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Religion is about a lot more than God, and that is more visible in India than anywhere
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I am a non-believer, and if belief in God was all there was to religion, then I could
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But there's much more to it than that.
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Religion can give people a sense of community, often even unity, and shapes, cultures and
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On the flip side, it can play to our worst tribalistic instincts and divide people just
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I often say on the show that people contain multitudes, or India contains multitudes,
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and when it comes to religion, this is actually more true of India than perhaps any other
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All the religions in the world exist here, even thrive here, and we have more gods and
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goddesses in India than even spices, and indeed the one area that most reflects this incredible
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melting pot of a nation is our food.
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And whether or not you believe in God, I think we can both agree that Indian food can be
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divine, and religion has played a part in that.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
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My guest today is a prolific columnist and author, Shobha Narayan.
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Shobha has just come out with a fascinating book called Food and Faith, A Pilgrim's Journey
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In Food and Faith, Shobha travels to 15 places of worship in the subcontinent and writes
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about the food you get there.
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Now, this is not just a book about travel or food, it's also about our history and
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our society, and it worked for me at multiple levels, mainly because the author's own explorations,
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her intellectual and emotional journey was so much a part of the writing.
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I was delighted to have Shobha on the show, and we had a freewheeling conversation that
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is as much about religion and Indian society as about food.
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I found it, in more ways than one, to be a mouth-watering discussion.
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Before we begin though, let's take a quick commercial break.
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As many of you know, I'll soon be coming out with a four-volume anthology of The Scene
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and the Unseen books, organized around the themes of politics, history, economics, and
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These days, I'm wading through over three million words of conversation from all my
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episodes so far to curate the best bits, and for this to happen, I needed transcripts.
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And that was made possible by a remarkable young startup called TapChief.
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TapChief at tapchief.com is a digital platform that allows companies to outsource work to
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Maybe they could solve your problem too.
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Shobha, welcome to the scene on The Unseen.
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Thank you so much for having me, Amit.
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Shobha, I loved reading your superb book.
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But before we kind of get to the book, I'm also sort of fascinated by your journey in
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the sense that I've read your column for many years in Mint and so on.
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And whenever I read anything by you, I mean, the three things I would typically associate
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you with are food, travel, and writing.
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And of course, you write a lot about food and travel.
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But you've also done journalism in Colombia and so on.
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So tell me a little bit about your background and your sort of journey of living in different
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places in the world and how that affected what you do.
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I grew up in Chennai, and I was one of those kids who knew early on that I wanted to be
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Even while I was in women's Christian college in Chennai, I used to write for the Indian
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There was this wonderful magazine called Asaid in Chennai, which was run by Janaki Benkataraman.
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And those days, there were no emails.
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So I walked up to her and said, can I write for you?
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And I used to write columns occasionally for the Indian Express, which at that time was
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edited by Rajmohan Gandhi.
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So very illustrious man, as you know.
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So as a college student, I wrote, as a school student, I wrote poetry.
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So I was one of those kids who just has written all her life.
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I took a detour in college when I went abroad to complete my undergraduate.
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I studied art and sculpture, and I have since developed an interest in that.
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I went to a women's college there, too, called Mount Holyoke, where I did art.
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And then after a master's in finance, I finally returned to journalism at the Columbia J School.
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It was a one-year program.
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It was a boot camp in many words.
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You had to ride in the back of a police car to do police reporting.
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You had to go to the criminal courts to write about law and trials and things like that.
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But I have always been drawn to memoirs.
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And my first break in food writing came when the New York Times announced a competition.
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They took a half-page ad and said, write 150 words about food.
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And if your essay is chosen by Ruth Reisel, who was then the restaurant critic of the
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New York Times, we will give you a $1,000 coupon to use as you wish.
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So as an impoverished student, the appeal of getting $1,000 to dine in New York was
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So I discovered, you know, writing 150 words and making an essay in that, in some ways
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harder than writing 850 words, which is what you and I do for our letters and blogs and
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So condensing a narrative in 150 words was difficult.
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I did it, and I won the prize.
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I should have dug up the essay, which I could have read to you.
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But it was about India, 1986.
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I want to study in America, but my grandparents will not allow me.
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Finally, the elders decide that they will ask me to prepare a feast, one that they are
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sure I will fail because I don't know cooking.
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And so I take up the challenge, and then I describe the feast.
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And each line had, so there was bindi roasted in oil with fennel seeds, and then there was
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the rasam piping hot with a sprinkling of coriander leaves on top.
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There was rice served with streams of mist on top and ghee, golden ghee.
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So essentially, it was a practice in food writing.
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So it was a practice in describing food in a very condensed way.
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So when I won the award, I got this $1,000 coupon, which I dined away.
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And Ruth Reisel, who went on from the Times to edit Gourmet, which is the late great gourmet,
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as I call it, she said, why don't you expand this 150-word essay and make it into 1,500
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And that was how the food writing began.
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They called it the God of Small Feasts, and it was published in Gourmet.
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And beginner's luck, it won this James Beard Award for the MSK Fisher Award for Distinguished
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And that was how I first learned about MSK Fisher, and I went on to read her book and
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then just kept writing about food and wine, Bon Appetit, gourmet while I was in Manhattan,
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and then moved to India and wrote about food as well for mint.
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Wow, that's quite a mind-blowing story, and to do it in 150 words seems to me almost impossible.
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Like, when I teach my writing course, I'll often quote Blaise Pascal's famous quote about
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when he wrote a letter to someone and he said, quote, apologies for sending you a long letter.
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I did not have time to write you a short one, stop quotes.
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I think anyone who's ever written to a word count or a deadline knows exactly how hard
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And while you were describing it to me just now, even though I just had my brunch, my
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mouth was kind of watering right away.
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So what is it that drew you to food writing in particular?
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Was it that this challenge came up and you liked food and you liked writing and you said
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okay, I'll combine these two and try it out, or were you already reading food writers?
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If so, who were the writers, food writers and otherwise, who you really enjoyed and
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thought that they might shine a light on the kind of writing that you want to do?
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So what was that process of evolving as a writer and then as a food writer?
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Because it strikes me that when one starts writing about food, you'll sort of begin
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by writing about the sensory experience of the food, the smells, the taste, the look
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But then you move on as indeed you have in this book, you move on to the wider cultural
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and social significances and the resonances that food carries.
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So you know, was that there from the start or is that something that you kind of that
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evolved within your writing as well?
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So Amit, as you know, there are two types of food writing.
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One is the writing of recipes and cookbooks and the other is the kind of work that I do.
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I'm not a good cook in my kitchen.
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And I stumbled on food writing, unlike writing in general, where I was one of those kids
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Food writing didn't come naturally to me.
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While in Chennai, I wrote about Sabaz and music and you know, whatever the editor assigned
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Food writing literally was a break, a fortunate happenstance, a discovery of a skill that
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I didn't know existed because all in pursuit of thousand dollars of a food coupon.
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And since then, I have worked at it.
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I think food writing is different from cooking.
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I don't think the two are together.
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In order to write about food, you don't need to be a good cook.
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You need to have a good palate.
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Fisher said, you need to have the capacity to eat prodigious amounts of food.
