Caste, Fat & Indian Culture: Who We Are Is What We Eat
From crisp skirts of samosa to the crunch of jalebis and lip-puckering achaar in oil, fats play an integral part in many of the foods that we love. Farah Yameen explores the variety of fats — both plant- and animal-based — used by communities around the country.
The year was 1940. My grandmother was 8 when a brand-new, affordable vegetable ‘ghee’ that the Lever Brothers (later Hindustan Lever, of Kodai poisoning ignominy) launched 3 years prior, finally arrived into our kitchen. It was called Dalda. By the time it reached my grandmother’s home in the village of Kararia in Bihar, a market had successfully been built. People were concerned about adulterated milk and ghee. Prakash Tandon, instrumental in building the brand, describes Dalda as “the first branded, packaged food in a country where everything was sold loose.” It positioned itself as the ‘pure’ alternative to possibly adulterated ghee, at half the price. Marketing itself as an invigorating fat, and a symbol of maternal love, Dalda became synonymous with hydrogenated vegetable fat, or vanaspati.
But Dalda did not replace all cooking fats at home. It had none of the pungency of mustard oil, irreplaceable in a chokha that uses it raw, in nose-stinging tempering for dals, or in pickles that are preserved in oil. In Bihar, mustard oil has earned the fond name kadwa tel (bitter oil), a reference to its sharp odour. Nanna’s father abandoned Kararia for Patna, and she married and moved cities, until my grandfather finally settled in Ranchi. But kadwa tel remained a constant. Its application preceded winter baths, and accompanied every bout of flu, staining all pillowcases in the house except for those reserved for guests.
According to Nanna, kadwa tel was the secret to the ebony black hair on Julie Bua’s head. In fact, Nanna simply assumed that mustard is what Julie Bua, who came to clean the house, used on her hair. Just as it was assumed that ‘bua’ (father’s sister) would be the correct honorific for the children to address her, as we did with every woman employed in the house. We did not know what Julie Bua used for her hair, nor where she lived. Neither did we care to ask. We occupied (and continue to occupy) a land that belongs to Julie Bua’s people, the tribes of Chhotanagpur. She is now surrounded by a city that was built on mining the resources of her forests, bringing in settlers from neighbouring Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa.
Where the city has not taken over their land, oil is not considered a necessity. And when it is used, it isn’t always mustard. Instead, their fields in rural Jharkhand now grow sarguja, a plant Nanna has never heard of. Sarguja, or the oil of niger, is not pungent like mustard. Instead, it has a smell that agricultural reports describe as “nutty”. At least that is what Prabha tells me. Nutty is not a smell that can be described in the version of Hindi mutually intelligible to Prabha and me. She merely describes it as ‘less pungent’ or less kadwa than mustard. It is not a ‘traditional’ edible oil. The oil from niger is used primarily for soap-making, lubrication, and as bio-diesel. In villages that grow it as cash crop in Bihar, Jharkhand, and Orissa, it is also an economical fat for food.
Prabha was a nurse to Nanna after she suffered a stroke, four years ago. When she left after a year, to get married, my grandmother cried profusely. When Prabha first arrived, Nanna refused to be fed by her, insisting that someone from the family do it. It was her twisted way of avoiding ‘pollution’. She knew, without asking, from a knowledge that is deeply embedded, that what Prabha ate, she would never even touch. Animal fat, for instance. Or the alcohol from mahua. Again, my grandmother presumes. The city has made its way into Prabha’s home. When she talks of sarguja, she too others its eaters. “They are people from the village.” She is now a city dweller in Ranchi. She uses oil from a ‘Fortune’ packet, or else kadwa tel.
Further, in the villages that edge the deciduous forests of Chhotanagpur plateau, a different kind of oil is used. The mahua. Nanna only knows mahua as a source of perpetual debauchery and inebriation. She surmises that tharra, from the mahua, has been the undoing of the tribes of Jharkhand, not the pillage of their lands. That something as innocuous as oil should come from the same tree, is incomprehensible.
But those who use the oil from Mahua, rarely need vegetable fat to cook. Their food is a mix of foraged and cultivated greens, and animals, that are usually roasted in their own fat over fire, or boiled. The Mahua tree is sacred to them. It must never be felled. Its branches are firewood, its flowers alcohol and food, and the seeds of the tree yield a thick unguent oil. In tribal regions in Maharashtra, the same seeds are called tolambi, and in Orissa tola. In Chattisgarh and Jharkhand, it is knows as tora/torai ka tel. Across the country, where there are deciduous forests, there is Mahua, and the people who live with them.
When there is mahua oil in the house in Western Orissa, Sitikantha’s mother fries coconut stuffed pitha in it, its fragrance seeping deep into the sweet dumplings, and bathes it in liquid palm jaggery, or taala gur. In vegetables and dals, as is often done with mustard oil, she first smokes it before cooking, to temper its pungency. Like elsewhere in this region of the country, it is either mustard, or the ‘Fortune’ packet, which is the primary fat in the house, not Mahua. On the occasions that a katla or a particularly robust rohu is brought into the house, no oil is called for. She will simply put the fish on a hot pan, and watch as the oil from under its skin pools into the pan. It is all the fat that she needs to cook the fish. The rest she collects.
In Old Bangalore, the women in Bhanu’s house have collected the fat that rises to the surface of meat curries, for as long has he can remember. He giggles, recalling how his aunt would liken the solidified fat of goat and pork, to butter. Besides being cooked in its own substantial fat, strips of dried pork fat would also make for snacks to accompany drinks, after a day of work. Several members of the Tigala community, to which Bhanu belongs, moved to agriculture and livestock keeping when livelihood from horticulture, their caste occupation, dried. Dairy-derived fat were thus a frequent presence. With the pressures of urbanisation and shrinking pastures, livestock keeping became rarer, as did the use of dairy-derived cooking fats. Instead, cheap palm oil, sold loose, became a constant presence in the kitchen, supplemented by peanut and sesame oils, which despite being locally produced could not compete with the disastrously low prices of palm.
