The Kansa Bowl My Grandmother Carried Across the Border to India
Ranu Bhattacharyya inherits her grandmother’s kansa utensils, carried across newly-drawn borders at the time of Partition.
The bowl would be waiting outside my grandmother’s kitchen door as my brother and I got home from school. Cast from gleaming gold kansa, a metal that is believed to enhance the intrinsic properties of food, it was always filled to the brim with some familiar delicacy that only her hands could conjure. “What is it today?” we would exclaim, rushing over to examine its contents. Maybe it would be bright yellow kacha moonger dal, lentils gently tempered with exact spices, flavourful and robust, yet soothing and delicate. Or, a medley of vegetables, a garden burst of color and flavour. Yet other times, the bowl would reappear with creamy payesh, a dessert most prized by Bengalis, slow-cooked for hours to achieve a texture unattainable by other means.
As we grew older, the bowl diminished in significance. Most young adolescents are not known for their discernment and we were no different. My grandmother, a strictly disciplined Hindu widow, followed an exacting, spartan schedule and maintained a separate kitchen for herself. Our household had another kitchen where family meals were prepared, and our lives were consumed with activities that carried us far from her threshold. The bowl would still make an appearance every day and we would wolf down its contents, without pausing to consider the what or how. What was the exact combination of spices that gave the dal its unchanging flavour? How did those vegetables retain their singular tastes without blending in to others? How did the payesh get those unique slivers of melt-in-the-mouth cream that greeted us every birthday? The ability to reproduce the same dish, over and over, without change in taste or texture is the hallmark of a master chef. Little did we realise that our grandmother was a master of her craft.
It was only when I inherited the bowl and set out to recreate her familiar magic did this epiphany strike me. In its wake came hurried consults and harried experiments. I unearthed recipes made difficult by the fact that none of the cooks of my grandmother’s generation ever precisely measured ingredients. I began a slow love affair with the actual vessels in which the dishes were cooked and served.
Forgotten in unused corners or locked away in rusty trunks, these were the vessels and utensils of everyday use from a past not that long gone. No longer a gleaming gold, these hand-beaten kansa handis and kadhais, enormous plates with raised edges, elegant in their minimalist simplicity, and deep bowls with fluted rims, languished on the edges of a life made convenient by iron and steel, porcelain and glass. These were amongst the very few possessions that my grandmother carried with her, when she moved to India on the eve of Partition, from her homestead in rural Barisal, in present day Bangladesh. These are amongst the few material remains of a place that exists now only in memory.
Indian metal objects and artefacts have a long lineage. Ancient Brahmanical texts extol the virtues of pure copper, perceived to be the purest of base metals. The Vedas prescribe the use of pure copper vessels for public and domestic rituals. There is a metaphorical allusion to this virtue in the core sections of the Ramayana, the Balakanda, thought to be scribed around the 3rd century BCE. Ganga, unable to bear the embryo of the Fire God and Siva cast it off at the base of the Himalayas. The lustrous quality of this radiant embryo became gold and silver, its acrid quality turned into copper and iron, and the residue became tin and lead. Interestingly, tin and lead were (and continue to be) the metals most commonly alloyed with copper to produce bronze and brass. Bell metal or kansa, is a form of bronze, a hard alloy of copper and tin in the proportion 78:22 while brass metal or peetal, is an alloy of copper and zinc in the proportion 70:30. Vessels made of copper alloys were permitted for domestic and culinary purposes.
Since ancient times, people in India believed that the materials in which food was cooked and served affected its nutritional and medicinal values. It was widely acknowledged that copper balanced the three doshas (humours) — vata (the air element), pitta (the fire element) and kapha (the aqueous element) that control metabolism in the human body according to Ayurveda. The Mughal historian Abul Fazal notes that the Emperor Akbar’s hakim advised Mir Baqawi (Chief of the Kitchen) that rice cooked in copper destroyed gas and removed spleen disease; rice cooked in bronze destroyed all three humours; rice cooked in gold alleviated poisons, warded of indigestion and jaundice, and improved vigour, vitality and arousal; and rice cooked in tin cooled the body. These beliefs persist even today. Base metals and their alloys have the ability to reduce the acidic nature of food and water, and increase alkalinity in the body. For domestic use, copper is plated with tin to negate the impact of acid, to which the metal is sensitive, a process known as kalai.
The prominence and notable preference for copper continued through Puranic times, well into 19th century pre-industrial India. Travelers’ accounts and other records from the 19th century indicate that manufacturing in copper was widespread — from the Indus region, along the Indo-Gangetic plain to the lower Gangetic plain, as well as in other regions like the former Central Provinces, Madras and Bombay Presidencies. Delhi’s coppersmiths were particularly renowned for ‘real Delhi degchis’. The clientele included members of different religious denominations. Copper workers were accorded a high status, a patina acquired through their erstwhile association with royalty and temples. Manufacturing in copper alloys was equally widespread, though it had a unique twist. Nayanjot Lahiri (1995) focuses on the resource conserving strategy of alloy workers in using old, broken scrap metal in their production process. In fact, E. B Havell (1890) notes that vessels were broken down every two or three years “so that one must look for examples of the fine old work not in temples nor in the houses of the rich, but among the waste metal of the brass bazaar doomed to the melting pot.”
