Illustration by Shruti Prabhu.
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The hearth of the matter
A writer's personal reckoning with ancestral kitchens and the ways in which we occupy them.
(This article is part of 'Ways of eating': a mini-series on food in Southasia)
Sometimes, when I ask my father about his ancestral home in a small town in Gujarat, he tells me little details about the female spaces that he had hived away in his memory: of kolso (coal) powering the bellows of the kitchen; of his mother, my bapaiji, hunkered down on a wooden patlo tossing rotlis on the flame that was never entirely extinguished (it was kept blanketed by ash that smouldered through the night); of the rotli that was immediately yellowed with butter and sugar for a snack; of fingers of dried boomla (dried fish) charred over coal-smoke until they became crisp as icicles; of smoke-mottled copper vessels, scrubbed and scrubbed clean; of a bowl of ravo (semolina) sown with soft, fat, butter-fried raisins; of a glass of iced orange squash, the ice fresh from a brand new icebox (a novelty!). The borders of the kitchen frayed into other spaces – the window ledge on which doodh na puff (milk-cream) settles into a froth of bubbles chilled by the morning dew; the otlo (raised ground on the front porch), on which my grandmother would chat with neighbours and bargain stridently with knife-grinders and fisherwomen; the fields, in which umbadiyu was made by sealing root vegetables into a clay pot and placed on red hot charcoals, then interred in an underground pit and covered with earth overnight.
I have never seen this home. It is long gone, pulled down and replaced by a moraine of trash. These are all memories gleaned singly from conversations with my father. There is both sweetness and asperity in his telling of the day-long work of my grandmother, in kitchen air that was fuggish with coal and wood smoke. For me, in my city flat, I also think of the shared cosmologies that such a space betokens; of amity and kinship, of widened social spaces.
In his ancestral childhood home, the kitchen was a part of the back of the house, but this was not always the case. During the early colonial years, for instance, the kitchen and its inhabitants were set at a remove from the main house, the pall of smoke from wood, coal and cow dung proving insufferable to the colonial sahebs and the families. "In some rainy parts of India such as Bengal, the walkway to the kitchen was covered over but where it was not, the food was exposed to all weathers, not to mention flocks of crows or kites. There are recorded instances of a kite swooping down on a plate borne aloft by the khitmutgar and carrying off a whole roast duck, leaving a bare plate of chips," writes David Burton in The Raj at Table (1993). Burton goes on to explain that it was the influence of the British that led to some kitchens adopting standing platforms, which might explain how in the tiny fold of the world that is the Parsi colony (even those built before Independence) chose to adopt them.
Mapping maternal kitchens
My mamaiji's house, in a Parsi colony built in the 1930s, has come down to my uncle and aunt nearly wholly unchanged. Mum tells me that when she was small, their tiny flat was as close to a living thing as a concrete house could be. Leaves gusted in through the balcony, parrots and sparrows and bees bumbled in and out of windows, a kitten curled round the scarred and dinted table legs – my grandparents were forever sheltering injured fauna, nursing them to health.
The home is small, the hall spilling into an abbreviated corridor that holds a tiny kitchen area. Slatted light falls from a small window onto a mori (kitchen sink). When my mother was a little girl setting out for school on her own, my grandmother would wave to her from here. A generation passed, my aunt did the same for my cousins. Drinking water sat then as it does now, cooling in an earthenware matloo, with a katli splashing into the water; water was drunk from a karasyo (metal drinking utensil) old and battered thin as a sheet of vellum.
During the early colonial years, for instance, the kitchen and its inhabitants were set at a remove from the main house, the pall of smoke from wood, coal and cow dung proving insufferable to the colonial sahebs and the families.
Particular places make particular thoughts, and I have always thought about my grandmother in her slit of a kitchen, the smoke from the kolso chafing her eyes and her nose, then struggling with a Primus stove, mercurial and difficult to start.