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And as you are eating it, to think about it, you need to have taste and you need to have
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So they are so Meenakshi Ammal's classic book, Samayitapar, which every Tamilian has and
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carries three volumes, is a precision.
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It is about use of this particular type of rice cooked to this particular amount of.
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And she even describes how you, the Tamil word is aathardha, which means to make cool.
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There are ways in which you make cool before, for example, in Tamil cooking, there is a
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dish called beans, which is beans in which you put the chanaikka dal and you grind it
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and then you put it in and then you steam it.
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And then she describes how you cool it.
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You put, I mean, in the olden days, my grandmother would put it out on a rice cloth, an old toned
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So that is a very precise type of Kubuk kind of observation, how you cool, how you cook,
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how long you cook and what is the smell that emanates when the idli is done.
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The kind of writing I do involves being, to quote Isaiah Berlin, the fox and the hedgehog,
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you need to have a wide spectrum.
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The surface area has to be quite large and you need to be able to connect history and
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philosophy and feminism for me and sensuality and India.
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So that's what my kind of writing does.
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And how did I cultivate that skill is I think that reading a lot, as you say, I was introduced
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after writing to all the big American writers.
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And Katie Achaya is a must read if you are an Indian food writer.
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I read Bikram Docter's columns religiously.
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I read Harold McGee who wrote an encyclopedia about food.
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And then, I mean, I have a long list.
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While in gourmet, one of the pleasures was to be exposed to food writers.
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So Fuchsia Dunlop books on Chinese cooking is one that I read.
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Michael Pollan, of course, although now he's overused, everybody reads him.
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There's a wonderful book called The Man Who Ate Everything written by Jeffrey Steingarten.
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He was the food columnist for Vogue and he wrote this fantastic book of essays called
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The Man Who Ate Everything.
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And in it, for example, he will take French fries and he will conduct experiment to see
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which is the best kind of French fry and how you make it.
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I loved a book called Feast, The Food of the Islamic World by a woman called Anissa Helu.
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And if I'm pronouncing it right.
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And what was fantastic about that is as a vegetarian, you tend to basically keep away.
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I mean, you think that books that focus on non-vegetarian food are not useful to you.
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But this book, for example, even though I don't eat meat kebabs, she places them side
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by side by side and then describes how a Turkish kebab is different from an Iranian kebab
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from an Iraqi, Iraq kebab in Iraq.
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And it was an experience of description of the kind that is very useful to me and of
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history and milieu and stories and community and family and cooking.
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Cooking comes last in a way.
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Then once you get into it, again, Vikram's columns will introduce me to Manaso, Lhasa.
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These are Sanskrit texts from the old KP Acharya talks about it a lot.
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So these are the things I read.
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And then there's an Indian book by Colleen Taylor Senna called Feast and Fast.
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That's a wonderful book because it anchors in food history in India in a very scholarly
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So for example, there are recipes for barbecued rat and there are recipes that basically convince
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you that we were not the prudes that we have become in terms of our attitude towards animals,
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certainly the cow and our attitudes towards meat and our attitudes towards cooking and
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this whole purity and non-purity that has invaded the Brahminical kitchen since.
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So then I can give you a longer list if you like, but that's a start.
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Yeah, and with this answer, you said you can't cook, but you provided a feast of reading
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for my listeners and for me because I'm sure many of these books are now going to get gobbled
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And of course, we share our admiration of Vikram Doctor.
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He's been on the show, in fact, talking about the Indianness of Indian food was the name
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of the episode and it was all about almost how everything that we consider Indian is
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So I kind of have a question also about how writing about something can shape a person,
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like at the obvious level, like this is again a sort of a two part question.
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I mean, it's really the same question, but two different directions and one is obviously
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that one would expect that when you begin writing about food, obviously your palate
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will get more refined because you will pay more attention and be more mindful about all
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the individual things that go into what you're eating and the processes and so on.
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So did that happen with you?
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And the second part is the kind of food writing that you have done would also then mean that
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you're not only expanding your palate, but you're also expanding your mind because you
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want to make these cultural connections, these social connections, historical connections,
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I would imagine that it then, you know, incentivizes you to read much more widely and almost in
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that sense and become a different person than who you would have been if you weren't a food
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Is there something to that?
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The short answer, I mean, is that yes, it changed my palate.
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It changed my palate in a very specific way, it forced me to pay attention to what I was
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You're just gobbling it up.
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So it also defined in sharp focus that I was losing a whole spectrum of taste because I
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happen to be a vegetarian and I have not been able to eat meat or fish or chicken.
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A friend of mine said this best, he said, eat meat if you want to just before you die,
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because then the amount of time that you'll spend regretting will be the least.
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So that said, I realized that a spectrum is lost to me, but what I think what being vegetarian
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does is that it forces you to pay attention to all the other flavors because you're losing
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So how do you eat is the question.
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How do you eat if you want to write about food and how do you take notes?
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How do you keep mental notes?
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Very slowly, start by eating very slowly, start by savoring the food.
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And I think that restaurant menus, for example, I always read them because they give me a
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way of, in India less so, but certainly in other countries, you can tell the chef's influence
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on the menu in the way they have written it.
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So for example, braised, does he use the word boiled or braised potatoes?
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Does he use the word sauteed beans or does he use stir fried?
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What is the taste difference between, I mean, just like computer technology has very specific
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words, cooking has specific words.
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And the question I always face is, is it reflected in the taste of the food?
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Chinese food, for example, is entirely about braised, sauteed, veg to cabbage.
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So take the cabbage and do it four different ways and see how it tastes differently.
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The other thing I always pay attention to is the environment and restaurants are a great
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For example, in India, there is a notion that the chef or the cook's temperament matters,
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which is why if you go to Hare Krishna kitchens or if you go to temple kitchens, they will
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chant the Lord's name, for example, or there will be peaceful music playing in the background.
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Some of my grandparents' friends, they would not eat outside food because they said that
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in Tamil we call it Yenna Padirgal.
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Yenna Padirgal means the thought, a stamp of the chef matters and it will influence
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how you eat and it will influence your body.
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I have interviewed chefs in New York.
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When you go into restaurant kitchens of Daniel Bouloud or John George, it is a hell hole.
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People are screaming, people are cursing.
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The food that comes out is sublime.
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So that's the other thing is that the milieu matters.
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How does the chef's temperament get translated to the waiter who describes the food to us?
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There is that whole chain and I pay attention to that and how does it?
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I studied psychology in Women's Christian College as an undergraduate.
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There was a very cool study where people would look at the menu and the first person, if
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they call out what you want, you will sort of be forced to call out something else, even
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if you actually wanted that dish to be different.
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So the psychology of ordering of food in restaurants or the psychology of eating is what I pay
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History is a very obvious one, but that doesn't come in the act of eating.
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When the act of eating, it is about using the fork or the spoon and using the hand,
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the tactility of the fingers, which is how we eat, the culture that invented chopsticks
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and why did China invent chopsticks as opposed to the spoon?
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So those are the kinds of questions you ponder while you are at the table.
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And I love eating at restaurants and because of all these things.
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The history comes afterwards.
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The history is not linked to a dish, in my view, the history is linked to a cuisine.
