Why My Skinny Book Was Half About Cooking and Half About Mothers
“Please Nandini, take your mother out of the kitchen. I can’t stand it anymore.”
by Nandini Dhar
1
For the last five years, I have taught a class on food, gender and literature. And every year, for the last five years, I have screened the film Julie and Julia for my students. Often, my students would point out, cooking through Julia Child’s recipe-book Mastering the Art of French Cooking gave the protagonist of the film, Julie, a sense of purpose. Some of them would point out that writing about this book, along with cooking, landed the protagonist a book deal. Often their observations would be peppered with commentaries like,
“She turned cooking into a tool for herself.”
Or,
“women are expected to cook for others. But here she really began to cook for herself. Cooking empowered her and got her what she wanted.”
This wasn’t surprising because my students grew up in the era of food blogs. This was a form they knew well. Heck, I’ve even had a couple of food bloggers in my classes over the years. And they, too, hoped a miraculous book-deal would land on their laps one day, just like Julie of the film Julie and Julia. I would point out to them, gently, that in her effort to become a successful food blogger, Julie had to modify her writerly dreams slightly. I would ask them if they had noticed this. For all five years I taught this class, not one of my students did. Initially, this used to surprise me. Now it doesn’t anymore. I point out to them that when the film opens, Julie is a wannabe novelist with a half-written novel. When the film ends, she is a successful food blogger and food writer. In the symbolic distance traversed by the film, the protagonist cans her novel and embraces an altogether different form — food blogging.
In making this observation, I am not attempting to create any kind of binary between novels and food blogging. In fact, the best of the food blogs nowadays are conversant with novelistic techniques. And some novels — in fact, quite a few of them — read like food blogs. What I am trying to point out is simple. In the film’s canning of Julie’s novel, and my students’ consistent non-noticing of it, there is a story of an uncomfortable collusion between the culture-industry and its consumers. And that collusion hinges on the subconscious equalization between food and femininity. No, not necessarily the eating of food, but definitely the cooking of such. It is this subconscious equalization that makes food blogging — and food writing in general — a form of permissible creativity for women, a feminized terrain of cultural production, so to speak.
To be clear, I am not claiming there are any cultural, social or economic prohibitions against women writing novel. It is too late in history for that. A quick visit to any bookshop would prove exactly the opposite. Women have been writing novels in copious numbers for a while now. All kinds of novels — literary fiction, genre fictions of almost every conceivable and inconceivable kind, graphic novels. Good novels, bad novels, mediocre novels. In fact, a brief glance at the history of the genre reveals an uncomfortable proximity between the reading of novels and women, the most complicated representation of which can probably be found in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. But what I am invoking in here is something else. I am here calling upon, specifically, a sense of discomfort. It is that sense of discomfort that surrounds me, when I write about food and domestic space. It is a form of discomfort that can’t be accommodated within the rights-language inflected term “sexism.” It is indeed about patriarchy, but it also exceeds our often empty, easy ways of referring to words such as “patriarchy” and “patriarchal.”
For example, I often wonder, what made a male Indian-Bengali academic scholar of film — and a self-proclaimed foodie and cook at that — say dismissively to me, after hearing that I work on Indian women bloggers,
I do get a lot of my recipes from these food blogs. But I don’t read their nattering stories.
There is a trivialization here of women’s experiences, of course. But there is also a deeper point of contention. It is as if there is an implicit prescription here for women food bloggers. A directive on how to write about food.
Give us the recipes, stupid broads. Don’t talk about the realities that make those recipes.
If the woman-blogger stands in this murky space between dismissal, trivialization and prescription, I — the scholar-poet-teacher who studies and teaches them — stands in an equally murky space. I can’t really be a serious scholar, can I, if I am studying food to begin with? And what if I am studying the dangerous trinity of food, gender/women and domesticity? And studying them as a woman myself?
I will make a claim here that many may find too essentialist. But I will go ahead and do it anyway. To study food, to write about food as a woman is to hit against the conceptual and ideological wall that thrives upon a naturalized equation between food and femininity. The same equalization that prevented my students from even noticing that Julie of Julie and Julia canned her novel in order to cook and write about cooking food. Women, after all, love to cook. Don’t they? And because they love to cook, women are always exchanging recipes. Aren’t they? And if this is what women are naturally prone to do — as women — then it doesn’t make any sense to study such activities. Right?
Yes, I am talking about one of the most foundational elements of our gendered social subconscious, the gendered commonsense. It is precisely this gendered subconscious that makes an administrator from my current institution describe my class on food studies as cookery (You’re teaching a class on cookery, right?) without flinching a single second. Like the film-scholar mentioned above, I share my Bengaliness with my administrator-colleague. But there is nothing inherent about their Bengaliness that prompted such a statement. Wasn’t there this older while colleague in my earlier institution in a country none other than the US of A, who on hearing that I teach a class on food, joked with a female student that she should bring him every morning the scones and cookies she is learning to make in my class? The implication in all of these instances was, women can cook food but can obviously never theorize about food. And, even more significantly, food cannot be theorized. If food cannot be theorized, neither can the women’s work around it.
There is also another implication here, namely that cookery — the work and aesthetics of cooking — is incompatible with the work that happens inside academic institutions. Academic institutions which supposedly thrive on the work of theorizing, the work of producing knowledge. Although, even a cursory look inside academic institutions reveals that food is prepared and served inside these spaces everyday. Cooking happens inside our cafeterias, hostels, messes. But there remains that almost unbridgeable and irreconcilable divide between those who step inside these institutions to cook in the cafeteria, and those who step inside to teach, learn and theorize. The name of that irreconcilability is class. The name of that unbridgeability is division between manual and intellectual labor.
It is within this shadow of irreconcilability that my class on food dwells. I teach about the fact that food preparation requires manual labor. Yet that very acknowledgment of that manual labor assumes the form of intellectual labor. In other words, my class does not bridge this gap in any way. But, it does attempt to make this gap visible within institutions that thrive upon, and reinforce these very divides.
