Remembering
Hi, I'm Apoorva Sripathi, a freelance writer and artist. If you enjoyed reading this issue or think shelf offering is great in general, you can buy me a cup of coffee // simply share the newsletter, and ask a friend or two (or three?!) to subscribe.
Or what even are food memories?
Part of the joy in returning to the conservative city [you call home] is you tend to look for comfort in activities that you previously took for granted — walking around your neighbourhood, buying chocolate cream buns and resisting the urge to eat them on your walk home, enquiring about the best-looking tomatoes that have been arranged into a pyramidal display on the vegetable seller's cart (from Red Hills bought from an old lady who knows how to pick them), asking your mum why the local 'fancy shop' has split into two separate entities and wondering out loud which one is doing better. But part of the sorrow in looking for comfort is that you are reminded crudely of all the liberties that you could afford while living alone and away from home, first of which is eating.
From Marcel Proust to the anthropologist David Sutton, food has been venerated as evoking a sense of nostalgia. A large formulation of all our food writing can be traced to it, especially food as sites of migrant experiences, bringing up comforting or terrible memories of 'home' and 'childhood'. I wrote an essay about using food to recreate the feeling of home and synesthetically remembering the memories of ‘home’ that migrants have known both locally and nationally. This was an essay for university, which later became the basis for my dissertation on the mango.
I was in London then, and lived there till early 2020. First few months, I felt like I didn’t really belong. I tried to acclimate myself, by learning tube and bus routes, walking to and back from university (initially I lived within walking distance), practising how to talk to new people, trying to make friends, drinking all the beer I possibly could, discovering different sausages and cheeses, going on walks... Then the loneliness hit. I was alone for Christmas and New Year’s, so I cooked, which I have always done on New Year’s Eve. I went to the movies. Immediately after, my landlady threatened to kick me out. So I moved out, and moved in with a friend and her flatmates. I recreated my mother’s (and her mother’s) recipes for them as a thank you. I taught a friend how to cook the basics: sambar, rasam, kootu. I journeyed to and from Wembley just to reach out to my favourite Sri Lankan Tamil grocer, to chat about Tamil films and music so I wouldn’t feel alone. In purely anthropological terms, it was ‘transnational and transregional food exchange’. In layperson terms, it was familiarity breeding comfort — back home, comfort came from spending time with the people (favourite grocers, vegetable vendors, mango sellers, bakery boys) I buy food from.
2019 was not so lonely. It was (is?) one of the best years of my life — I was part of family barbeques and birthday parties; I ate so much sausage, lamb, beef and chicken, as if to make up for the absence of meat in my life for 25 years; I made an orange-date loaf cake for Christmas breakfast; and ate turkey for Christmas dinner. This identity was more than the sensory pleasures involved in cooking with spices, in smelling mustard seeds popping in ghee, and in curry and coriander leaves flecking the golden hot rasam — it was new, it was visceral, and it followed me to Bangalore, Mumbai and London.
In Parvathi Raman’s powerful memoir about her migrant family’s journey to Britain, food provided comfort by not only playing a central role in establishing ‘home’, it also provided “frameworks of memory” to help mediate their migrant and pre-migrant bodies, and in the family being accepted into new communities — in short, helping the migrant selves create emotional attachments. And as Arjun Appadurai writes in his paper, Gastro-politics in Hindu South Asia, food and food events as memories serve as important “mnemonic functions” that are linked to the “sensory and emotional immediacy of food consumption”. This is found in what migrants cook and how they cook, in ingredients they procure, how and where they do so, constantly weaving a synesthetic experience of memories, between their bodies and their many identities.
I understood mine [identity] through food as well, with my many trips to Wembley and Drummond Street, lugging back wholesale packages of rice and lentils, but only after I exhausted my mother’s many packages of rice, lentils, coffee, tea, tamarind and spices — some of which I was going through, even seven months after my arrival in London. Unlike Raman’s mother, who “had none of the embodied memories” or the “performance of cooking ‘home’”, and like Raman herself, for whom cooking is a “space of comfort” and a physical activity that defines a part of who she is, cooking defines who I am. In cooking the same meals that my mother made for me countless times, I tried to reconstruct and remember [synesthetically] the memories of 'home' that I knew and embodied. And in cooking food that my mother never has — chicken biryani, sausage and mash, falafel — I threaded an independent life, created memories of my own 'home', and shaped a different geography of belonging, all of which has come to inform my identity. Once, I walked up and down Chinatown till my feet ached, then ducked into a corner shop to buy tobacco only to be gently reprimanded by the Tamil-speaking owner for smoking. “If I were your father, would you not have listened to me?" he asked. (I would not have perhaps.) On his insistence, I picked up a packet of crisps and a bottle of juice, so that my "stomach doesn't remain empty".
Cooking and eating aren’t the only ways to claim identity when you are a migrant.
