The Eternal Food: Gastronomic Ideas and Experiences of Hindus and
Buddhists
Reviewed by Francis Zimmermann
The Journal of the American Oriental Society
Vol.114 No.3
1994.07-09
Pp.480-482
Copyright by American Oriental Society 1994
Most of the papers collected in this volume were first presented at
a conference on Food Systems and Communication Structures, organized
in 1985 at the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, by R.
S. Khare and the late Professor M. S. A. Rao. This is a book about
the ways in which the Hindu and Buddhist cultures approach food as
an "essence" and an aesthetic "experience" within personal and
social life. Several papers discuss the issue of food essence and
aesthetics, with special attention to Hindu saints and devotees, for
whom foods represent a cosmic principle at one level and a most
immediate and intimate semiotic reality at another. The entire book
is based upon a theoretical assumption formulated by R. S. Khare in
his introduction:
Food in India is never merely a material substance of ingestion, nor
only a transactional commodity. It is synonymous with life and all
its goals, including the subtlest and the highest. Sometimes highly
abstract (approximating the linguistic, aesthetic, and even
nontransactional, or supratransactional "grammars") and sometimes
palpably tangible (as a physical substance and "bodies"), this food
asserts such a life-guiding presence that it concerns, one way or
another, the thought and practice of the entire Indic civilization
(p. 1).
The general orientation thus defined will be discussed below, after
brief presentations have been given of each of the eight papers
included in the book.
R. S. Khare (University of Virginia) opens the series with "Food
with Saints: An Aspect of Hindu Gastrosemantics." These are general
comments on the way Hindu holy persons handle food to serve moral
and spiritual purposes, in various forms of "transactions" (for
which word Khare gives vyapara as a Sanskrit equivalent, p. 31),
encoding foods with special messages as they go about eating.
Detached from food, the holy man makes food "speak" and "act" on his
behalf. His food conveys his blessings and curses. As leftovers, his
food guides disciples toward spiritual experiences. David G. White
(University of Virginia) specializes in comparative mythology and,
from the rich material he collected on the mythology of the dog-man,
he has extracted a well-researched paper, the title of which speaks
for itself: "You Are What You Eat: The Anomalous Status of
Dog-Cookers in Hindu Mythology." White's precise annotations and
exhaustive references should be praised. Contrary to the other
contributors to the volume, White is well acquainted with researches
currently pursued in Europe (Charles Malamoud, etc.), which allows
him to throw a bridge between American transactionalism and European
holism in the study of Hindu mythology. Vidyut Aklujkar (University
of British Columbia) is a student of devotional poetry in Marathi, a
striking feature of which is the profusion of food imagery.
Aklujkar's short contribution, "Sharing the Divine Feast: Evolution
of Food Metaphor in Marathi Sant Poetry," offers vignettes of
Jnanadeva (1275-96), Namadeva (1270-1350), Ekanatha (1533-99),
Tukarama (1598-1649), and their poems, with special reference to
feasts and leftovers as poetic symbols of shared intimacies with the
divine. Paul M. Toomey (who has taught at Cornell and Tufts)
conducted field-work on Annakuta (the Mountain of Food), one large
food festival held in Braj, in which a metonymy is established
between food offerings and Krishna's enjoyment of his own blissful
nature (rasa) through the emotions of devotees he brings into
existence. The title of Toomey's paper, "Mountain of Food, Mountain
of Love: Ritual Inversion in the Annakuta Feast at Mount Govardhan,"
refers to symbols and behaviors that create an overall sense of
ambiguity. In some cases, for example, Brahman pujari dress as
cowherds. Or else, in contrast to most other large food festivals
where pakka foods (cooked in or with cow products) are central,
Annakuta is the only occasion when kacca foods (boiled in water with
no ghee nor milk) are displayed and offered to the god's icon. The
visual display of a category of food which is prohibited in most
commensal situations, and in a space which is defined as public,
formulates in ritual terms the strongly egalitarian message of
devotional Vishnuism. Manuel Moreno (Northeastern Illinois
University), studying the "Pancamirtam: God's Washings as Food,"
relegates emotion and otherworldly pursuits of the devotee to the
background, in order to focus on the pharmacological and humoral
nature of foods and baths offered to god Murukan's icon at Palani in
Tamilnad. Twice a year, in winter and summer, the idol of the god is
said to swell due to cold or heat as humors (Tamil tosam, i.e.,
Sanskrit dosa). Important festivals, accompanied by well-attended
pilgrimages, are held to heal the god, by offering him pots of water
from the Kaveri river to cool him, or pancamrtam candies to warm him
up. Murukan's food washings are collected by a particular group of
pilgrims, the Nattukkottai Cettiyars (a caste of traders and
bankers), who ingest them to regenerate certain lost qualifies in
their bodies that they share with Murukan's body. Moreno publishes
the detailed schedule of daily feeding and bathing of the Palani
idol, and the recipe of the Palani pancamrtam. He concludes with
remarks on "God as rasam" (p. 167), playing upon the polysemy of
this Sanskrit word, which may mean "juice," "alchemical
quintessence," "flavor," and "aesthetic mood," according to context.