In doing so, my class also makes it obvious that, if we cannot admit that the culinary labor of others keep our institutions of knowledge production alive, it is difficult — nay, almost impossible — to admit that the culinary labor that happens outside of these institutions, keep our very institutional selves alive. And working. In the fancy language of the social sciences, we call this “reproductive labor.” Additionally, I, who was supposed to do this work of reproductive labor outside of the academic institutions, am suddenly inside. And not only inside, my class stands as a reminder of this other reality, the other kinds of labor that academic institutions historically effaced, erased, trivialized and minimized.
But then, my teaching and writing about food is a form of labor that is markedly different from actual, material culinary labor. My class privilege allows me to theorize about food, rather than preparing it. As does my educational privilege. In this, the work of teaching about food that I do in the classrooms remain, I repeat, as irreconcilable with the food-work that happens in and around an university campus — inside the hostel mess, faculty mess, cafeterias, food-courts and coffee-shops. And in being so, my class on food makes me join the class of male academics whose patriarchy I have just made fun of.
2
Yes, I am claiming a position for myself here that even I am uncomfortable to reside in. I am admitting that there is something about writing that will forever remain irreconcilable vis-a-vis the material world it describes. Although, just to save my own skin, I will also say, writing has its own materiality. Yet, the truth is that no amount of writing about this culinary complexity I am invoking — rife with both gender and class — will help eradicate or even reduce either gender or class inequalities in “real” life. Although I will be also the first one to say that stories and poems (and all other forms of art, really) have immense material impact on almost everyone who comes across them. But that’s a different story. To get back to what I was talking about, in view of the essential inequalities that guide our writing lives, what we are left with as writers (and readers), when we take up social complexities as our raw material, is a strange desire to attain a form of socialism-on-the-page.
There is nothing wrong with this as such. Aren’t all forms of social changes imagined first before they are enacted out in real life? What is literature if not a trial-run for the kind of errant imagination that does not have any place in our everyday life?
But given that socialism — even if it is only on the page — is a rowdy, rambunctious affair (and it is), what kind of language can it garner if my material happens to be the realm of domesticity and food? Culinary labor? The realm of the “reproductive”, so to say? Because nothing is supposed to happen inside our homes. Right? And when something does happen, and becomes the subject of our stories, it generally tends to be catastrophic. Like death. Or domestic abuse. Otherwise, the home stays strictly within the realm of the non-event. The unspectacular. After all, there is no plot in the performance of everyday, repetitive tasks which constitute reproductive labor. And without a plot, there is no drama. Without drama, there is no story. That’s how we have been taught to think, taught to read, taught to write. Attend any American MFA-style workshop, and that’s the lesson you’ll come away with. As far as the MFA-Industrial-Complex is concerned, postmodernism didn’t happen. Neither did Modernism. But that’s a different story, best reserved for another occasion.
In our everyday language, the metaphors of home somehow replicate this sense of non-event. We talk about being at home. We talk about home-cooked food. We also tend to refer to home-cooked food as comfort food. In all of these instances, the very naturalized association between home and comfort is somehow related to the idea of the home as a site of non-event. The kind of non-event that also happens to be the ultimate site of comfort. In other words, when it concerns our homes, non-event is good. Boring is desirable.
Consequently, if you read my chapbook Occupying My Tongue, you will find, nothing much is happening. As Keki Daruwallah writes in his review of it,
“I have read Nandini Nair’s Occupying My Tongue. At least half the book is about her mother (why not?) and the other half on cooking. How does it matter what the subject is, if the poetry is good — and it is.”
We will forget here for a moment that Daruwallah really did write my name wrong. We will also forget he assumes the book is about my mother, simply because the words “I” and “my” have been used throughout the book quite liberally. But what catches my attention here is the question within parentheses: why not. And the sentence that invariably follows that fumbling self-reflection.
How does it matter what the subject is, if the poetry is good — and it is.
This is a kind of passage that can mar the praise of an older poet for a younger. Ironically, these are words that can also convince a younger poet that she has done something new, for which the older poets do not have a critical language. Yes, allow me this bit of the arrogance of the younger. The kind of arrogance that takes a strange kind of pleasure in the stumbling of the older. See, I am already being rambunctious. I have taken a step forward — towards that mythical socialism-on-the-page.
But then, there is a bigger political and aesthetic stake in Daruwallah’s comments, especially within that parenthetical why not. That stake consists of a more foundational question: can domesticity really be the legitimate site of our lyrical expression. Can mother-daughter relationships be the legitimate site of our lyrical exploration. Can the lyrical “I” really center around the specific form of culinary labor called cooking. There is a profound belatedness in these questions. The history of feminine and feminist lyric is ancient. As are the multiple traditions of food writing. In both of these, domesticity features in crucial and complicated ways. There is also nothing new about women writers (or men) writing about the complexities of mother-daughter relationships. Mother-daughter relationships have been written about in diverse aesthetic and literary forms in literatures from around the globe.
There is then, in Daruwallah’s critique, a profound absence of an awareness of the complicated histories of women’s writing and literary traditions. There is also a reiteration of the essential impulse that made my academic colleagues trivialize my scholarly interest in food studies. Food, especially in its combination with domesticity, cannot be the subject of serious scholarly investigation. Can it? In the same way, mothers and their culinary labor cannot be the subject of serious poetic expression. Can they?
3
So, let me be clear. When I began to work on this particular series of poems, I began working on them with the full knowledge of this specific burden. I mean, how could I not? After all, in my professional life, I am a literary critic. I know there is no genderless literary sphere. In the same way there is no classless, casteless, raceless or anything-less literary or cultural sphere. And then, there is the other side of the story. To write about mothers and culinary labor — domesticity in general — is not political enough. Didn’t one of the most outspoken writers, of our time, Meena Kandasamy, say,
“There are great Indian fiction writers. But some become very lazy. Some write the ‘Sari-and-Mango’ novel. People of my age write novels in airports. People of an older generation reminisce about cooking and spices — pandering to the exotic as well as the urban Indian readers. I really did not want to write what was safe or comfortable.”
There is also Kandasamy’s comment about “suffering” through Indian novels where “nothing happens.” Google hard enough, you will find it. In that comment, I find it terribly telling that Kandasamy’s thesis about the non-eventness of Indian novels assumes a food (beverage) metaphor, a metaphor that is also one of culinary labor — making coffee.
