Food For the Gods

When I was young, I looked forward to the ten days of Dussehra, not because I was religious but because each meal was a feast. The dishes are mentioned in Cook and See: ‘payasam [kheer], amavadai [vada] and fried applams[ papad] are a must’ in addition to buttermilk soup, koottu, pachadi, dal, rasam and rice. For Saraswati puja, Bengal gram sundal [split chickpeas], red gram dal vadai, payasam, rice and ghee, and sojji appam, accompanied the regular meal of buttermilk soup and the other dishes mentioned above. The Deepavali feast, which followed Dussehra, included payasam, curd pachadi, salt kosumali, sweet kosumalli, one curry, koottu, buttermilk, pithily, rasam, boiled dal, amavadai and applam (fried) chips. And for Sankranti (the homage to the Sun God), two types of pongal (made of rice and split mung dal) and tempered with either savoury (ginger, pepper, cumin, green chillies) or sweet (jaggery, cashews, raisins, cloves, nutmeg) ingredients, soft medhu vada(for the toothless sun god) and sweet potatoes were de rigueur.

I knew that Ganesha liked kozhakattai, a steamed rice flour dumpling (kodak) filled with either coconut and jaggery, or black gram dal. Krishna enjoyed two types of cheedai—a sweet one and a savoury one. My personal preference was the sweet variety made of rice flour, urad dal flour, jaggery, cardamom, butter and white sesame seeds, which are rolled into small balls and fried. Lord Nataraja, on the other hand, enjoyed kozhambu prepared with broken beans, pumpkin and ash gourd, but I didn’t much care for it. Drumsticks and ribbed gourd, however, were not to be used in any dish offered to the cosmic dancer.

But these deities did not display the same preferences in other geographical locations in India. Some dishes— like a modak filled with coconut and sugar or jaggery for Ganesha—remain the same, but not others. In Maharashtra, batatayachi bhaji (potato curry made with minimal spices), varan bhaat (made with toovar dal), moong ki khichadi are served during Ganesh Chathurti. For Krishna Janmashtami in Mathura, the families eat only one meal, which consists of fruit, mithai (a sweet), curd, kuttu singhare ki puri or pakori, kasaar (a sweet made of jaggery and wheat flour) and charnamrit (made of yoghurt, honey, milk, puffed lotus seeds, coconut and water from the Ganges). If one looks at the dishes prepared by the non-idol worshipping Muslims, some ingredients and dishes, for example, vermicelli kheer and pilaf during Eid, are common to both religions.

It got me thinking about the relationship between a ritual feast and cultural memory. Do we, by partaking of a prescribed set of dishes during a festival, connect with our cultural past? If indologist ED Bassuk is right that in India ‘ancient religious man connected God with animals which he revered and feared, so he attributed God-like qualities to these animals, creating theriomorphic deities’, then can one say that the purpose of associating the notion of a favourite food with a god was to make the deity more approachable? Bassuk cites the example of Indra who manifests in the form of a bull or ram, and of Varuna who comes out of the point of an arrow and becomes a bull. So, a modak performs the function of providing a bridge between us and the deity. Or is the explanation more complicated?

Food is a central motif in the ancient Vedic texts. The gods, in a Vedic ritual, eat by smelling the aroma. A food offering made to the fire, which transforms it into medha, ‘juice, essence, aroma’ and asu, ‘life force’. Immortality, an unending existence in the next world, too, is articulated in terms of food. According to Carlos Lopez, in Food and Immortality in the Veda, Vedic poets understood life and society in terms of the basic struggle of acquiring food. Food itself becomes the most basic conceptual tool by which the functioning of the human being, society and the cosmos are understood.