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So the Middle East is fascinating to me because I think some of the best writers of Middle
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Eastern cuisine are women, but it's such a male centric culture.
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So how did that happen?
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And then learning about, for example, there was a wonderful cookbook called the Suryaana
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Cookbook and by Latika George, I believe it was.
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And the Serene Christian food is heavily fish centric.
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I don't fish, but what you got out of that cookbook was the milieu of Serene Christians
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and as somebody who spent a lot of time in Kerala, it was a wonderful read for that reason.
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So to answer your question about palate cultivation, I think slowing down and paying attention,
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making connections as disparate as you can would be the three things I do in terms of
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how it has expanded me is that the slowing down, paying attention, favoring, making disparate
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connections force you to, each of those has like a four factor output, which forces you
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to read four different types of books or come back and research four different types of
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My other sort of observation about a lot of your writing is that in one sense, even when
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you're writing about food, it is like in this book, I got this sense and more senses and
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the fact that you just went to all these different sites, but that it's a travel book and it's
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not just a travel book in the sense that it is about travel.
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It is your travel book in the sense that it is about your journey, not just your sort
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of physical journey through space, but also how you are evolving and changing.
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Now before I kind of get to the book, what I was wondering about was that you've lived
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in different countries or different parts of your life.
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You have also written extensively about, you know, first settling into America, then, you
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know, coming back to India and settling in here, and it strikes me that someone who travels
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like that, who is sort of in a sense, I wouldn't say uprooted because these are all choices
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that you made, but someone who chooses to live somewhere else and then come back somewhere
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else is forced to do something that others who stay in one place are not, which is to
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constantly re-examine themselves, re-examine their sense of self, their self of identity
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and all of that, which in the context of religion, obviously there's a lot of in this book, which
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I'll ask you later, but in a general sense, you know, what has that kind of exploration
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Because it always strikes me that, you know, we always assume that individuals are what
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individuals are, right?
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As if it's, you know, you are a fixed person at a given point in time.
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But the point is that, you know, if you had a different set of experiences, you would
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be a fundamentally different person.
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How do you think all of this shaped you?
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You know, was it easy to settle into another culture?
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How did it make you look at your own identity as an immigrant and as someone born a Hindu?
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You know, did it make you more open?
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Did it, you know, like some immigrants to the US, for example, become more assertive
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about their cultural roots and all of that?
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Tell me a little bit about how that journey happened for you.
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So the gift of being an immigrant is that you straddle two cultures or three cultures
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all the time and it forces you to compare, which is a gift for a writer because really
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writing is about the best way to illustrate what you want to say to your reader as you
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just did with Blaise Pascal is to compare or so show the other the cause of being an
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immigrant is that you are always a Trishanku.
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So that is broadly been my life.
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And I think it's helpful for me because I grew up till I moved to America at age 20.
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I was a Chennai girl and as I know from your previous podcast, but for example, Chennai
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It used to be when I was growing up, but that was a gift because it forced it gave you a
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certain set of parameters that were unchanging and that you thought was true for the rest
#
So you go from that to America where I lived for the next 18 years or 18 years in 18 years
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America where I was moving all around.
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So I sometimes wonder, I went as a fresh off the board person and landed in Massachusetts
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in a very liberal college.
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And as a result, I became a Democrat by philosophy.
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I was just thinking, had I landed in Memphis or Georgia, would my philosophy and politics
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have become Republican?
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I have no answer to that.
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But I think those are the kinds of questions that I asked is that am I a democratic?
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Am I liberal because of where I landed?
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And I think what happens when you are hungry to leave your hometown as I was, Chennai was
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stifling to me because I grew up in a fairly large family where everybody had an opinion
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about how much oil I should put in my hair and how long the hair should be, what I should
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eat and how I should dress.
#
So I was ready to just flee.
#
And when you go and land as a tabula rasa, which I was and so open, the influences, you're
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like a child, you're like an infant and the influences, they shape you and as they shaped
#
I think my deep rooted sort of reflexive taking up for the underdog, whoever the underdog
#
is of the moment comes from my time in Massachusetts, which is very liberal and democratic and has
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a strong social conscience.
#
My liberal politics, feminism, Mount Holyoke is one of the seven sisters.
#
So I became, I went from a mother who said a woman is like a creeper and you have to
#
sort of creep and bind yourself to your new family to this place where feminism was argued
#
So I think for anyone who leaves home, whether within a country, like a lot of my friends
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in Bangalore have come from the North or a different country, it forces you to take your
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parents and your family and your community off that pedestal and see them for the people
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with clay feet, people you love, but people with clay feet that they are.
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And it forces you to question everything.
#
And I think that is the point of going away from home.
#
And some of us take advantage of it as I did, and some of us don't.
#
And I think we fear it, we fear the change.
#
So a lot of Indians who went to America in the sixties and seventies became more Indian
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and became more encapsulated within their culture.
#
And I wasn't like that.
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I didn't see the point of living abroad if you were not.
#
And being an artist helped, so my friends were gay people.
#
My closest friend was a lesbian who colored her hair purple.
#
So okay, so if you don't take the arts, no matter, but I think once you have a family,
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then there's a tendency to go inward and kind of freeze yourself when you left India.
#
That's what happens to a lot of Americans.
#
After that, I moved to Singapore, which is a different sort of experience.
#
Singapore was a bubble.
#
It had the gift of three fantastic cooking cultures, which was the Arab cooking, the
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Chinese cooking, and the Indian cooking.
#
So it had that, but living in Singapore as an immigrant was a bubble.
#
And then I had a choice of moving to Chennai or Bangalore, but my husband could not stand
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Chennai summers or the heat, so we ended up in Bangalore.
#
So it's a very gentle, welcoming city, which is a city of immigrants.
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So I'm happy that I landed here.
#
So I think that being an immigrant forces you to examine and question constantly.
#
It's just a state of dissatisfaction, really, most of your time.
#
And for a person to live with that angst is not a happy thing, but it helps with the writing.
#
I'll take a detour here and point out something which I loved about your book, which is that
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it's full of so many light touches, it's got a conversational tone.
#
And I was just reminded of that when you mentioned having gay friends and a lesbian friend, and
#
there's a delightful anecdote in your book about how your lesbian friend was once accosted
#
by another girl who wanted to convert her to Christianity and said, why don't you come
#
out and talk with me for a couple of minutes?
#
And your friend told that girl that I'll come out with you, but here's the thing, either
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you'll save my soul or I'll seduce you.
#
So I found that so kind of delightful.
#
And your book is full of these light, charming moments that make a person hello and so if
#
any of my listeners are not interested in either food or faith, you can still have fun.
#
So that's sort of your third F there for you.
#
Let's kind of now go closer to the book.
#
Like you've described this book as a book about Hinduism written by a skeptical Hindu.
#
Now before we talk about the book and about Hinduism, I want to talk about the skeptical
#
You know, in your afterword, you write about how quote, religion is an inheritance and
#
And it's interesting how it shifts from one to the other for you.
#
Like you've written about how as a teenager, you were an atheist, then agnostic in your
#
twenties and thirties, and you turn to religion again, you know, later in life.