To begin with, let me go on the record as saying, I am not a fan of ‘sari-and-mango’ novels, as Kandasamy puts it. Or airport novels. Or the cooking and spices novel. Yet I don’t think, those forms of narratives are the only ways in which we — the Indian writers of English — pander to an “exotic” and “urban Indian” readership. That pandering can well happen through writing about anything really. Caste atrocities, class struggles — anything. I mean, we write in English, damn it. Which rural, non-elite subcontinental reader do we think we are “pandering to” anyway? And, I write this with the arrogance of someone who is equally fluent in writing in both English and my native language, Bangla. I write this with the arrogance of someone whose emergence as a writer has happened through the little magazine world of Bengali literature, much of it under the shadows of the radical-left activisms and movements.
But to get back to the point, in Kandasamy’s vocalization of what she was writing against, there is a clear trivialization of the domestic. That world of non-event, that world of mundane reproductive labor. The world of kitchen-based labor. The figure that then looms large in Kandasamy’s comments, is the figure of the bored housewife. The figure who remains absent in Kandasamy’s rhetorical flourish, but also ever-present. And in her absent presence, she enters a zone of binary that Kandasamy creates — the binary between the world of the gendered domestic and the public world of the class-struggle. Of course, in Kandasamy’s version, the latter is almost always the terrain of the event. And, if one may say so, if the realm of the domestic, for Kandasamy, is the sphere of non-event, the realm of the class-struggle in Kandasamy’s rhetoric becomes an over-evented world.
But I don’t blame her. In fact, I don’t blame her at all. That’s not only because of my political allegiance — troubled as it is — remains to India’s radical left, but also because in my professional capacity as a literary scholar, I happen to be that woman who wrote an entire dissertation on slave rebellions in the literatures of the Black Atlantic. In other words, I am no stranger to that other world of writing about class struggles.
There is a certain inevitable burden which comes with writing a dissertation in which almost every page is peppered with some version of terms like class antagonism, class conflict, and class warfare. This is especially true if you are writing that dissertation within an American university, where the academic world is still ruled by and large by a polite and informal McCarthyism. You automatically run the risk of not being taken seriously as a scholar for very different reasons than theorizing on food as a woman. You are not taken seriously because are assumed to be a “mechanical Marxist” — whatever that means. You are labeled as someone non-conversant with the latest academic language. You also run the risk of looking like someone who does not quite fit into the world of post-structuralese.
Then there is the fact that there are certain obvious problems that come with the terrain of trying to theorize class struggle as a woman. In all too many of our popular perceptions — academic and leftist-activist — class struggle is still understood as essentially masculine. As much as we try to push through that perception, by decorating our Facebook and social media pages with iconographies of gun-toting peasant women, that essential equalization between masculinity and class conflict remains naturalized amongst us. In the same way, the equalization between food and femininity remains intact. And precisely because of that, perhaps, there is also a pleasure and a liberation in walking into a territory of theorizing which is not supposed to be yours. That pleasure, obviously, consists of a certain kind of transgression — even if it is a seeming transgression, for sure. On the other hand, to try to write about food and domesticity as a woman is to tie oneself even tighter into the web of what is perceived to be “natural.” It is almost like a reaffirmation of gender rather than a transgression or negation of it.
But here is the rub. My twenty-one year old or twenty-three year self would have thrown back her head and laughed uproariously at the idea of writing a book on food, domestic space and mothers. At the age of twenty-five, I could do many things — writing political tracts, public speaking, class campaigning, reading, arguing, addafying, organizing, editing journals — just to name a few. Cooking, however, did not feature on this list. The truth is, I could not even boil a pitcher of water. For real. At home, no one taught me to. And, I didn’t think cooking was a skill that was important enough to teach myself.
The fact that cooking and other forms of culinary labor did not feature in my “female education” at home can be attributed to three things — class, caste and gender. As a second-generation refugee Bangal, whose family migrated to this side after Partition, I grew up in a large family that survived on one person’s moderate income as a government employee. We could not afford a full-time servant. There was no question of hiring a cook. Nor was this exceptional by any means within the social environment in which I grew up. There would occasionally be part-time maids, who would come to clean and wash. In local Bengali parlance, these women were often called thike jhi. This meant, in our home, my mother handled most of the cooking and other housework. She did not think it was necessary to involve me in these chores. The fact is, the complex middle-class formations amongst a section of Hindu, swavarna refugees, combined with the vestiges of the Nehruvian state, created enough of a surplus — just barely enough of a surplus — to release me from housework. In this, too, I am not exception in middle-class Bengal of my early youth.
When I reflect on this process, I acknowledge that this surplus, however small it was, was structurally significant. The truth is, in spite of the financial precarity of the post-Partition refugees, the fact that my family was upper-caste enabled them to survive. Quite literally. I mean, they had just enough social and cultural capital to not be pushed into the Dandakaranya area. They had just enough resources to not die in Marichjhapi, the first ever massacre undertaken by the CPI (M)-Left Front government once it came to power in 1977. The name of this social and cultural capital is undoubtedly caste, which even in conditions of dire financial precarity brought certain material resources and some cultural surplus. Without this surplus, I would probably have never been released from housework. As millions of girls in India aren’t. Whether they work in their own homes, or those of others.
Yet, this releasing of girls from the cycle of housework in my family wasn’t just a function of class and caste. There was also a nascent understanding of gender there that can be termed as a liberal feminism-of-sorts. In my mother’s stubborn insistence that I stay away from the kitchen, and use that time for other “meaningful” activities — like academic achievement, sports and other arts — there was an understanding that housework — and more specifically kitchen-work — needed time. And, that time is valuable, and once gone, doesn’t come back in the same way. And because it doesn’t come back in the same way, it is important to spend it in training for other things. Those “other things” will bring in money, whereas the kitchen-work/domestic cooking will not.
Unless of course, I work as a cook in someone else’s home. And, then, that’s not exactly the kind of wage work my mother imagined for her daughter. Probably, no middle-class woman does, thus proving the classed limits of our aspirations for our children. Aspirations that are often nurtured and undertaken with the children’s “best interests” in mind. To put it simply, then, in my mother’s version of women’s empowerment, economic independence played the single-most important role. And, domestic work was looked upon as a deterrent that would prevent the kind of education that lets a young woman find financial independence through a middle-class job. If I have to sum it up in one sentence, it is this: my “female education” at home circled around a serious caveat. Don’t be a housewife. Ever. In that caveat, there existed the admission and acknowledgement that domestic labor is unpaid. Hence, undesirable.
