Home cooked food!: The mantra, yantra, tantra of hygienic and clean food

A couple of days ago, a friend of mine, recently returned from the United States, complained about the stomach condition he had developed. What galled him most was that his illness had been caused via spoiled food served at a 5 star hotel. He had been warned, a dozen times over, that while road-side stalls were unsafe and unhealthy, the food served in the 5 star hotels in India was safe. And yet, this was not the first time 5 star food had him shuttling to and from the toilet. When I heard his story, I sat back and smiled. There was ofcourse, an explanation for why exactly his logic was not computing.

To get a grip on this logic however, we would have to go back in time, a couple of years when I was sharing a conversation with a friend. Speaking about the dabbawallas of Bombay, this friend remarked that this unique institution probably had something to do with the unique eating and dining habits of the South Asian. Caste rules as regards dining in older times restricted who we ate with, what we ate from whom, and where we ate as well, not to mention the times at which we ate. Thus, it was possible for a ‘lower’ caste person to offer food to a ‘higher’ caste person as long as it was uncooked. Where the degrees of separation between castes were lesser, then the possible pollution could beundone by sprinkling the cooked food ritually with ghee. The best route however, was to make sure that the food was cooked by some one reliable, someone who was ritually pure, and would thus provide ritually pure food. Someone from your home. It was partly for these reasons, this friend reasoned, that the dabbawallah was such a success in Bombay. It ensured a perfect system where ritually and socially privileged ‘home-cooked food’ could be delivered to you.

These ritual obsessions with purity, could explain the mania that the Indian displays for ‘home cooked food’; the home being a symbol for the pure. It is the absence of such preoccupations in other parts of the world, that allows places as wide-ranging as South-East Asia, Europe, the Americas and not least of all, the Islamicate urban centers of the South Asian subcontinent, to have such rich street-food cultures. The elusive hygiene of the street-side food-stall in India then, is less about hygiene and more about (often time unconscious) concerns for ritual purity. When we are not so sure about the social location of the cook, it is better to err on the side of caution.

Similarly, certain ritual systems of the subcontinent consider the consumption of food is an activity that makes one vulnerable. Thus the space in which one eats is something that one ought to give attention to. For the ritually conscious then, the liminal space of the street, that is open to polluting influences of all sorts, is best avoided as a place to eat. The ideal space to eat is the space in which one is secluded, in an environment where one is safe from intrusion of the polluted and dirty outside. Once more, scientific hygiene has nothing to do with the safety of the food.

But this is not to say that scientific hygiene has absolutely no role to play in any of these choices. On the contrary, it does and in a very interesting manner. Scientific hygiene was a colonial introduction into the subcontinent, and marked heavily by racism. The brown (or black) body was seen as the repository of filth and dirt. The tropical home of these coloured bodies was similarly loaded with pestilence and illness. Colonialism, through its mechanism of the ‘white man’s burden’ offered a way out of this mess to the coloured person, through the doctrines of scientific hygiene, urban planning and education. The elite of the subcontinent grabbed these ideas of hygiene with as much aplomb as they grabbed at the political institutions and ideas of the white man. As an illustrative case, take Gandhi’s agenda was tied as much with hygiene as it was with the setting up of the Indian nation-state. The political language of equality that Indian nationalism utilized did not however, necessarily transcend caste boundaries. In a clever move, while the dominant castes invested themselves with Western attributes, the attributes that were credited to the coloured person, were passed on to the ‘lower’ castes of the subcontinent. Thus their bodies and lifestyles, already deemed ritually unclean, were now also see as unhygienic. Just as the coloured person was seen as lacking in education, the Westernised coloured person, now projected this need for education and upliftment onto these ‘dumb’ castes.