#
So much so that in the introduction of this book, you wrote quote, it defines who I am,
#
perhaps not as much as feminism and certainly not as much as being a writer or a mother,
#
And this turns to unpack here, but I'll just ask you about religion and per se that, you
#
know, what has been the role of religion in your life and what's kind of, you know, just
#
as you've made a physical homecoming by, you know, settling in India, it seems that your
#
journey with regards to religion has also, you know, gradually come that kind of circle,
#
So tell me a little bit about the role religion has played in your life and the different
#
ways in which you think about it.
#
So my mother is a, what is called a Sri Vidya Upasaka, by which I mean she was, it's a feminine
#
So I grew up with this Amit, I grew up in a home, which was, she became this after my
#
brother and I left home.
#
She said she caught hold of religion when her children left home.
#
Possibly that is a trajectory that many people will follow because most people take to religion
#
I am similar in that, so I'm not, and the bell shaped cover, I'm sort of in the middle.
#
In terms of the usefulness of religion, a long time ago, maybe two decades ago, there
#
was a cover story in Time magazine about religion and it made this case about how people who
#
had faith, and it was largely Christian faith because Time magazine was for the Western
#
world, and there was a whole slew of benefits that were listed out.
#
You will have better marriages, you will have better health, you will have better relationships
#
within the community, your immunity will be higher, and again, these are narratives that
#
Now they say if you keep a gratitude journal, you will have this, this, and this, and this,
#
but I remember I was not part of the self-help genre, I was not paying attention to that,
#
but so this really sort of caught me out of the blue and said, my God, if Time magazine
#
says religion is so great, I better start looking at it.
#
And I shelved it away and I just didn't pay attention, but so you have two strands.
#
One is because my mother was so deeply spiritual, I sort of rebelled against it.
#
And then intellectually seeing the benefit of faith, but then faith as I have come to
#
learn is a felt experience, it's not a cerebral experience, it is a visceral experience,
#
and I'm not there yet, I think it would be wonderful to have that visceral experience
#
where monks in the Kumbh Mela have experienced transcendence, when they see the Ganga, they
#
just, I mean, and here we are saying, you know, in California, drugs have become legal.
#
Imagine if you can achieve that without drugs.
#
So that's what religion did to you.
#
And I've seen it time and time again in India.
#
Now, okay, so let's say I've come to a point where I admit faith as an idea into my life.
#
Buddhism and Hinduism are both seductive to me, monotheistic faiths don't attract me
#
Hinduism is a marvelous faith because of our, it is a faith that still has not given up
#
its very ancient animistic roots, where rocks are worshipped, where trees, we have sacred,
#
and Nandita Krishna has written this wonderful book on sacred trees and sacred groves.
#
You know, we are original tree huggers, we are the original rock worshippers and river
#
And that connects us not just to our own Vedic path, but to paths in Egypt, where, you know,
#
the pyramids were built.
#
My father passed away recently, and the death ceremonies that surround an Indian death are
#
very similar to sending off a pharaoh to the next life.
#
So we sent my father off with a cow in it, with an umbrella, with slippers, with clothes,
#
with his favorite food.
#
I think that's so wonderful.
#
The rituals that I disdained as a child are so meaningful to me now that we are living
#
more and more in a world where our life is shorn of meaning.
#
Our life has been the vestiges of the rituals that connected us to milestones.
#
You know, in African cultures, when a man reaches a certain age, we would send them
#
off to the hunt, and they would have these markings and tattoos on it.
#
We still have that, but we have forgotten them.
#
So if you admit faith as essential to your well-being, as I have come to believe, then
#
you have to choose your faith, and as an adult you can, and I chose the faith that I was
#
I haven't found enough to give it up, and I like the fact that there are women goddesses.
#
There aren't too many faiths in which there are women goddesses.
#
I think that was a key element, which makes me like Hinduism, and I specifically like
#
the Hinduism of the left-handed path, as my mother would call it, which is there in Bengal,
#
which is there in Kerala, which is there in Nepal, when I went to see the goddess.
#
The left-handed god is tantric.
#
It embraces what Carl Jung calls the shadow, which is the quote-unquote, the so-called
#
bad part of yourself, the things that you suppress.
#
It embraces sacrifice, animal sacrifice.
#
It embraces blood, wine, madhu, the goddess drinks blood and wine.
#
It embraces all the things that have been sanitized out of, you know, the, how shall
#
we call it, the middle path Hinduism.
#
So I like the left-handed path.
#
I like Chinnamasta, the tantric goddess, who cut off her head and dances on corpses.
#
So the reason to embrace faith is intellectual for me.
#
The reason to embrace Hinduism is the marvelous variety, and the fact that I am interested
#
in Carl Jung and dreams and transcendence and how to end the whole, you know, marijuana,
#
if you have to say it, and effects of it thereof.
#
And the fact that people are, in Bangalore, one of the most interesting things that I've
#
attended recently is a fire-walking ceremony.
#
And if you like, we can talk about that.
#
Yeah, we'll come back to it.
#
There's so much to unpack here, and this is, what kind of fascinates me about everything
#
that you've just said and which you've written about in your book is this notion of faith,
#
of the instrumental qualities of faith, where you point out that, you know, like you point
#
to the Time magazine article that it can help us lead more fulfilled lives and we are happier
#
and so on and so forth, thereby pointing out how, you know, faith is useful, I mean, faith
#
is important because it is useful.
#
It doesn't matter if it's true or not, as long as it's useful.
#
And this brings me to a very interesting thought, because I often get semantic about, you know,
#
People think of them as separate points on a continuum.
#
But you can actually be atheist and agnostic at the same time, because atheism has to do
#
with belief, and an atheist is someone who has an absence of belief, he doesn't believe
#
that there's no God, there's simply an absence of belief.
#
You know, much as, you know, not collecting stamps is not a hobby, similarly, it's not
#
a belief itself, it's an absence.
#
And while atheism deals with belief, agnosticism deals with knowledge.
#
And what it means is, an agnostic holds a position that you cannot know whether there
#
is a God or not, there is epistemic humility.
#
So it is possible to be both an atheist and an agnostic, if you look at it technically,
#
because you can both not believe, and at the same time, accept that there are some things
#
And the interesting addition to that is that besides being an atheist and an agnostic,
#
you can now be a person of faith also.
#
Because without believing and accepting that you cannot know, you can still embrace faith,
#
because of the utility it has in your life, and you know, that sense that you're part
#
of a community, the comfort that you get from these rituals and traditions, I mean, in fact,
#
again, just thinking aloud, it reminds me of a book by Steven Landsberg called The Big
#
Questions, in which he says that most people who profess to believe in God actually don't
#
You know, they say they believe, but if it comes to the crunch, you know, so again, I
#
mean, it seems to be coming from the way of thinking that, hey, religion is useful, even
#
So what's your sense of, you know, you've been to all these places, you've mingled
#
with all these religious people in the sense of this kind of balance between usefulness
#
What are your observations?
#
So I both agree and disagree with Karl Marx's statement about religion being the opiate
#
of the masses or the opium of the masses.
#
It is actually, it has the benefit of comfort and otherworldliness that a drug gives.
#
But what touched me was the way a devotee, the truly faithful deals with God has nothing
#
It's a very particular thing.