Additionally, there was also another implicit understanding. That intellectual labor is far more rewarding than manual labor. And to the extent that women’s — even middle-class, upper-caste women’s — path to intellectual labor remains complicated, and not completely unquestioned up till now, my mother tried to make my entry into that world easier in the way she best understood it. I might even say, her insistence that I stay away from the kitchen made it possible for me to join the men of my class as a co-worker in the theory-industry and not a reproductive-dependent. Thus, even when I critique their patriarchy, we remain joined at the hip as members of the same class. And as members of the same class, we conspire on who to exclude. We do so consciously and unconsciously. Yes, even when I am making fun of their patriarchy.
Anyways, to go back to happy, fuzzy childhood memories, so far I could tell, my father agreed with her vehemently. Although, there was a fundamental contradiction in my parents’ own lives — my father hardly ever did any housework. Let alone cooking. Thus, I grew into young adulthood experiencing these deep contradictions about the gender politics of housework. The home I grew up in was deeply gendered in terms of the ways in which domestic labor — including, but not limited to, culinary labor — was performed. Yet, I was also taught to problematize that gendered division of labor in rigorous ways. I was made to understand, what I see within the four walls of my home, is not to be repeated in my own life in anyway. As one can imagine, this fucked me up. Fucked me up profusely. And therein began my lifelong suspicion of domesticity as an ideology. When I say domesticity as an ideology, I am also creating a certain kind of distance from the notion of the mere physical space of the home. There are certain chores that need to be done in any home, indeed in all homes. These are domestic chores, but are not to be confused with domesticity as an ideology. We all need to cook food, wash clothes, clean our toilets. At least, sometimes. Even the most fiery revolutionary or the bohemian poet needs to eat once in a while. And someone has to do that work of cooking. Not to speak of the fact, that I consider the right to a decent home-space to be a universal human right. Just like a plate of nutritious food. Rights that we haven’t been able to realize as a species for all of humanity. So, when I talk about domestic ideology, I am referring to the ideology that claims home to be a place of comfort and “natural” belonging. The ideology that not only claims home to be a place of our most intimate belonging, but ties that sense of comfort to familial affiliation. The ideology that ultimately ties both the feeling of comfort of intimate belonging and familial affiliation of our home-spaces to marriage and the subsequent formation of a family, and naturalizes that feeling through multiple and complex technologies of representation — legal, political, economic, cultural and social.
4
As a result, in my early twenties, I stayed away from anything that could even be remotely construed as domestic — cooking, other kinds of housework, any form of love that could lead to marriage. I still flee — mostly from the last one. The first two cannot be avoided if one has to continue one’s life as an independent adult in this wide, wide world. But if I have to be perfectly honest, I will also have to admit, in my desperate flight from whatever constitutes the domestic — in real and symbolic terms — there was also a fear. To be overtly domestic is also to be overtly feminine. To be feminine is to be subservient in some way or the other. A few years back, I would have written “dominant notions of femininity.” I hesitate to write that now. Instead, I would argue, as a society, as a world, we have failed to evolve any feminine aesthetics that does not replicate essential notions of subservience and submission. Not even our “bad girls” are immune to this. Although, this is something we — the hyper-educated, urban, upper middle-class, professional
women — would deny with vicious vehemence in most cases.
I love that young woman I was in my twenties. It is her deep questioning of anything that is domestic that has led her to experience the world in some very significant ways. Ways far too complex and too confusing to explore in the space of a single essay. It also made her lonelier, because she happened to be a person most found quite difficult to understand. Yet, she was not afraid of loneliness — the fear of which that had made many of her friends embrace either the regression of their natal families, or their dreadfully dull and dead marriages. Sometimes both. But life has its own ways of getting more and more complicated with time. We age. Even if one succeeds in staying away from domestic ideology oneself — more or less — there are your friends’ domestic set-ups to contend with. In other words, I learned, domesticities are unavoidable even when you are afraid of them, repulsed by them and want to avoid them at all cost.
In a different kind of a way, the many incarnations of domestic ideologies are unavoidable even when you are trying to set up a home for yourself. Undoubtedly, there would be no Occupying My Tongue if I hadn’t begun to live on my own. There would be no Occupying My Tongue if I hadn’t learned to cook on my own. Learning to cook taught me certain things about the materiality of culinary labor. It is those lessons that I tried to translate in the language of poems in my skinny book.
And then there are moments when you crave a domestic space for yourself. Even an anti-domestic person like me gets those cravings. A space where you can entertain a friend with a cup of coffee without having to pay an arm and a leg. A space where you can cook a meal for yourself, without having to worry about anyone else’s tastes. A space where you can ask a friend to come over, just so that you can try out a new recipe. There will be moments in my life when I will question these desires, will try to understand them in the context my almost-visceral reaction against domestic ideology as such, and then dismiss both the desire and my efforts to understand this desire as an inextricable element of my middle-class selfhood.
In some ways, working on domesticity as a scholar and a writer sharpened some of these contradictions. This sharpening happened in ways that I wasn’t always quite prepared for. For example, I learned that if you present a paper on the ideologies of domesticity in contemporary women’s food blogs, you will find you are suddenly being read as the “domestic type” by your fellow academics. The “domestic type” is that strange breed that exists in academia — the women who militantly claim that they love everything homely. The women who claim that home has given them a sense of identity. The women who claim it is in domesticity that they find their true selves, although the big, bad and cruel world also makes them earn money for a living.
It doesn’t matter. Even if you pepper your article with terms like “neoliberal mundane”, “capital” and such, once you begin to write about the intersection of food and domesticity as a woman, you will be read as the domestic type. And that’s what happened to me. From the unkempt, bad-mouthing rogue element, I am now the domestic type. Supposedly. The type associated with the image of the uptight, subdued female academic who, even in her scholarly work, cannot leave behind the shadows of housewifedom. And in not being able to do so, becomes the academic housewife. The academic and the housewife combined in the body of one person. We have poet versions of this too. The world of the academic-housewife (and the poet-housewife) is the world of the ultra-feminine. This also often happens to be the world of the ultra-heteronormativity. Because I work on domesticity, I sometimes trespass into it. Uncomfortably. And even as I trespass into it, I try to stay away from it.
