For Nina*, dal (stewed lentils) tastes like defeat, preparing it feels like a lost cause.
“Sometimes, there is ‘too much salt’, sometimes there is ‘no salt’, so much so that salting is very stressful for me,” she says, recounting the harsh words her cooking receives from her husband of 27 years.
Last month, he picked up the brass dish of dal and flung it across the room.
The idea of a woman being harassed and even assaulted by her husband in India is not as shocking as it should be and, according to a 2021 canvas by the National Family and Health Survey, about 45 percent of women and 44 percent of men surveyed felt it would be justified in one of seven circumstances.
Among the seven? Not cooking properly, which 14 percent of women and 10 percent of men surveyed thought would justify spousal abuse.
“The kitchen to me is a prison sometimes,” Nina says. “But if I am with my children, it’s the warmest place where they sit with their friends, door locked, talking to me and loving each other.”
Nina’s day starts just after dawn; laundry is done, groceries readied and the house tidied before the cooking begins at about 7am. For as long as she can remember, she has made a hot breakfast for four people, but recent stress at work meant the family has had to resort to grains of cereal instead and Nina can see the resentment building.
“Food has to be made at regular intervals or he gets ‘headaches’ for the rest of the day, whether I am at home or not home, whether I am tired or not, after travelling or childbirth.”
But food was not always a source of agony. Before marriage, Nina enjoyed cooking for others and herself. It was a ritual; no act of finding a recipe or procuring ingredients was mundane. She experimented, she reused, and she nourished. Food was something she longed to write about – how it made her and underscored the wisdom of her family.
The kitchen can be more than a place where “tradition” is guarded. Some women are remaking rituals around food as they explore their own relationships with it.
The Indian household has carefully moulded rituals and traditions around food, its preparation and consumption. This is no trivial matter: There’s a long list of ingredients, spices, magic masalas (spice mixes), ways of tadka (tempering), and wisdom absorbed by watching mothers and grandmothers in the kitchen.
By the time Vasumathy* was 10, she realised cooking is more labour than love. She had spent hours standing by her mother’s side in the kitchen, little nose barely reaching the marble countertop. Her fascination with her mother’s precise, sharp hands as they dropped finely chopped tomatoes into soaked rice was tempered with the realisation that, no matter what, others in the family did not receive the food with love.
“My mother would cook and was criticised when things didn’t turn out right,” she recalls. The curry was too spicy, the viscosity was not quite right.
“It was a thankless job. And the expectation that the woman should learn to … has to, make three meals [a day] and feed her family, the expectation was too much for me. I think … that turned me away from cooking.”
Cooking was a chore, unglamorous and repetitive.
The reality of kitchen work in an archetypical traditional Indian home is beautifully shown in the Malayalam movie, The Great Indian Kitchen. The dining table bustles with plates of banana chips, puttu (steamed cylinders of rice flour and coconut), sambar, chutney, and rice, but cooking is not glamorised.
The Wife, trying to fit into the traditional role expected of her, is caught in the tedium of cooking and cleaning, dirty vessels, clogged drains, and leaking taps while the men eat, practise yoga, and peruse their mobile phones outside the kitchen.
She only eats alone, when they are done, pushing aside food scraps the men spat out of their mouths to make space for herself on the tablecloth.
This depiction of traditional Indian gender roles shows there is no space for the Wife (and by implication the Mother or Daughter) who nurtures her family with food yet eats last because she neglects to nurture herself. The kitchen she is relegated to is an arena for unpaid labour that devalues her work and precludes her from a social identity beyond the family.
Eating becomes political because it raises questions of when, what and where women eat. When men’s needs are prioritised, food is unequally distributed and women come last – despite the fact that “in many contexts in India women may end up expending more calories than men” in doing heavier work, Sreeparna Chattopadhyay, a cultural anthropologist who researches sexuality, gender, and families in South Asia, notes.
This discrimination results in poor physical and mental health. A 2021 study showed that in women between the ages of 18 and 65 in three Indian states (Jharkhand, Bihar, and Maharashtra), less autonomy due to eating last was a factor contributing to poor mental health.
Moreover, even if they want to, women who live in some vegetarian households cannot eat meat, since it implies impurity; a poor vegetarian diet and no animal protein leads to not just anaemia but micronutrient deficiencies that affect women’s health as well as children they give birth to.
So if food is a communal affair in India, traditionally consumed at home and prepared by the women who eat last and eat leftovers, how can they navigate something they never learned to see as theirs? Perhaps by taking up space. By choosing what to eat, where to eat it and the company – if any – they choose to share this food, women can take the space the traditional family denies them.
