Emic perspective of Indian food reveals untold stories of migrant labourers, women, cattle

The struggles of people travelling to other states to find daily-wage work are mostly documented for how they build a life in an alien land with very little means and away from the support system of their families, how they have to withstand harsh and dangerous work conditions or how their desperation to earn a living is often exploited. But in fact, their hardship begins even before they land in the destination city — during their journey. 

The one time their journey did make headlines was when they were left with no option but to walk miles across the country to return to their hometown amid a nationwide lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Ishita Dey, a food anthropologist and assistant professor of sociology with the South Asian University, Delhi studied the internal migration of informal sector workers, travelling with them to observe the arrangements they have to make in trains that are just not designed for their needs. Many times, she found the sleeper coaches filled four to eight times their capacity, making basic amenities like drinking water insufficient. Pantry food is either not affordable or suitable.

In such conditions, discrimination and intolerance run high. Similar was her experience of the sweets industry of Bengal and Bangladesh, where women’s labour goes unrecognised and migration of foreign milch cows are forgotten. She addresses the issues in her upcoming book Sweet Excess. Biography of Sweet Encounters in West Bengal and Bangladesh.

In a conversation with Down To Earth, the researcher shares stories from her field trips:

Preetha Banerjee: You have studied the migration of people working in the informal sector through the lens of their journeys to and from their hometowns as well as diet. Please share some of your field notes, especially those that reveal how the migrant workers perceive trains. 

 

Ishita Dey: Thank you for this question. In my ongoing project supported by the Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, I am following migrant workers on their train journeys. So far, I have completed one round of fieldwork on a single train route from Bhagalpur to Mumbai. As most of us who travelled in trains will be aware, the staff from IRCTC sell breakfast, packaged lunch, dinner, samosa and tea.

At the stations, vendors sell food items according to the season and place. For instance, the moment the train bound for Lokmanya Tilak Terminus in Mumbai entered Maharashtra, we could spot vendors selling vada, idli and vada pav, which does not match up to the food that is sold in Bhagalpur or Patna. 

It was interesting to note how sugar syrup-soaked sweets stacked in steel buckets are sold in trains round the year.

My conversations with migrant workers revealed their adaptability to the dietary constraints of their surroundings. I have observed that migrant workers try to carry food from their homes that will suffice for breakfast and lunch (both onward and return journeys), so that they have to buy dinner and one snack in the morning. On rare occasions, I have seen migrant workers order a meal from the pantry but they buy samosa, tea from both IRCTC vendors as well as vendors who travel in these trains for shorter distances.

While many carry dry food items such as round fried flatbreads with dried cooked items (ranging from brown gram, vegetables to meat) from home, some soak kala chana in mineral water bottles and let them sprout. One of the major expenses in summer, as I write in my recently published report, is bottled water. Though there are water dispensers installed at railway stations, migrant workers are forced to buy bottled water for two reasons. One, at times, the train is too crowded to step out, buy water and get back, and two, for the fear of missing the train as it usually halts for no more than five minutes.

PB: Have you noticed a difference in the relationship with food among the different categories of people you interacted with? 

ID: In trains, yes. Food is often perceived as a reflection of our caste-class-religion and other identities. Trains are a symbol of modernity, and therefore, one would expect trains to be tolerant of each other’s beliefs and practices, but I have come across people who have used food as a means of othering and marking a community. It is very interesting how people assume my fetish for fish when I tell them I am from Calcutta and yet it is this same fetish that leads to stereotyping of a Bangla conversant domestic worker in the National Capital Region. I have written about how a domestic worker’s employer would taunt her that she smelled of mustard oil. 

The politics of identity is deeply entangled in our suspicion / fear of being “contaminated” by the other. How do we make sense of all the violent incidents on suspicion of carrying ‘beef’? Why is it so important to declare “only veg” or “only chicken”? Is it simply to do with hygiene? 

Irrespective of caste-class-religion, there is a way in which food is used to mark the “boundary” of a community and the existing scholarship, be it Dalit autobiographies, or a range of food scholarship, reveals the subtle and explicit ways in which stereotyping of a community with certain animals, fish, vegetables or fruits can also lead to othering and exclusion.

PB: In today’s economy, what is the role of migrant workers?

ID: Migrant workers are the backbone of urbanisation and yet they remain invisible in the planning and everyday functioning of cities. In my ongoing work on migrant journeys, I am trying to understand whether or not migrants feature in the planning of infrastructural services. The answer? Yes and no. 

Every year, the Indian Railways run special trains right before and after festivals to ensure safe passage. Yet every year, we come across news of overcrowded trains, passengers with confirmed tickets not able to secure a berth, etc. 

In my conversation with migrant workers in trains and railway stations, I feel the state views migrant workers as a problem to be managed rather than from a rights-based perspective. Recognising a rights-based perspective would allow the state to have a space for the migrant workers in their imagination — however mythic it is. Most migrant workers ask me counter questions such as: Tell me, apart from Shramik Special Trains in the pandemic, why can’t we have more trains? Have you seen any of us trying to travel without a ticket? We are not travelling for free, but tell me, where are the trains with coaches where we can travel? “We want to travel with dignity” — is an oft-used phrase and I think it is time the state intervenes and recognises the migrant worker from a rights-based perspective who wants to travel and live a life with dignity.

PB: Your upcoming book delves into the changes taking place in the sweets industry at a time when health awareness has peaked. What were your most striking observations about the ecosystem and its various politics in this regard? 

