What an Odia Widow Can Eat

Sailen Routray

Photo Credit - Wikimedia Commons

While browsing through the second-hand bookstore Blossoms on Church Street in Bangalore some twelve years back, I picked up an old and relatively un-tattered copy of The Granta Book of India (2004). While going through the book on a lazy Wednesday morning in order to stave off lecture-induced boredom, the title of one essay caught my eye: ‘What Bengali Widows Cannot Eat’ by Chitrita Banerji.  I found the article disturbing. The problem starts with the title itself. It is titled ‘What Bengali Widows Cannot Eat’—not ‘What West Bengali Widows Cannot Eat’, not ‘What Bengali Hindu Widows Cannot Eat’, definitely not what ‘Bengali Brahmin Widows Cannot Eat’, but ‘What Bengali Widows Cannot Eat’. By discussing the experience of her mother’s widowhood, the article makes a case for the deprivation and degradation encountered by ‘Bengali’ widows and uses the taboos related to food, especially non-vegetarian food, as the motif for this deprivation.

Although the details that Banerji provides regarding her mother are in fact representative of the experience of Brahmin widows, especially in Bengal, at some level the article touched an emotional raw nerve and made me think about my personal experiences with widowhood. Among my grandparents, I was closest to my jejima (father’s mother) who passed away five years back; she was nearly hundred years old when she died. She was a widow for as long as I can remember (my jeje [father’s father] died when I was around four years old). 

She was quite good-looking in a strong, matronly way. I never saw her wearing a white sari. She was a brilliant cook, especially of traditional Odia Khandayata[1] dishes, many of which are non-vegetarian. She especially liked a traditionally-cooked mutton curry or small shrimps with mustard paste roasted after being wrapped in pumpkin leaves. She was quite a terror. But once in a while it would get into her mind to be nice to her grandchildren. 

During the monsoons, the dark green paddy fields of coastal Odisha swarm with small shrimps and crabs. She would ask one of the women weeding our fields to stop working and search for small crabs.  Half of the catch would be given to the woman, and other half would be delivered back home. Then she would change into one of her coarser and more colourful saris, pick up the hammer and try and kill the crabs as painlessly as possible. 

After being killed they would be thrown into the remnants of the fire after the afternoon’s cooking was done. Half an hour later, she’d pick them up from the embers and break the shells. Then she’d get the fibrous meat out and grind them on a large piece of stone with garlic, green chillies, mustard oil and salt, and make my siblings, cousins and me sit around a huge bowl of pakhaala[2] and then all of us, including her, would have a leisurely, late afternoon meal.

These are amongst my fondest childhood memories. So when you read lines like ‘Sometimes, as I sit and look at her, I see a procession of silent women in white going back through the centuries. They live as household drudges, slaves in the kitchen and the field; they are ostracised even in their own homes during weddings or other happy ceremonies—their very presence considered an invitation to misfortune’ the description jars a little. It’s something that does not speak to my experiences at all. 

Why would Chitrita Banerji make claims about ‘Bengali widows’,  as opposed to, say, only Bengali Brahmin widows (for whom her claims are perfectly valid), and what kind of discourse does this kind of story legitimise? My jejima was a widow. She never wore white. She was not a vegetarian. She would laugh uproariously when Bollywood bimbos would heave their ample bosoms under huge waterfalls on TV. Did that make her a ‘bad widow’? Is that the premise of the kind of discourse that Banerjee’s story feeds into, a normalising one that turns an apparent ‘anomaly’ into a ‘should not’?

It cannot be argued that this kind of writing is non-academic and is not to be taken seriously. In matters such as these, the dividing line between academic and non-academic writing, in terms of the level of explanation that they have to offer and the way they generalise (say about ‘Bengali’ widows), is thin. Quite a bit of academic writing is now a matter of common knowledge and shapes the way we perceive our social world and vice versa; one such ‘common knowledge’ is that generally women of the ‘upper’ castes have had subservient positions in families whereas women of the ‘lower’ castes have had more freedoms.

I belong to the jati of Khandayatas. They are numerically perhaps the largest non-Shudra jati in coastal Orissa. They are, by self-definition, at the top of the hierarchy of all the peasant jatis in the region. As far as can be ascertained, they have been dominant for the last one thousand years or so. The British reordering of the land revenue system stripped the jati of much of its former dominance, but it still retains much of its old power, especially in the rural areas of coastal Orissa. In terms of its history, therefore, it’s a ‘normal’ Hindu uchha jaati (high caste). 

My grandmother and other older Khandayata women would often make the claim that the Brahmins living in the village were ‘unclean’ because they were na karmia (literally, having only nine Hindu karmas, i.e. samskaras or major rituals for the males) and were inferior compared to us because we Khandayatas were egaara karmia (having eleven Hindu karmas, i.e. samskaras or major rituals for the males).

The ‘common knowledge’ surrounding women of non-Shudra jatis does not seem to ring true in the context of my jejima’s life. She was married twice and was widowed twice. My jeje was her second husband. Despite being an ‘upper caste’ woman she wore the pants in the family. After the first five-six years of her marriage, she started going to the fields to supervise the workers. She’d also take most of the major decisions, ranging from buying or selling land, hiring tenants and selling produce to having the final say regarding the choice of spouses for her children. My jeje was apparently ‘inefficient’ and accepted her leading the household. No one saw her as non-normal.

She single-handedly stopped the decline in our family fortunes; a big part of the limited success that my father and his five siblings have had, can be attributed to my jejima. She did have a room to herself in our village, which she not-so-generously shared with a couple of my first cousins. But she rarely let go of her privileges as the matriarch: the right to the head of a rohi or bhakura (varieties of fish) that my chuaa bou (my father's younger brother's wife; literally 'small mother') made is one of them. 

As the eminent sociologist J.P.S Uberoi remarked once in a slightly different context, Indian social sciences generally tend to suffer from narratives of what he termed as ‘victimology’. Stories of women such as my jejima might be one way out of such a state of affairs.

End Notes

[1] Khandayata is ritually the highest ranking jati amongst the peasant castes of Orissa, and the dominant caste in much of coastal Orissa.

[2] Rice with water, sometimes eaten fresh and sometimes slightly fermented; it is the staple food in most of Orissa. 

Authorial Comment: This essay was first published, is a slightly different form, with the title 'What an Oriya widow can eat' in the journal Contributions to Indian Sociology, in the year 2008, in the second issue of the 42nd volume of its publication. The relevant page numbers are 307-310.