#1000Kitchens: Vamsi Matta Cooks his Grandmother's Pachiroyyalu

At Goya, celebrating home cooks and recipes have always been at the heart of our work. Through our series, #1000Kitchens, we document recipes from kitchens across the country, building a living library of heirloom recipes that have been in the family for 3 generations or more. In this edition, Sumana Mukherjee speaks to theatre and visual artist Vamsi Matta about a prawn curry with brinjal recipe he learned from his grandmother.

This season’s stories are produced in partnership with the Samagata Foundation—a non-profit that champions meaningful projects.

“I am a Mala boy!” exclaims Sri Vamsi Matta multiple times during his solo performance, Come Eat With Me. It’s a simple statement of fact, a robust assertion of identity; it is also a milestone in the long, turbulent journey of the Dalit in taking open ownership of his caste. Vamsi, resplendent in an indigo kurta with a strand of jasmine around his man-bun, does so with full awareness of the weight of that history, with humility, humour and joy. It is evident when he uses apparently simple stories to open his audience’s eyes to systemic injustice, when he forces them to engage in reiterative questions-and-chorused answers, and when he ladles his mum’s famed chicken curry onto plates at the end of the play.

It is most evident in casual conversation with Vamsi, as he bustles around his home — a charming apartment in a low-rise complex in north Bengaluru that he shares with his partner — prepping his grandmother Chakramma’s prawn curry with brinjal.

“Growing up in Vishakhapatnam, of course, I knew I was Dalit. There were people who misbehaved with my parents, there were problems when my older cousins wanted to marry people they loved … it doesn’t make sense in the moment, but these are the ways one learns about caste,” he says. “But it was only when I joined the Indian Institute of Science for my graduation in Material Science that I learnt what caste does to people.”

Like every young person in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana at the time, Vamsi dreamt of an engineering career. But when he got the opportunity to join IISc for a pure sciences degree in 2011, he considered it a key to “the greatest pursuit of mankind.” A few months in, he realised that science, like every other domain, was also gate-kept by people in power. “Simultaneously, I grew more interested in theatre — I’ve loved performing since I was a child — and started spending more time in rehearsals than in the classroom,” says Vamsi, now 33. “I began doing theatre on political issues, gender issues, capitalism, but never caste. I was young, I didn’t know these stories, which were my reality, needed to be told.”

A turning point came with the 2016 death of Hyderabad Central University student Rohith Vemula. “As (Coming Out as Dalit author) Yashica Dutt says, I could not be the same person after that institutional murder,” says Vamsi. “And soon afterwards, the pandemic hit and all my theatre gigs dried up. I’d formed my own group by then. Stuck at home, I re-read my father’s short story ‘A Star in the Sky’ — my dad is a veterinary doctor and writes short stories and novels in Telugu — based on the life of Dr Vemula, and on his own experiences in an educational institution. I was able to see myself in it too. I read it aloud to my friends, and they said, ‘This is the story you need to tell’.”

Developing the story into a play for an online workshop, Vamsi was able to introspect deeply on how caste influenced every aspect of his life. “The pandemic strengthened caste lines: there were questions raised on Dalit doctors; Hathras happened (the 2020 gangrape of a Dalit woman by four upper-caste men)… Caste was glaring at me.”

Around the same time, Vamsi came across a big-budget theatre production involving food. “It occurred to me then: If I were to cook food and ask people to come, would they come? Till then, food had been a big part of my life — I love cooking and all family occasions were always built around food — but this was the first time I thought of documenting recipes I’d grown up with, and building a performance around it.”

The idea was revolutionary, and there’s no way Vamsi could have not known the fact: Inter-caste food sharing, an intimate act of friendship, hospitality, trust and camaraderie, is as hallowed in Indian mythology (the tribal Shabari offering food to Ram and Lakshman during their exile) as it is a trigger for tensions today, from upper-caste school students refusing to eat mandated mid-day meals made by a Dalit cook, to middle-class households segregating utensils for their hired help. While there is greater awareness of Dalit culture in the mainstream today, popular conceptions about the Dalit diet — rooted, perhaps, in the work of older thinkers such as Kancha Iliah Shepherd and Shahu Patole — centre it around beef, blood, entrails and offal.

