"Hatred in the Belly" or How We Celebrate the Day We Got a Constitution

Yesterday in the post, a copy of Hatred in the Belly published by the Ambedkar Age Collective.

It's a book I've only dipped into but I would recommend it to anyone interested in the debate around the appropriation of discourse about caste. 

Okay, let me rephrase that: when Arundhati Roy wrote ... actually, what was it that she wrote? An introduction? An essay appended to the beginning of Ambedkar's Annihilation of Caste?

Begin again: A couple of years ago, Navayana published what it called "The Annotated Critical Edition" of Ambedkar's Annihilation of Caste. [I won't link to the Amazon page; you can google it for yourself and have a laugh at how A.Roy is listed as the Illustrator of the book. This after people protested how online retailers were listing Roy as the AUTHOR of the work. Can we talk about appropriation?]

Round Table India and many other dalit writers, artists, academics had lengthy critiques about this shameless appropriation [see above] and - worse - shoddy reading of Ambedkar's work which, for some mysterious reason, gave more footage to Gandhi than it did to Ambedkar.

Yes.

All of that excellent material online, but nothing available to people with no knowledge about Round Table India.

So the Ambedkar Age Collective gathered and curated a lot of the material into a book that goes against the grain of what a mainstream publisher would call 'saleable'. It has illustrations, poems, essays, conversations, transcripts of social media interactions - it attempts, in fact, to bring offline, the nature of discussion and debate conducted online.

With a brief Introduction by Kuffir Nalgundwar and Anu Ramdas [who can be found on FB] that provides a context to how the book came to be, it begins with a poem that says in essence what I think the rest of the book will elaborate via different approaches:

But what I don't understand is
this one thing - 
In the name of 'solidarity'
Will you do just anything you like?
Using the parachute of your social privileges
Will you land and install yourself ahead of this caravan too?
And tell us
How to walk?
How to think?

This is especially relevant when you notice that in the wake of Rohith Vemula's death at the University of Hyderabad on the 17th, and through the subsequent protests and debates, how many articles that have appeared in the mainstream media have been by savarna journalists explaining caste to the rest of the world. [With no links, because who wants to give them more airtime, and off the top of my head, there's been Ananya Vajpeyi, Shiv Vishwanathan, Mohan Guruswamy, Manu Joseph, PB Mehta.]

Against that, there've been some great pieces by Meena Kandasamy, Yashica Dutt and her Dalit Discrimination tumblr and this especially moving piece by Rohith Vemula's transgender friend, Karthik Bittu Kondiah. 

Why I mention all this in the context of Hatred in the Belly is that while it may not be news to most people that discrimination and atrocities against dalits continue, it might be news that in the recent amplification of these atrocities, there is an attempt on the part of savarna 'intellectuals' to hijack the narrative and to curate the discourse about caste.

When, really, it would just be better to shut up and listen.

(As a minor aside, when I tried to make this point in the lead up to a recent poetry reading at Lamakaan - which was billed as an evening of protest poetry, coincidentally scheduled a few days after Rohith's suicide - I got caught in a hilarious but also frustrating correspondence with the manager of Lamakaan, who thought I was saying I didn't want to bring up the matter of the suicide during the reading. Nope. I was saying this was the best time for me to not read and that they should get a dalit poet to read instead. But, as I said, that is another story that shall probably never be told).

And let's not forget that today is Republic Day. Automatically a good day to think about Ambedkar, his writings, and the interpretation of it by those to whom he spoke in his lifetime.

Oh - and go get Hatred in the Belly. You're unlikely to see reviews of it in the papers or elsewhere. When I'm done reading it, I will write about it here.

Review: Gogu Shyamala's Father May Be An Elephant And Mother Only A Small Basket, But...

My review of Gogu Shyamala's book in today's Mint.

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Here’s a provisional definition: A short story is a story you can tell in one sitting, perhaps in the time it takes to feed a circle of hungry children as they sit with hands held out for the next spoonful of food, and where food and story come to a simultaneous and satisfying end.

