnavism and the culinary milieu in Early modern Bengal, Kosher and the formation of Cochin Jewish Identity, Culinary Nostalgia and the Gendered construction of Imaginary homelands (through which Jayanta Sengupta took us on a tour of “culinary memories by diasporic South Asian women such as Madhur Jaffrey, Chitrita Banerji, Shobha Narayan Saira Hamilton), Public Dining in the Bombay Presidency, Colonial Cookbooks and how they were more than just recipes, fragments of home and hearth – partition and reconstruction of the Bengali foodscape, new gastronomic trends in West Bengal, Dalit cuisine and cultural trajectories, Brahmanical social assertion and the lost food habits of Bauris, the Metamorphosis of Naga cuisine, the legend of Khaar and Tenga: evolution of Asssamese culinary tradition, vanishing art of Paasa: a tai Khamti delicacy of Arunachal Pradesh, A gastronomical Ode to Delhi, Culinary Narratives and Cultural identity in Kerala, Rethinking the Millet Movement, and harappan diet – all framed together and yet uniquely in tapestries of time and space, with one common element: Food and its multifarious presence across universes.

All of the papers brought forth a composite matrix with food at the center of it all. It brought together different flavors of South Asian cuisine, often placing one in relation with others and sometimes in its entirety and independence, but almost always connected and entwined with other contemporary cultures, in either manner or form. I was specifically enticed by the tales of partition concerning Bengal which were effectively covered in two papers, one on the gastronomic trends in West Bengal following partition by Madhumita Sengupta and her research scholar Tanisha and the other by Srijita Biswas, who presented the reconstruction of the Bengali foodscape following partition; another interesting presentation was by Theyiesinuo Keditsu, who spoke on the Naga cuisine and the vegetarian-non vegetarian dynamic and the notions of identity and ‘interplay between tradition and modernity in shaping cultural narratives’. I would also take the opportunity to write about my presentation which was on the evolution of Assamese culinary tradition, celebrating the two essential elements of Assamese cuisine – Khaar and Tenga – the alkaline and the acidic, to traverse from the kitchen of the Burra Sahib to the commoner, as also placing Assamese cuisine in a larger culinary spatial plane, along with a description of food and its forms, briefly touching upon the importance of culture, civilization and the role played by the ‘chef’. Food for me is the reflection of life itself and its various colors; more prudently, the life of a community and how people have embraced a certain ‘plate’ of food, holding it dear and discarding certain things while accepting others during societal evolution. A community’s food preferences undoubtedly is affected by the geographical milieu along with the people’s religion and ‘values’, which in, extension includes certain norms and sanctions about cooking and eating.

The said conference was nothing less than a dream where different ‘traditions’ sort of met and ‘blossomed’. While history is undoubtedly connected to food in some way or another and vice versa, we need more conferences and gatherings as such in order to understand the archaeology, history, and dynamics of food and its evolution.

(Author: Swaswati Borkataki, PhD Research Scholar, JNU, New Delhi)