Roots and Root Vegetables

A guide to ritual and food through Dalma

Sibani, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Brinjal heads, raw banana skins and pumpkin guts are splattered all over the white kitchen slab. The whistling steam of the pressure cooker envelopes the kitchen in a sauna bath. The ancient smell of ground-up dried red chillies and cumin seeds incites a sneeze. Meanwhile, the daal oozes out of the whistle on the old cooker in a stream of the yellow musical fountain. In a worn-out steel plate lie some cumin and panch phutana, dry chillis, a dollop of ghee all in anticipation of their coming parts. Let's make some Dalma, today.

There is a lot going for the Dalma. Like most Indian dishes, you do not have recipes to bind it down to ingredients and measurements. There is a general direction that the history of your family wants you to go to - you boil vegetables in pulses and then temper it. But that is just a fifty thousand feet view of the dish. When you put on your chef’s apron (or place your Khordha gamcha on your shoulders) and get down to the details there are a million different way you can approach it. For example, in my family alone the tastes of the Dalma, my mother and my mother-in-law prepares are hugely different - my mother-in-law adds grated coconut while my mother does not, my mother makes it spicier, and my mother-in-law makes it sweeter.

As a kid, I used to hate Dalma. It was not because I did not like the taste, it was ok. But it was not a chicken curry or a fish fry. When my mother cooked Dalma I would often make a face and raise hell. It was only later when I reflected on my childhood that I could see the tears and sweat of my mother. Tears and sweat are one of the many things that are sadly invisible on an Indian mother.

Colloquially or as a joke, Odias often say that Dalma is so-called because it is the Ma of Dal (The mother of pulses). The point is often to drive, the superiority of the Dalma, home. While this may or may not be true it always triggers in me, the idea of women in the Indian household. Re-read the first paragraph again and you know that there is one thing missing. A woman. As the pressure cooker sizzles and the unbearable heat of the kitchen makes you sweat from every pore, it is a woman who is slaving away. The vegetables are cut in the perfect sizes lest the man of the house complains that they are undercooked. The spices are roasted to the perfect temperature just so the kids find the dishes palatable. Like many other dishes, the Dalma owes its existence to hours and hours of unpaid labour that the women of India put in.

Every year thousands and thousands migrate to states and countries outside Odisha looking for jobs and a better life for themselves and their families. Immigration often feels like a machete hacking away at your roots. You feel like you must exert the identity that is within you. As you watch foreign things slowly grow roots in you, you feel a longing within you to all that was you and all that was yours. It feels like a song from a distant familiar land. You try to find whatever little bit of home that is around you and hold on to dear life.

For an immigrant, food often has a ritualistic nature. While back home there is a lot of freedom and leeway to try out things in different ways - at home you can afford things going wrong, since all around you there are options. But in a foreign country, you hold yourself to a process. You call up your mother and make sure you note down the exact steps. For making a Dalma, you note down the exact ratio of the water and the pulses. You count the number of whistles the cooker makes. These are often not important. But your instincts have now been dulled by exposure to a foreign land and you do not want to take a chance.

In an episode of “The Seen and the Unseen” Amit Varma and his guest, Shoba Narayan talk about the importance of ritual in worship and food. Shoba specifically talks about the temple kitchen in Jagannath Puri (where the Dalma is absolutely to die for) where there are specific instructions that are followed to the T by the “cooks”. They believe that the food would stay uncooked if they don’t follow these rituals. This was fascinating to me. In a country where ritual often takes form of self-harm, sacrifice or overt display of affection to some form of patriarchy, I have always been uncomfortable about ritual.

But something Shoba said in the podcast stuck with me. She says that at some point we will be at the crossroads to take a call that if we want to throw away the baby with the bathwater. Take for example the Habisa Dalma which is prepared ritually in some Odia kitchens with all indigenous ingredients like elephant foot yam, colocasia, elephant apple, grated coconut, grated ginger, raw banana during the Mondays of the Karthika Masa. This specific form of Dalma almost certainly reinforces some concept of purity. Purity might seem to be a harmless little obsession of the oppressive upper castes, but many downtrodden have lost lives in this "little" obsession. But should we give up the Habisa just because it is historically (and currently) associated with oppression? I do not know the answer to this, but this is something worth pondering over. Anyway, the question should be directed at the oppressed to get the answer.

Dalma has become the poster child of Odia comfort food recently. In a combination of channa dal and toor dal boiled with a host of indigenous vegetables, tempered with panch phutana, and spiced with a special masala there is much to seek comfort in. Maybe it is the contrasting texture of the dals where the channa dal has retained a better memory of its past life. Maybe it is the vegetables all mixed and mashed yet preserving an identity. Or the delicious jugalbandi it has with a plate of steaming white rice and a dollop of gua ghia. Dalma has a way of finding some nook for you where you can rest your weary head on.

But as Dalma becomes one of the foods that Odisha is recognized by, we tend to forget that it is not something that all of Odisha eats. There are whole groups of people who prepare a completely different set of food that sadly has not become famous for a variety of reason. This is rather ironic because Odisha has for long accused the centre of being partial to certain places. We have blamed consecutive governments as they blatantly ignored the demands of huge sections of the country to satiate the needs of a few. Now the onus is on us. While Dalma, Ratha Jatra, Pithas and Panas are all quintessentially Odia, that is not the sum of all that Odisha is. Odisha is as much the Mudhi Mansa, or the Black Carpenter Ant Chutney, or the Chaul Bara, or the Kalara Achara or the many more delicacies present all around this state.

As a species, we have long outlived the times when food was just sustenance. If we trace out each food item we consume today, we can uncover whole currents of history. The Biryani, the Tea, the Potato all have tales of violence associated with them. But in seeing their current nationwide appeal and in these times of vast divides and tyranny, food shows us a bright way out to mix, mingle and still stay individual. Like the medley of vegetables in the deliciously made Dalma.

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This was written some time back after a rather satisfying meal of Bhata and Dalma. I have been so sick over the last few days that I haven’t been able to read/write and work. But I hope today will be better. I am having some Dalma today, too.

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In other news, #ReclaimTheNight protest are going on all over India in response to the RG Kar brutal rape and murder. Also men all over twitter are losing their shit and tweeting #NotAllMen. Nothing more to add.