Feeding frenzy

It’s that time of the year once more – a time of eating what one normally wouldn’t through the rest of the year, a time of gluttony and a time for skyrocketing sales of digestives!
Our Durga Pujo is not just a religious festival: it’s also a cultural riot. Among other things, we have sharodiya shankhya (annual numbers) of magazines to look forward to. And while we gorge ourselves on writers that we have known-- and gauge those who have just broken into the state’s milling literary community – we often turn first to the pages that appeal to humans the most: the pages on food; the pages on recipes we just have to try out.
There are both a traditional and a radical aspect to food during the Durga Pujo. This mix goes back a long way – indeed to 1790, or thereabouts. Previous to that decade, Pujos used to be private affairs held in the thakur dalans of rajas and zamindars. It is said that when 12 men were stopped from taking part in a household pujo at Guptipara in Hooghly district, they defiantly set up a 12-member committee and held the first baroyari (derived from ‘baro’ – meaning 12, and ‘yari’ – meaning friends) pujo. But it took more than a century for the first sorbojanin pujo (public festival) to be held, at Balaram Basu Ghat in 1910. The eclecticism of those 12 fast friends continues to inform the gastronomic insanity that is at the very heart of Durga Pujo, where, if a rule is perceived to have been made, it will be broken, or, at the very least, modified.
Today, there are more sorbojanin pujos than private pujos (blame it on Bengali garrulousness and the longstanding populism of the Left government, if you will). Some of the private pujos of the older families – many impoverished but obstinate in custom, a few still rolling in money – have royal spreads laid out for Durga. It is almost mandatory for them to have vegetarian food for all five days of the Pujo. But – and this is where the rule-breaking leprechaun makes an appearance – a few, like the Badan Royer barir pujo, offer a maach (fish) bhog on Navami, notwithstanding the priest’s apoplexy.
I was brought up in Delhi, where we patronised the Kali Bari pujo. Our group of friends, and most others who made a way-stop there, had to have the lal chhola (red chana). I have not the least idea where the chholawallah disappeared to for the rest of the year, but he invariably surfaced at the Kali Bari during the five Pujo days and probably made a killing. His sweet-sour chana was crimson in colour, which should have warned us off but did exactly the opposite, and was served with a sprinkled pinch of his particular spices on top. It gladdened my heart no end that my sins were passed on to my daughter, whom I caught enjoying the five-day wonder with the same gusto.
The lal chhola was acidic. To tamp down the sensation, there was the golé (literally, cannonball), which was our own version of gelato. It was hardly more than a brick of ice grated and skewered with a stick at one end and then moulded into a conical shape. Sugar syrup of various hues – heaven alone knows what the electrifying colours were made of, or contained – was then sprinkled on top. If there is any truth to the saying that it is the occasion that lends taste to food, the evidence was right there.
The evenings were a little more, shall we say, disciplined – biryani, kosha mangsho, chhole bhature…you know, the usual intestinal explosives. We would hunt in packs for ‘sponsors’, usually unsuspecting uncles or brothers-in-law, to foot the bill.
But all this anarchy came to an end when I got married and came to live in a small village, which had rules of its own that were distinctly different from those in metropolitan Delhi (or even, I presume, in Calcutta). The Durga Pujo meals at home were planned to an inch of their lives – from entrée to dessert, from look to taste, from presentation to quantity.
Shasthi was celebrated by married women with progeny (brattish, for the most part, on this occasion) with an all-vegetarian meal sans even onion and garlic. (Try making super-edible luchi, aloor dum and chana dal without these two ingredients, but we did, and they were great.) The men, meanwhile, had no such proscriptions and would be bolting down their non-vegetarian meal at the same time that we women would be denying ourselves – or they would be denying us by grabbing liberal quantities from our share.
Ashtami was a bit of a downer; for me, in particular, because of the sacrifice of goats at some pujos. I happen to love animals with a passion, and can see nothing put right by their blood that we humans have done wrong. It was then that I heard of an oxymoron called niramish mangsho (vegetarian meat). Since the meat was to be offered to Durga, a symbol of extreme purity, no onion or garlic could be used in its cooking. I’m given to believe that it tasted wonderful, but I have no first-hand knowledge of it since, to show my distaste for animal sacrifice, I absolutely refused to taste it.
