Village customs are often baffling to one who’s not steeped in them. And none is stranger than those to do with religious taboos.
I have Muslim, Christian and Hindus neighbors. All seem to coexist quite peacefully. The women draw water from the same well. They stop and chat in a friendly way. Some of them visit each others' homes. They invite one another to weddings.
But on the issue of food and marriage, mysterious walls spring up to divide them.
The young man of a neighboring Hindu family went off some years ago to a Gulf country to earn his fortune. There he fell in love with a Goan Christian girl and married her. His sister Jyoti related the tale of her brother’s folly to me. Why, she said bitterly, did my brother have to be the only boy in the whole village to do such a thing?
And she proceeded to tell me how awkward it was when the girl turned up to stay with them for a few days.
It was the kitchen that was the crux of the problem. How could we allow a Christian girl into our kitchen? Jyoti asked. What would people have said? She had to sleep in Christina’s house.
And presumably eat there too.
Surely, I said, it shouldn’t matter so much. After all, she is your brother’s wife.
But Jyoti shook her head in pity at my ignorance. They had a responsibility to the neighbourhood temple, she explained, with which traditionally her family was associated. If it became known that a Christian girl had entered their kitchen, they would not have been able to participate in the temple rituals during the big festivals of Shigma and Ganapathy.
Nobody from the temple would ever visit our house again, she said. What could we do?
The brother has taken his wife and child and settled in Mangalore. He never visits and the family is bitter about it, but they dare not relent.
The food taboo cropped up yet again, some other day. I had some Goan sausages, which some friends had left behind in my fridge. Goan sausages are a delicacy, but I can’t stand them. Knowing Christina and her daughter would enjoy the sausages, which are not available here, I went over to her house with a packet.
She was sitting in her veranda. Do you want some Goan sausages? I asked.
Shh, Christina said, looking round fearfully to see if anyone had heard.
Don’t tell anyone you gave me these sausages, she whispered, taking the packet from me. If the others get to know we eat such food they’ll never accept anything from my kitchen ever again.
So Christians eat pork and beef.
Muslims eat beef, but not pork.
Hindus regard both with horror, and want to keep both people and food of a certain kind out of their kitchens.
The love for fish is what all faiths have in common. But presumably it's not enough to unite people in love or marriage.
Monday, April 6, 2009
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2 comments:
I don’t know if you have heard of the term Catholic Brahmin in Goa- these are Brahmins who converted to Christianity and consider themselves superior- they are normally well to do and only marry among themselves- caste is still a very operative system in India and even well educated urban Indians are always caste conscious (remember the question- aad nav kai?, where they try to place you in terms of caste) especially when it’s a question of marriage- In many Brahmin households the aversion to meat, killing, blood etc is so strongly ingrained that the revulsion also includes people who consume meat- it’s like “I somehow gulped the tea in their house without throwing up as the whole house was stinking of beef”
I've been reading about Brahmins converting to Christianity in 'Goa: A daughter's story'. But in my post all the people are non Brahmins, Hindus who eat fish, chicken and mutton. Of course, people's attitude to food, particularly different kinds of meat, is deeply ingrained, but it's also hypocritical. I used to travel regularly on the Delhi-Bombay Rajdhani. And invariably there used to be these Gujju kids getting ecstatic at the idea of eating "non-veg" on the train. Obviously in their kitchens at home, meat was not cooked. But they were permitted to eat it outside.
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