(Khare glossed over the same word in his introduction, by saying: "a
material-Ayurvedic-aesthetic-divine substance [rasa or rasam]," p.
13.) However, this interpretation of the humoral and pervasive
nature of god Murukan is based on folk etymologies that would
require further analysis. The name Palani is said to derive from the
Tamil expression palamni, "you are the fruit." Murukan "is the fruit
par excellence whose juices are the sweet pancamirtam washings from
his body" (p. 168). Murukan is the god who has muruku, that is,
youth, tenderness, sweetness; "in other words, he embodies the
essence (rasam) of the hills and their inhabitants" (p. 158,
repeated p. 168). But rasam, here, seems to have been superimposed
on the ethno-graphic data. One has the feeling that the
interpretation remains at the level of images and depends upon
hurried semantic shifts from fruits to sweets to pervasive juices.
In "Food Essence and the Essence of Experience," H. L. Senevirame
(University of Virginia) explores analogies between physiology,
aesthetics and religious experience. Although the last pages are
based on an ethnographic description of Sinhalese cuisine, this
paper is essentially made up of approximative statements of
Ayurvedic humoralism and the aesthetic theories of rasa and bhava.
Then comes another contribution from R. S. Khare, "Annambrahman
[sic]: Cultural Models, Meanings, and Aesthetics of Hindu Food,"
which outlines Hindu views on the relationships between seen and
unseen properties of food. Khare suggests placing the Eternal Food
at the intersection of upanishadic views on prana (breaths),
Ayurvedic views on food transactions, and the Hindu philosophy of
tapas (austerities) and self-discipline. The series of eight
contributions ends with a fine "bouquet" of flowers of rhetoric
arranged by the late A. K. Ramanujan (Chicago), "Food for Thought:
Toward an Anthology of Hindu Food-Images," which is both an essay
and a collage. Poems and tales are cited to exemplify different
paradigms of Hindu thought, in which food provides the basic
imagery. Ramanujan reviews larger schemes like that of the Food
Chain, performatives like proverbs about food, and figures of
speech, including metaphors like "the Karman eater," etc.
In the latter part of this review, I would like to concentrate on
two theoretical issues. Indologists would be prepared to accept
Khare's statement quoted above: "Food in India is synonymous with
life, etc.," although they might question the exaggerated importance
attached to the cosmic dimensions of the food metaphor. But he goes
one step further, when suggesting that India and the West have
entertained two fundamentally different attitudes toward food: "The
cultural approach to food in India, I suggest, has been distinct
[from the Western approach] in some fundamental - ideological -
ways. Food is not just a symbol of or for the cultural but it is
integral to the Hindu's ultimate reality in the same way as 'self'
or 'soul' is" (p. 19 n. 3). This relativistic presupposition is
highly questionable, which amounts to saying once again that Indian
thought is unique and untranslatable. That food is integral to the
ultimate reality is very much a tenet of traditional Western
worldviews. Let us refer to Jean Bollack's Empedocle (Paris:
Editions de Minuit, 1965-1969), index s.v. nutrition, and, for
example, vol. III.2, p. 404: "leur subsistance ne se distingue pas
de leur nature." Aromatics and cuisine have been shown to display
the very same philosophical and cosmological connotations among the
Pythagoreans, by Marcel Detienne in his celebrated Les Jardins
d'Adonis (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). The idea that, in various
cultures, food is integral to the ultimate reality was first
pro-pounded by Marcel Mauss in 1939, in an expose entitled
"Conceptions qui ont precede la notion de matiere," where he traced
the shifts of meaning from food to subsistence to substance to
matter (Mauss, Oeuvres [Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1969], II: 164).
I hope these references will help the reader contextualize the book
under review.
A specific activity conducted during the Mysore conference, which
determined the transactionalistic orientation of this book, has
unfortunately been kept in the background, but it should be
mentioned here. Professor McKim Marriott (Chicago) introduced
Samsara, a game which simulates, or formulates, by means of
simulating behaviors, the transgenerational process of rural Hindu
life. Since this game has not yet been published, its description,
outlined in pp. 201-2 of the book, will be of interest as a
complement to India Through Hindu Categories, a book edited by McKim
Marriott (New Delhi: Sage Publ., 1990), where he resorts to other
simulating devices to construct an Indian ethnosociology. The goal
of each player of the Samsara game is to conduct his life, i.e.,
birth, marriage, accumulation of wealth and crops, feuding, and
dying, with minimal "markings." This simulation game of "markings"
ascribed to players whenever they make a move is, to me, a
convincing interpretation of the karma concept. Food, precisely,
represents one of those markings, and the Samsara game represents a
most appropriate realization of what Khare and his colleagues had in
mindwhen choosing the title of the book: "The Eternal Food," that
is, food as karma markings flowing throughout samsara.
FRANCIS ZIMMERMANN ECOLE DES HAUTES ETUDES EN SCIENCES SOCIALES,
PARIS