2200 words approx. EXCERPTED FROM DIGESTING INDIA—(published in the UK/US as “The Great Indian Food Trip”) by Zac O’Yeah
‘Welcome to Bihar,’ says the student who wants to shake my hand as soon as the train rolls into Patna Junction, the modern incarnation of Pataliputra, the once-upon-a-time headquarters of Mauryan civilisation. ‘I hope you’ll come back again.’
I wouldn’t know. Bihar seems nice but people persistently warned me before this trip: Don’t expect to come back alive from Bihar, they said. Don’t expect any roads, they went on gleefully adding, don’t expect electricity. So, despite the warm welcome by the student on his way to his ‘native’ by the Nepalese border, I am wondering how unwise it might turn out to be a vagabond hereabouts. I can’t help but notice how the railway platform behind the student resembles a freshly ploughed potato-field.
Nevertheless, I’ve always had a soft corner in my heart, and a rough spot in my tummy, for Patna. To the north of town, in Motihari, a house is identified by a concrete sign on the roadside as George Orwell’s birthplace. His father was an opium-tax collector in the Opium Department, a strange British-run government-owned industry devoted to peddling narcotics (which would have landed Orwell’s dad in jail had he been alive today). And so young Orwell spent his first years around here. In adulthood, he worked as a colonial police officer in another remote area – Burma, which falls outside the scope of this book. His novel Nineteen-Eighty-Four coined the expression ‘Big Brother is watching you’ and perhaps it was inspired by the Soviet Union, but apparently it can also be read (alongside his Animal Farm) as a fictive history of Myanmar.
Patna is furthermore the model for EM Forster’s fictional Chandrapore – a city on the Ganges where the ‘very wood seems made of mud, the inhabitants of mud moving. So abased, so monotonous is everything that meets the eye, that when the Ganges comes down it might be expected to wash the excrescence back into the soil. Houses do fall, people are drowned and left rotting, but the general outline of the town persists, swelling here, shrinking there, like some low but indestructible form of life’ he wrote – after touristing in town for some two weeks – and it is here, where much of the action in A Passage to India (written 1912-24) ostensibly takes place.
Except for those pivotal picnic passages in the spooky Barabar caves about 100 kilometres to the south, which he visited in January 1913 and fictionalised as the Marabar Caves, and that literary scholars have been speculating over for nearly a century. (To be precise, the fictional Chandrapore is based on Bankipur, the colonial parts of Patna. A guidebook from the time notes that the ‘modern city contains nothing of much interest to the traveller, except a building called the Gola, which was built for a granary in 1783, but has never been used for that purpose,’ but inside of which ‘there is a most wonderful echo, the best place to hear which is in the middle of the building. As a whispering gallery there is perhaps no such building in the world. The faintest whisper at one end is heard most distinctly at the other.’ This may well have inspired the sound phenomena that spooked the memsahib at Barabar.) Forster was frequently enough quoted as saying, ‘When asked what happened there, I don’t know.’ He visited the caves in a disturbed state of mind and spent much time sobbing in Patna, where his friend Dr. Masood (the novel’s Dr. Aziz) at the time was teaching, which is reflected – or perhaps repressed – in the fictional scene. And which prompted him to write the novel Maurice, upon his return to England, although it was only to be published posthumously.
The only time I went to the caves (in 1992) I too found the caves unnerving – a fat man tried to kidnap me and another man had his throat slit – so understandably I haven’t gone back. In the decades since, I have decoded Forster’s novel as the story of… Ah well, I’ll write about it in due time, but it is basically about cultural misinterpretation when somebody clueless goes where they misunderstand everything without realising that they haven’t understood anything. It is a common phenomenon among tourists – sometimes causing the ecstasy that tourists feel in India, at other times the disappointment they come away with – but this delusional aspect of tourism has not yet been named by psychiatrists. But maybe A Passage to India is a book for India rather than about India, ‘probably the best novel ever written about the country by an Englishman,’ to quote literature professor Harish Trivedi, ‘ an enduring literary monument of the 200 years of British rule in India. It preserves for us human feelings and attitudes from that fraught period as only literature can.’
The director of the sumptuous silverscreen spectacle, David Lean, rejected the real caves as not mystical enough. He worked on the screenplay in New Delhi using elements of Karnataka-born writer Santha Rama Rau’s stage adaptation and set the film in Karnataka instead of north India, shooting mostly in and around Bengaluru’s surrounding rocky landscapes and enigmatic crags. There, a decade before, the wild west-style Hindi blockbuster Sholay had been filmed and, at the time when it was still called Bangalore, the town had a fair amount of milieus suitable for a colonial period cinematic extravaganza – some of the recognisable shooting locations include the city’s palace and the old Bangalore Club.
The contents of the novel’s over-the-top picnic remains another mystery save for one man tippling and another smoking a fag, apart from which there is just a fleetingly referenced porridge dish (khichdi?). One may only speculate what Forster’s characters ate during their last meal before the culture clash – one colonial-era Indian menu devised for English people I study for reference, in a musty autobiography, mentions hilariously named fusion fare such as cutlets, that are not meat slices as Britons might expect, but potato patties. To further befuddle the English, such veg cutlets are also called chops which as per the dictionary means ‘small piece of meat on a bone, usually cut from a sheep or pig’. Or take hotche-potche soup. I’ve no idea what that might be but hazard a guess it is a peppery rasam which, after an unknown ‘Madrasi cook’ added chicken to it, came to be better known as the colonial Mulligatawny Soup. Then they were served cotholathe mouthong (presumably genuine mutton cutlets this time) with poulay (most likely a chicken pullao) and cocks turky (roasted chicken legs?), and maccaroning (hmm… curried pasta?). However, what really takes my cake is a menu of Rice Dumplings with Doll Curry and Cock-Nut Sauce – it took me a while to decipher it as your standard idli-sambar with chutney!