“I get well-meaning, liberal, Savarna people coming up at my shows — I’ve done nearly 40 performances of Come Eat With Me — and telling me, ‘Oh, I thought you’d cook beef!’ I think these questions are as much about the age-old lens of brutalization and violence through which Dalits are perceived as it is about virtue-signalling that you are okay with beef,” says Vamsi. “But you also need to see [the evolution in Dalit food habits], when people migrated from their villages to towns and cities for education and employment, for a better life, they were scared of what their markers of untouchability would do. So they let go of them.”

“Beef was never a reality in my house,” he says. “As the son of two favourite children, I was the apple of my grandmothers’ eyes. My paternal grandmother Chakramma, she was a force of nature: She lost her husband early and brought up five children single-handedly. She was a great cook, and she would never let any visitor leave hungry. Narasapuram, where she lived in Andhra’s West Godavari district, is where the river meets the sea. So fish, prawns, dried fish were all part of her diet. When we went visiting, over Easter or Christmas, this is what she would feed me.”

As a child, Vamsi spent a fair amount of time in the kitchen, watching and helping his grandmothers and mother cook. He began cooking seriously only after moving to Bengaluru, so most of his dishes were recreated from memory. “We lost Chakramma in 2014, she suffered from Alzheimer’s towards the end, so the process of my putting one of her recipes together begins with calls to my aunts. And I find I usually have about 90 percent of it right and they help with the last bit,” he says. “I lost my mum in 2017, my aunts, too, are ageing. Part of my journey will be compiling these recipes together, because they’ve never been documented — that also is a power game.”

Vamsi is a natural cook, his movements certain and assured around the open-plan kitchen, the measures instinctive and rarely in need of correction. He cuts and chops the veggies himself, stepping out once to the adjacent terrace for some fresh curry-leaves, washing hands between steps and wiping them on the kitchen towel habitually slapped across his shoulder. He doesn’t allow himself to be distracted by the conversation or the camera as he cooks the curry, boils eggs, steams rice: The kitchen, after all, is also a performance space.

When we sit down to lunch, the aromas have whetted our appetites sharply. The curry, protein-boosted with eggs, is delicious, the pendant-shaped brinjals perfectly cooked and accentuating the unctuousness of the dish. Accompanied by rice, dahi and a chopped salad, it’s a meal Chakramma would have been proud of.

CHAKRAMMA GARI VANKAYA PACHIROYYALU

(Chakramma’s Brinjal and Prawn Curry)

Ingredients

500gm fresh prawns
250gm small-sized brinjals (eggplant), cubed
2 medium-sized tomatoes, chopped
2 medium-sized onions, chopped
3 or 4 green chilies, slit
Oil as needed
Salt and chilli powder to taste
1 tsp ginger-garlic paste
1 small lime-sized tamarind, soaked in hot water
A handful of coriander leaves
Boiled eggs (according to preference, ideally one per person)

Method

Clean the prawns by rubbing them with turmeric and salt. Set aside for a while, then wash thoroughly to remove any raw smell.
In a kadhai or small wok, heat oil till smoking, add the onions and fry until golden brown. (Add a little salt to help the onions cook faster.)
Next, add the ginger-garlic paste and sauté until the raw smell disappears. Then add tomatoes and green chilies. (You can also add chopped drumstick with the tomatoes, if you like.)
Once the tomatoes are soft and cooked, add the brinjal. Reduce the flame to low, add salt, and let them cook. This is when you add washed prawns so as to not overcook them.
After the brinjal is cooked, add chili powder and enough water so that all the pieces are submerged, depending on the quantity of gravy you want. Once 90% of the curry is done, add tamarind extract. At this stage, you can also add boiled eggs (these are optional).
Let the curry simmer for an additional 5-10 minutes on a low flame.
Before removing from the stove, taste and adjust salt and chili powder if needed. Finally, garnish with coriander leaves and serve.

Words by Sumana Mukherjee. Photos by Sanskriti Bist.
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