Diwali has always been a big event at home. I come from a mixed heritage. My mother is a Punjabi which means there has been a lot of influence of Punjabi festive food culture. Diwali meant dahi vada, namak pare (nimki in Bengali) and laddoos or some kind of meetha being made and then there would be chivda. On the Bengali side of the family, Diwali is marked with Kali Pujo. Some fast all day and the puja happens at night after which prasad is served. Among the items is niramish mutton curry, that’s mutton curry without onion-garlic, also called proshadi mangsho. These are two vastly different cultures and we celebrate them both.
When I was seven, back in the 1990s, my family moved to Nigeria and we ended up living in a really small town called Owerri. Nothing remotely Indian was available there, my parents would drive to a town 150 kilometres away to get dals and masalas. My memory of festival food in those days is of my mother making everything at home, whether on Diwali, Holi or Durga Puja. Everyone did that and then there would be small celebrations among the Indian community there.
Essentially, we were taking a piece of India with us and trying to recreate it in lands far away. But because I grew up in a place where Christmas and Easter were major events, I carry memories of those festivals. We would be invited over to friends’ homes, there would be a big Christmas feast but different from the one in India, and it was common practice to gift each other hens, turkeys and ducks. My mother drew the line when my brother and I were gifted a piglet; he had to be sent back.
I divide my time now between Mumbai and the mountains of Uttarakhand, in the Tons Valley. Besides the popular festivals we know such as Diwali, Holi and Christmas, people there have a festival calendar quite different from the one in cities, filled with little festivals, melas, and tyohars traditional to the area. This is true across India where local traditions and cultures have their own festivals or celebrate popular festivals in their own ways.
In Sikkim, Dharamsala and places with Tibetan Buddhists, Losar, or the Tibetan New Year, is usually celebrated during spring in the month of February or March. In Ladakh, though, it is celebrated in December. The legend goes that King Jamyang Namgyal, in the 17th century, celebrated Losar early to avoid going on an expedition during the festival. Local chieftains or oracles advised him to set out after Losar, so he celebrated it earlier in the calendar and then left for the war. Since then, it is celebrated two months earlier every year in Ladakh. The dishes traditionally made during Losar are blood sausages or gyuma and khapse (cookies). This tradition is gradually getting lost but in the yak herder community in the villages there, it is still a practice to slaughter a yak, cook different parts of it for the feast, and make blood sausages.
In the Tons Valley, besides Holi and Diwali, one of the important festivals celebrated is Tyohar every January which is eight days long. This is the coldest time of the year with temperatures dipping below zero degrees. Tyohar is celebrated as a marker of Uttarayana which is the southward movement of the sun. In the mountains, the sun and heat are very important. The festival brings a feeling that the coldest time of the year has been reached and the days will get warmer. During winter, it is natural to be cooped up inside our houses, not be social, because it is extremely cold outside and it can be depressing. This festival brings everyone out of their homes. The practice is to visit each other’s homes, married daughters go back to their parents’ house, and on every day of Tyohar, one dish is cooked in all houses in the valley.
Photo: Shubhra Chatterji
One of these is Doodh Bhaat which is basically rice cooked with milk, like a kheer, but not necessarily sweet. It can be served with salt or sugar; people can choose what they want to put into it. Another dish is goshua, which is like a ragi or wheat dough preparation almost like Ravioli. A sweet mixture of jaggery and bhangjeera (perilla seeds) is made as a stuffing for the ragi or wheat rotis. Some add walnuts, posto or khus khus, which are warming ingredients, and stuff this into the goshua before dropping them into boiling water. The cooking technique is similar to that of Ravioli. Halwa is made on one day and, on the last day, a Ram is slaughtered. Every part of it is cooked and blood sausages are prepared as is done in Ladakh with Yak intestines and blood.
Across Maharashtra, similarly, a lot of communities celebrate the Jatra in honour of local deities or saints during which pigs or goats or buffaloes are slaughtered. In Bihar, the Chhath Puja is celebrated in October-November and, in Rajasthan, Teej in July-August. Each has its own tradition but the common aspect across these festivals is that the food made or associated with them is seasonal, a celebration of the produce available at that time. Many of our festivals are centred around harvests because India is largely agrarian.Baisakhi or Lohri are harvest festivals. Similarly, rice, dals and rajma are harvested around Navratri. Festival food is rooted in the produce available at that time. Lesser-known festivals also celebrate local produce – certain grains or plants are planted during some festivals, harvests of others flood the markets at other festivals.
Diwali across India
In Uttarakhand, Diwali is celebrated ‘late’ because, as the legend goes, the news of Rama’s return to Ayodhya took time to reach the mountains. So, our Diwali up there happens a week later. Jupti is made from pine tree sticks which are oily and easily catch fire; this is the local phuljhadi. Since autumn sets in, we harvest rice, dals and ragi, make halwa, rajma chawal and Goshua. In Punjab, of course, we have halwas, ladoos and dahi vada which is a Punjabi Diwali spread. Across Maharashtra, people make tons of faral, an array of sweets and savouries in which besan ladoos are a must.