Of what he encountered on Indian menus, Forster was (as already noted in Hyderabad) into biryani which may have resembled aforesaid poulay. And jackfruits were ‘extraordinary’ according to him. But although the picnic in the novel was hosted by Aziz, the friendly Muslim, vegetarian fare was obviously served as a Brahmin cook is mentioned and one of the characters, Professor Godbole would only eat ‘vegetables and rice if cooked by a Brahman; but not meat, not cakes lest they contained eggs, and he would not allow anyone else to eat beef: a slice of beef upon a distant plate would wreck his happiness.’ And I’m reminded of how, when Forster lived in Madhya Pradesh, he got tired of the vegetarian spreads – this picnic perhaps mirrors that frustration?
Patna also inspired the city of Brahmpur in A Suitable Boy, the 1990s hit novel by Vikram Seth, but Mira Nair’s TV-series based on it shunned Patna just like Lean’s movie did decades earlier, and it was primarily canned in Lucknow which was deemed a more suitable backdrop. Despite how it has inspired great novels, Patna isn’t a glossy town, like Paris, or Rome. Clouds of dust hover over the streets. Hogs dig into piles of garbage – this simply isn’t the hottest destination you will read about in award-winning travelogues. Most people, in fact, tell you out that it would have been a better option to come here in the days of the Buddha, who wasn’t born in Bihar (his birthplace is believed to be Lumbini in Nepal) and didn’t die here (he died in Uttar Pradesh) but he spent much of his life here, roaming around an area covering 180,000 square kilometres or twice the size of present-day Bihar.
It seems to have been an interesting time, but no trains in India run that slow that they can arrive late by 2500 years. Yet trying to forget the present, I check out the head attraction at the museum, apparently nicknamed Jadu Ghar (‘magic castle’), on Buddha Road which is a life-sized statue of a well-developed woman known as the Didarganj Yakshi, dating from those times. The museum collection also has statues of Buddha. He was so respected in Pataliputra – filled with good people who were ‘the most distinguished in all India’ according to the ancient Greek geographer Strabo – that one of the sixty-four gates in the city wall was named after him. Perhaps he even strode down Buddha Road, maybe he met and preached to the voluptuous model, I muse in the garden outside the museum. Maybe she ran a tavern in town?
As a matter of fact, Buddhist jataka tales contain India’s earliest food-writing – if one may term it so – giving a fair idea of what foodstuffs were on offer to travellers. Bihar itself is named for the many viharas (monasteries) that once existed in the state, serving both as centres of learning as well as safe accommodation where one might break journey for the night and be provided a wholesome dinner. Many monasteries were virtual food plants with sugar mills and oil presses. KT Achaya, who studied the matter of Buddhist cuisine, mentions chickpeas and various other pulses, condiments such as black mustard seeds and asafoetida, fruits (bananas and grapes), and also sugarcane which remains a major crop in Bihar. Dishes in Buddhist texts that sound tempting include barley-honey balls – laddus? – and staples such as wild rice khichdi and honey-flavoured kanji. A monk who sailed from China to the Nalanda monastery described a menu of rice with boiled barley and peas. Many kinds of flatbreads were part of the diet, salads and fruit, and – hold your breath – non-veg.
Meat of pigeon was familiar fare, perhaps braised in fruit juice like some Asiatic Buddhists still cook them – at one modern monastery inhabited by monks from Cambodia, the chatty monks I met were cooking what looked like pigeon, squeezing some esoteric fruit juice onto it, but it turned out to be a chicken curry. Some monks, during the Buddha’s lifetime, brewed a potent beverage known as Pigeon’s Liquor (not made out of pigeon’s poop, as you might think, but it was a fortified palm wine thus named due to its somewhat murky greyish colour). This practise stopped in 520BCE when the Buddha found an old monk lying drunk outside a monastery. Non-veg was also flavoured with lime juice – limes were special fruits for Buddhists and are depicted in the cave paintings of Ajantha, and it were Indian monks who introduced limes to China in the 4th century.
Before achieving enlightenment and after having starved for weeks, the Buddha is said to have eaten a traditional Bihari rice pudding which opened his eyes to the futility of extreme asceticism. And thereafter his diet was quite typical of any Indian – rice and dhal, occasionally non-veg items such as fish and eggs, as well as sweet items. He is even quoted as describing what to him counted as soulfood, ‘I recommend food made out of rice, barley, wheat, all kinds of beans, ghee, oil of sesame, honey, sugarcane, sugar, and other seasonal foods which are full of soul qualities…’ Such foods were considered rich in merits, virtue, wisdom and they warded off evils. He urged people to embrace moderation and self-control, not to lust too much after delicacies that were bad for karma, as all craving was back in those days before consumerism became our modern religion. Statistical experts have concluded, after studying the meals described in Buddhist literature, that he was 40 per cent vegan, 54 per cent vegetarian and only every twentieth meal he had was non-veg.
Most intriguingly, the Buddha is believed to have spent time in the company of cannibals as he in the Lankavatara Sutra discussed the problems of cannibalism faced by a king whose ‘excessive fondness for meat, his greed to be served with it, stimulated his taste for it to the highest degree so that he ate human flesh.’ This of course alienated a ruler from his kinsmen if they suspected that he might cook them. ‘In consequence he had to renounce his throne and dominion and to suffer great calamities because of his passion for meat,’ says Buddha as he advocated the benefits of vegetarianism. Though this was of little use as the monarch’s rebelling subjects killed him in the end.
If the Buddha has living descendants, it is reasonable to assume that they can be encountered in present-day Patna’s restaurants.
