Identity and Food

Vani Sharma 
SYBA 2019

Thekua

0.0 Context

This paper is written in terms of a monologue of sorts and each stanza supported by its academic counterpart to draw parallels between my original narrative and its disciplinary justification. The last monologue is separate from the recipe in the first half of the paper, it’s a continuation of the paragraph itself. That’s why I’ve italicized “On one hand” within the paragraph itself since that’s where the context of this personal addressal to my mother starts. A sweet dish isn’t an isolated product, but rather a systematic amalgamation of its raw material, the process just as important to determine the underlying connotations of its socio-cultural setting. Hence, the recipe of Thekua, the Bihari sweet dish that I have chosen, has been associated with each sentiment it denotes as its set out on a plate to be consumed.

 

 0.0 The Cooking and Presentation of Thekua

Three Hundred grams of wheat flour,

One Fifty grams of jaggery,

Fifty grams of grated coconut,

Two tea spoons of ghee,

Green Cardamom for stimulated taste buds,

And oil to smooth over centuries worth of anguish.

For over a decade, I have witnessed meticulously crafted “desserts” drown the dysfunctions of abysmal disappointment in the oddity of our colloquial sweets that I can’t even sweep under the name of my ownership. In dissecting the confusing and incomplete narrative of the first statement, I want to begin by clarifying that “Thekua” in itself isn’t as prejudiced or depressing as family dynamics have morphed it into as I’ve grown older. Cooked during the festivities of Teej and Karva Chauth, personally its significance is much more decadent during the celebration of Karva Chauth. Hence, I find myself identifying with Teej instead simply because it’s a product of my Bihari lineage or rather my Kayastha caste identity as opposed to the baggage of being Brahmin from my father’s side of the family. The dichotomy between how sweet Thekua tastes on Teej in contrast with its bittersweet aftertaste on Karva Chauth proves Arthur Asa Berger’s endeavour of claiming food items as microcosms in themselves true. I believe that even food isn’t left untarnished by man’s propensity towards conflict and sentiment. And when something as petite in dimensions as Thekua is touched by human hands, its every bite denotes a vehicle of expression whose engine has been creaking and operating for generations - much like language. Food is directly held responsible for personal attributes like piety of character, tenderness, roughness, sensitivity, bravery, passion, violence, and evil, especially in case of vilification and glorification of mythical characters. It inevitably gets classified into categories of where, when and how its served pertaining respectively to qualities of goodness, passion, and dullness of an occasion and is a reflection of the traditional values that entire communities are supposed to imbibe. The category of gender also affects consumption of food. And mind you, the borders between Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have erected a barbed wire between my parents, one that becomes more pronounced with the passing years. The cultural distinction between the two families is more prominent in why they serve Thekua on Teej and Karva Chauth Pooja than in their mainstream dialogue.

You start with shattering jaggery into shards,

Framed for barricades separating adjacent states,

Two pieces of the same land,

A million miles apart,

I’ll allow it to brew over boiling inter-caste tensions,

And this concoction gives you a seemingly sweet mixture.

On Teej, Thekua is made solely for the purpose of offering it to the girls of the respective families, it’s the celebration of womanhood across generations that has been misinterpreted as an invocation for your husband’s long life which is literally what Karva Chauth Pooja is for. It celebrates the individual agency possessed by women and reclamation of the same by Goddess Parvati. Hartalika Teej, as its Sanskrit translation unravels is “abduction = harit” and “female friend = aalika”. On being forced to marry Lord Vishnu by her father (Himalaya) against her wishes, Parvati’s friend plotted for her to run away to the forest where she could pray to Lord Shiva. Impressed by her dedication and affection, Shiva agreed to marry Parvati along with her father’s blessings. By stating that the ritual is merely dedicated to the well-being a Hindu woman’s husband dilutes Goddess Parvati’s struggle and Lord Shiva’s recognition of her individuality and strength.

We strain the dissolved jaggery once its simmered down,

Conflated egos too exhausted to rise,

The adulteration washed away,

Adding ghee to strengthen the bond,

And coarse cardamom peeled back to soften the blow,

Powdered until its coruscating of impunity rather than shackles,

Because despite the raging conflict,

In a society like ours, where even today in the twenty first century, a woman is identified by her title as the daughter of her father or the wife of her husband, Goddess Parvati’s tenacious resolve is revolutionary. She displays courage in her unyielding stance to assert the importance of her personal choice in matters so pertinent to her existence, something most women, including those belonging to my family struggle with. In the context of marriage specifically, women’s identity with that of the family’s honour and caste status is perhaps super imposed if not an extension of each other. Teej then signifies the celebration of defiance and doesn’t reinforce patriarchal shackles intertwined gently with the practice of fasting for an entire day.

We have both vowed to raise our child differently,

For she should not have to bear the brunt of prejudiced beliefs.