In the South, the oil bath or abhyanga snaan is mandatory on Diwali morning and bhakhshanam, like faral, is a must. Here, especially in Tamil Nadu, many communities mark Navratri with different kinds of sundal, a light stir-fry with legumes, every day for the nine days. Across Andhra Pradesh, Bathukamma is celebrated at the time of Navratri with dishes made of rice such as coconut rice, lemon rice, sweet rice and so on. In Gujarat, on Dussehra, the tradition is to have fafda and jalebi. In Bengal, on the 10th and final day of Dussehra, there’s mutton curry and, through the festival, bhog is served every day at the pandals. Across the North, on Ashtami, it’s always halwa-puri-chole.
What comes across through all my travels is that food traditions are beautifully diverse in India. And one of the best places to see it would be a housing society in Mumbai because people here come from across the country. It is interesting to see how one’s neighbours celebrate different festivals and take in the aromas wafting from different houses. My Mumbai neighbours, with their roots in Jharkhand, sent over freshly made puas for Diwali.
Photo: Shubhra Chatterji
Forgotten Diwali dishes, caste and purity
In a strange way, festivals have played a part in keeping the tradition of certain foods alive like my family having dahi vada at Diwali as a ritual, others making gujiya or karanji on Holi, or specific festivals like Sheetal Shashti when one has only cold food. Honestly, festivals have been important to keeping food traditions alive.
However, there’s a crucial need to look at our food practices from the lens of caste too. The idea of people celebrating and eating together, though romantic, is a fake one. Even during Tyohar in the mountains, different castes celebrate it at the temple on different days; there are particular days when the Harijan community is allowed in the temple to celebrate and have their feast. Although it is a time of community gathering, caste lines are strictly drawn. It is always the privileged or the oppressor caste people who have their celebration first, then pass down the leftovers to the oppressed castes. From the caste lens, there is nothing romantic or nice about how we celebrate many festivals.
There’s another less-talked about aspect about festival foods – women and their labour. They are the ones labouring in their kitchens to make mountains of faral, fulfilling patriarchal expectations set down in the name of tradition. Even today, in cities, there is a sentiment that it is not right if one does not make faral at home but people miss the point that even when you outsource the preparation of dishes, you are still celebrating the same food.
Another aspect is the commonly-held misconception that all festival food does not have onion-garlic; I am not even getting into the whole ‘pure vegetarian food’ debate here. Festival food is varied across India and resonates most with the local traditions, climate and legends. The ‘pure’ and no-onion-garlic rules have been created to separate the food of one caste from another. From the perspective that all food offered at temples can only be cooked by Brahmins, temples are honestly among the most casteist places; people from other ‘lower’ castes are not even allowed across the threshold of temples.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Archiving and documenting food
I am wedded to the idea of ‘history on a plate’ where one’s history and identity are linked and reflected with what’s on one’s plate. It’s a person’s story. For example, my name is Shubhra Chatterjee which gives the impression of being a Bengali but I am half-Punjabi, have lived in Mumbai/Maharashtra for the past 23 years, married to a man from Tamil Nadu, and we have a home in Uttarakhand. Where does all of this come together? More than in my name, attire, or languages, these influences reflect in the food on my plate. A typical meal is a mix – rajma from Uttarakhand, Govind Bhog rice from Bengal with baby mango pickle which is traditionally Tamil, thecha from Maharashtra. And the plate tells you who I am.
So, I believe it is important to preserve and document what we eat, at regular meals and festivals, whether by shooting photographs or videos, sharing them on social media, making documentaries or videos for YouTube or OTT platforms or TV, and discussing them. I have been doing this since 2010 with the television series ‘Chakh Le India’ and many others since. Travelling around the country for 65 episodes made me think about why people eat and celebrate the way they do, and I believed that it was important to document as much as possible. In Mathura, for example, it is not just the making of the pedas but the associated history and stories that lend them a unique identity of the city itself.
In fact, the entire history of humankind has been – or can be – written by people’s need to eat – during festivals or at other times, during wars or peace. Man’s need to own land was also driven by the need to grow food. From agrarian societies, we got nation-states, then villages and clans and families all of which have been stamped with – can be unravelled or peeled off layer by layer – through food. After all, it binds us all.
Shubhra Chatterji is a well-known researcher, writer, and filmmaker. She has created several narrative non-fiction series notably Lost Recipes, and Chakh Le India and, most recently, directed the docu-series Rainbow Rishta for Amazon Prime Video India. She has also authored the experimental play ‘New India Lodge’ as an immersive theatrical dining experience. Presently, her research focuses on Food, Gender, and Representation, with a specific interest in subaltern food histories. Shubhra is also a co-founder of Tons Valley Shop.
Cover photo: Shubhra Chatterji