It is no revelation that to most people in the third world, the 5 star hotel represents the developed West. It is a space where we can produce, and reproduce, ourselves as sophisticated, westernized and upper class. But as should be obvious, this westernization, and upper classness, also has casteist elements to it. Thus it is also an exclusive space, where we reject those who are not ‘people like us’. While there is no denying that a greater amount of care is possibly taken in the kitchens of these hotels, the fact is that these places are deemed cleaner, not only because they are more hygienic. They are deemed cleaner, because they are places where ‘people like us’ go, and where food is cooked ‘for people like us’. This is the safe space where the unknown and unclean cannot intrude, and this, perhaps above all, produces its ‘cleanliness’. In the past we had filthy cooks prepare food that was deemed ritually clean, because the cook was Brahmin (or of comparable caste groups). Or ritually suspect food could be eaten, because it was ritually purified by water or ghee. Similarly today, hotel food is produced as hygienic by the ritual mantra, yantra and tantra of shiny modern kitchens, presumed conformance to hygienic standards, and the modernity and exclusivity of their location.

Consequently then, we can make sense of the Facebook status message that started this whole conversation…

“Myth: Eating @ 5 Star hotels in India is safe. Just had my 2nd ever experience of illness due to spoiled food served. Consequently I have warned against "road side chai" and have had it over 2 dozen times. Number of illness bouts from chai? = 0”

(A version of this essay was first published in the Gomantak Times Sept 8 2010)

Mantra, yantra, tantra: refer to the three necessary components of magic formula, machine or implement, and the procedure through which 'Hindu' ritual can be successfully completed.

Faith, Hindus, Christians and Cynics: A Letter to Sudin

Dear Sudin,

A couple of weeks ago, I read a letter to the editor in one of our local newspapers. Written by a Hindu gentleman who had visited a temple dedicated to Shantadurga, the letter does not indicate to us why he went there. One presumes however, that he was there to perform a ritual. While at the temple, he came across a farmer who was there to beg the intercession of the Goddess. He had suffered rodent damage to his crop, and was convinced, or so the narrator of this letter tells us, that sprinkling the teertha (holy water) in the fields would save him and his crop. This simple (and perhaps naïve) faith of the farmer proved too much for our gentleman narrator, and in his letter to the editor, exhorts that we must cease such practices of blind superstition and adopt scientific principles and rationality.

I have to confess on reading this letter I was most upset. While I might join the narrator in thinking the farmer’s practices naïve, surely they are just as naïve as the reasons that the narrator was in the temple in the first place? For what was our narrator doing in the temple? Was it not to honour a deity of graven stone?

You will realize that I am not rubbishing the practice of the worship of the Goddess. I am merely challenging the supercilious attitude of our narrator, asking him to indicate where blind superstitious faith ends, and rational belief begins! While the formulation above was clear to my mind, I nevertheless felt that I was missing something in my analysis of the issue.

A few days ago, in the course of a virtual chat, I was eager to impress you that I speak about the importance of faith in public life, not in religion. You retorted, indicating that perhaps this ‘faith’ was something you (Christians) have, whereas we (Hindus) don’t need it, it is enough that ‘we’ perform the ritual. No sooner had you made this suggestion, did I realize what was bothering me about this letter I have just elaborated on above. My response will deal with two issues; the first the whole idea that the Hindu/ Indian is alien to faith (this being a Christian/ Western innovation) and second the implications of this faithless religion.

In its attempt to dominate the world, colonialism set up certain binaries of virtues. Thus if the colonizer was material, the colonized was spiritual. If the colonizer intelligent, the colonized innocent. In these binaries, the colonized always landed up with the least flattering, as the colonizer was cast as the mature and pragmatic sibling in the relationship. These binaries were wildly popular during the halcyon days of nationalism. In the attempt to give the colonized a voice, rather than challenge these binaries, these binaries were valorized and made the basis of the colonized’s challenge. While we don’t engage in such childishly embarrassing binaries today, the tendency remains. There is an attempt at shallow sophistication. Thus colonialism is now tied to Christianity, and this faith-tradition is counterposed to the native traditions, and differences trotted out. Christianity has a text, Hinduism does not. Christianity has faith, Hinduism does not, and so forth. The idea is to cast colonialism as bringing modernity, and in face of the problems and violences of modernity, to suggest that the non, and pre-modern can provide a useful platform for a challenge to our modern mess. This is the intellectual origin of the suggestion that the Hindu has no need for faith.

