‘Where the hand is, the gaze follows’
Text by Farah Yameen
The hand is understated in media representations of cooking. Photo by Vivaan Rupani / Pexels
Four-year-old Hamid is at the Eid fair, three paise in his pocket to spend on himself. He buys no toys, nor gulab jamuns or revadis. How could he spend on something so flighty when all he has is three paise? Instead, he returns home to his grandmother with a pair of tongs which cost him all his Eid allowance. She is angry. Why tongs? What would he do with tongs? Hamid surprises her with his answer: so she wouldn’t burn her fingers making rotis for him.
The Hindi author Premchand ends this widely popular short story on a lachrymose note. We never know the fate of the tongs. Does Hamid’s grandmother adopt them to throw rotis into the fire and nudge them out? I am tempted to think that she put it lovingly on the edge of the stove, but am unable to imagine her using them. I have had tongs for eight years now, and I cannot bring myself to use them for rotis. The haptic feedback of a roti on the tava as I press into the centre to encourage even cooking is a necessary assurance. I imagine Hamid’s grandmother fiddling with the tongs; perhaps flipping a roti too soon, ripping its edge with the harsh metal, uncertain of the appropriate pressure, and putting it away for the certainty that her hands offer. I know I have.
The sense of touch, specifically the touch of the hand, is remarkably understated in media representations of cooking that is crowded with a surfeit of equipment. Yet a number of cultures rely on touch as a primary sensory feedback to literally and metaphorically create mazaa or rasa – words of Persian and Sanskrit origin respectively – that can be translated as ‘flavour’, but also (and simultaneously) ‘essence’, ‘emotion’, ‘pleasure’, and ‘expression’. Mazaa and rasa are all these at once, and yet still more than their sum. In his upcoming book, Food in the Making of the Indian Nation, food historian Pushpesh Pant argues for the ‘cooking is an art’ aphorism and offers Bharata Muni’s oft-quoted verses from his treatise on the the performance arts, Natyashastra:
Yato hastah tato drishti,
Yato drishti tato manah
Yato manah tato bhaava,
Yato bhaava tato rasa
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Where the hand is, the gaze follows
Where the gaze is, the heart follows
Where the heart is, the emotion follows
Where the emotion is, the rasa follows
In cooking, as in the performative arts, the confluence of hands, eyes and heart creates a taste experience that is more than just a biochemical reaction in our mouth. What we taste is a combination of memory triggers, emotional states and our perception of the hands that have cooked our food. Neither joy nor disgust is produced isolatedly in response to flavour. They are produced in our relationships with the hands that cook, including our own.
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On the Forgotten Food project led by Sheffield University, a number of my women interlocutors often ask when I find the time to cook. Most often, I don’t. Like many middle-class families in India, I employ a cook, a remarkably skilled one. This is not surprising to them. Does she come twice a day, so we have fresh meals at all times? I respond in the negative. She comes in once in the morning and we eat the same food for lunch and dinner. All their inquiries have been leading up to the final and most consequential question: Do I at least make fresh rotis for my husband? Negative again. It is rare for a question to follow this response. They make excuses for my negligence. Their concern here is not only for eating fresh, but also for at least part of the food to have been produced by hands that unite with the gaze and heart to produce rasa.
There is also a murkier anxiety about who cooks; as with everything in India, caste tensions couched in hygiene politics are quick to make an appearance. Kent, a water purifier brand in India, put out an advertisement in May last year, at the onset of the COVID pandemic, with the question: “Are you allowing your maid to knead atta dough by hand? Her hands may be infected.” The atta maker sold by the company offered a solution to the problem of this ‘infected touch’ with no compromises on ‘health’ and ‘purity’. A subsequent outcry to its evidently casteist positioning led to the ad being taken down, but the deep-seated bigotry that the ad echoed with such nonchalance voiced questions that caste-conscious homes have always asked of themselves.