This oral quality, this sense that the story could change unexpectedly depending on the mood of the audience, could—and does—break into song or take diversions via social history, is the most striking thing about Gogu Shyamala’s first collection of short stories, Father May Be An Elephant And Mother Only A Small Basket, But...

Shyamala is a senior fellow at the Anveshi Research Centre for Women’s Studies in Hyderabad and is a Dalit feminist working on creating biographies of Dalit women political leaders. These stories, translated from Telugu by several people, including her colleagues, have something of the autobiographical about them. Shyamala herself grew up in the Madiga quarter of the kind of Telangana village described in these stories. While the rest of her family worked, sometimes as bonded agricultural labourers, Shyamala was sent away to finish her higher education. The world these stories describe is not born of nostalgia; neither is it an imperfectly imagined idea of what village life must be like; this is Shyamala’s world and she knows it very well indeed, even if she no longer lives in the kind of village she describes.

Shyamala’s village is a site of many contradictions: the Mala, Madiga and Sabbanda communities have a close relationship with the land and its seasonal rhythms; their oral histories and identities are inseparable from the landscape and its stories. Yet it is impossible to escape the consequences of caste unless the village is left behind.

In Raw Wound, clearly the most autobiographical and powerful story in the collection, Syamamma is sent away to school in order to save her from becoming a “jogini” (a lower-caste woman who is declared the sexual property of the whole village). Her father leaves her at a school, and pleads with the warden of the hostel to keep his daughter safe. “This was the first time I had seen my father weep uncontrollably and I felt the village’s lake flooding with sorrow. I held fast to my father and could not help but cry myself,” Syamamma says.

Shyamala’s language is straightforward yet lyrical—the village lake flooding with sorrow elevates individual suffering into the entire community’s suffering. In another story, The Village Tank’s Lament, the tank itself speaks to a child. There are tonal shifts and changes in perspective that make each story a fresh experience: In one, a couple of visitors to the village watch some boys dive and swim in a village well; it’s an instance of straight reportage told as story.

Often, there is an overwhelming sense of suspense that is constantly confounded with an ending that, if not always happy, at least manages to avert the worst-case scenarios we expect; even though we know—with the 2006 Kherlanji massacre and other examples before us—how terrible the possibilities are. Many things can and do go wrong, but there are no burnings, killings, maimings and rape (though there are threats of, and attempts at, some of these things).

This is an interesting tactic because when stories end well—such as Braveheart Badeyya or Tataki Wins Again—the reader is forced to question her expectation of violence in fiction and ask what it means that the author refuses time and again to offer it. That Shyamala avoids a bleakness of tone while leaving alive the possibilities of violence is a tribute to her mastery over the short story form. Indeed, Shyamala’s greatest achievement is the note of humour and lightness that sounds through this collection.

If there is a striking absence in this book, it is that of the Communist movement in the Telangana region. The stories touch upon many of Shyamala’s own concerns, after all: land, agriculture, Dalit politics, feminism and oral history. It seems impossible that the Naxal movement, which has a long history in the region, should find absolutely no mention in these stories. After Shyamala’s own early involvement with the movement, and her subsequent departure from the political positions the Maoists hold, I read this absence as an act of power by a Madiga who, by such a deliberate erasure, reverses the classical Indian Communist’s blindness to caste.

When I began reading, I was struck by the title’s resemblance to Yasujiro Ozu’s film, I Was Born But... It occurs to me that this book shares other qualities with that particular film: a respect for the perspective of children as they negotiate the adult world, the ability to create their unique world without descending into nostalgia for one’s own childhood, and the hard-won lightness of an adult who has known bitterness and loss.

Word of the Quarter: Haecceity

This word had been sitting on my desk on a yellow post-it, with mysterious numbers whose purpose I have now forgotten, for the last three months. Somewhere in a folder, among other post-its that I swept off my desk, it still sits half-stuck to another chanced-upon word.

I don't know where I read it, but I recognise it every time it reappears now. We smile faintly at each other in acknowledgement.