#
You know, I saw women in Palani doing Anga Pradashnam, where you rolled around the temple
#
and saying, Muruga, Muruga.
#
And it was her, from her face, from her demeanor, from the supplicancy with which she rolled
#
and from the eyes which were tuned in with God, she was not paying attention to the surroundings.
#
You could tell the fervor with which she believed that if she did this particular thing, that
#
her problem, whatever that specific problem was, whether it was a son or a daughter being
#
So it is a connection, this sort of connection, INV, you know, and I saw this countless times.
#
I mean, mostly in South Indian temples, because I could tune in very quickly to the nuances
#
So you go to Ambalapura, the palpaisam was made for the God, and the priest would go
#
out every day and call out, Vasudeva, Vasudeva, three times.
#
And you're calling, as if you're calling your son who is playing the cricket field,
#
and I know you're writing a book on cricket, to come back.
#
So it is a feat of imagination.
#
And the word that is used by my mother is bhavana, bhavanai in Tamil.
#
So okay, so assume you're a skeptic like I am, why not cultivate faith, just to improve
#
your imagination is the question I have.
#
I mean, I think there are many ways to do it, the art of drawing, there are books about
#
it, how to, and there are lots of people in the West who've made a fortune by teaching
#
you how to cultivate your creativity.
#
But rituals are a great way where you can look at a grain of rice and see a universe,
#
you look at a stone and see the Shiva, the destroyer of the universe.
#
You hold the Nataraja pose in your Bharatanatyam and then you become that goddess, as so many
#
Bharatanatyam dancers in Chennai demonstrate.
#
And the best Kathak, as my friend Madhu Nataraja in Bangalore tells me, some of the finest
#
Kathak choreographies or the creations were done by a Muslim Nawab who pretended he was
#
So these are flights of fancy that will help you no matter what area of life that you would
#
So there are two things I find that religion is about, you take it all down.
#
One is Bhavana or imagination, the other is Saranagati or self surrender.
#
Self surrender has to do with, it's not about giving up on free will, it is about applying
#
for a job at Apple or Microsoft, doing the best you can.
#
And then, you know, having this faith, which Ramanujan, the mathematical genius had, is
#
that something is beyond my spectrum that will help me.
#
And devotees have that.
#
And usually they are down and out, usually somebody is sick.
#
It is, visiting a temple is, if you see, if you go beyond the praying and everything,
#
it is about being caught in a quagmire of hopes and dreams.
#
You stand in the temple, in any temple and you're surrounded by murmuring people.
#
And it's as if you are in a cloud of dreams, fear and hope.
#
And they've all come to this one place to solve it, to solve their problems.
#
And if you are a feeling person like me, you will feel that.
#
And then that's the transition from cerebral to visceral.
#
And I truly believe what Diana X said in all her books, the word deceives the yatra.
#
And the more you go, the more you subjugate yourself, the more you get rid of this ego
#
mind and get into the feeling mind, you will be touched.
#
And it is a privilege to be touched in that way.
#
And I'm very sort of intrigued by the role of both rituals and food in that.
#
I mean, food, of course, is a part of some rituals also, but, you know, deep associations
#
with each of these places.
#
And we'll kind of talk about some of them.
#
But what it kind of, again, strikes me is that, you know, again, when I teach my writing
#
course to go back to that, I'll often tell the people who participate that if you want
#
to, you know, one useful hack in terms of building a routine is build a ritual around
#
So, you know, in the sense that you get up at the same time, you make a cup of coffee,
#
you sit at the same place, you listen to the same playlist, and you're more likely to get
#
into the writing groove.
#
And the reason for that is actually a scientific one.
#
You know, neurologists would say neurons that fire together, wire together.
#
So when these things kind of come together, they can work together.
#
And it seems that there is a deep truth there which religion hit upon, because you have
#
all of these things coming together, you have ritual coming together, you have food coming
#
together, you have, you know, certain ways of doing things, different customs in different
#
places, like the Sufis in Ajmer may, you know, whirl and do all of those things.
#
You have these separate distinct rituals.
#
And therefore strikes me that it doesn't really matter whether there is a God or not, or whether,
#
you know, what the religion holds out as facts are true or not.
#
What is true is that all of these, they can come together and they can kind of put you
#
in a particular state of mind which can, as you so eloquently put it, make the whole experience
#
In fact, I was going to ask you earlier when you were talking about how food can be affected
#
by how it's presented and everything around it.
#
You know, you've mentioned at one point in your book that if you were asked, you know,
#
if you had one meal to have before you left the planet, what would you have?
#
And you mentioned breakfast in Haridwar, especially their samosas.
#
Do you think part of the reason that food tasted so good to you is everything that was
#
You know, so are all these things also part of religion?
#
That religion is not just about the bland fact of there being a God and everything associated
#
with that, but all of these local things also play a part in that?
#
A hundred percent, Amit.
#
I think that this is why they say when we offer it to the God, we call it naivedyam
#
and it becomes prasadam or prasad after the God has blessed it.
#
And a hundred percent, I believe the taste of the food, the divinity associated with
#
it, the feeling that what you are having is the God's blessing contributes to your wellbeing.
#
So I actually, after these trips of mine, I'm a little, I have started looking at this
#
notion of the energy around the food, energy around the cook a little bit more carefully.
#
Haven't come to a conclusion yet, but I actually think there is something to the fact what
#
we Hindus have discovered in India and what the faithful have discovered in every state
#
is that the milieu surrounding the food and its preparation matter and it makes a difference.
#
And it is a subtle difference, perhaps we have lost the art of recognizing it, but I
#
have come to believe there is a difference.
#
And I am trying in small ways to figure out experiments to figure out that difference.
#
But I wanted to add, I'm sure if you haven't done this already for your students, the Paris
#
review interviews, which are available online for free, I'm sure you know them, but they
#
are great examples of the routines and superstitions that writers develop.
#
And one that struck to my mind was the Furnace Hemingway, of course, is the great one who
#
wrote and when the writing was good, he would stop and then go out drinking and come back
#
But the other one was, I think Dan Brown got these shoes that were anti-gravity shoes and
#
would sort of hang on the ceiling upside down as a writing ritual routine.
#
But that was for your students and yeah, and I think I've answered your other question
#
In fact, I do cite the Writers at Work series as you know, the Paris review interviews were
#
called to my students, I talked about the Hemingway interview also, because he said
#
some really interesting things in there.
#
I haven't read the Dan Brown interview, but I now will.
#
And this is probably a good time then to, you know, before we get down to the book to
#
talk about the craft of writing, like you are someone who's been a prolific columnist,
#
you've kind of written all these years, you've also written a bunch of books.
#
So what is kind of the process like?
#
What is the column process like?
#
Do you face writer's block?
#
Do you have hacks to deal with it?
#
And you know, how has, you know, looking back over the years, how has sort of your craft
#
evolved and the way you approach, I mean, let's talk about columns first, you know,
#
can you can you give me some insight on that?
#
So I'll go from the details to the broader one.
#
I actually believe in Hemingway's words, kill your darling.
#
So then if you write a paragraph that you're very proud of, you need to look at it again,
#
and you need to kill your darling, by which he meant that when you fall in love with your
#
own writing, examine it with a little bit more critical eyes.