Ha u! Ha u! Ha u!
I am Food, I am Food, I am Food.
I eat food, I eat food, I eat food.
I am a fame-maker! I am a fame-maker! I am a fame-
maker! I am the first born of Truth,
born before the gods
in the navel of what is immortal.
The one who gives me
he, indeed, has aided me.
I am food.
I eat him who eats the food.
I have conquered the whole universe.
I am like the light in the firmament
—The Taitriya Upanishad, 3.10

Patrick Olivelle, the renowned scholar of Sanskrit and a translator of the Upanishad, points out that the central questions in the Dharmashastra pertain to food—what one is permitted to eat, how one should prepare it, from whom one can accept it and with whom one can eat. The Satapatha Brahmana uses food and eating to classify all reality: ‘food and eaters of food, that’s all there is! …That which is cooked belongs to the Gods.’ Similarly, the Rig Veda (10.90.4) divides all things into those that eat and those that do not. This classification, argues Vedic scholar Brian K Smith, is in reality a practical observation about a world where the powerful eat the weak. The Vedic rites and hymns pertain to the question of how to become the eater rather than the eaten. ‘The eater is superior to his food, in society as well as in nature…the [castes] are divided into eaters and food.’ Kshatriyas and all the lower classes are food for Brahmins, and Kshatriyas in turn eat the common folk, the Vaishya, but cannot eat Brahmins. Also witness the association of each varna with a sacrificial animal. Brahmin: goat; Kshatriya: horse; Vaishya: cow; Shudra: sheep. The Rig Vedic equivalent of hell is a reverse world and has an inverted food chain where the sinner becomes the food of what he ate during his lifetime.

Worldwide, the food served to gods was based on taste and domestication; the early agriculturalists grew crops whose bitterness and toxins could be reduced. In ancient Egypt, bread and beer were authorised offerings to the gods. The Rig Veda associates Indra and Vishnu with ‘a brew of milk and rice’, and the Sutras mention rice and barley as the principal offerings to the gods.

While power is a central motif in the Vedic narrative, the oral tradition speaks of food as a general concept. The complicated pairing of a particular dish with a deity occurs later and has been explained by scholars as codes reflecting the configuration of power. Anthropologist Mary Douglas shows us the way: treat food as a social code, and the messages it encodes will be found in the pattern of social relations being expressed. ‘The message is about different degrees of hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, boundaries and transactions across the boundaries.’

By this logic, if we understand ritual as forming structures that refer to one another and are differentiated in relation to one another, then the change in the food habits of a deity when it is worshipped by other castes, groups and geographies, becomes more comprehensible. These propositions—you are what you eat; your god is given what you cook; what you cook for your god is governed by what is available to you seasonally, geographically and by the rituals of your society—sum up the story.

Treating the diversity of offerings as a code illuminates the power relationships between groups. Just as there are castes who refrain from eating meat and those that do, there are deities that only eat vegetarian food, while other gods are non- vegetarian, and may even prefer sacrificial fare. Religion scholar CJ Fuller points out that some high vegetarian deities such as Meenakshi and Sundareswarar, served by Brahmin priests, are conceived by the lower castes as dependent on the non- vegetarian village deities such as Chellattaman. Chellattaman is brought in a chariot once a year to the Sundareswarar temple where Brahmin priests perform the coronation of the deity. This interdependence and differentiation at the level of divinity is replicated in the vegetarian and non-vegetarian food offerings to the two deities by members of the two castes. In another example, rich and powerful people donated food to the temple in Tirupati, and by doing so, partook of the deity’s royal authority, and established leadership over a constituency.

With the dawn of a technologically complex age and its associated madness of dealing with events, messages and people on a minute-by-minute basis, we have less time to continue the tradition of preparing an elaborate ritual fare. But by failing to keep up with our cultural memories, we may be losing a vital part of what makes us who we are. This, of course, begs the question: can we retain a cultural memory without replicating the power (caste) relationships inherent in these rituals? I think so. Just as one does not have to be a ‘believer’ to participate in a ritual feast, so too can one continue to recreate the ritual feasts without adhering to coded caste hierarchies.

About The Author

Shylashri Shankar

Shylashri Shankar is the author of Turmeric Nation - A Passage Through India's Tastes