Yet, working on domesticity has made me brush shoulders with the inner contours of this world in a way I have never done before. And one of the ways this happened is the way the academic-housewives I have written about in the preceding paragraph have begun to see me as one of theirs. There had been assumptions about my love for cooking. There had been assumptions about my preferences for home decor. There were conversations about how feminism has no place for women who love love love the domestic space and had never wanted to be anything other than to be mothers. My agreement with these assumptions was tacitly presumed.
In most of those cases, I smiled sweetly and refrained from saying too much. Most of the time, I left these conversations with a palpable sense of discomfort. Because of the content, yes. But also because of my silence. I recognized, like most others, that I, too, have grown up in a climate of a diluted feminism, where as long as a woman makes a choice, it is considered feministic. No matter how ideologically problematic I find it to be. The new twenty-first century glorification of domesticity and motherhood on the lips of so many of the self-proclaimed feminists happens to be one of the symptoms of this ideological and political dilution. To question this dilution in political, ideological and other ways, is to risk being called judgmental at the very least. But guess what, I’m not afraid of being called judgmental. In fact, I will take this as a compliment and move on.
5
The truth is, I am not one of the professional-housewife types. I am not married. Nay, I have rejected marriage. I am not a mother. Yes, I rejected motherhood too. Marriage and motherhood — the twin foundations of a domestic ideology that teaches us that our familial homes should be the most naturalized spaces of our comfortable belonging. So when I write about domesticity, I repeat, I write as an interloper. In the same way that I am an interloper in the world of Anglophone writing. And it is the sacred duty of the interloper to be irresponsible. Yes, when I write about domesticity and domestic spaces, I write irresponsibly. Isn’t irresponsibility that mysterious space that almost every “family man” or “family woman” is afraid of, yet most desires?
What does it mean to write irresponsibly about domesticity and family? First and foremost, the responsibility that comes with being an irresponsible chronicler/versifier of family and domesticity is, one has to hit hard against the notion that home and the domestic space are spaces of comfort. What makes this challenging is that it’s easier to write about drastic, spectacular forms of abuse that occur within domestic spaces than to create the effect of discomfort about the absolutely mundane activities that occur within the walls of our homes — so mundane that we hardly notice our participation in them until they cease to exist. For example, what kinds of violences are encoded in the act of serving and eating meals — activities that are considered to be not only essential for our survival, but also for our need to nurture and be nurtured?
In saying this, I am not at all claiming that instances of domestic abuse — dramatic and drastic in the way they can be read as events — cannot be, or should not be, written about. In fact, they need to be documented in as many ways as possible. But as a writer, especially for this particular project, what I was interested in was the violence of the non-event. The violence of the non-event in a relationship that is considered to be sacred, and therefore, beyond conflicts and contradictions — the relationship between a mother and a daughter. Besides, to write about mothers in India is a risky business. It is almost like we all carry a humongous bronze statue of Mother India within us. A statue we can neither spit out, nor digest. Consequently, we are quite unable to look at the mother-figure without sentimentality. Not even when we write poems in English with sleek enjambments.
According to popular sentiment, mothers reside outside of history. They are beyond contemporaneity, beyond social construction. And because they are beyond history and society, they are absolutely incapable of committing any violence on children. And others. Even when the mothers end up committing any violence on children, they do it out of sheer love. The kind of love that we non-mothers can never really understand. And if you’re not a mother, this will be shoved down your throat in many, many ways. Trust me. By mothers and non-mothers alike. In this context, the responsibility of an irresponsible interloper into this business of documenting domesticity is to de-sentimentalize the mother-figure. De-sentimentalize and historicize — simultaneously. De-sentimentalize and show what we call love — familial love — is steeped in violence. It has to be that way. The very political character of the institution of family ensures that.
In my effort to do so, I chose a specific site — the kitchen. It wasn’t a random choice as such. Just do a quick Google search, and you will find that there is an uncanny association between food and mothers in most of the contemporary food media and contemporary food writing. The mother’s recipe remains the most fetishized object in our contemporary food culture. In our everyday conversations, in our Facebook posts, we all love to boast how our mother’s this or that is the best in the world. We like to claim, it’s not the correct combination of ingredients, skill and labor that make the stuff our mothers make delicious. But supposedly it’s something called love. This elusive concept that can be traced back to anything and to nothing. I, therefore, started by asking certain basic questions. What does the very concept of love (or labor of love, if you will) obfuscate and efface when we are talking about culinary labor in the domestic kitchen? Where are those mothers in our food writing who simply don’t love to cook? How do such representations of deviant mothers put pressure on our poetic language? Especially since poetry happens to be the genre through which much of this machine of mother-sentimentality operates?
One of the central strategies I used to break this mother-machine poetry (and songs and films and cooking shows and food blogs and and and…) is to write the mother-figure’s cooking in my poems strictly as labor. Not as love. Not as creativity. But labor. To be honest, there is very little love in my manuscript. Almost none. Unless you happen to be that reader whose understanding of love happens to be fairly complicated. Which, by the way, happens to be the p.c. word for fucked up. But that’s a different story. The poem where it was most self-consciously done was “She Tastes Everything First.” There are two parts in this poem — a recipe and the poem itself. The latter has been written in disjointed, fragmentary images. The recipe, on the other hand, appears on page as a relatively seamless narrative. Unless you consider the poem as a disruption of the recipe itself.
To anyone even remotely familiar with Bengali cuisine, the recipe holds no surprises. It happens to be aloo-posto — potato in poppy seeds. This is an integral part of middle-class Bengali cuisine, a deceptively simple dish. Recent research by food historians has shown the addition of aloo-posto to the Bengali palate is comparatively recent. It was not until the beginning of imperial opium cultivation in eastern India that the dish was introduced into Bengali cuisine to begin with. Consequently, aloo-posto contains within itself the deep marks of Bengal’s colonial-capitalist modernity.