Purnima Mankekar emphasises another aspect in her paper on how Indian grocery stores in the San Francisco Bay Area reify the construction of ‘Indian culture’ (I don't think there is one reductive form; the term 'Indian culture' feels like a misnomer), and therefore identity, for members of the diasporic community. Mankekar argues that these grocery stores exist not just for shopping [for Indian ingredients], but more so are "complex social spaces" where Indians "gather and exchange information", and where new arrivals "learn about neighborhoods, schools, and employment opportunities". I mentioned this in my piece for Vittles as well: talking to many people from South Asian cultures, for whom the mango was an important focal point, not only informed me about their personal and national identities, but I also got to know where they'd converge — local Indian supermarkets or corner stores — to talk.
Though Mankekar’s study is on Indian diaspora from the beginning of the 20th century, noting that the majority of H-1B visas have been given to software engineers from India (also Taiwan, Ireland, Israel), and that immigration policies produce a tiered hierarchy divided by race, class, gender, and age, what is largely and quite obviously missing from the narrative is — caste. She writes:
In general, the racial self-representation of Indians in the Bay Area is overwhelmingly shaped by class... The celebration of the (varied) successes of middle-and upper-class Indians in Silicon Valley must not blind us to the racial foundations of the U.S. economy and the U.S. national imaginary.
Currently, this seems to hold true in the selection of Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s running mate, which has only reinforced already existing racial stereotypes against Asian and Black people. But what a section (of the media or Harris herself or American/Indian people) fails to acknowledge or mentions in passing without really digging deep about "family legacy" is that Harris wouldn't have been successful if it weren't for her mother's Brahmin privilege. It's also the case with a video shared by her sister Maya Harris, who talks about their mother — a brown woman with a heavy accent — who was constantly overlooked even though she was a cancer researcher. For Asian or Black women who have migrated to first world countries, and whose identity and food has always been suspect, questioned, and belittled, the video is no doubt a story they can identify with. But as Sharmin Hossain, the political director of Equality Labs, notes, "the video omits a key part of South Asian heritage that her mother was proud of, the deeply rooted casteism in almost every upper caste person in the United States… Kamala Harris isn't just a South Asian, she's Brahmin."
This is also a narrative missing in the video of Harris making masala dosas with Mindy Kaling, where Kaling makes a remark on them (and their dogs) being "very good Hindu vegetarians", and Harris talks about south Indian food being "all vegetarian" (as if it's the norm), which is really code for upper-caste. The moral distinctions of caste aren't just articulated through a division of labour — they are through the practice of endogamy (as seen in Netflix's Indian Matchmaking) and through a food hierarchy.
This is a narrative that is missing in Mankekar's paper on Indian grocery stores and transnational configurations of belonging. This is also a narrative that is missing from Padma Lakshmi's [Brahmin] heritage. Her new Hulu show might be rooted in (food) politics, identity, and immigration, but Lakshmi, who has become a "vocal social justice activist and political commentator", and who herself has, as the above linked Eater piece notes, "personal stakes here" (Lakshmi and her mother migrated to America in the 70s), has failed to acknowledge the privilege that afforded them to move continents. This is also a narrative that Madhur Jaffrey omits when she talks about, say choosing a life that she wants. Such a life just isn't possible without the privilege of caste and/or money and it must be acknowledged.
This is the same (caste) privilege that has helped me study in London (I did apply for a student loan which I'm struggling to pay back right now, in the interest of full disclosure), and helped me build an independent life, even if it was brief. My family too brought me up by couching a lot of terms when it came to food, like the rest of upper caste India: that vegetarianism is the norm, when it really wasn't. That vegetarianism is pure and morally superior, when the reality is that it has — and will always be — a marker of caste identity. And identities like people, memories, and food, will travel, sometimes unchanged.
When anthropology of memory comes in contact with food, it usually looks at the sensual and evocative aspects, but hasn't anthropology always been concerned with everyday life? The memories of food then, shouldn't just be restricted to purposes of one-off nostalgia; it must extend to everyday life. For it is everyday that we eat, cook, and deal with food. It is the everyday experiences of food that are invested with meaning, value and emotions, the everyday memories of food we pick up throughout our lives that shape our identities, whether cultural, national or personal. And it is the everyday food memories that shape the narratives of our lives, by which we define and redefine who we are.
Miscellaneous
- I haven't talked much about that awful show Indian Matchmaking on purpose, but read Yashica Dutt's essential piece on it for The Atlantic. Read everything she writes, in general.
- This iconic Tamil song from the 80s! If you know, you know that this set a trend in serenading, with a guitar of course.
- Sarah Cooke's latest newsletter on loving food kept me awake last night but also put me to sleep like it was a comforting lullaby — "food is not just 'lifestyle' but an assertion of existence". Lovely!
- Hate the term "gig economy" and everything about it. ICYMI, Michelle Meagher on the precarity of those who work for delivery apps.
- If you would like PDFs of the papers I have mentioned above, write to me and I'll send them to you. Appadurai's paper is linked and downloadable in my piece.
I would love to hear from you — idea, shoutout, or just a chat about shelf offering. Or if you want me to write on food, culture, identity as well. Or Tamil movies. Reach me at seriouscheats@gmail.com.