No we don't. A word like 'haecceity' is not whimsical. It just - how do I put this? - is. Which is why to even begin a sentence with 'a word like' and then follow it with 'haecceity' seems wrong.

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There comes a moment while reading a collection, when my attention snags and then I really begin to read the poems. With me, this is never with the first few poems, which pass by the way a Films Division documentary passes.

Reading Roddy Lumsden's new collection, Terrific Melancholy, the first poem that sinks its hooks in is the 22nd one: 'Duology'. This is not the fault of the collection but mine. My attention is scattered and hard to rein in. But once I've been caught, I find more and more lines and poems I want to savour. 'Duology' has the word of the quarter. Two poems on I find my Word of the Day.

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The Word of the Day is selvage. In my mind, it's always said by my mother, or some lady like my mother, as a word in the middle of a sentence in Tamil. For a long time it sounded like self-edge, which makes complete sense and is total nonsense all at once. It's most frequently heard at the tailor's and comes with a smell of new cloth and starch, of dark corners and bins full of odd-sized, bright tangles of left-over bits.

Nobody says selvage anymore. It's been stiched up by the picos and the falls and has fallen silent.

And is given voice again in Lumsden's'The Sign of O': 'that which dallies/ at the selvage of our apprehension, blinking/ seldom, as the Titan arum lily blooms;'

Or maybe not.

selvageselvageselvage.
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Duology
by Roddy Lumsden

Le jeu lugubre - not one of Dali's lighter pieces:
autoerotic, omnisexual, a spandulous whorl
of heads and hats and hands. Translated
by bottom feeders as The Lugubrious Game,
by the enlightened as Dismal Sport, the former
sends the arrow close to its quiddity, the latter
pins its haecceity to the canvas.
                                                    The way we dress
is beyond determination, gene-gleaned:
one girl looks a fool in a gown, another glides
into the nightlife in a catsuit; one lad squires
in his homodox jerkin, another skives in a flat cap
he knows is a black fib. History's dayjob
is to usher us closer to its shady marquee.
And so we age: easier to love, harder to desire.

from Terrific Melancholy, Bloodaxe Books, 2011.

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This must be one instance where looking at the image which triggers an ekphrastic poem has done nothing for me. Maybe I'm done with Dali.

Give him a word, someone, and send him home.

Permanent Revolution, Public Space, Fox on Acid, Dalitness and Manu Joseph

Some things I've been reading:

1. Permanent Revolution by Hossam el-Hamalawy

The military has been the ruling institution in this country since 1952. Its leaders are part of the establishment. And while the young officers and soldiers are our allies, we cannot for one second lend our trust and confidence to the generals. Moreover, those army leaders need to be investigated. I want to know more about their involvement in the business sector.

All classes in Egypt took part in the uprising. In Tahrir Square you found sons and daughters of the Egyptian elite, together with the workers, middle class citizens, and the urban poor. Mubarak has managed to alienate all social classes in society including wide section of the bourgeoisie. But remember that it’s only when the mass strikes started three days ago that’s when the regime started crumbling and the army had to force Mubarak to resign because the system was about to collapse.

Some have been surprised that the workers started striking. I really don’t know what to say. The workers have been staging the longest and most sustained strike wave in Egypt’s history since 1946, triggered by the Mahalla strike in December 2006. It’s not the workers’ fault that you were not paying attention to their news. Every single day over the past three years there was a strike in some factory whether it’s in Cairo or the provinces. These strikes were not just economic, they were also political in nature.

He ends by saying 'we have to take Tahrir to the factories now'.

2a. Gautam Bhan in Kafila about Egypt and public spaces.

Another thing that keeps returning to my head is the images of the numbers in Tahrir square and how important the square was in and of itself spatially in the moment and the movement.