#
I also, small things like don't use the same word in the same paragraph or within two or
#
The thesaurus should be your best friend, because it will actually force you to look
#
at, so if you're struggling for a word, look at it in thesaurus, it may enlighten you on
#
how to actually present it.
#
The beginning and the end are the most important aspects of a column, especially the end, because
#
ideally in this age of soundbites, think about coming up with a soundbite, a one line soundbite
#
which encapsulates your column that will be probably the most important sentence you write.
#
Like a poker player, don't reveal your hand all at once.
#
So a New York Times editor once told me that in the first paragraph, you're pretty much
#
written the whole essay, don't reveal your hand so much, so do it gradually, do a little
#
bit of zigzag to maintain the tension.
#
These are the things that all of us learn once you do it enough.
#
As far as my column, Raju Naraswati, who is known to both of us, described my column,
#
he was my first editor and he said it is of seeing, using the small everyday act to come
#
So that has been sort of how I approach column writing, where you use simple things to come
#
up with a bigger philosophical, whether it's philosophical or a larger picture.
#
And that's how, that's how I think and that's how I view the column.
#
So there are many kinds of columnists, you are one who links events to philosophy.
#
I am not an event to philosophy person, partially because I'm not a politics junkie like so
#
many columnists are in this country.
#
I am much more of everyday things, small things linking it to bigger truth.
#
So that in that itself, there are two types of columnists.
#
If you would like to be Amit Verma type of columnist, I have no words for you.
#
If you would like to be sort of a humorous, a little bit playful, again, what I said about
#
seeing the universe in a grain of sand type of columnist, I would say, first of all, when
#
you stand in a line, don't look at your smartphone, talk to people around you, when you're going
#
to buy food, try your best not to use after COVID, stop ordering on Amazon, actually go
#
out to your Monday and find people.
#
Because in order to write about life as I do, you have to engage with life.
#
And more and more these days, it's become very easy to sit at home and look at the computer
#
And the problem with that is that you won't get flashes of insight, which only come when
#
you're bored, when your mind is idle.
#
And you have to force yourself to give yourself that moment of idleness when you're not checking
#
So I don't, I, for example, some, a few things I have done, I removed Facebook, Twitter,
#
I go through large spaces of the month when I disengage email, which is easy to do if
#
you have a smartphone, I mute WhatsApp messages.
#
So notifications, muting is a very important thing.
#
So if you're addicted to checking your phone as I am, at least mute the notifications.
#
Whenever possible, forget your phone at home when you go out.
#
So these are ways in which you engage with the presence when you engage with people,
#
talking to people is a good one.
#
Try to compartmentalize your life so that you're writing time, do the Pomodoro.
#
I use the Pomodoro technique, which is 20 minutes without surfing the internet and stuff
#
I used to have an app called Freedom, which is installed where you basically shuts off
#
your computer and you can't open Chrome and nothing will happen.
#
So I have been known to do that.
#
Usually the way I write a column and I did a weekly column for Mint was that be on the
#
lookout for an idea that is somewhat topical because nobody cares about.
#
So essentially have attention for festivals that come up, have some notion of what's going
#
on in the world and tangentially be on the lookout for that idea.
#
And usually the idea would percolate, I would make notes longhand on A4 paper and because
#
you're on deadline, I would sit down to write the column and pretty much finish it in the
#
800 words is easy to do in a span of a day if you have enough notes.
#
There were times when there would be writer's block, but one study actually helped me.
#
Study was examining the words of people who were forced to write and the words of people
#
who wrote when the muse was sitting on their shoulder.
#
So basically it got a control group of say 50 people and said, okay, write.
#
And then control the experimental group of 50 people who were told, okay, write when
#
you have the urge to write.
#
And the output was, there was no difference.
#
So I said, you know, I don't feel like writing, this is bad writing.
#
All the negative narratives that come into your head, you just, I used to think of that
#
study and said, you know what?
#
I may think this is stupid and bad, but the output when people look at it, guess what?
#
The study said there'll be no difference.
#
So that's how I forced myself to write.
#
So I think attention is the most important thing a writer has.
#
What you train your attention to focus on is priceless for a writer.
#
And to make it count, you know, focus attention on things that matter.
#
I mean, go to kacheris or go to concerts because guess what?
#
There are a few places when insight would strike.
#
I get insight when I listen to Hindustani music or Carnatic music.
#
And I think the sitting back and letting your mind wander is a very special thing.
#
And you have to figure out ways to do that, whether you end up being a bird watcher like
#
me and standing in the balcony and looking out, or you're a runner, running, I mean runners
#
Figure out a way for you to be bold.
#
This is all fantastic and very wise advice, you know, especially that bit about how, you
#
know, if you're forced to write a lot, that will actually help you because the one thing
#
that I keep saying is that what leads to excellence, iterations lead to excellence.
#
You keep doing something again and again and again and again.
#
And that's much more likely to happen if you force yourself to do it rather than if you
#
just sit around and wait for the muse to strike you, as you said.
#
And you know, since you sort of now created this framework of Amit Verma kind of columnist
#
and Shobha Narayan kind of columnist, I would just tell my readers that please don't be
#
an Amit Verma kind of columnist because people who write about politics and economics do
#
nothing to change the world.
#
But being a Shobha Narayan kind of columnist gives you a shot at changing the way people
#
live their lives in, you know, all the small pleasures, like some of the things you pointed
#
out and indeed about eating food.
#
And now it's time to talk about your book.
#
But let's take a quick commercial break and come back after that.
#
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Welcome back to the scene in the Unseen, I'm chatting with Shobha Narayan about her delightful
#
Shobha, we've spoken a lot about your personal journey before the break.
#
And now as we come to the book, I'd like to sort of begin by asking you, how did you conceive
#
Like you've written about food before in the past, throughout your career.
#
You know, you've spoken about your sort of relationship with religion and how it gradually
#
But how did the idea for this particular book actually come about?
#
And how did you decide to approach it?
#
So the food writing angel was Ruth Reichel, who sparked my career in food writing.
#
As far as the faith goes, about right after my first book, Monsoon Diary, which is called
#
a memoir with recipes had come out, an editor from India, Kamini Mahadevan, who used to
#
be with Penguin at that time, took me out for a coffee.
#
I was living in New York then.
#
And she said, you've written this book on food, and Penguin has published it in India.
#
Why don't you write a book called Sacred Food?
#
And we'll come up with a list of temples and you will visit the temples and write about
#
And it's taken me this long to come for the book to actually be finished because I was
#
moving continents and countries at that time.
#
So Kamini's vision of the book was largely Hindu and with Ajmer Dargah and a few others.
#
I pretty much stuck to her vision.
#
And the way the logistics of it coming out was me pitching Sukumar at Mint and Sidin
#
at Mint, saying, I will write essays about this for Mint on Sunday, which was at that
#
So some of the chapters were published in Mint and then a lot of the other stuff was
#
added on by me, the research and Kumbh Mela, for example, all that, the Nepal chapter.
#
So there were many chapters that were not written about for Mint before.
#
So that was how it came about.
#
And it was choosing the temples became a big dilemma.
#
For example, Tirupati Balaji temples, Ladoos are very, very famous and I chose not to include
#
them because a lot had been written about them.