Something similar happened in Blathur in Kannur, a village in Kerala that once depended on agricultural labour for livelihood. Pork fat was a ubiquitous presence. Pappadams fried in pork fat are a fond memory for Jyothi. “It was an OBC village,” he says, "So animal fat was freely used.” The animal wasn’t slaughtered in the village though. Slaughtering is a non-savarna occupation. The neighbouring town had a bustling Christian population, and pork would be brought from the butcher there. His grandmother would slather the buttery fat, bearing the distinct smell of meat, on her skin after a bath. To Jyothi, it is the smell of comfort. The village prospered when its agricultural economy shifted to cashew and rubber plantations. It can now afford more pork, which is still cooked in its own fat, but otherwise they prefer coconut oil, which they can grow and extract locally. And sesame, which is no longer a luxury.
Pork is not something we speak of in our family. As children, Nanna told us we should never even name the animal. Suar was a word the kids would sometimes say on a dare, then worry that our tongues had been befouled for 40 days. Elaborate ‘scientific’ arguments were made in defence of the animal being haram (forbidden under Islamic laws).
Our relationship with bovine fat is more complex. At bakr-eid each year we inevitably face the complete animal — edible and inedible parts alike. We grimace at the offal and the fat, those unfamiliar bits that have been erased from our culinary repertoire with sanitised countertop kitchens, where the distinct smell of rendering animal fat is irreconcilable with the urban middle class visual and olfactory aesthetics. Instead, those who cannot afford to affect gustatory moralities, take it home and transform it. Yasmin, who loves the fat, says that she heats it, until it renders its liquid. The remaining solids make a crisp churri that is salted for snacking. The best kachoris, puas, and nimkis in her home are fried with the rendered fat of the animal sacrificed on Bakr-eid.
Nanna, despite austerities of most material possessions in life, is very fond of fried food. She enjoys crisp skirts of the samosa, the crunch of jalebis, and lip-puckering achaar preserved in oil. After she hit her 70s, she limited herself to khichdi more often than not, but never without a chilli pickled in mustard oil. When a snack tasted greasy to her, she declared it made in Dalda, that ‘plant ghee’ from her childhood that duped everyone into believing it was the healthier alternative to ghee.
The conversation around health that led the middle class to hastily drop ghee and animal fats, also made them eventually disavow Dalda. Nanna, who would listen religiously to BBC Urdu every night until she became hard of hearing, and subscribed to weekly news digests until her eyesight weakened, was always on top of the goings-on in the world. She caught on early to the fat and heart-disease relation. In the 90s, the obsession with fat consumption as a leading cause of coronary diseases bolstered the market for refined oils so much, that nobody who could afford it in our city, questioned its supremacy over all other oils. In our neck of the wood in Bihar and Jharkhand, however, flaxseed oil, and even palm, emerged as the alternative. Flax had not always been considered an oil suitable for cooking because it oxidises at high temperatures. It is an oil that is too expensive for the poor, and too lowly for the rich. Instead, it is sold loose or in large unidentifiable cans as ‘refined oil’ of indeterminate origin. The vegetable source of the oil became irrelevant. As long as it was refined, it was safe.
Unlike Dalda, which proliferated the smaller towns and villages like a termite infestation, the refined oil campaign was slower. In the small town of Bhuj, in Gujarat, the shift has been very recent. The region used shenghdana, or peanut oil, as a staple until it got around that the oil was bad for cardiac health. In fact, in the Bhuj diet, peanut oil was systematically replaced by refined oils. This may have not been carried on Nanna’s evening news, but the displacement of an entire political lobby of 'telia rajas' in Gujarat, leading to the Patel agitation for reservations, can be attributed to peanut oil’s disastrous fall in demand, as palm oil imports shot up.
Nilamben who married into a Bhuj family, has replaced the family’s shenghdana oil with a mix of different refined oils, as her doctor advised. But the larger population of Bhuj now consumes cottonseed oil, a relatively recent entry into the Gujarati diet that Nilamben pegs as the ‘poor person’s’ oil. According to the ICAR- Central Institute for Research on Cotton Technology, Mumbai, the first cottonseed oil mill was established in Gujarat in 1914 at Navsari. A by-product of the thriving BT cotton industry, it is the cheapest oil available in Gujarat, and large corporations like Adani-Wilmar have been putting their money behind it. Earlier this year, Tirupati cottonseed oil, a name familiar in Gujarati homes, roped in Kareena Kapoor as their brand ambassador, a sure indication that cottonseed oil is going to be the next fat, campaigning to be the healthier, cheaper alternative to whatever it is we use now.
In Nanna’s 89 years, Dalda has risen and fallen from grace, and India has become the largest importer of palm oil, a fat that none of its communities are culturally tied to. The urban middle class kitchen aesthetics has written amnesia onto animal fats, as something distinctly outside the purview of clean eating, except when purchased in imported tins. As with everything else we include and throw out with the ebb and flow of fads, it is safe to predict that a minuscule bottle of animal fat, or the oil from the mahua, will appear in a store that claims to be rooted to the land, branding itself as handcrafted and artisanal. An article on the virtues of natural unprocessed fat will be lauded on an influential social media page, and kitchens will reorient themselves to the smells they once purged themselves of. In the quintessential modus operandi of trends, it will disinfect the fat of its caste and tribe links, as if any rootedness to land could be fabricated outside of that.
Farah Yameen is a public historian with a special interest in urban foodways and food history.
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