Eating India by Chitrita Banerji

Author:Chitrita Banerji
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2009-06-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

BENARAS: FEASTING AND FASTING

IN SHIVA'S CITY

Delhi and Lucknow may symbolize the patrician Islamic culture of northern India, but there is another city in the state of Uttar Pradesh (of which Lucknow is the capital) that faces the world as Hinduism's most sacred site. Varanasi, more familiarly called Benaras, is noted for its temples, ghats (steps leading down to a river), pilgrims, and funeral rites, as well as its music and street food. It is a peculiarly photogenic city where beauty asserts itself in spite of claustrophobic, malodorous lanes often blocked by the slow progress of a bull; the cloying smell of offerings and incense; and a river choked with urban waste and the detritus of human cremation. In Benaras the business of death surmounts the business of worship, since Hindus have believed for centuries that dying here ensures freedom from rebirth and permanent salvation. As the river flows past the cremation grounds every day, you see flowers offered to the dead being carried by a current that has witnessed the unbearable and the unspeakable.

I was not interested in doing penance or finding salvation. I went to Benaras looking for its worldly side, the side that glories in the pleasures of food and drink, the side that has survived with hedonistic panache in spite of the overwhelming aura of sanctity projected by temples, priests, and worshippers. But the first thing that confronted me there made a far greater impact than either the sacred or the secular. It was a human tragedy I had always known about and yet pushed aside from the forefront of my mind. Benaras has been, for centuries, the final destination for Hindu widows, particularly young widows, packed off by their families to live out the rest of their days surrounded by holiness, while forced to endure nearly intolerable deprivation. Although widows from many parts of India, especially northern India, were regularly exiled to Benaras, probably no other state sent as many as my region, Bengal.

The life of the Hindu widow has always been the dark side of eating in India, and nowhere was it darker than in Bengal. Not only was the Bengali widow forbidden to remarry, as were widows from other regions, she was also expected to give up a large number of common foods permanently. In a fish-loving culture, she was forced to become a vegetarian, giving up fish, meat, eggs, and even lentils, onion, and garlic for her entire lifetime, which was also punctuated by frequent, rigorous fasts. Her husband's death was traditionally attributed to her misdeeds and unnatural appetites; a common word of abuse in rural Bengal translates as "husband-eater." Guilty of the sin of survival, she was considered a personification of disaster and bad luck, and as such, her presence was forbidden at any happy ceremony, particularly weddings. If she was allowed to stay with the family, her days were often spent in unmitigated drudgery. In times past, when very young girls were often married off to doddering old men, these deprived lives extended over many years—a dreadful experience of thwarted desire.

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