A refrigerator or icebox was a great expense (the flat was too small to admit one anyway). As a result of course, every meal would have to be cooked fresh. Every few days, ice would be delivered by an ice-wallo, shouting his wares in the colony. A woven basket would be sent down from the balcony. It would climb back up with its burden of ice. In this way, the balcony became an extension of the otla and the fields for my bapaiji – used for shopping, keeping an eye on the children, drying foods, growing herbs. "The roads and houses were scaled in such a way that the call of passing hawkers could be heard by housewives inside their homes and they could bargain with them right from their verandahs," writes Kamu Iyer of the flat in Dadar-Matunga that he grew up in.
The refrigerator, when it came, became a status symbol for middle-class homes, to be displayed in the hall. My great aunt was the first in her extended family to get one, fifty years ago. It was bequeathed by a former employer moving out of Mumbai – and was proudly displayed in the dining room.
Our Khar kitchen was lined with stainless steel, non-stick pans and mixer-grinders.
Independence necessitated a radical rewriting of the city's kitchens. Partition drew a deepening river of refugees to Mumbai, leading to a sudden lack of habitable apartments. The first developers-built apartments in which the large kitchen of the erstwhile three-room flat was halved in size to accommodate a bedroom. These apartments were then sold as 2BHK (two bedrooms, hall and kitchen), a canny marketing strategy because the area of the apartment remained the same [as before]," writes Iyer. The shrinking of the kitchen had an enormous impact on the lifestyle of the family. Women of the family and hired cooks, used to cooking, cutting and cleaning on the ground, were forced upright onto raised platforms, and were divorced from families used to sitting and eating in the kitchen. And as with my mamaiji and her sisters, the moris in which women sat and washed dishes, became too extravagant in terms of space – when the time came, all three shrugged their shoulders at modernity and converted theirs into sinks (moris).
The politics of kitchen space
While fossicking through the history of kitchen architecture in Mumbai, I find Nikhil Rao's House, but no Garden, a book, which amongst other things gestures towards the class and caste bias inherent in the two-entrance flats of Dadar-Matunga built in the 1920s and 1930s. "This design feature meant that any sweeper or servant could come into the house and proceed directly to clean the nahani or toilet without actually entering the living room or the bedroom," he writes, quoting from an interview he conducted with an elderly resident of the area, M A Rajagopalan. As a result, toilets and kitchens were to be kept apart, never sharing a wall and not even a water system – "it signified a polluting presence that needed to be kept away from food (and the images of gods, which were housed in the kitchen." The kitchen was always the most sanctified part of the home. Many Parsi kitchens too, housed small shrines to their ancestors around an eternally-burning divo (lamp).
Building laws were re-configured to allow the enclosure of balconies while toilets and kitchens shrank (all spaces in which women worked and congregated).
Gendered and caste practices revealed themselves in other ways, writes Rao. He refers to sociologist K L Mythili's ethnography of Matunga's South Indian community– "for reasons of economy and caste orthodoxy, families would buy whole spices and whole grains and the women would then pound and grind these on stone slabs into powdered spices and flours." Hesitant to offend with loud, intrusive noises, the pounding always took place on the ground floor at times when the men were away at work.
Another waypoint in kitchen history was the upward rise of the real estate market in the 1970s. In her essay, Gendering of the Culture of Building: Case of Mumbai, Neera Adarkar waves away the platitudinous patter that architecture is a 'pure' category, reiterating that it has always been tainted with gender, caste and class markers; women interact differently with the geographies of home, and thus require flats designed by those cognisant of this. As an example, she brings up the work that her team did on the Slums Rehabilitation Scheme in collaboration with Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action (YUVA), a voluntary organisation active in the same community. In a series of interactive workshops with the women of the community, Adarkar's team learned (among other things) that they in fact preferred kitchen platforms to be placed on the floor level which made it conducive for family members to participate in kitchen chores. And unlike most pre-designed kitchen spaces, they felt wall-facing platforms became exclusionary spaces, warping them away from their families.