It is universally accepted that outsourcing the preparation of food to hands other than that of the woman of the house is a compromise not only in care but in the morality implicit in the feeding act. A now removed post on a Facebook group dedicated to food and travel asked: “Do you let someone else cook at home, or do you prefer to do it yourself?” The overwhelming answer, largely from women respondents (although the group has a number of active members that identify as men) is that they do it themselves, even when they hire someone, because they (mothers, sisters, daughters, daughters-in-law, wives) do it with ‘love’.
In the subcontinent, women cooking for their families is often directly equated with care. Photo by Usman Yousaf / Pexels.
This singular association of women with feeding and the glorification of the hand that cooks were conscious components of the project of nation-building. In his paper, academic Partha Chatterjee unpacks the ‘contradictory pulls on nationalist ideology’, where male reformers sought to distinguish India by pitting its traditional values and spiritual essence against the ‘material’ cultural values of the colonisers. As upwardly-mobile, middle-class, upper-caste men sought to acquire scientific knowledge, the purpose of women’s education was to make them better homemakers. By the 1930s, Mary Hancock writes, educational institutions had Home Science courses meant to teach women to be scientific and rational in their domestic roles. Lady Irwin College in Delhi, the first institution to dedicatedly teach Home Science included ‘mothercraft’ as part of its curriculum in addition to book keeping, elementary anatomy, nutrition, laundry and other subjects. Simultaneously, women’s “labour was aestheticized”, as Utsa Ray illustrates in her book Culinary Culture in Colonial India. Instead of household chores being simply an activity expected from women, they became acts of preserving the Indian ethos.
While Ray and scholars like Tanika Sarkar have focused on literature in upper-caste Hindu Bengal, Urdu literature (also upper-caste) and the educational movements among Muslims in the same period in North India showed a similar inclination towards definition of the role of women in the domestic space. Historian Asiya Alam highlights this proclivity to define the new family in her analysis of Gudar ka Lal a novel by Akbari Begum on the subject of polygyny, where there “is an increasing emphasis on motherhood and the role of women as child-rearers. Tasks that were hitherto dispensed to servants, fathers, neighbours, relatives and others, are now gathered up under the rubric of ‘maternal responsibility’, a significant part of which was the duty of nourishing the family.” There was a consensus that women’s reluctance to feed the household with their own hand, and the outsourcing of this care, especially to cooks, was a threat to society. In novels, cookbooks and advisory journals, prescriptions for the ideal women often began with laments for the disinclination they showed towards domesticity. Consider this translated introduction from Maniram Shamra’s Pak Chandrika (1926), which historian Saumya Gupta presented at a conference in 2019:
“Whose heart shall not grieve to witness the same women who were deeply dedicated to the culinary arts display such revulsion towards it? … The effort with which Arya women prepare food, and the faith and purity with which wives, daughters, sisters and other women relatives cook and serve the food, can never be expected to be matched by a cook who is paid for it.”
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The idea burrowed deep into the collective subconscious and in the articulation of the hand-food relationship. In April this year, food researcher Shubhra Chatterji, who runs the Instagram handle @historywali, asked, “Do you know of a word similar to Nafas in any Indian language?” The question referred to a New York Times article by Reem Kassis on ‘nafas’: that inexplicable quality in a person that imparts their food with inimitable flavour. The word translates literally to ‘breath’ or ‘spirit’ in Arabic. For someone to possess nafas is for them to breathe soulfulness into food. Responses to Chatterji’s questions were almost all related with the hand: In Marathi it is ‘sugran’, very similar to ‘sughad’, which is used liberally in North India for women whose hands are especially skilled in the culinary arts. Although the word itself is not gendered, its associations often are. Bangla (haather gun), Tulu (kai the lakshana/gunna), Telugu (chethi gunam), Kannada (kai guna), Malayalam(kai punnam), Tamil (kai mannam), Marathi (hatacha gun), Konkani (haath gun), Hindi (haath ka swad/ras), Urdu (haat men mazaa/lazzat) and all have phrases that refer to the ‘taste of the hand’.