And there is another reality. This is the fact that posto or poppy seeds are considered to be a West Bengali rather than an East Bengali delicacy. Which means, posto dishes were not introduced in any serious way into East Bengali or Bangal families like mine until well after Partition. The “well after” which has produced my generation. The generation that carries within itself the legacies of the Partition and its aftermath in multifarious ways. The generation that also embodies the complicated and the contradictory legacies of the refugeedom, so to speak. Yet we are removed from the immediate realities of Partition just barely enough. Just enough to ignore it in our everyday lives if we want to. In terms of the Bangal culinary everyday, the “well after” also happens to be the period during which the disruption of East Bengali food habits caused by the Partition solidified itself, and was normalized within our everyday lives. The very structure of the East Bengali kitchen that produced these cuisines changed too.
Any attempt to translate perfectly into cooking most of the East Bengali “traditional” recipes will run aground on the reality that it is almost impossible to produce these dishes while cooking alone. Believe me, I learned this the hard way. There is also another knowledge that lurks behind this realization. Most of what we term traditional East Bengali cuisine actually emerged from the upper-caste, Hindu, landowning feudal familial kitchen — frequented by the women and children of many different generations, as well as servants. In other words, our much-loved dishes emanated from a very specific mode of production. And, quite obviously, if what we know today as “traditional” Bangal cuisine emerged from landowning feudal domestic kitchens (assuming that our families really were landowning feudal families — I mean, you know the joke, right? That if you really put together the land that our families claim they left behind, it would far exceed the present territorial span of Bangladesh), then what did the servants who worked in those kitchens cook for themselves? What did the peasants — the ryots of the landowning families, the majority of whom happened to be Muslims — eat? That’s a question that remains more or less absent in my poems, in my skinny little book. Because this is a question that has also remained more or less absent in the upper-caste, middle/upper-class Bangal nostalgia for fresh fish and lost cuisines — the taste of which supposedly lingered on our ancestors’ tongues long after they came to epar (this side).
What is there instead is a story of transformation. How, in the post-Partition era, in the absence of that feudal kitchen, Bangal cuisine and the tongue had to get used to a different taste. Along with the loss of a homeland, the Partition is also about the loss of tastes and tongues. Within the four walls of the Bangal home, this transformation works in strange ways. The absence of the feudal kitchen often transformed domestic culinary labor into a solitary activity, undertaken by the wife/daughter-in-law/mother of the family. On occasion, she might have been assisted by a servant or a female relative, but the financial precarity of most refugee families like mine, even when they could claim middle-class status, precluded the possibility of too many servants. The post-partition era, then, for the Bangal homes, not only meant the vanishing feudal kitchen, it also instituted the figure of the lone housewife in the middle of it. And that’s the reality that my poem actively comments upon.
In order to do so, the poem uses a recipe of the aloo-posto. There is no originality in this recipe. It cannot and does not boast of any intergenerational secret ingredient, whispered into the ears of the daughters by the mothers. Instead, it’s a compilation of multiple recipes of aloo-posto culled from multiple food blogs and cookbooks. Remember, I am the girl whose mother thought learning to cook as a girl-child would be a waste of time, so I didn’t inherit my cooking skills from my mother. My mother never loved cooking enough to compile her own recipe book. Just in the same way she thought teaching me to cook would be an absolute waste of time, she thought, writing down the recipes would be a waste of her own time. Yeah, I owe my cooking skills to food blogs. And my own tongue. As a reader who also happens to be a writer, that’s one of the contemporary textual realities I wanted to recreate within the body of the poem. I wanted the poem to bear the burden of other forms of food writing. Forms of food writing that are not poems.
In doing so, as a writer, I was hoping to address — nay, confront — the mother-machine a little bit head on. To begin with, what does it mean to think of your mother being formed by the intersecting confluence of caste, class and communal identities? What do you do when the mother who gives you unconditional love does not allow the maid to use the family bathroom in your home? How do you record these domestic atrocities in your poems? To what extent does the act of recording them disrupt the ma-ki-haat-ki-dal narratives of the food media?
But the recipe is a text too. A prescriptive text that gives directions. A list of commands. A recipe also has its own sense of time. And that sense of time cannot be reduced to the alphabets, sentences and punctuations. Instead, that sense of time needs to be seen and known in terms of the actual time it takes to cook. Without the latter, every recipe is an incomplete text. There is an excess, then, within the very textual structure of recipes on the page (or on the screen). An excess that can be accessed only through taking stock of the messiness of material culinary labor.
For example, think of these directions.
“Grind the seeds into a paste, using a shil-nora. Add a green chili to add some flavor to the paste. Needless to say, you need to strain the seeds of excess water before you begin to grind them.”
These lines, a relatively straightforward narrative in many ways, reveal a strange absence when brushed against the grain. Nowhere in this to-do list is there an inventory of how much time it takes to grind the seeds or to strain the seeds of excess water. Yet few of us ever ask a recipe to split itself open to leave space for this actual, material time, the time it takes to finish the chores that constitutes a complete dish. We are so used to the form of the recipe, that this omission does not stand out to us in anyway.
As a poet, I trained myself to stare at this recipe for a long time. To stare at it so that its absences became really obvious. One can say, this is the first step towards splitting open a text. Any text. But since staring at anything never really produces anything else in concrete terms, my challenge as a poet was to make a decision about what would be the object — the tool, so to say — through which this work of splitting open would be performed. It’s a question of form, but it’s also a question of content. Or, rather, what we used to call “content” back in the day. To counter the list of chores that a recipe provides, I came up with another list. A list of work that happens inside the kitchen:
“she reaches for the spoon/lists what needs to be done/tea-leaves, three spoonfuls/water, eight cups/ sugar, only in four of them — ”
The work of list-making, then, becomes an ubiquitous trope in the poem itself. The mother of the narrator makes lists, in order to figure out how much work has been done, and how much remains to be done.
Yet, the lists in the recipe, and the list in my poem, are different. One is of a prescriptive nature, the other descriptive, interrupted by the narrator’s mother’s outbursts. And, of course, the narrator’s voice. What I was trying to foreground here was the reality of domestic culinary labor. The labor that is performed by the lone post-Partition middle-class or lower middle-class housewife in the kitchen. Labor that we know is unpaid. And yet we term it as a “labor of love.” But in the poem, even the labor of the lone housewife occurs within a more collective context, a collective history. There is thus the figure of the grandfather smoking outside with his friends, constructing nostalgia out of the memories of leaving. Constructing nostalgia for what has been left behind. In other words, the grandfather represents that specific post-Partition Bangal moment — that moment of nostalgizing and romanticizing the opar (the other side) — that we, who have no direct memories of Partition, love to laugh about so much. And then there is the narrator as a little girl, who is kicked out of the kitchen by the mother so that she can finish her homework. It is this moment of being kicked out of the kitchen, that will mark — literally and metaphorically — the birth of a new woman that is me today. A woman who can reject both marriage and motherhood and say so openly.
