Mind The Gap: The keepers of memory
The festival season kicks in, a newish genre of cookbook memoirs reminds us of women’s role as the custodians of oral history.
It’s only on page 185, roughly halfway through Cooking for my firefly, that Malvika Singh gets down to the business of recipes. Until then, the cookbook memoir traverses dinner parties and buffets, cocktails and special occasions, high-ranking officials and custodians of culture.
Describing herself as a “professional dilettante”, Cooking is the second of Singh’s trilogy of memoirs. The first, Saris of Memory memorialized her life one sari at a time. This one is told through food, or to be more precise through entertaining.
“I was brought up to believe that life and good living, at work and after work, was about engaging with people, participating actively in conversation, sharing ideas over a meal of appetizing, wholesome food,” writes Singh, an author and publisher.
The firefly in the title is a reference to her husband, Tejbir or Jugnu as his friends call him (Jugnu translates to firefly in English). The memoir continues with the philosophy of the good life through good food and mindful entertaining. Of course there is privilege—prime minister Indira Gandhi drops in for dinner; impromptu meals could include 50 or more at few hours notice; and sit-down dinners are planned with three courses and a dessert and, equally important, seating plans that might encourage better conversation.
The book, Singh makes clear, is written with legacy in mind. At 76, the daughter of Raj and Romesh Thapar who founded the influential Seminar and daughter-in-law of Sujan Singh who built much of modern Delhi, says she began writing her memoirs “in order to leave a record of our lives and times for my grandchildren”.
A celebration of food and people, Firefly goes back to an era of Russian salads and canapes served on Monaco biscuits. When the meal was home-made, not catered. When birthday parties had not yet lost their innocence of passing-the-parcel and home-baked cakes. When conversation had not yet been replaced by emojis and Instagram likes.
Mining memory
When I left India to study journalism in the US, my mother packed a copy Tarla Dalal’s cookbook. My first crack at it turned out, unfortunately, to be my last. I found the recipes too difficult to follow—if I remember correctly the demand for freshly ground spices did not seem amenable to student life. Stumbling upon Madhur Jaffrey was a lucky chance. I forget which one of her early cook books it was. But since she lived abroad, the recipes were easy with ingredients readily available.
The early cookbooks were no-nonsense, straightforward how-to’s. From Ambabai Samsi’s Rasachandrika, published in 1945 by the Saraswat Mahila Samaj to Mrs Balbir Singh’s 1961 classic Indian Cookery, these books had the sole aim of putting a meal or just a dish together.
In 2007, Madhur Jaffrey published Climbing the Mango Tree: A memoir of a childhood in India; the parenthesis (with recipes) tagged on almost as an afterthought. A compelling origin story, it was perhaps among the earliest in the genre of cookbook memoirs that have now proliferated. Recounting her childhood growing up in a large joint family of Mathur Kayasthas, a sub-caste with historic links to the Mughal throne, the recipes seem incidental to the recollections of a childhood spent plucking mangoes from the tree to eat with a mixture of salt and chili powder.
The clear demarcation of gendered roles—the men busy in the outside world and connected to it even at home through the radio, the women keeping painstaking accounts of every paisa spent in large registers—is apparent, though Jaffrey does not specifically comment on it.
It’s a division that is equally clear in Rukmini Srinivas’s Tiffin: Memories and recipes of Indian vegetarian food (2015) where recipes are not tagged on at the end but are an inherent part of a recollection. In the chapter, Aviyal for a Family Wedding, it is Srinivas’s mother who is tasked with the physical labour of preparing the dish. Watching her stir, a young Srinivas is imbibing the skill of cooking not through precise measurement of ingredients but through feel and instinct.
Srinivas’s book evolved when she began sending her US-based daughters recipes for healthy snacks. Mining her memory for those dishes, she ending up wandering through rememberances with people and places. “My replies grew into lengthy stories,” she writes and so the book was born.
Tiffin—the word itself, she writes, is a colonial hang-over from tiffing, a term in use in 18th century England for ‘tiffing’ or sipping—captures a wonderful slice of history. Srinivas writes about a time when she, aged all of eight-years-old, and her younger sister, six, would travel, unaccompanied, on the Deccan Queen from Pune where her father worked to Mumbai to spend the summer with their uncle.
Beyond the recipes for batata poha and ulundu vadai, Tiffin serves as a reminder that women, confined to their kitchens, were keen observers of their time and era; that history is not just the great public events unfolding in courtrooms and legislatures, but also what occurred privately, behind closed doors, captured by those who observed.
The documentation project
Samrata Salwan Diwan grew up listening to stories from her grand-parents who had moved from Pakistan to Delhi during Partition. “I felt these would be lost unless they were documented,” she says.
What began as a weekend project to record oral family history has now become a bespoke publishing house, Family Fables where individuals and institutions ask Diwan to help them document their histories through photographs, archival research and, yes, recipes.
“Food is such an integral part of memory,” Diwan says. Food, recipes and nuskas (home-remedies) were part of a heritage that was protected and passed down by generations of women. For instance, in a book commissioned by a family from Multan, Diwan learned of a tradition called doli ki roti—deep-fried flat bread that could last for days and would be sent along with the bride at her farewell.
“Women are the gate-keepers of oral histories and since food is such an integral part of culture, women are able recall the finer details. There is so much that is extra-ordinary in these ordinary stories,” Diwan says.
That’s it for this week. If you have a tip, feedback, criticism, please write to me at: namita.bhandare@gmail.com
