Writing Initiatives

Such acts of spatial remaking remain commonplace in Bombay. In a city lacking stable infrastructure, public spaces, or a robust system of libraries and art centres^[10] (an accessible public commons, in other words) everyday spaces become rich, multivalent sites of community life. As the urban domain grows ever narrower, space is at once prized commodity and pliable, continually reclaimed resource. In the hands of the city’s populace, pavements become sites of commerce, traffic islands breakfast spots, and roundabouts places of leisure. Beyond the limits of the formal map is a liminal Bombay of the everyday: a set of geographic markers that exist in public memory but outside geographic fact. These landmarks of the ordinary citizen, multipurpose and movable, remake the city in the image of those who occupy it, resisting the tendency of the official map to, in the words of de Certeau, “[cause] a way of being in the world to be forgotten”^[11].

Within the worlds of 20^th century artmaking, the coordinates of the avant-garde performed a similar function, eking out space for practitioners who would otherwise be invisible. For the artists and writers of the 1960s, food served as link, tool, and subject. The spaces in which it was consumed were at once social and professional, allowing for nourishment and comradery alongside the development of new forms and idioms. In places like the Wayside Inn and Café Samovar, the poetic and the everyday bled into each other. These sites provided a place for food to be consumed and relished, for work to be exchanged, and for the city to be observed and documented. What emerged was a creative practice enmeshed in the texture of the city, an approach to creation deeply attuned not just to what was being said but also to where it was being said from.

Sitting at his regular table at the Wayside Inn, Kolatkar would pen dozens of poems about the lives and rhythms he was witnessing. The watermelon seller, rat poison man, and fisherwoman became his protagonists, their daily routines the subject of his work^[12]. In their own ways and mediums, his contemporaries displayed a similar loving attention to the everyday, creating little magazines, paintings, and poetry that recognised the city – crowded, filthy, humble, alive – as worthy of art. In encountering portraits of the urban across aesthetic and temporal distance, it is sometimes possible to take a sanitised view of art-making, separating it from the material constraints that so often circumscribe its creation. The cultures of independent art-making in the 1960s, deeply reliant on the resources available to them, deny such distance. Instead, they deliver us to the intersection of creative practice and everyday life, revealing how the city’s cultures of eating, movement, and leisure are foundational to the art that is produced within it.

The essential question of nourishment – both metaphorical and literal – is a pathway to a fuller understanding of artistic production. In viewing the work in light of that which sustains it – space, time, resources – we may reveal the profound material requirements of creative practice. Food, as one among these, functions as a barometer of cultural life. Food is communal, public, collectively negotiated. It acts as a nucleus of social life and a marker of cultural identity. In asking who is permitted to eat, where they can eat, and what they are eating, we are asking, also, who the city belongs to.

In a sequence from his poem “Breakfast Time at Kala Ghoda”, Kolatkar records a set of meals –  “khima pao at Olympia/ dal gosht at Baghdadi/ puri bhaji at Kailash Parbat…”- that is being eaten “up and down/ the whole hungry longitude”^[13]. Many of the spaces in the poem are now gone, built over in the ceaseless forward march of the city. But Kolatkar’s work is more than a document of a place and time. It is a reminder of a way of being in the city, one that persists even after its coordinates have been erased. Today and tomorrow and the day after that, Bombay’s residents will find space to eat and drink and rest. They will stop on pavements and at run-down cafés for a quick meal or a slow chat. Perhaps someone will witness this and think to write about it. Perhaps not. It will happen anyway.

Rushdie employs the metaphor of the “whorehouse” to encapsulate the often transgressive, licentious and unrestrained nature of eating-out establishments. This playful figurative expression shows that situations of dining out allow for interaction between humans, objects, and affects that collectively moulds consumption behaviour. This is to say that the look and feel of the environment of the restaurant (much like the taste and feeling of the bread) allows the eating public to think with their bodies and in the process sensuously realigns them. The significance of ambience and atmosphere in eating out experiences, therefore, gestures at a transformation of tastes.

Restaurants, cafes, and other spaces of dining out have become a common feature of urban lived reality. They make a small world possible, moving past traditional ways of being. The changing landscape of eating spaces, along with situations and scenes of eating, shows the increasing ordinariness of restaurants and their potential to create new worlds which can be free of traditional cultural affiliations. In conclusion, this short essay tries to argue spaces of eating-out are capable of generating new intuitions and new kinds of gastronomical affinities. Such new dietary belongings and fidelities, as Rushdie’s piece shows, are significant in their disavowal of nostalgic culinary identity and in the creation of post-ethnic affiliations and worlds.

For the most part, food has not played an active role in the narratives of Indian cinema. And on the off chance that it features in a film, it is used to show a woman’s dedication towards her family or the man she’s in love with. However, in recent times, filmmakers are conversing more through the act of cooking and eating. Films across Indian languages now weave in aspects of liberation, caste discrimination, desire, and power into the narrative, and they do it through food.