I think of a rally a few weeks ago for Dr Sen. After a long time, a protest in Delhi wasn’t at Jantar Mantar but actually walked its streets – from the Red Fort to ITO. I remember being struck by how different it felt, and how long it had been, to walk in the city in the name of dissent and protest. Images from Tahrir and the streets of Tunisia now stand next to that feeling in my head. Dissent need not be but often necessarily is deeply physical – the presence of the bodies on the street is as near an experiential sense of the “public”, in one sense, that one can get. Public spaces are the heart of challenging the centralization of control and of creating cultures of equity and dignity – be it in the city or in the nation-state.

In Delhi, for example, the increasing instances of gating, the control over gathering anywhere outside the two hundred square feet of Jantar Mantar, the spectre of Section 144, and a deeply inequitable and fractured housing and land market, have, in very different yet particularly spatial ways, all render the idea of the “public” as an afterthought, a residue – a space that no one can claim. The physical absence of residents in public spaces is both the chicken and the egg of a story of a changing and depleted imagination of a shared public among the city’s residents – be it of services, of resources, of aesthetics, of citizenship and of a very simply idea of dignity, of who can, should and does belong to the city. This story – in similar and different ways – is being played out the scale of a nation as a whole.

Could reclaiming public space for conversations, debates and voices – regardless of what these voices want to say and whether “we” agree with “them” or not – become a single point agenda for a movement of our own? Could the idea of the public bring urban residents together – regardless of what we want to do once we’re in that space? Could public space be an answer that rallies people together – the more voices, the more noise, the more debates, the more antagonism that come, from any point of view, would that noise not represent a resistance to the single story being told about India today?

2b. Serendipitously read the next piece [which is actually a couple of years old] just before Gautam Bhan's thoughts. Khalid Omar on the disappearance of public beaches in Karachi. 

Karachi must be one of the few waterfront cities in the world to have no waterfront at all. Karachi is a city by the sea, but considering the amount of water activities which takes place, it could well be in the Sahara. The primary reason is that most of the beaches in Karachi belong to the military or some other government scheme, and are off limits to civilians, or are private property and once again off limits.

The Pakistan Army, Navy and Air Force have taken over practically all the beaches in the city.

Now, while it is understandable that the Navy needs some waterfront to man their boats, the Pakistan Navy takes the cake by claiming the entire coast of Pakistan belongs to them. Besides their bases, housing schemes, naval clubs and what not all taking up miles of waterfront, they've also cordoned off the best beaches to build huts for their upper brass. Case in point: A number of beautiful beaches are used by the Navy as training grounds, smack in the middle of Karachi. Even there, the best part of the beach has private huts reserved for the top brass -- and out of bounds to civilians.

3. Amitava Kumar interviews Arundhati Roy for Guernica.

Guernica: Your stance on Kashmir and also on the struggles of the tribals has drawn the ire of the Indian middle class. Who belongs to that class and what do you think gets their goat?

Arundhati Roy: The middle class goat is very sensitive about itself and very callous about other peoples’ goats.

Guernica: Your critics say that you often see the world only in black and white.

Arundhati Roy: The thing is you have to understand, Amitava, that the people who say such things are a certain section of society who think they are the universe. It is the jitterbugging elite which considers itself the whole country. Just go outside and nobody will say that to you. Go to Orissa, go to the people who are under attack, and nobody will think that there is anything remotely controversial about what I write. You know, I keep saying this, the most successful secession movement in India is the secession of the middle and upper classes to outer space. They have their own universe, their own andolan, their own Jessica Lal, their own media, their own controversies, and they’re disconnected from everything else. For them, what I write comes like an outrage. Ki yaar yeh kyaa bol rahi hai? [What the hell is she saying?] They don’t realize that they are the ones who have painted themselves into a corner.

4. S. Anand's essay in Caravan on Dalit literature says some interesting things about Manu Joseph's Serious Men [which I admit I liked for the most part].

