A Watched Pot

“EVEN THE BIGGEST GOON will not be able to do what a bone can in a Hindu hotel,” remarks Ganesh Gaitonde, the lead character of the web series Sacred Games, as he slyly inserts chicken bones inside thalis before serving them to customers at an eatery. Satyanarayan Shukla Hindu Hotel is run by a Brahmin man from north India, and it employs only Hindu Brahmins. As a Maharashtrian Brahmin, Gaitonde finds immediate employment at the hotel. To seek revenge against his owner for delaying his salary, he serves chicken bones to the customers, most of whom consume only vegetarian food. Minutes after the plates reach the tables of the customers, violence erupts. Plates heaped with rice fly across the hotel, as customers throw furniture across the room. The owner of the “pure vegetarian” hotel is beaten black and blue. Gaitonde walks away, pleased at what he pulled off.

Shukla is held guilty of violating the same assurance that attracts people to his hotel—that of serving vegetarian food considered “pure” precisely because it is cooked and served by Brahmin employees. Eateries, often locally known by different names, such as khanavals, and run by people from similar caste, religious and regional backgrounds, was a widespread and longstanding practice in Mumbai. The historian Frank F Conlon, for instance, noted that migration to the city “guaranteed a continuing demand for a means of providing suitable, inexpensive meals within religiously and regionally specific diets such as South Indian Brahman, Gujarati Hindu, Sindhi Muslim, Maharashtrian Brahman, or Maratha.” Caste norms being vigilantly maintained within the home setting has been explored at length in cinema too. The 2021 film The Great Indian Kitchen chronicled this in detail, focussing on the daily life of a newlywed woman in an upper-caste Kerala household. The woman has to cook the food that the men of her family prefer, and clean after them, but also must maintain the food’s conceived purity by adhering to various rules, including abstaining from cooking while menstruating.

The anxiety and rage around encountering food that transgresses such norms in public crops up in many recent films. The 2013 film Fandry explores discrimination against the Kaikadi community, for their livelihood and what they eat. In Axone, a 2019 film, migrants from the Northeast living in New Delhi are earmarked and harassed for the food they eat. The anthropologist Dolly Kikon has written extensively about “the persistence of mainstream caste Indian society to label Dalit lives and food practices from Northeast India as ganda (dirty).” She continues, “Power dynamics and intellectual reasoning that creates and perpetuates beliefs of superior and inferior food cultures is founded on caste, but often presented as a civic nuisance. Thus, the 2007 Delhi police campaign against fermented food eaten by migrants from Northeast India in New Delhi became an issue of law and order.” Besides documentaries such as Lynch Nation, which call attention to anti-Muslim violence perpetrated by cow vigilantes, including cases stemming from accusations over the consumption of beef, the feature film Aani Maani imagines the havoc wreaked in the household of a lower-middle-class kebab-shop owner after the government orders a beef ban.

The ways that caste, religion and community shape culinary choices and freedoms in India is reflected, unsurprisingly, in the genre that deals with food the most: cookbooks. These play an important role in making food “public,” in bringing it out of the private space of the kitchen and helping the gradual standardisation of a cuisine as well as its association with a particular community or region. But they have also promoted limiting stereotypes. In a 2020 Scroll article, the historian Aparna Kapadia points out that cookbooks have tended to include recipes that cater to the socially powerful communities: “What the Mughal, Anglo-Indian, later Indian, and today’s digital avatars of cookbooks all have in common is that they are produced for a tiny fraction of elites.” She continues: “Journalist Shahu Patole’s 2015 book Anna He Apoornabrahma or Food is an Incomplete Creation, which chronicles Marathwada-Dalits’ food history in Marathi, is an exception but also a stark reminder that we have not yet fully begun the much-needed documentation of culinary traditions marginalised for centuries.”