Boba*, 21, recalls that the “kitchen at home was a prison and will probably always be”. Her father would step into it only to “mansplain” things to her mother, which made cooking a stressful experience. The insults were hollow aches, hurled loudly some days, whispered across the table on others.
Even eating was fraught with conflict: Boba lived with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and dealt with weight issues, so her parents decided starvation was the way to go.
Every Monday, she was to eat only fruits. Every evening, she was to go to the gym. Some days, her mother would slip some shaan khaosue, a noodle soup with a coconut milk base, into her room.
Her idea of the kitchen changed when she moved out and took charge of her own. There was an induction stove, a single skillet, a spatula – everything she needed to feel uncaged. “Cooking for myself gave me a sense of freedom and a creative outlet.”
The stove is a canvas of trial and error; she mixes things that aren’t usually paired together. Eggs and toast with a side of pineapple cucumber salad – the hot, tender yolk against the sweet and tart of the pineapple. “If you cook for yourself, you’re free to feed yourself well – unlike my mother’s limited portions at home.”
Food can be messy, can come with fuss, Boba thinks as she looks out of her balcony at a pani puri cart on the street. Perhaps nothing is as messy or as delicious as pani puri, a deep-fried street food that has to be eaten whole without spilling the fillings and chutneys in the crisp, puffy mini-breads.
But when she craved those fragrant morsels, she had to ask someone to go with her. You cannot share a pani puri, eating it is a solitary, one-bite act but she, like many women, had grown up believing women don’t eat out alone, they have to exist in public in the context of a group.
The pervasiveness of this idea “hinders one’s ability to associate with food at an individual level”, Boba muses. “I always had trouble going out to eat by myself,” she says.
Then one time, about two years ago, Boba got stood up at a restaurant. “I was a little mad and decided to go all out and ordered a lot of food. I genuinely enjoyed not having to share my food and not having to make awkward small talk.”
Then she started going out alone, to lunch, dinner, dessert. She had found the “space to relish my food on my own terms”.
There’s still a social and cultural stigma around women eating alone. It implies their agency and independence; the act of eating is meant for the nourishment of the self and not for anyone else. Moreover, it changes how society perceives female bodies, which are celebrated for their aesthetics and not for their functionality and strength. When women eat alone, they reduce eating to both a function and an indulgence – meant only for themselves.
For Labanya*, 24, eating with family meant eating under a suppressive gaze. “My father is very strict about our eating habits … We all have to eat dinner together because of him.”
He is vegetarian, so the dining table only carried vegetables and pulses for dinner. Occasionally, he would ask what they had for breakfast, a tone of questioning that bordered on interrogation.
Any “fuss” would be met with punishment, which would be carried out over the dining table too. “We were punished because of food, but we were rewarded with it too.”
If she did any kitchen work or helped her mother, she would get sweets as a bonus for good behaviour.
Any insistence on eating together was like a flesh wound, reminding her of the restrictions she faced as a child. She felt controlled by food; plates and spoons were strings, dictating when to eat, how to eat, and what to eat.
The antithesis was to eat in the space most intimate to her. When she went to college, she abandoned tables and dining rooms for the comfort of her bed. “I would rather order food than eat in a restaurant. Even if I go out, I would take the food and eat it somewhere quiet, with trees maybe.”
One day, she hopes to have a house of her own, with a kitchen of her own. Where no one can come.
During the pandemic, Akanksha, 32, translated her love for eating and cooking into starting a tiffin service for migrant workers in Pune who were stuck far from home. Her kitchen was divided into two zones: one for cooking and the other for assembling dal, roti, rice, and a vegetable stir fry into aluminium foil-cushioned tiffins.
Food has been central to her makeup. As a young girl growing up in Vashi, a suburb of Mumbai, relatives would come set themselves up at the dining table, vying for her mother’s biryani. When she moved to Scotland for higher studies, she started a blog of recipes for homemade Indian food. Soon, it morphed into a service where she sold dishes to people living away from home but holding onto the nostalgia of a familiar taste.
While providing different communities with meals during the pandemic, Akanksha ate with different people, in different places. Not only was the kitchen undone, but the dining table, too.
Arguably, socialising through food, outside the setting of a family and home, has always existed. Sikh gurudwaras have langars – kitchens where people are served food free of charge regardless of their social identity. There are community kitchens offering food relief during times of war and peace, preparing food on roads, in government shelters, or in public spaces. This offers an alternative to the dominance of the Indian family kitchen, which in most middle- and upper-middle-class households are enclosed spaces that alienate the maker from the rest of the household.
Source: Al-jazeera