To come back to the author we began with: Manu Joseph manages to inaugurate a new template—he identifies his characters specifically as Dalits (not as untouchable Chamars or Pulayas) and depicts them as fully conscious of (but enraged by) caste oppression. Joseph’s rationale for making Ayyan Mani a Dalit makes for interesting reading. In an interview with rediff.com, he says:

When Ayyan first formed in my head he was just the same but he was not a Dalit. He had this anger and a comical interpretation of the modern world and modern women and science and everything around him. But he was not a Dalit. Then I asked myself, why is he so angry, can I give him a justification? And the idea of a Dalit male who is trying to create from thin air the first Dalit boy genius just fascinated me.

Consider what kind of social reality leads a writer like Joseph to decide that Ayyan Mani ought to be a Dalit because he is “so angry.” Mani’s specific kind of imagined ‘Dalitness’ is clearly a by-product of the post-Mandal anti-reservation rage of the upper classes of India, represented with deep sympathy by the Brahmin-controlled media. Such a portrayal of a scheming Dalit—who is merely a prop in the novel—would perhaps not have been possible in the period before the 1980s or the 1990s.

It is not that a Dalit character ought not to be dark and devious, especially in a dark comedy. It is not as if one is looking for a portrayal of triumph shorn of the complexities of human nature. What’s worrisome is how Mani’s son Adi has to be a congenitally poor, underperforming student with a hearing disability (to compound matters), who has to cheat his way through tests and quiz shows—lacking inherently in “merit.”

Two Minutes Older: The Year We Talked Privacy

The year 2010 will be best remembered for the questions it threw up about privacy. On the one hand, governments and figures of authority everywhere have stepped up their scrutiny of people: in the US, debates rage over the invasion of privacy caused by full-body scanners at airports; Indians are going to have to get used to having their biometric data collected; some schools this past year have installed CCTVs in school. Let me bite my tongue before it says Orwell!

On the other hand, we have those who belong to the Great Scrutinised trying to return the favour. Wikileaks, on twitter, links to a poster that says “Intelligence Needs Counter-Intelligence”. With the word redefined to no longer mean ‘disinformation’, the ‘counter-intelligence’ camp has people such as Wikileaks, RTI activists and a few remaining members of what we like to call ‘the free press’, who do more than accept the word of authority figures, that all that is done is for the greater good.

If the right to privacy is the right of an individual to ‘seclude information about themselves and reveal themselves selectively’ (wikipedia) then we are seeing more breaches of privacy than before in the name of safety. We need to not only redefine privacy in light of new technologies, but also ask whose privacy we are talking about. The privacy of an individual differs greatly from that of corporations (which are, nevertheless, granted personhood in law) and governments.

Privacy is also not the same as secrecy, though it’s a distinction governments and corporations are at pains to blur. When the heads of corporate houses invoke the right to privacy, what they really want is for their own excursions in information-gathering and in influencing policy to remain secret. When governments are red-faced over diplomatic cables being made public, what they object to is having already-held suspicions confirmed.

Let’s be honest: we’re all in the business of information gathering. It’s the reason why we hang out at coffee shops, over the neighbour’s wall, at the water cooler and on Facebook (whose position on privacy is, if you have nothing to hide, you should have nothing to fear from having your data in the public domain). We are all public creatures by virtue of being human and perfect privacy is possible only with perfect isolation.

Governments and activists operate on the belief that transparency leads to accountability.

Despite the not-very-stringent provisions we have in India to shield the data of individual and larger entities, it has always been possible (though not always legal) to unearth information, even if it’s carefully hidden.

In effect, what we’ve always had is not privacy but an illusion of it. This is one of the arguments that people in favour of the UID offer: that the perceived loss of privacy in having a unified identification number does not outweigh the benefits that many disadvantaged people will gain just by having their individual self recognised. After all, if privacy is inseparable from personhood, it has no meaning for those whose existence is not even recognised by the state. In other words, privacy is a concern only for those who have legal existence.

But as we’ve seen with the Radia tapes becoming public, the intention behind the gathering of data and the effects of its unintended use are two completely different things. Making some data public might have consequences we see as good; but what if, for instance, data is mined to persecute minorities – whether religious, caste-based, or gendered?