#
There's a Jain temple which serves Sukri Prasad.
#
So that was an obvious miss, that was partly because for whatever reason I couldn't visit
#
And I believe that everybody says the God has to call you when I wasn't called.
#
So that was an obvious miss.
#
Partly Prasad was, there was no way for it to be without seeming forced.
#
So that was how it happened.
#
So thanks to an editor.
#
And what was your experience like of going to all of these temples, like some of them
#
like you pointed out when you were young and you were actually growing up in Chennai, you
#
had visited some of these in the past because your family was fairly religious.
#
But now you're visiting them again and looking at them in a different way.
#
In a sense, you know, one could, if there's a throng of people at the Kumbh Mela or at,
#
you know, the Jagannath temple in Puri or wherever you are, one could actually shine
#
a spotlight from on high on you and say that here's someone who's looking at all of this
#
very differently from everybody else, that you're taking a step back, you're getting
#
meta, you're trying to be descriptive, you know, you're focusing your attention as it
#
So what was that process like?
#
Like as a writer who's writing about all of this, do you think about possible narratives
#
Do you do pre-research and kind of go there?
#
What are you looking at?
#
What are you looking for?
#
So that, yes, definitely a lot of pre-research in the choice of the temples and also how
#
to approach each temple, which was different.
#
India has this wonderful thing called Thalapurana, which is the regional story of that particular
#
The problem with that is most of those books are available in-situ.
#
You have to go there and most of them are in the regional language.
#
So I quickly discovered that it was hard to do the kind of internet research that we do
#
because they are simply not available.
#
So when you go to Jagannath, there is a 10 volume set on the Jagannath Puri temple, not
#
You can't find it online.
#
Thalapuranas of temples are written in Tamil in very slim volumes, so you have to end up.
#
So I started by saying a lot of pre-research will be done, but the research would be done
#
in the choice of the temple and in the planning of the trip, whether to plan it during a festival
#
or not, trying to find a contact in the temple because going there for two, three days, you
#
would want to speak to the priest, you would want to speak to the local scholar.
#
So the research was mostly logistical in finding experts in the place and then going there,
#
talking as much as possible to 10 different priests, 10 different scholars, usually somebody
#
from the board of trustees who happened to be a historian of that temple and then buying
#
as many books locally as possible and then coming back and actually doing the research
#
and sifting through the mounds of the beauty is in religion is there's so much material
#
available in India because even the humblest of temples will have the Thalapurana.
#
So then the question becomes, it's a curating job really is reading up on everything and
#
figuring out what is it that I want to say about all this, so that it doesn't end up
#
becoming another descriptive book on a Thalapurana.
#
So the point of view became really important.
#
But here's something I'll tell you, if anyone in your listeners, I know you have a ton of
#
listeners, if anyone in your listenership is wondering about faith and is saying, you
#
know what, I'm 35 years old, I've had, I mean, I got laid off, I start a field, whatever
#
it is that I'm trying to figure out.
#
If I have it in me to be become one of the faithful, I would say give yourself an experiment
#
of visiting 10 temples in 2021 and doesn't matter which choose a large temple, ideally
#
I will guarantee that it will raise questions on you.
#
I will guarantee that it will change you.
#
You may not end up faithful.
#
I am not as devout as I would like to be.
#
I think, though, the experiment of visiting temples in sequence in a consistent way with
#
discipline will change you.
#
And I think it's a good experiment to do, because places of faith are very special,
#
because they have had imprints from hundreds of thousands of people who have come there
#
carrying fears, hopes and dreams.
#
And you can say what you like, but that makes the place sacred.
#
That gives the place its gravitas.
#
That is why it is a place of worship, where you speak with your soul and not with your
#
So, I'm kind of both atheist and agnostic and not that open to faith, but I would say
#
this is terrific advice anyway, because I think, you know, and one gets sort of a rich
#
feeling of this through your book that, and I imagine anyone who does visit any of these
#
temples, especially at a time when there are lots of pilgrims and so on, will, you know,
#
get a better sense of the necessity and the impact of religion and maybe a deeper understanding
#
into our culture and so on.
#
And I don't think faith needs to necessarily be a part of that experience in terms of becoming
#
But you know, as an experience, I think it would be incredible.
#
Another thing that I loved about your book, like when I first got your book, I have to
#
be honest, I looked at all these chapters and they all have the names of these places
#
and I thought, okay, she's gone to each of these places, she's going to describe the
#
I'm going to enjoy that.
#
I didn't expect more, but I got much more.
#
And one of the things I got is that through the book, you are sort of meditating on these
#
deeper questions, which have often, you know, cropped up in my own thinking and some that
#
So how I'd like to kind of structure the rest of this episode is examine some of these deeper
#
questions first, and then we'll talk about these specific places and the mouthwatering
#
food described there, because if we talk about the food first, people might just go off to
#
eat and who's going to listen to the rest of the episode.
#
So my first big question again comes from, you know, something that you said right at
#
the start, that you are becoming more of a Hindu in terms of, you know, Hinduism playing
#
a part in your life, but you're also a feminist and that's a big part of who you are.
#
And it's inescapable that so much of Hinduism, and of course, Hinduism contains multitudes,
#
which also we'll discuss it's, there are so many things that are so beautiful and deep
#
and inspiring, but there are also so many mythogenistic elements to it.
#
I recently re-read Yogantha by Rawati Karve, which is a fabulous book about, you know,
#
her feminist take of our epics.
#
And you've also mentioned during this time that you've been traveling that there are
#
no women priests, and at various places there are restrictions on what women can or cannot
#
How did you reconcile all of this for yourself?
#
Frankly, I haven't, amidst the hypocrisies and the misogyny and the male predominance
#
in Hinduism for sure, but every faith is, you can't escape it.
#
I told you my father passed on recently, and the priest in an attempt to explain the rituals
#
to us, he said, our Vedas say, kasha marana mukti, which I knew, you die in Kashi, you
#
Now, if you don't die in Kashi, what is the antidote to that?
#
Die in a place where your son is.
#
And I have two girls, and I'm a daughter, and I'm thinking, what about the daughter?
#
And so it is at every stage, and for example, the daughter is not supposed to do all the
#
I have two girls, I hope they will do it for me.
#
And the certain mantras called the rudram, there is a japa, rudram is a very famous Shaivite
#
I asked the priest, why do you say only males should chant the mantra?
#
Why can't a woman chant?
#
And he sort of said, he said it in Tamil, he said, ningle parvati madri, you yourself
#
are like Parvati, why do you need to chant?
#
So I am very attuned to the hypocrisies of faith.
#
I think religion is important, but the religious, the way, the closest, the people who have
#
high levels of religion, the pious, are full of pettiness and hypocrisy.
#
And it's hard to turn away from that.
#
And I really don't know how to wrap my head around it, Amit.
#
I think the only way to do it is that with everything that is great comes pettiness.
#
Picasso was a great painter, misogynist to the core.
#
Paul Gauguin is an impressionist giant, left his family in France, ran away to Tahiti.
#
Vincent Van Gogh had madness in him.
#
So the only way to resolve it is to have this holistic view that life is this way and you
#
take the good and leave out the bad.