Surely the encounter in the temple narrated above should convince you that the ‘pagan’ native is capable of and not innocent to faith. Empirically therefore, your argument should fall flat on its face. It is possible that you would choose to argue that this native has learned faith from the Christian. I trust you will not go down this embarrassing path and deny the bliss of faith to the native. Should you choose to do so however, what you are effectively doing is to suggest that Christianity is forever alien to native soil (a preposterous position for reasons beyond my being a South-Asian Christian). Secondly, you would be suggesting that the native faith traditions have somehow emerged fully formed, without any evolution, or that any evolution has been entirely indigenous.

In response to your argument however, I will not deny that there are Hindus who operate without faith. This is not however, exclusively a Hindu domain, since this dubious facility is shared by Christians, Muslims and Jews as well. These people fulfill their religious obligations, but do so recognizing that these are religious rituals that must be performed for the social sanction they obtain. Thus John Fernandes will take his children to mass, and introduce them to First Holy Communion, even though he thinks the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection to be ‘scientifically impossible’ and thus akin to our farmer’s use of teertha.

In these days of religious revivalism, fundamentalism et al, it is not the faithful that I fear. It is the religious. That is, those who operate in the field of religion without faith. It is true that the fields of faith and religion intersect so often that it is often difficult to distinguish one from the other. The faithful can be gullible, but it is the cynical, those who perform religious ritual, without a belief in its spiritual merit, that are perhaps more to be feared.

In the course of my itinerations round Goa, I have seen the cynics that populate the temples, obsessed more with using the Goddess as a tool to power, rather than falling prostrate at Her feet. The narrator of the letter, I would wager is one of them. The product of his cynicism, is that not only is there a failure to grow in the virtues of trust and mutual dependence that faith brings, but it brings also, as was so obvious from the letter to the editor, a certain disdain for those of the lower order. These ‘superstitious’ are seen as in- need-of-education, and at the end of the day, merely tools for us to reach the paradise that we have deemed fit for creation. Indeed, as the good Pope Benedict XVI repeats constantly, contemporary man, having displaced God, arrogates unto himself the power of God, but in the process renders fellow humans less than human. Setting out to create paradise, he invariably produces the hell of contemporary existence.

To these ramblings, I would welcome your comments.

(Sudin, is the pseudonym for a Goan (Hindu) currently engaged in a PhD in the UK. While Sudin is a pseudonym, all other references are entirely factual.)

(First published in the Gomantak Times, 13 Jan 2010)

La Vie en rose: Why the material is mystical

Some months ago, the current Commissioner of NRG Affairs, Mr. Eduardo Faleiro inaugurated a debate over the matter of the management of Church properties in Goa. Initially it appeared that a suggestion was being made that the State take over the management of Church properties, or at the very least have a say, supervisory control over this properties. Howls of indignant protest followed, most pointing out that to suggest that the State have such a power would be like setting the cat among the pigeons. These objections pointed out that the State machinery itself has ruthlessly presided over the sale of common properties impoverishing the common man in the State, and such an institution is likely to only complicate matters further. In light of this rather robust response, Mr. Faleiro presented a document to the Archbishop that suggested internal reform and vigilance.

Among the many suggestions, there was one that particularly caught my eye, especially because it seemed to one that had purchase in some of the meetings organized by Mr. Faleiro. The suggestion reads “Administrative committees, duly constituted, may be truly empowered, so that lay persons feel really responsible for the administration, as the Church are Christ's faithful and the assets of the Church are their assets. Administration of the ecclesiastical assets should be their domain mainly. If this happens, priests will be left free for what is their proper field, viz. apostolate”. An interesting suggestion is being made here, that priests have really no business administering property, since property is a material good and priests have committed themselves to the spiritual. As such, leave property to be managed by those in the secular and material world. A version of ‘To Caesar that what is Caesar’s, and to God…’