One way of achieving privacy is to hide behind a firewall of excess information, like Hasan Elahi did. When he found himself on the US government’s watch-list as a suspected terrorist, and was detained in 2002 and questioned by the FBI, Elahi began to make public every minute of his life as photographic material. He put up massive amounts of material online and called it The Orwell Project. Anybody watching him seriously would have to deal with a tsunami of information – at first with incomprehension and finally with disinterest.

As a blogger said, ‘Everybody is in favour of other people’s openness.’ I’m sure those in the privacy storms will agree – even if only secretly.

This appeared in today's edition of the New Indian Express.

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Am awa on vacation, so the links in this piece are pretty sketchy; but for anything Assange related, please go to Zunguzungu. For the rest, all responses only in the new year.

Two Minutes Older: Ayodhya and Savanur

As I’m writing this, the Babri Masjid verdict is yet to be delivered. By the time you read this, we will already know what its effect was on the country. The aftershocks of the 6 December 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid are still being felt.

The Sangh Parivar has always held that the issue cannot be decided by the courts because it is a question of religious sentiment and faith. If enough people feel that Ram was born right on that particular spot (though no one can as accurately say when he was born), their ‘feelings’ ought to be respected and the land handed over for the construction of a temple.

Most civil movements that began after the widespread riots in 1992 talked about a return to the values of secularism, of which Indians have a pretty wide and inclusive definition. Unlike other countries (such as France), in India secularism means the freedom that all religions have to live by their religious creeds and the neutrality of the state in relation to these practices. It is what Mukul Kesavan calls, in his book Secular Common Sense, an ‘all-are-welcome secularism’ that was born of the need to bring every kind of Indian on board the anti-colonial, national movement.

One position taken by a politician after the demolition of Babri Masjid had nothing to do with rights or religions. It ought to have counted as a valid and very secular reaction. Yet, not even the secular civil movements that wanted to heal the wounds of ’92 took Kanshi Ram’s statement as anything more than a badly-timed piece of irreverence.

I’d like to examine Kanshi Ram’s suggestion that “the best solution for the Ayodhya dispute is to build a public toilet on the disputed site”.

If this horrifies people, as I’m sure it did and will continue to, let’s consider what constitutes the sacred for any religion. With most religions, sanctity resides in several locations: in the word of god, in an idol, a book, a place of worship or diverse symbols. But the sacred never includes gross physical processes, because somehow, the body (being mortal, I suppose) always has to be mortified or transcended to reach the divine.

Toilets are never, ever, sacred spots, even though all kinds of other places – such as beauty parlours – are now described as temples to the body. If anything, in our country, the presence of gods is supposed to repel bodily functions – consider the tiles depicting deities that are meant to discourage people from spitting and peeing in the corners of stairwells and other public places not designated as bathrooms or spittoons.

Why are toilets so unmentionable? Why are they so outside the pale of sacred discourse? Why are the necessary functions of the body supposed to be disrespectful of the divine?

What the exclusion of the functions of the body from the sacred hides is something Kanshi Ram brought up but which never entered the debate around secularism post-1992: that to allow the sacred to exist one has to cast out from public notice the large numbers of people who help us keep our bodies and sacred spaces ‘pure’.

Manual scavengers are not supposed to exist according to our laws. But they do – every time the drains overflow, it is these manual scavengers who are found waist deep in manholes, clearing up blocked sewage systems. The rest of us could not be ‘clean’ if we didn’t have someone whom we could consider ‘filthy’.

It says something (not very flattering) about us as a country that we’re more easily shocked and traumatised by the demolition of a place of worship than about the existence of manual scavengers. Recently, in Savanur in Karnataka, a Bhangi community that was facing eviction from their homes protested by pouring excreta on themselves. It didn’t impinge on our national consciousness in any way, did it?

That protest was as potent a political comment as Kanshi Ram’s statement that a toilet ought to be built on the site of the demolished mosque. But it will probably never have the impact it ought to until we take our toilets as seriously as we do our places of worship. Or until we find a god of toilets.