To be sure, nothing spectacular happens within the poem as such. The mother-figure masquerading as the lone housewife in the kitchen cooks. And cooks. And cooks. Has there ever been a poetics of boredom? Then this is it. Has there ever been a poetics of drudgery? Then this is it. There have been readers who, while reading the draft version, said to me,
“Please Nandini, take your mother out of the kitchen. I can’t stand it anymore.”
My response was that’s precisely why I won’t take her out at all. If it’s so difficult for you to read about it, then imagine how it is for the person who spends her time there. Yes, part of my goal in this book is to bore the shit out of my readers. Especially those who go on and on about the unfathomable magic of ma ki haat ka khana. If after reading this book the dal that your mother makes for you tastes bitter inside your mouth, I will consider myself to be vaguely successful. Yes, you are right. I am killing the magic that resides in your mother’s recipes. If I haven’t been clear enough yet, let me make it even clearer. I am taking up the challenge of writing a “cooking-and-spice” book. Only I am trying to write it in a way that the heat of the sizzling spices will make the reader desperately sneeze out loud.
6
The creation of this cooking mother and lone housewife figure also meant that I am writing about a kind of female subjectivity that is far from my own. Not only is it a kind of female subjectivity that’s far from mine, it also happens to be precisely the kind of female subjectivity against which I have defined myself. Do I then approach the very figure of the housewife with a kind of feminist disdain? Or do I go to the other extreme? That is, write the housewife figure with such an eye towards the vociferous New Agey, mass-cultured feminist impulse of recovery that the borderline between sympathy and empathy is lost? In other words, what I learned is this, writing the housewife figure is one of the most uphill tasks in the world.
Faced with this dilemma, my initial strategy was to be honest with myself. Since I have defined myself and continue to define myself as a woman against the social and cultural space that a housewife occupies, I need to record that alienation within the space of the manuscript. One of the concluding poems in the collection documents this alienation, as it tries to write an account of the narrator’s departure from domesticity:
“I am already/writing my leave-takings and rehearsing them every night, proofreading the spelling errors.”
This departure from domesticity that has earlier been explored in the poem in terms of the narrator’s refusal to join her mother and aunt around the kitchen table, and therefore from the domestic roles and ideologies that naturalizes women’s relationship to food, is also a loss. A loss of the domestic women’s sphere to the narrator. A loss of the culinary domestic sphere within which women often spend both their laboring and leisuring hours.
Yet, this loss is necessarily accompanied by a history of empowerment and enrichment. The kind of empowerment and enrichment that the public sphere offers women. The kind of empowerment and enrichment I fight everyday to have access to. This moment thus marks a culmination of the mother’s desired trajectory for the daughter. Yes, the daughter turns her back to the kitchen. Metaphorically, as an interiorized lyric moment. The kitchen, the space which so often becomes the allegory of women’s ultimate domestication. That space that also becomes the ultimate symbol of the domestic culinary creativity. And in a rather conspicuous kind of a way, women’s creativity. In other words, within the manuscript, this moment survives as a moment of harmonious jugalbandi between the mother and the daughter. Yet, my goal was to break the harmony as soon as it was formed.
I tried to write that breakage through gestures, images:
“I do not look up from my bowl. I am already/ writing my leave-takings and rehearsing them every night, proofreading/the spelling errors.”
In writing these lines, I wanted to ask, if the future that the mother had planned for her daughter includes an avoidance of the kitchen (and its attendant housewifery) through “gainful employment”, where is the anxiety in these lines coming from? Is the daughter planning a life beyond family and employment — the two sites on which most discussions in mainstream feminism hinge — that she herself does not quite visualize yet? What will that life look like? If the narrator-daughter cannot visualize it, can the reader?
Yet, back at my writing table, I also had to admit that writing the figure of a housewife is one of the most difficult things we can write about. Almost as difficult as writing the figure of a left-revolutionary. But it is difficult in a very different kind of a way. If the figure of the left-revolutionary poses a specific challenge to the writer precisely because he stands outside of everything that we know and go by, the figure of the housewife poses a challenge because she is looked upon as a figure who over-identifies with everything that we know and live by. And, supposedly, love. A figure that supposedly holds together one of the oldest institutions in human history — the family — a housewife is simultaneously seen as conservative, sexually repressed, inward looking, overtly emotional and volatile. She is supposed to reside outside of politics and the public sphere at large. And most definitely, outside of left politics. And not only outside of politics as such, but outside of political consciousness, a feeling reiterated in Kandasaamy’s implied binary between “bored housewives” and “class struggle.” An unwitting binary perhaps, but nonetheless politically limited and problematic.
7
The question that I faced as a poet and scholar, then, is how to historicize the character of the housewife in the poem. The housewife who also happens to be the mother of the narrator. How does one create a lyrical voice that is interested in historicizing the mother-figure of one’s poems while dealing with all the sentimental crap that pervades the popular representation of mothers in this country? How does one create a lyrical voice and subjectivity that is neither too distant nor too emotional in one’s effort to do so? My response to all these questions was similar to most other writerly and scholarly crises I’ve encountered. Politicize, politicize, politicize. As it is, I repeat, instituting the housewife in the middle of the social-material and political circuits constituting her “real” life is one of the most artistically and politically challenging tasks.
Consequently, I placed the mother in the context of a political movement that, as a nation, we still don’t know how to deal with. Yes, I am speaking about Naxalbari. A movement which we can’t really swallow, yet can’t also spit out completely. The mother of my book, thus, becomes one of the young people whose life was profoundly touched by the movement. It was touched profoundly, yet she never becomes the left-revolutionary. She stays at the margins of the movemental sphere, as the lover of the fire-breathing politico — the father-figure of the book — who remains absent in the poems other than as a shadow. What did these women, who didn’t quite have the courage to become full-fledged revolutionaries within the raging class-struggle, do? How did they think , as middle-class, upper-caste women, a revolutionary movement with its political basis in class-struggle would change their lives?