Independence necessitated a radical rewriting of the city's kitchens.
"As if in tune with the wage labour market, where the policy of retrenchment is first imposed on the women, the economy drive of the home spaces first attacked the 'women's' spaces," she writes. "The by-laws were altered to reduce the minimum sizes of the kitchen and the toilet. This further decreased the possibility of making the cooking and household activities more participatory. These shrunken kitchens further suffered because the source of ventilation and light was subsequently allowed to be derived from the inner open 'chowks'."
Similarly, the idea of the open balcony was seen as irrelevant, what Adarkar referred to as another "casualty in the utilitarian culture of minimalism" in Bombay apartments. Building laws were re-configured to allow the enclosure of balconies while toilets and kitchens shrank (all spaces in which women worked and congregated).
My kitchen inheritances
My first Mumbai home, in a low, blocky building in Khar, was one of the few flats that still had an open balcony; otherwise all down the lane, verandas had thinned and enveloped themselves into the house. The outside world had been closed off. Under the skin of the building, each apartment was also tamed by homogeneity – the construction of the building was assiduously matched to its four sister buildings next door, parcelled and squared and divided and standardised into sameness. It was built post-Independence, when in fact seriality and standardisation were seen as signifiers of progress, so construction could be quicker and more affordable. "Most houses, if not built by their owners, are designed and built by contractors according to standard models," write Jon T Lang, Madhavi Desai and Miki Desai in Architecture and Independence: The Search for Identity – India 1880 to 1980 (1997). The kitchen too, aped these conventions – the uniformity of the kitchen tiles across buildings, the placement of the sink and the shelves and the hob (this was the Golden Triangle rule, the fridge, the choola (stove) and the sink all meant to be equidistant to increase culinary efficiency). There were no windows in this kitchen. On the one side, a corridor, on the other, a small dining area.
More standardisation. Our Khar kitchen was lined with stainless steel, non-stick pans and mixer-grinders. These rested companionably with a stone grinder and its attendant sil batta (rolling pin), the patio (the dish is actually named after the flat-bottomed vessel of the same name) which had to be re-tinned every few months, and the nariyal khurachvano khamani (coconut scraper). Using an ancient copper vaasan (vessel) from my great aunt's kitchen feels like a culinary correspondence with someone I cared about very deeply, and a way to mitigate the erosion of my memory. No wonder then that it is tempting to remain in thrall of traditional vessels freighted with a sort of prelapsarian nostalgia.
Particular places make particular thoughts, and I have always thought about my grandmother in her slit of a kitchen, the smoke from the kolso chafing her eyes and her nose, then struggling with a Primus stove, mercurial and difficult to start.
It is harder to remember why many kitchens chose to rely on stainless steel – its shine, its solidity, its ease of cleaning as opposed to flame-brindled traditional cookware that required far more effort to use, something cooks and domestic staff would grapple with (immortalised by artist Subodh Gupta in his installation 'All In The Same Boat'). "Most fascinatingly," writes Santosh Desai in his column in the Times of India on 3 November, 2008, "stainless steel managed to meet deeply traditional needs by being incontrovertibly modern. It was seen as pure and indestructible, the two virtues that give it pride of place in a kitchen. And yet, unlike gold, which is interwoven into custom and the ritual role of which is well established, stainless steel had no past in India. Dubbed as 'ever-silver' in the early phases of its introduction, it was clearly a modern substance, glinting with metallic hardness."
I love my kitchen now, and I love cooking in it, but did my grandmothers? And did theirs? And so, I am using this essay to remind myself not to be beguiled by the memory maps of the past. In telling the stories of my matriarchal kitchens, I am hoping in some way to explore a few ways in which our kitchens and our personal geographies inhibit and inhabit us, and the ways in which we navigate them.
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