The politics of a domestic kitchen

Our cultural conditioning has led us to believe that the kitchen is a woman’s domain. Often in Hindi cinema, cooking has been used as a way to show the taming of a shrew  – a once-‘modern’ girl running out of a kitchen wearing a saree is a popular narrative; remember Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Bawarchi (1972)? The domestic kitchen is then portrayed, with a certain nostalgia, as a gendered space.

Neeraj Ghaywan’s Hindi film Juice (2017) breaks that nostalgic lens. The short is set in a middle-class home in small-town India. A get together is on – men sitting and chatting comfortably in the living room in front of an air cooler, drinks in hand, while women huddle around the hot and humid kitchen, making dinner. It’s a scene right out of the life of most upper-caste, middle-income Indian families. The film doesn’t just focus on the gendered division of household labour – the men crack casual sexist jokes, show their support towards right wing politics, and, in a scene where one of the women guests pulls out a steel glass to pour chai for the domestic worker, Ghaywan highlights the everyday casteism that is rampant  in Indian homes.

In Chaitanya Tamhane’s Marathi film Court (2015), a scene from the domestic life of the public prosecutor subtly illustrates the experiences of a working woman expected to juggle her professional and personal life without much help. Both husband and wife work a nine-to-five job. But the husband comes home and sits in front of the television, while the wife changes, freshens up, and heads straight to the kitchen.  The  rest of her evening is spent there, cooking dinner for the family. But unlike Court, Juice ends with an act of defiance. Manju, the woman of the house, picks up a chair and drags it to the living room, placing it right in front of the air cooler. She sits down, aware of the discomfort this act of hers has caused the men, and drinks from her glass of orange juice.

As opposed to the films exploring the relationship between food and gender by looking at the oppression of women in domestic kitchens, the Malayalam film Kumbalangi Nights (Dir: Madhu C. Narayanan, 2019) portrays the performance of masculinity in relation with food. Shammi, who shares the house with his newly-wedded wife, her sister, and mother, assumes the position of the family patriarch; he subtly moves his chair to the head of the dining table as he invites the rest of the family to sit and eat around him. He’s a ‘man’s man’ and in his world, women are mere second-class citizens. In total contrast, Saji who has shared a dysfunctional relationship with his half-brothers so far, cooks and shares meals with his real as well as adoptive family (his dead friend’s wife and his half-brother’s girlfriend) and assumes the position of nurturer as he begins to let himself be vulnerable. The film shows two forms of familial commensality, one authoritarian and the other egalitarian, both mediated through dining practices.

For the last few days, a cloud has hung over my head. This heavy, grey, shapeless mass whose weight equals that of a duvet, under which I pretend to no longer exist. It has been a little over a month that I have had this table for one. Perhaps, such an overwhelming sense of inadequacy was boosted by the condition of being alone, perhaps it was induced by pending work, or could it have been triggered by my inability to read more than a few pages at a time? Of this I cannot be sure, but what is certain is my urgent requirement to blow off the fluff. So I go for a walk.

And just as the whispers take on their own narratives and stories are created for this lone woman, I too am writing on my own — about myself and those I encounter. As if taking advice from Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’, we women are fashioning a space for ourselves to create our own fictions. We exist because we do this act. And our imaginations are ignited because we have gifted ourselves this publicly solitary time. 

It is not entirely solitary, because there are the small interactions of asking for the table, ordering, nodding thank you when you’ve finished. But mostly you are alone. And in that isolation our daydreams manifest into realities, we are allowed to be whoever we want to be in that moment: a femme fatale, a spy, a woman at peace, an author, an artist, a whiff of mystery…

And within this action, we mentally cleanse ourselves. We confront issues through new eyes, we sit differently using our bodies in new ways, we caress our hair, our hands, our thighs, in different ways. We are no longer that former self, we are ‘othered’ by choice.  And that other can be whoever we want them to be, it is powerful and it is unusual. Though it is difficult to get to this euphoric moment of release, of opening up to the new and of discovering oneself, when reached, this moment can be magical.

Simulating a machine that is commonplace in most urban areas, what intrigued me was Kairoi’s defiance of serving as per expectation, which came to reflect a range of factors that shape our habits, the value we ascribe to processed foods, and the impact it has on the formation of our personal and social selves. With a finger placed on a simulated biometric sensor, the stack revealed familiar but temporally-specific products upon patient gazing. These ranged from Frooti and Uncle Chips, manufactured by Indian industries that were subsumed by MNCs post liberalisation, to imli candies, Natkhat, and Phantom Cigarettes, produced by local small-scale industries, alongside other items in the stack that were manufactured by emerging corporations pre- and post-Independence and which, in many ways, shaped the national consumer imagination. 

Britannia (Little Hearts, Bourbon) introduced mechanised food production to India and played a key role in supplying biscuits to the British Indian Army during World War II. Parle (Parle-G, Kismi, Frooti, Monaco) was the first Swadeshi confectionery to create affordable Indian alternatives to imported biscuits and candies. Whereas, Nestle (Maggi, Kitkat) was invited by the government to develop the dairy economy post-Independence. In turn, the consumption of products manufactured by these companies became a way to participate in nation-building and serve the values they espoused. 