After all,

The dough is ours,

Flour added with grated coconut,

Sprinkled with cardamom,

And kneaded with jaggery,

She’s half of you and half of me,

Built with Goddess Parvati’s resolve,

There is no question of compromise,

And in a Kayastha household where my mother is one of two daughters and her parents have refuted the ideal of equating sons to prosperity and daughters to liabilities, she’s grown up celebrating womanhood. Then perhaps inevitably, Teej became more important than Karva Chauth Pooja and she imbibed this attitude in marrying my father out of love. Like Parvati, she was met with hurdles in pursuing that relationship. My paternal grandmother went as far as threatening her and her own parents have been upset over this matrimony even twenty-two years down the road. And I carry that burden of repression as my paternal aunt continues to try and stifle my mother’s cultural identity. With the increasing commodity value of cultural difference (Leve, 2011) between the two families and the repression that has followed in the subtle intimidating undertone of condescension in belittling Teej by trying to assert Karva Chauth’s importance in my home, I find myself gravitating towards Teej as a form of protest. Thekua isn’t a sweet for the rest of the family to devour as the married women starve themselves during Teej, but by offering this decked up comfort food to the younger girls, you’re celebrating everything you won’t deprive them off and then the purpose of fasting is to silently protest the idea that only a son’s arrival can be celebrated and that a woman is a second grade citizen in her own home.

You preheat the oil in a wok,

Your family and mine mincing their words,

Simpering with a scathing vocabulary,

They sit awaiting to curb our makeshift home,

Prepping for their picture-perfect punishment.

The environment within this family then demands for my mother and particularly me to render that section of traditions as irrelevant. And in the face of fascist ideologies that demand women to forego centuries worth of their acquired identities, the space between institutionalised marginalisation and “Thekua” as a celebration of womanhood becomes close to diminutive. This further implies that your personal identity as a woman is sort of a meta-culture: a culture not just in itself, but for itself. This analysis becomes more publicly relevant in demarcating how a “singular” person shoulders the responsibility of keeping their distinct traditions alive when their nostalgia, upbringing and communal belonging is being threatened by their in laws in order to systematically isolate them as a minority in what is supposed to be their home and dissolve their beliefs into more “significant, superior” traditions.

Now we break the dough,

Smaller pieces rolled gently to fit a mould,

Hold on,

Identity based discourse in the frame of reference doesn’t then seek to dismantle the history or meaning of any particular collective identity but the epistemological nature of identity as an object. This mechanism of battling an opposition for the sake self-preservation transforms into a violent assemblage of being and knowing oneself and the people you chose to love in the configuration of a mini socio-political formation. Because somewhere, “politics of recognition becomes politics of compulsion” (Appiah,1992). The consequences of reinforcement of self essentialisms regards an individual with a certain limit of conformity itself. Teej isn’t then associated with its fundamental celebration, its draped in the garb of being a fast for your husband’s long life, just to level the playing field with Karva Chauth. Which is actually quite pathetic since Teej is so much more. The oddity is that if Teej is a tokenistic tool to reiterate your lost position in a household by changing the reason for celebration, then its significance is entirely lost. By allowing it to operationalize in a structure that is already broken in preaching a value system that contradicts everything that the festivity stands for, aren’t you responsible for perpetuating that same system? Perhaps it’s easier to coexist in a dysfunctional system by adhering to that rule book and manipulating your way through it than to wage a war against the warped reality you enter when you got married.

I thought we weren’t sieving the dough?

Weren’t our hands meant to prepare a different shape?

We rose from the land of ardour,

But now sink bank into the folds of time,

The zeal we took to thus persist,

All vaporised within the confines of this kitchen?

 

2.0 Thekua And My Identity

In this age old system of making the strange familiar and the familiar strange, the discipline now asks questions about the different kind of experiences you’re subjected to in one lifetime, in one body despite being cleaved into two in separating your nostalgic sense of belonging from your lived reality today as a married woman. Thekua is symbolic in being languid and open to perception. On one hand, it’s reflexive of change in the meaning of culture and as to how a mother or wife chooses to lay claim over her own histories and cosmologies and the exclusive right to represent herself.

And on the other hand, Thekua is also a forthcoming apology,

And I, the daughter, an only child,

Mother you bear no son to precede you – a dilemma for your in laws,

This offering survives in tumultuous times,

It heroically attempts to transform your trials and tribulations,

Into something far more bearable for me.

You assumed it would be as revolutionary as its original celebration,

Yet it falls short in the confines of gendered times,

Caste ridden spatial dynamics,

And its existence changing breadths to survive the semiotics of our family.

Teej then becomes a period of mourning,

For despite the benefits of my “feminist” father,

Mom you have a largely oppressive and oblivious husband,

In whose eyes,

His real family could cause no harm,

Could only ever want the best for me,

Their blood relative,

But blood once tainted can’t be fixed by the waters of Holy Ganga either.

So, as you continue to conduct Teej every year,

Know that your hopeful idealism isn’t lost in defeaning silence,

I learn from you every day,

And in my eyes,

You’re Goddess Parvati who cannot be shunned amidst this chaos,

And I will carry your legacy forward.

After all,

I am first your daughter,

And then my Brahmin surname.

 

Reference

Berger, A. (1990). ABOUT THE HOUSE: CULTURAL STUDIES: THE TOASTER. ETC:

A Review of General Semantics, 47(2), 151-153. Retrieved January 24, 2020, from

www.jstor.org/stable/42577193

Leve, Lauren. "’Identity’" Current Anthropology, vol. 52, no. 4 (August 2011): pp. 513-

535. doi.org/10.1086/660999