An edited version of this in Zeitgeist, the Saturday edition of The New Indian Express.

And thanks to Paro for inputs. 

Two Minutes Older: Eating for Shiva*

The year began, not with festivities, but with a festival. Every year my mother announces Thiruvathirai, and every year I stop myself from asking, ‘What’s that?” This time, to remind myself what the festival was about, I said to my mother, “Why don’t you tell the kid the story?”

So she told my son the story of Nandanar: how the 8^th century outcaste farmer wanted to see Shiva at the Chidambaram temple in the month of Margazhi (Dec-Jan); how he was told he couldn’t go until all the work in the field was done; how he managed to go despite all the work and as he stood outside the temple – being a dalit – he could see nothing because of the Nandi blocking his view of the lord.

The story goes that Nandanar was in tears at being unable to see Shiva. In Gopalakrishna Bharati’s Nandanar Charitra Kirtthanai, translated by Lakshmi Holmström, Nandanar says,

Are you not the ever compassionate Lord?

Untouchable as I am, may I not serve you?

To be there to witness your dance of supreme bliss

may I not come to you?

Shiva, touched by the man’s bhakti, asks Nandi to move so that he is visible to his devotee.

The high-born folk are abashed and awed in equal measure, and Nandanar’s fame precedes him everywhere. (I don’t know if this meant that he thereafter had help tilling the field or if those things remained status quo – because stories like these end with the arrival of the god, who invariably remains strong and silent on such matters)**.

To celebrate this, we eat kali and kootu.

I have to say that this story annoys me. Setting aside the politics of turning a story of injustice into one of spirituality, I resent having to eat a dish that is half sweet, half savoury and wholly an ordeal on the palate. For one thing, there’s the taste of gud and coconut in the kali. It isn’t as sweet as sakkaraipongal but it isn’t like regular pongal either. In the kootu, the taste of sweet potatoes battles with the beans and the peas with the pumpkins. Brought together, they make the tongue shiver and produce in me as many conflicting emotions as the story of Nandanar and the Arudra Darsanam at Chidambaram.

Everyone knows that festivals are an excuse to eat things that are seasonal, hard to make and digest and that keep women in the kitchen for most of the day. Usually the things we eat on these occasions are passed off as the favourite food of this or that god: butter, sheedai, kozhakattai and such. Someone please tell me whose favourite food this is: Shiva’s? Nandanar’s? Or Nandi’s?

I have a theory that Thiruvathirai kali and kootu are meant to reflect the complexity of the story. After all, it is not a simple story of faith and reward. Mixed up in it is the question of boundaries, of who is kept out and who does the keeping out; and of who ‘deserves’ the favour of god. Show me a dalit who celebrates Thiruvathirai as a triumph against established order. Depending on where you’re coming from, Nandanar has either circumvented an unjust convention to directly commune with his god or he has been tricked into thinking that the barriers have been removed, when really he’s still standing where he’s been ordered to.

The dish is equally complex and disturbing to the taste. What it produces is not comfort or pleasure. There are too many different tastes and textures, too many conflicting sensations, too many ingredients that don’t get along with each other. It requires a sophistication that I don’t yet have to transform this discomfort into something that I see as not just palatable but enjoyable. It is an uneasy dish that celebrates a disturbing story.

Every year, I try my best to like it and every year I fail better at it. For now, I have decided to live with the taste. In fact, I think I might even experiment with it: I wonder what would happen if, next year, we added karela to the kootu? I think it might add the one taste that was missing.

(An edited version of this in Zeitgeist, the Saturday edition of The New Indian Express.)

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* I will retain my own titles to these pieces; I'm not too sure about the ones they think up for the paper.

** In Sekizhar's version, the Nandi doesn't move at all. What happens is, Nandanar comes into Chidambaram hesitantly, doubting his own worthiness to see Shiva. Shiva arranges for Nandanar to be 'purified' by a fire and becomes resplendently Brahmin before he gets to be one with his god. See.