Superficially the argument makes eminent sense. It extends one of the principles of secularism, of separating the Church/religion/spirituality from the State/secular/material life. Unfortunately however, this logic works well only if restricted to the secular world, it does not work at all if one does not admit of this distinction between the material and the secular. On the contrary to apply this logic to the operations of a religion, would ensure that religion ceases to have any meaning at all. The mistaken assumption of Faleiro and the secularists is that religion is about ritual and the spiritual, and it has no connection to the material. Making this assumption, they can extend the principle of secularism as they do. However, religion admits of no distinction between the spiritual and the material. On the contrary, religion is about precisely how to guide one’s material life, and as such has everything to do with the material. It is not as if Catholic culture does not admit members of the laity to be models to be emulated. On the contrary, there are a number of such examples, and priests more often than not, operate in parishes across the world in active participation with lay individuals who are identified (either by them or by social consensus) as significant members of the community. However, Catholic culture nevertheless gives the priest, one trained in the scripture, thought and tradition of the church, a preeminent place in guiding the community in its life. And because there is no such thing as a purely spiritual life, and life is lived out in a material world, this pastoral guidance necessarily extends to how we must mould our material life.

However Faleiro’s suggestion is troubling not only because it turns the idea of religion on its head. His suggestion is troubling because it perpetuates other deeply disturbing, though admittedly popular, distinctions. This distinction is between that of the public and the private. One of the reasons for the early continental European separation of Church from the State, was not because these republicans were necessarily averse to Christianity. On the contrary, their public culture continued to echo Western Christian tradition. The separation was necessary because the Church, as a human institution, was closely tied to the feudal order that the bourgeois republicans were seeking to destroy. These liberals also forged the distinction between the public domain and the private. In the private you could continue with your religious (and other traditions), and in the public they cultivated the religion of the State. Feminists for a few decades now have pointed out the problems with this distinction, pointing out that this distinction serves only to blind the eyes of State justice to abuses that go on in realms that are marked out as private. Just as there is no distinction between the material and the spiritual therefore, there is no distinction between the public and the private. Echoing the phrase ‘the personal is political’, popularized by the feminists in this context, will make the overlap between Faleiro’s suggestion and this larger ‘secular’ tradition strikingly clear. [As an aside, I should mention that this proximity between the spiritual and the feminist argument should make some in the clerical hierarchy sit up, take off their bigoted blinkers, take notice, and start thinking!]

One of the reasons I seek to articulate this critique, is because this separation that is being pushed will have a perilous impact on public life. What it will result in, is the further reduction of religion to ritual. Most of us, already thoroughly secularized in our thinking, even if we consider ourselves devout, understand religion to be ritual. Ritual in religion is however, animated by a spirit that makes meaning of it all. When that spirit is divorced, ritual is emptied out, becoming what secularists and atheists hold it to be ‘empty ritual’. The danger of empty religious ritual is that it becomes a kind of a communal marker that is then pandered to, building up the foundations of communal tensions in multicultural societies. Shorn of the mystical element that gives it meaning, and in fact allows us to transcend narrow social markers, ritual becomes the basis for marking difference. We can already see this operating in the Indian polity. ‘Hinduism’ is emptied out of the ethical values it contains to become Hindutva, an empty shell of symbols and rituals that are believed to represent a community. Islam is similarly emptied of its ethical values to become the political agenda of the jihadi. Similarly Christianity. The State panders to these symbols, only exacerbating the problem, when in fact the ethical practitioners of these faith traditions would, in daily life, normally transcend these barriers.

This particular suggestion that Faleiro makes therefore, has multiple problems for which it must be firmly ignored. The larger point however, is of the problem with this binary ‘secular’ logic; that has more followers than just Mr. Faleiro. It is a logic that is so built of partitions that it fails to allow us to lead holistic lives where we can see the connections between each other. It is a logic that builds solutions on partitions, rather than transcending the divisions that are created or may exist. If the feminists suggested so many decades ago that the personal is political, may I now suggest that indeed, the material is mystical?

(Published in the Gomantak Times, 29 Oct 2009)