It is not accidental that phrases that describe the possession of that ineluctable quality often refer to the hand. This is embodied learning that transfers through proximity. When I ask women how they first learnt to cook, the most common response is ‘by observing’. Women who had rarely cooked before they entered nuptial bonds, found themselves simulating hands and bodies that they had observed in the kitchens they grew up in. Delhi based gynaecologist and obstetrician Suhail Fatima, looks at her fingers and says, “I realised at some point that my ring finger and middle fingers join together when I am cooking. My mother’s fingers would form themselves like so when she cooked and I must have adopted that form thinking it would enable me to cook like my mother.”
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Professional cooking in India, on the other hand, actively distanced itself from the intimacies of touch in favour of the clinical values of precision and hygiene, both of which are achieved through the introduction of implements. Some of the first television programmes in the country introduced the chopping board and chef’s knives to an awed audience that is given to aerial chopping, their fingers serving as the surface against which vegetables are chopped. Daawat, the earliest cooking show on national television, had men manoeuvring knives, whisks, and spatulas on spotless counters. Cookbooks by Tarala Dalal, the grande dame of the Indian cookbook revolution, gave precise metric and American measures for cooking. Sanjeev Kapoor’s countertop in Khana Khazana, the longest running cookery show in India, arrayed cutesy ramekins with spices that he spooned out in exact measures into glossy vessels. Indian kitchens, where two teaspoons were rarely the same size, adopted the recipes ingeniously by simply replacing spoon and metric measures with the practiced sleight of hand, famously known as andaaz in Hindi/Urdu.
At the same time, the fascination with sleek kitchens built in imitation of those in the first world, with a diverse and sparkling array of appliances and equipment, has endured for at least a century. In Atiya's Journeys: A Muslim Woman from Colonial Bombay to Edwardian Britain, an early 19th century travelogue translated by Siobhan T. Lambert Hurley and Sunil Sharma, we read a description of an English kitchen and its touch-independent cooking:
“Pots and pans are placed on a gas stove, that is, iron chulha, at whatever temperature is desired. Food is prepared with such speed, cleanliness, and low cost. Cleanliness is to the highest degree—the hand hardly touches anything. ”
The western cooking aesthetic and table etiquette created a complex class aspiration, most visible under scrutiny. The middle-class scrambled to acquire maximum dexterity in employing forks and spoons when eating in restaurants, looking askance at neighbouring tables, nervous that they’d be caught short of skill. Table knives were confusing. Until quite late in the ‘90s, most Indian restaurants served a limited menu of North Indian Mughlai, Indo-Chinese, and South Indian food, none of which required a knife. My father, determined to use every available piece of cutlery on the table, took to slicing dosas with the knife and using the fork to shovel the unwieldy morsel in. But fingers achieve what spoons cannot: combining elements on the plate in perfect ratios for each morsel, feeling for bones through fish flesh, picking meat off the bone, judging heat and texture before the food is eaten. The ability to use cutlery, on the other hand, remains a class pass with significant currency. In stay-at-home mother Farzana’s natal home in rural Delhi, meals are served to several people on a single platter over a dastarkhan (a cloth spread on the floor or the bed), and everyone dives in with hands. Her daughters, raised in the city, wince at this lack of ‘manners’ in their grandmother’s home. They prefer their own plates, spoons in hand, eating daintily from their rice and dal.
This socialisation into using cutlery was abetted by a call to improved food hygiene. The subcontinent already had religiously sanctioned practices of extreme cleanliness and purity in the kitchen, second only to the temple. This took the form of purifying the kitchen from all polluting elements, including the touch of an ‘other’. Additionally, in Muslim homes like mine, complex notions of ‘paak’ (clean) and ‘napaak’ (unclean) fostered advisories on the amount of water and number of washes it took to render something clean. The scientific rationality that the notion of hygiene bestowed upon the fixation with purity manifested itself most peculiarly in the obsession with the hands of street vendors.
