Food & Faith: A Pilgrim's Journey Through India by Shoba Narayan, An Excerpt

In Food & Faith: A pilgrim's journey through India, Shoba Narayan approaches faith through food. An Excerpt:

I am going to Puri to write about Maha Bhog--the pinnacle of all prasadams; the Lord's food, which will be served to his devotees with his blessings. It is kind of a futile exercise really, because I will not be allowed into the temple kitchens.

As someone who was kept out of cricket fields by my neighborhood boys while growing up, I smart at this discrimination. In Puri though, this isn't about gender. No outsider is allowed inside the temple kitchen except the 1000 male cooks who make 56 different kinds of offerings-- called Chappan Bhog-- to serve to the Gods, six times a day.

The list of dishes isn’t just 56; it runs to the hundreds.  The Lord, and his people, likes variety. The sweet dishes alone are over fifty types, including several types of laddu, malpua, kheer, and rasagulla, making this a diabetic’s nightmare.  Thankfully, there are boiled rice dishes; lentil-based dals; vegetable curries; and their permutations and combinations. Food is central to worship in this temple because, you see, Lord Vishnu dines here.

It is a great exercise in imagination to connect an activity with worship in the four greatest Hindu pilgrim sites: the char dhams, they are called.  Rameshwaram, Puri, Dwaraka and Badrinath.  Four abodes of God.  They were created by Shankara, an 8th century young genius who grew up in Kalady.

Vishnu has a bath in the seaside temple of Rameshwaram in South India. He comes up to Puri for a meal; goes onward to Badrinath where he meditates for the welfare of humanity; and retires in Dwarka.  Since he eats in Puri, this temple serves Maha Bhog or the Lord’s food to all devotees.  That is why food is a big deal in this temple.  It is literally the place where Lord Vishnu dines.

The kitchens are vast—spread over an acre.  If you stand on the roof of the Puri library across the street from the temple kitchens, and bend over till you almost fall down, you can see the courtyards leading into the kitchens using a pair of binoculars. This is where 200 junior cooks, who are not yet allowed to enter the kitchens, do the prep work.  They grate hundreds of coconuts: a tiring, thankless job, made tolerable by chanting the name of the Lord.  They chop a mountain of vegetables; wash the earthenware pots that are used. Inside, it is said, are multiple rooms— some say nine; others say 32. Here, 500 main cooks or suaras, as they are called, do the actual cooking along with 300 assistant cooks.  Even by Indian wedding standards—where thousands of guests are fed at one go— the production capacity of the Puri temple kitchens is staggering.

There are 752 chulas or stoves, lit only with charcoal and wood, as it was done in the olden days, imparting a dense, smoky flavor to the food. These stoves, made with mud and brick are hexagonal--and tantric-- in shape. They are quite large--about 4 feet in diameter-- and equally deep. On the floor of the stoves is a nine-chakra yantra or drawing. Every morning, before the fire is lit, the sun god and the fire god are invoked through chanting and homams (havans), imprecisely translated as fire sacrifice, although the only thing that is sacrificed is ghee and grains.

All the cooking is done on earthen pots, which are stacked on top of each other in groups of nine, cooking the food in a kind of sequence. Nine is an oft-repeated number in rituals.  There are navagrahas or nine planets; nava dhaanyas or nine grains; nava durgas or nine Durgas; and so on. Things that take the longest to cook like rice are stacked in the bottom pots, while lighter vegetables that cook easily are placed at the top. Only indigenous vegetables and fruits are used; which means that the list of vegetables that cannot be used is long. No potato, tomato, green chili, cabbage, cauliflower or any other foreign vegetable. Coconut, ghee, rice, dal or lentils, and milk products--yogurt, homemade cheese, and ghee, and milk, are used in abundance. Molasses and date palm are used instead of sugar; black pepper instead of green chilies; rock salt instead of iodized refined salt. Spices such as cardamom, cinnamon, raisins and saffron flavor the sweet dishes; while mustard seeds, fennel, cumin, fenugreek seeds, ginger, asafetida, turmeric, and tamarind are used for the savory dishes. Oil is used for deep-frying certain dishes, mostly sweets. Much of the food is boiled or steamed in earthenware pots over long periods of time with drip-holes for the excess water. Slow cooking at its best.

Excerpted with permission from Food & Faith: a pilgrim's journey through India by Shoba Narayan.

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