There was a rich diversity and variety in metal vessels produced across the subcontinent. Production continued apace for elite as well as common consumption and included beautifully crafted vessels for daily use. Patterns and shapes were sometimes associated with places where they were produced like the Baleswari from Balasore and the Gayeswari from Gaya. Sometimes names indicated whether they were polished or unpolished, ribbed or not ribbed. Lahiri recounts the unusual story of a vessel associated with a historical episode. The Elokeshi Bati, a bowl in copper alloy, derived its name from the gruesome murder of 16-year-old Elokeshi in 1873 in Bengal. An illicit love affair that shook colonial Calcutta, even today the phrase ‘Elokeshi Sarbanashi’ invokes shudders of abhorrence even though the actual incident has been long forgotten and can be referenced only through Kalighat pattachitras and the elusive aforementioned bati.
In a similar vein, the vessels I inherited encode stories of yet another historical episode, the brutal and violent sundering of the subcontinent in 1947. Even as the borders on both sides of India were being reimagined, my grandmother carried her heavy kansa utensils across the yet-to-be-drawn India-East Pakistan border in the East, just as Balraj Bahri Malhotra’s mother carried her peetal vessels from her erstwhile home in Pakistan to the newly formed republic of India, in the West. In her book, Remnants of a Separation (2018), Malhotra’s grand-daughter, Aanchal Malhotra recounts stories of many such journeys of Partition, focusing on the objects people chose to carry with them as violence and chaos erupted around them. What to carry? What to leave behind? What instinct, what intuition, what intelligence guides these decisions? While narrating the story of their momentous journey, Balraj recalls that many families carried kitchen items with them as they joined the waves of refugees fleeing their homes. In remembering his mother, he says, “Survival — that was her basic concern. To live, to survive, and for that we needed food. Ration would be provided but what would we cook it in? We couldn’t eat raw lentils or rice, so she carried the utensils.”
Survival. I carefully turn the molten gold bowl with the fluted rim in my hands, the cool metal heavy against my skin, and I wonder: Is survival an instinct encoded in its depths? Did the instinct for sustenance, the need to feed her large family guide my grandmother’s choice as she pondered what to carry, what to leave behind? Did intuitive intelligence forecast settlement, the shadowy outlines of a new home envisioned even as she stepped out of the old? Beside the bowl, I inherited the handis and kadhais, the ladles and spatulas, the plates and glasses that comprised my grandmother’s kitchen. These are now amongst my most prized possessions. As I traverse the globe with my diplomat husband, I lay these utensils on my table when I welcome guests from other lands.
“This is the kadhai my grandmother boiled milk in, only cow’s milk mind you!” I explain to my dinner guests as they admire the large shallow vessel illuminated with floating candles, the glowing centre-piece of my table. “I remember frothy cream rising to the top as she brought the milk to a slow boil. Then she would leave it in a shadowy corner to cool, and wait for the thick cream to form.” Our milkman in Cairo, our current home has been bringing us a similar rich milk, and I’ve been experimenting with saving the cream to make ghee, the clarified butter that is the secret ingredient in many a simple dish. I describe the process of making ghee to my fascinated audience – the patient coaxing of the cream to liquefy at just the right temperature; the focused sniffing for the exact aroma as it enters its finishing stage, a moment’s judgement deciding its final fate; the careful straining, the clear golden liquid catching the light as it streams through pristine white cloth, leaving behind a concentrated crumbly brown residue. “And we ate that residue wrapped in aish!” chimes in Yasser, our Egyptian friend. All eyes turn to the new storyteller at our table, till then a most sedate and quiet dinner guest. It is evident that my story has prompted a memory from his childhood. Yasser recalls his grandmother making samneh, the Arabic word for ghee, and saving the brown crumbs for all her grandchildren as a special treat. As he narrates his tale, for a suspended moment in time, it seems that all the characters in these stories are at our table — my grandmother from Barisal, Yasser’s grandmother from Alexandria, those cousins and playmates of a childhood long gone – we’d lifted layers of memory and rendered them visible again.
My table has emerged as a manuscript upon which I draft stories, the old vessels and utensils now occupying centre-stage as unique characters who voice tales — of moves and migrations, of home and belonging, of families and communities, of histories and geographies. Stories of sustenance and settlement. Recreating recipes perfected by generations of mothers and grandmothers in our families, I honour their work, their resilience, their nurturing instincts. As I recount their stories, similar stories emerge from my guests, drawing us all into a shared human experience. We are the stories we tell — stories allow us to blur distinctions between the past and the present and give us hope for the future. Creating homes in lands not my own, several times over, I gain confidence from the mundane materiality of the utensils I’ve inherited. Look at us, they whisper to me. We survived even when uprooted. So will you.
Ranu Bhattacharyya is an educator and writer who has lived and worked around the world, exploring and archiving narratives that connect people and cultures.
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