Despite misgivings about hygiene, there has always been a wide consensus that street food doesn’t taste the same off the street. Photo courtesy: Paper Boat drinks
It is uncertain what prompted this obsession, and my evidence is purely anecdotal, but when I was about ten years of age, everyone from my mother to the ICSE science curriculum designers was warning us off eating at street food stalls. The descriptions from teachers were graphic: blackened, germ-infested nails, sweat trickling from hands and into potatoes mashed for the puchka, mucous wiped on the back of the hand making its way into chutneys. There was, however, a consensus that street food did not taste quite the same off the street. The women of the home, whose hands could achieve miracles, could never achieve the flavours of the hands of the street vendor with — and despite — all their unsavoury imagery. The joke was that it was the germs and the sweat that produced that distinct taste.
The adventure and romance of eating on the street is a powerful validation of touch, as a momentary breach in insularity across caste and class. A chance meal at a vending stall is a simultaneous challenge to fanatically-preserved caste purity and the gods of gustatory disorders, and the famous (if unverified) Indian immunity has been built at these vending stalls, which thrive in spite — and in the face of — the desperately uneven access to clean water and sanitation facilities.
The adventure and romance of eating on the street is a momentary breach in insularity across caste and class. Photo courtesy: Paper Boat drinks
While I was sneakily eating at chaat thelas (or carts) in the nineties, Bollywood heroes were tearfully lauding ma ke hath ka khana (literally, food from the mother’s hand) and seeking women who could replicate that taste and produce happily ever afters. Commercials for mass produced food and kitchenware positioned themselves as accessories to achieving this ideal. Dalda (the ‘vegetable ghee’ brand) famously went by the line, ‘Mothers who care, use Dalda’. Adperson Nitish Mukherjee reflects that Maggi ads over the years have struck the fine balance between no-fuss Maggi prep and the mother's thoughtful addition of vegetables to the noodles.
Nonetheless, millions of households across the country continued to be nostalgic for the ‘simple rural past’, an idea that emerged in the colonial period and has firmly established itself since. LPG was a late entrant into most middle-class households, and despite the advertisements on TV, a conviction persisted that the taste of food was proportional to the labour invested in it. Mother’s Recipe, which sells a wide range of pickles, pastes and ready-to-eat foods, capitalised on this nostalgia, marketing itself as a mass-produced product that replicated the taste of the mother’s hands. By the late ‘90s and noughties, ‘handcrafted’ had been packaged as an aspirational idea. In a country that largely continues to buy its food unpackaged, descriptors such as handcrafted and artisanal became an urban upwardly-mobile, middle-class buying ethic. The suggestion is that the ‘simple, no-chemical, non-toxic’ life can be bought, should one have the disposable income, and that it is better than the ghastly uniformity of mass-produced food created on emotionless conveyor belts. All rasa comes from emotion.
In Uttarakhand, Pushpesh Pant tells me, there is a village called Hathrasiya. The story goes that it was a village of Brahmin cooks who prepared an elaborate feast for the local sovereign. The king was so delighted by their skill that he conferred on them the title ‘hathrasiya’ (or those who have rasa in their hands). The title is an acknowledgement that food lives in this intimate osmotic relationship with the hands that make it, soaking up their love and warmth, but also their malice and resentment. Perhaps our anxious need for the ‘made-with-love’ assurance stems from the fear of absorbing the rage and misery of food made by tired, dispirited, calloused hands. All hands tire. This includes both those that are intimately familiar to us — the hands of mothers, wives and sisters, and those that are strange — labouring hands that we recoil from. And all hands know love. Reams could be filled with words on food as a labour of love, but it is the untethering of labour and love that dangerously minimises either the emotion or the work that is the act of cooking.
The phrases in different languages were contributed by various people whose names/instagram handles are mentioned in order of appearance: the.homely.kitchen, Shyni Shetty/Shreyas, itsmeanu_r,Manasi R Kumar, Anushree Arunkumar, Lakshmi Iyer, lubudimulgi, Renuka Nadkarni