In the book, the mother-figure occupies an intermediary space — that shadowy realm between the radical-left revolutionary and the housewife — which was not unknown to many women of her generation. Although by the end of the book, she is resolutely and unequivocally a housewife. In some ways, these questions become the flip side of the questions I previously suggested in this essay — that class-struggle is a complex, multi-layered process. When we confine it to the realm of the spectacular event — almost solely, predominantly — we do the notion a disservice.
In a very strange kind of a way, the book and the poems that constitute the book become a quest. The narrator’s quest. A quest that refuses to be accommodated into the binary between “bored housewives” and “class struggle.” A quest that is profoundly personal and political at the same time. It becomes a story that hinges on a quest: how did the women who once wanted to change the world embraced the kitchen. In other words, the question I wanted to ask and the observation I wanted to make was this: domesticity often offers easy solutions even to women who once wanted to dream themselves out of it. An easy refuge, in the sense that it remains a socially and culturally acceptable option for women in a way few other things are.
I mean, as a woman, my love for cooking will never be questioned. Neither will be my decision to stay at home as a wife or as a mother in a heteronormative relationship. Historically, women — especially middle-class, upper-caste women — have used this option. They have consented to the prevailing social equalization between femininity and domesticity. They have done it in complex ways. And that consent itself has produced its own discontent. As it happens to the mother-figure of my poems. Yes, that production of consent by the women involved is also a mark of agency. Though, this consent is also an example of what I would as negative agency. The exhibition of the kind of agency that does not bring about any structural or ideological upheaval in our fucked-up world, but reinforces the status quo in perverse, convoluted, complex and distorted ways. To be very precise then, in this skinny book, I was trying to put into lyrical language a story of an earlier generation of women’s negative agency. And I was doing it through the prism of food, domesticity and the kitchen — the combination of which some scholars might term alimentary domesticity. In this book, my goal was to identify that space of alimentary domesticity — and maybe even domesticity in general — as that space of perpetual regression, from which not even the women who once dreamed of or participated in class struggles are immune.
Working through the medium of poetic lines, I could not ask these questions in the way I am asking them here in the essay. Yet, my only hope as a writer is that my readers will ask these questions.
8
But then, the story I am trying to tell is also a story about class. My protagonists are profoundly middle-class. The women I write about, lead their lives within and through secular Hindu, Bengali, middle-class, upper-caste formations. The patriarchy they confront possesses a profound classed, casteized and religious basis. Consequently when they resist, their resistances, too, bear the marker of such a classed and casteized consciousness and existence. Yet how does one break open, in poetic form, the ways in which middle-class women’s resistances can embody both? A will to change and a will to conform? The moment of discontent against patriarchy and the reaffirmation of class-caste hierarchies? In my manuscript, that moment comes when the mother shouts, “What am I to this family if not a maid?” This is not exceptional by any means. Women we know — mothers, grandmothers and aunts — say things like these all the time. Sometimes we listen. Because we don’t have much choice. Sometimes we half-listen. Because what they say is profoundly boring. Mostly, we ignore them. Yet when placed in the middle of the poem, these everyday forms of women’s (boring) speech become texts. They become parts of the poetic language. They become documentation. Texts that can be read, re-read and decoded. And, when done so, reveal an embodied political unconscious.
What is the kind of political consciousness revealed in this particular instance? Obviously, a discontent with domesticity, a discontent with housewifery, and even with everyday foodmaking. No, the mother of my poems is not the happy housewife of the television advertisements and the cooking shows. Yet, when she expresses her anger, it is expressed in terms of a class consciousness. A middle-class consciousness. No, housewives are not maids. We all know that. We would never mistake our maids for our mothers. The mother of my poems knows it too. Hence, when she shouts, “what am I to this family if not a maid”, she also yells out an assault. An assault that goes against the very core idea of “family values” because the very idea of family values denies the fact she is a laboring unit. In doing so, she also separates herself from the rest of the family. Yet, in this dissociation proclaimed by the mother/housewife, it is the maid — the real, actual maid — who occupies the most precarious position.
A middle-class housewife is not a maid, I repeat. And, no matter how much a middle-class woman compares herself to a maid, I am yet to know a single middle-class woman who would voluntarily embrace the life of a maid. Even if that act would ensure employment to an otherwise un-incomed housewife. She does not do so precisely because a middle-class housewife’s life, enmeshed as it is within the cycles of unpaid labor and economic dependence, ensures a kind of day-to-day material well-being and comfort. The relationship between the middle-class housewife and maid, then, revolves around a contradiction. The kind of work that is unpaid labor for the middle-class housewife happens to be waged work for the maid. It is this contradiction that keeps spilling out in the interactions between the middle-class housewife and the maid, making the middle-class home the site of a very different kind of class struggle. And, herein lies the complicated tale of domestic class struggles. The kind of class struggles Occupying My Tongue hints at, but does not necessarily go into detail about.
And herein is my admission as a writer: if you happen to be a politically conscious writer of the left persuasion, then domestic class struggles are one of the most difficult things to write about. Precisely because this is the kind of class struggle that remains within the realm of the non-event. It resides within the realm of the non-event, and colors everything we are familiar with — food, clothing, the corners of our home — with a kind of unfamiliarity that we rarely want to take stock of. Even when we call ourselves leftists. Precisely because doing so would hurt the very basis of our profoundly compromised and middle-class lives, where leftism, too, is rarely more than a comfortable rhetoric.
Here then, in this essay, I started with food. And ended with non-food. In the middle, I resolutely slipped back into the realm of not-food and non-food. Because, food is not just food. It is also about lots of not-food and non-food. Deal with it.
Nandini Dhar is the author of two full-length books of poems in English and Bangla respectively — Historians of Redundant Moments: A Novel in Verse (Agape Editions, 2016) and Jitakshara (Aainanagar Prakashani, 2016). She is also the author of the chapbook Occupying My Tongue (as part of FIVE, Aainanagar/Vayavya collective chapbook project.). She is the co-founder and co-editor of the independent micro-press Aainanagar, which she manages with dancer, illustrator and writer Madhushree Basu. Nandini hails from Kolkata, and divides her time between Sonipat, Haryana and her hometown.