Beneath the products, instead of prices or timestamps, words denoting duration were mentioned, like ‘soon’, ‘simultaneously’, ‘lapse’, ‘longing’, ‘exhausting’, etc. They signified how the computed time didn’t always correspond to its lived experience, where the latter (along with the product’s value) was more often shaped by nostalgia, nutritional promise, access, rewards, and packaging narratives used by corporations banking on hunger.

In a conversation with Sonam on the machine’s refill frequency, it was interesting to note how Phantom Cigarettes with the highest timestamps were refilled faster than Parle-G and Little Hearts, with comparatively lower timestamps. These observations reflect that product values are contextual, and as reminded by Neil Cummings, “… (values) are not properties of things themselves, but judgments made through encounters people have with them at specific times and in specific places.”^[4]

What the Baburnama (and other culinary treatises that emerged during this period, like the Supa Shastra from Vijayanagar^[2]) did was capture an idiosyncrasy of the land that felt explicit in its excitement. It was celebratory of the soil from which it grew, and tenaciously tender and juicy in the face of scorching elements under the sun. In other words, to see such fruits grow, to live around them, and to eat them in manners hitherto unimagined – was fun. This was a time when every mycelial root spread over the country would gather around with mouth-watering dishes like kothal guti lau pat khar from Assam or panasa pottu kura from Andhra Pradesh (I’m personally more of an appam type of person). No longer mere curiosities, such fruits were venerated, celebrated – regardless of how prickly or unattractive their exterior may be, they were a cause and participant of feasts and celebrations, with ballads sung in their names.

Nothing can capture the tenor of this emotion as well as the conundrum around finding the ilish (hilsa) in present-day West Bengal. The fish, considered to be the queen of the piscine world, is embedded in the context of contested claims on the river and the Ganges delta, which facilitates its growth and reproduction. Over its life cycle, the fish is largely found in the deep seas of the Bay of Bengal. However, it travels upstream towards freshwater to lay eggs in water that is more favourable for breeding. Affected by a number of problems including unchecked water pollution, unpredictable climate and unlawful fishing activities, the lifecycle of the ilish is also plagued by another issue – the dam on the Indian side of the Ganges at Farakka, West Bengal and the subsequent water flow that makes it to the Padma River on the Bangladesh side.

Susan Sontag wrote in her diary on the last day of her marriage, that she had eaten a soft-boiled egg, orange juice and a dish of apple sauce at ten in the morning after her husband Philip left with their son David on a trip (2009: 149). Apple sauce, which is mainly eaten as a side dish, is most likely converted into the main dish here, considering the size of an egg. Putting minimal effort into cooking and spending less time in the kitchen, making do with what is there and finding satisfaction in it, is also a kind of queering, as in a patriarchal family system, this would not work. For Pradipta, another friend, making something as mundane as home-cooked food funky with the use of absurd ingredients that usually don’t go well with each other but somehow do, was a way of parodying the mainstream. Welcoming and sharing food with people who are queer, on a table that doesn’t enforce the etiquettes of dinner at your father’s boss’ house is queer too. The music that is played, the people that come together, the ambience that is created, unhindered by fetters of judgement or roles, is what adds to the queerness of this ritual.

Kyle Fitzpatrick writes, “It is less about what is literally eaten, but it is more than just the presence of queer people at the table. Queer food is the food of a temporary utopia, one where unexpected eating styles and culinary creativity thrive, where things that seem too weird to work, actually work.” Raj mentioned that cooking was something they allowed themselves to be mediocre at and if it did not turn out to be good, it did not harm anybody. The spirit of going-along-with-it is what makes kitchens constructed outside the contours of conventional familial units feel so inclusive. Jennifer E. Crawford in her series ‘My Queer Kitchen’ with Xtra Magazine spills fudge sauce, upsetting the perfect structure, and it is fine, and this can be read alongside the fact that allowing oneself to be messy and make mistakes has no place in the normative kitchen. The Great British Bake-Off contestant Michael Chakraverty talks about his messy kitchen and unconventional cooking practices which has led to disasters like spilling flour. While baking in easy-bake ovens, drag queen Trixie Mattel burns food, creates a mini fire and makes nearly inedible cookies from decades-old dough—it is all fun and in alignment with the spirit of the queer kitchen she has created for herself.

Nandini, who was part of Amra Odbhut Collective which started Adamant Eve – A Queer Feminist Café, and then the Amra Odbhut Café, resisted cooking until she was twenty, when she entered the kitchen after leaving an abusive situation. Her pleasure in cooking then came  from her autonomy in choosing to cook, which was never afforded to her mother. Cooking for her is meditative and her kitchen is private–her relationship with cooking and food has helped her heal. The Amra Odbhut Café had a library with queer and feminist literature and, moreover, held movie screenings, and hosted music and dance-fueled evenings. Like the architecture of kitchens in our houses, the café initially had a small kitchen, which was later extended to accommodate the many people who came to be involved in the process of cooking. At an event where Nandini was overwhelmed, she had many community members come forward of their own volition to help her make coffee and bake cakes.