We did have bhog on Ashtami and Navami, and it consisted of the usual khichuri, labda and payesh. But what I’ve never been able to fathom, in my career of having written 45-odd cookbooks, is why this very same food never tastes this good when it is made on any other day. Is it the devotion with which it is cooked which confers upon it its special taste? Or is it the devotion with which it is eaten? Or is it just good old Durga Pujo orgy of cramming food – good, bad and sometimes noxious – down the throat? I’m sure there is a possibility of a religio-culinary study here somewhere, but I’ll leave it to someone else to carry out.
Maha Navami is the last day of Durga’s stay at her mother’s, and it is the last day that she will get to see food vanish astonishingly into the collective human maw. The next day, she will be back home in Kailash, imperturbable for another year, very distant from all the eating, belching and other manners of venting. So, Navami is, in a sense, the day that the spirit of Pujo guzzling goes to the head. Since Bengalis are by nature, culture and conviction carnivorous– it’s mangsho to the hilt, cooked any and every which way.
Purists have it that meat should be cooked on this day in the traditional Bengali manner, but purists are, by all accounts, fast going extinct; in these days of globalisation, the adventurous – which usually means the young – try out various carnivore cuisines, but mostly within their own groups. The Bengali kitchen is still a hotbed of gastronomic Puritanism, especially during the Durga Pujo. And the kitchen is still a woman’s domain, although it fell on my brother-in-law to cook on this day: it was his fault for having been a wonderful cook. And bless my in-laws for realising that taste beat gender any day, Pujo or no Pujo.
Dashami, the day of Durga’s departure, was the last day, and it gave the heady spices of the preceding days a rest. Durga still gets a send-off with sweets, although the nature of the sweets has changed to accommodate changing times, and tastes, and designs. It’s not only Durga’s face that gets stuffed, it’s everybody else’s, too. Earlier, sweets (I’ll stick to “sweets”; “sweetmeats” is an oddly off-putting oxymoron) used to be prepared in the kitchen: narkol nadu, chandrapuli, gaja… The list is extensive.
People knew how to make them, and make them well. Some still do, but now that knowledge, once firmly kept in the domestic domain, is steadily devolving to sweet shops in various parts of Bengal, a handful of which have “specialised” in making particular sweets. It’s all commerce, of course: their ‘special’ sweets bring them more money during the Durga Pujo than they do in all the months of the rest of the year combined. Slowly, but surely, individual households are losing the expertise – nimble fingers, tactility, the subtle senses of smell and taste, a minute attention to time – required to make the best of Bengali sweets. These days, the best mishti doi is to be got not at any home I know of but at a shop in Nabadwip in Nadia district; the best mihidana and sitabhog at Burdwan; the juiciest jolbhora shondesh at Chandannagore.
Although, on Bijoya Dashami, sweets are the main food distributed – there is more fun and satisfaction in giving on this day than in stuffing oneself – our family has a peculiar ritual (the radical coming into play again): we have mangshor ghughni (minced meat in chickpeas). In Delhi, I recall, Duttababu’s home was a special attraction because it always served shami kabab. Ah well, each to his own idiosyncrasy.
The food trend during the Durga Pujo has changed, and is continuing to change, rapidly. Some of it has to do with the evolving cosmopolitan nature of Kolkata, with ethnicities making a permanent home here and adding to and stirring the pot. To put two clichés together, eating out en masse is now de rigueur. There’s even something that used to be beyond ordinary contemplation – the pub crawl. Even a decade ago, I used to have requests from journals and magazines for interesting (emphasis on “interesting”) recipes to cook during this week of festivities. These days, I’m asked to do restaurant reviews.
Maybe it’s just me, but it is possible that pandal-hopping leaves people little time for cooking at home. Or maybe they want a little time-off from the usual routine of knocking around with pots and pans. Furthermore, there is no denying that the Bengali palate has become more sophisticated: it yearns for different tastes, including Pan-Asian cuisine and the kind of authentic Bengali food that, oddly enough, only high-end restaurants seem to be able to provide.
As for me, I remain a purist. Good food on Durga Pujo translates automatically into traditional dishes cooked, in a steaming, aromatic, chaotic, clangourous kitchen-- with labour that only the love of the occasion can provide.