ID: In my work, I have tried to understand what “sweetness” means in the lives of people in West Bengal and Bangladesh. You are absolutely right that the sweets industry has to address the associated health concerns, and in response to that, the sweet shops have come up with their own range of ‘kom mishti’  (low sweet) sweets by using sugar substitutes. These sweets are catered to diabetic patients and called “diabetic mishti”.

Most sweets available in commercial sweetshops are prepared from a milk base, chhana, produced from coagulation of milk and separation of whey water. It has a shorter shelf life. 

The sweets industry’s biggest challenge and achievement is to cook chhana with a sweetening agent (sugar and / or jaggery) and achieve a consistency that is hard (kara) with a prolonged shelf life or a norom / softer consistency, with a shorter shelf life. 

Sugar is central to the sweets industry. I conducted my fieldwork in Rajshahi Division in the peak of summer. One learns how sugar is key to preservation, especially if one watches the workings of the sweets industry in summer. Here, I learnt about the thicker consistency of sugar syrup that holds the key to the shelf life of cham cham. 

If you look at the ecosystem of sweets making across Bengal, you are bound to see that sweet shops depend on milk and chhana suppliers and sweet shops claim to have an association over generations. 

Sometimes, the milk and chhana suppliers travel on trains or buses to reach their final destination. Workings of the sweets industry are dependent on the caste-kin networks of milk and chhana suppliers, who are responsible for supplying “quality” milk.

PB: You have touched upon the invisibilisation of women in the sweets industry in an article. How pervasive is it? 

ID: When I began my recce visits in 2010, I was curious about the relative absence of women sales personnel in sweet shops. I was fortunate enough to meet the late Manjulika Das who was the managing director of KC Das Pvt Ltd who confirmed my suspicion and made an interesting remark. “You will see many women entrepreneurs but you will not spot a single women karigar”.  

Lahana Ghosh from Jugal’s was the brainchild behind the first literature festival on mishti. In a session on women’s labour, I got to know of initiatives where women from indigenous communities are being taught to prepare sweets. In my fieldwork on sweetmaking, I have come across Baby Ghosh, who along with her husband, prepares a crisp layer of milk cream that is a key ingredient of a sweet associated with Krishnanagar in Nadia district. I also write about her in my upcoming book, along with Subhadra Pal, who is remembered as Pishima (Bangla kin term for father’s sister) in Natore, Bangladesh. I did not have the fortune to meet Subhadra Pal but Prabhat Pal, her nephew, was kind enough to share with me the newspaper cuttings which helped me to reconstruct her biography. There is an old, faded photograph of Subhadra Pal standing tall with a long ladle stirring a mix in a kadai. 

But what I must emphasise is late Manjulika Das and late Subhadra Pal came into the business because of their familial ties with sweet making. Lahana Ghosh, I am aware, is trying to break this gender stereotype through involvement of women personnel in her sales team to begin with. So, hopefully some day, we will see women karigars but my field work shows that there are no women workers in sweet shops.

PB: You have also studied the migration of non-human species. What were your learnings? 

ID: I think you are referring to my article on Bogurar Doi published in Gastronomica. It was interesting to understand how people claim a certain breed as their own. In this article, I write about how the British were instrumental in the introduction of the Sahiwal breed across the Indian subcontinent and to other empires, including Kenya. I refer to an article by Jitendra in Down to Earth, where the farmers in Kenya never realised that the Sahiwal breed was a “foreign” breed. 

Kala chana soaked in a water bottle belonging to a migrant labourer travelling in a train bound for Maharashtra from Bihar. Photo: Ishita Dey

Similarly, experts at the Rural Development Academy, Bogura told me that some of the breeds that are perceived as indigenous are actually foreign breeds. The migration of Sahiwal within and outside the subcontinent leaves us with something very important as to what we consider our own is always processual tied to movement. 

I cannot but iterate what Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson have observed that “cultures and peoples” are not mere “spots on the map” because they evolve with the movement of humans and non-human species. We have a lot to learn and map about voluntary, coerced movement of non-human species and its impacts on what meanings of association with food, place and identity.

PB: What do the food industries you have studied (mishti, doi) do for quality control, both in terms of taste and nutrition?

ID: Taste and nutrition have had an interesting place in the sweets industry. Some believe that since milk, the base material, is bacteria-prone, it is best to switch to mechanised production of sweets to make it safe. Some believe buying pasteurised milk is the key to retaining quality and for others, taste and nutrition of sweets would be retained if the sweet shop owner has complete ownership of the supply chain.

Some sweetshops have their own cattle farms to ensure quality, some have video displays of how sweets are made in their factories to assure customers of the quality and for most sweet shops, it is through a sense of trust, smell and touch that they ensure taste and nutrition.

Sweets in West Bengal and Bangladesh are used for ritual purposes and often in conversations with owners and workers they keep on itierating the trust and social sanction they enjoy which will disappear with one batch of fowl sweets.  

I have visited a sweet shop in Krishnanagar which took pride in not selling refrigerated sweets and we asked how. The secret to running the business for this sweet shop was assessing the quantity that would be sold. Very early on, the owner of the sweet shop taught me a key question to assess the scale of the business. “How much milk do you work with?”

Most sweet shops have started to display best before signages in sweet shops. 

PB: What has been your biggest learning from studying Indian society through food?

ID: This is a difficult question. I feel there is an immense potential to study transformations of Indian society through food. Food biographies, as I attempt to show in my work, could provide a glimpse into how communities are made and unmade. What kind of caste-class-gender relations do we foster through our food preferences? Food provides us with an opportunity to understand our histories of migration, foodways and trajectories of who we are and what changes we are forging through food practices. For me, it has shown the ruptures, and fractures of the Indian society and how we should recognise and address “difference”. 

(Ishita Dey is also a member of the Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group.)