#
But that doesn't mean that I have been able to look away from the hypocrisy.
#
Yeah, also what sort of, you've pointed out at various points in time is, through this
#
book, is the presence of caste.
#
For example, you write about one temple where the Brahmans are eating separately.
#
You talk about at one point the five great sins of Hinduism, which include killing a
#
And of course you point out that like almost everything that has come about in the religion
#
It was meant to be five rules for people who are living with their guru in the guru-shishya
#
parampara and therefore there was, you know, one of the other rules was you shall not covet
#
And extremely specific.
#
And throughout the temples, as you described, you do see this, that there is sort of, you
#
know, Brahmans are elevated in this kind of a way.
#
And again, this is one sort of, you know, ugly aspect that one can't help noticing.
#
And I, you know, if any of my listeners are sort of wondering why I'm stressing on the
#
negative aspects, these are just the two which struck me because they lead to cognitive dissonance
#
and there are many other good things which we'll also talk about, including the food.
#
Again, would your approach to this be the same as to the misogyny that, you know, you
#
don't have to accept the whole, you know, there are some things which are wrong with
#
So caste is a big topic in India and I try to stay away from it in my book, but it's
#
I think that the gift of being an immigrant, you know what, underneath, at the DNA level,
#
I have a bar-belt approach to this whole topic.
#
One is that I don't believe in, even in all this national identity and boundaries, at
#
the DNA level, we are all the same.
#
But I do believe now in what I have come to call the tribal identity, which is something
#
that is linked to rituals, it's linked to milestones of your life, it is linked to community
#
and it can be your building community, it is not about, or your village, which is, so
#
it comes from this whole village notion of this is my community, but currently it's
#
So I believe that there is a place for community, but I also believe that we are one, I mean,
#
So then how does one reconcile with caste?
#
The way I actually was able to reconcile with the caste notions that predominate faith and
#
What helped me was dealing with craftspeople in India.
#
I have a love of textiles and I was going around for a website that I created called
#
Project Loom, where we documented hand loom clusters.
#
And when you go to Kutch and you talk to the weavers and the dyers, or when you go to Kancheepuram
#
and talk to the weavers and the dyers, it is entirely caste-based, they say it without
#
any shade of judgment, there is none of the political overtones that we associate with
#
But they do this type of embroidery in Kutch, they do this caste does this type of embroidery,
#
this caste is a dyer, this caste is, and I know Tamil words for it, but I forgot the
#
But I said, wow, their identity is linked to caste, and it is not about, I can sit in
#
an ivory tower in Bombay or Bangalore and say this is all wrong.
#
But we are a far, we are a long way off from destroying these segregations that have come
#
about so naturally for these craftspeople, and they still live in that way.
#
So actually working with craftspeople is a way to wrap your head, as Laila Tayyabji has
#
done, as Aachna Shah, who founded Bandage, has done.
#
So they understand in a very intuitive, very easy way that this is how it is in India.
#
And the overtones that we give about the hierarchy that we give is absent there, it is kind of
#
So that is one way to resolve it in your head.
#
The other two are viscerally against this varnashrama, as they call it, as I am.
#
I had a great episode on this with TM Krishna, which I will link from the show notes for
#
Moving on to something, you know, that I do sort of deeply admire about the culture of
#
this country, which I guess in a sense you can call Hinduism also because it can just
#
mean so many other things, which is the incredible diversity.
#
And one of the things you point out is not just diversity in the traditional sense that
#
we have, you know, so many thousands of gods, it is like the biggest buffet ever, you choose
#
your god depending on what your proclivity is.
#
But also this is not just a diversity across space, it is also a diversity across time.
#
Like you point out that, you know, we have these animistic traditions which survive,
#
these paganistic traditions that survive.
#
It is like, you know, the last 30 centuries of, you know, this subcontinent's evolution
#
in religious terms, all exists till today in a religion.
#
And you have also seen, you know, different aspects of this in the same place.
#
It is not that Puri is just one kind of thing.
#
You pointed out about Puri, that the origin myths of Puri go to Jainism, Buddhism to different
#
sects of Hinduism, everyone has got a different origin story, that is so incredibly fascinating.
#
So tell me about your experience because at an intellectual level, we of course know that
#
the diversity is out there.
#
But you experienced it at a visceral level as well.
#
So tell me a bit about that.
#
So the incredible thing about India, but if you look at it through my lens, is that God
#
still roamed the earth.
#
And I mean that quite literally.
#
I mean men and women dressing themselves as gods and taking part in a procession.
#
If you go to the other great hotbeds of civilization which came up with philosophies and ideas
#
and invented faith, Egypt for example, Greece for example.
#
If you go to Greece, nobody prays to Zeus, nobody prays to Athena or Apollo or Aphrodite.
#
They have all but disappeared.
#
Greece has cut itself off from its past that was so powerful.
#
I mean it shaped Western civilization.
#
But you go there now and that country has just cut itself off from that past.
#
You go to Egypt, which was the sort of the fertile crescent where Egypt, the river Nile
#
and Euphrates were the seat of where it all began, but you go there Ra or Horus or any
#
of those gods absent and Egypt as you go to Cairo, they have shorn themselves of their
#
India happily, we still wear the clothes that our forefathers wear that you now only see
#
in the Museum of Metropolitan Art, all the robes.
#
We still have traditions which continue and rituals and superstitions and links to seasons
#
that so in that sense, the long arc of civilization has not ended in India.
#
The narrative continues.
#
We are not at the last chapter, whereas Greece, what happened was they had their chapters
#
as Zeus, Hermes, everything, ta-da-da-da-da, cut and now you have Harry Potter, this, that
#
It is a chasm in the middle, whereas in India, it is a gentle arc and it to quote Martin
#
Luther, the arc is long and I think it will bend towards justice even in our current political
#
So, I am very proud of India that all our states together have figured out a way not
#
to cut ourselves from the past.
#
The sacred and the profane live concomitantly in India.
#
We have not cut ourselves from that, so that's wonderful and you see that everywhere.
#
I was talking about this fire-walking ceremony, which touched me so deeply.
#
It happens in Shivaji Nagar, which is one of the most powerful churches in Bangalore
#
is there and the feast happens there.
#
It is largely occupied by Muslim merchants and the Hindu group, what happens was the
#
goddess comes into a man on Amavasya night, the new moon night.
#
He dresses himself in a fabulous Kanchipuram sari.
#
He believes he is the goddess.
#
He wears lipstick, he wears makeup and turmeric on the face and he walks around the neighborhood
#
collecting money and there is a group that follows him, he included, religious fervor
#
builds up and then they all end it with him walking over fire and a lot of dancing and
#
shaking and ecstatic devotees walking behind him.
#
And then inside the house where he enters there is a mound of meat and this goddess,
#
he calls himself Angala Parameshwari, which is a very old tribal goddess before Saraswati
#
Lakshmi, all that came about and he takes arms full of the meat and puts it into his
#
mouth and distributes it to his devotees.
#
I mean, this is like, I don't know, a Tolkien book or some sort of a Steven Spielberg fantasy
#
Man dressing as a woman, you have the cross dressing and all the things that my daughter
#
talks about now as being politically irrelevant, the him, his, the gender, everything is contained
#
So how can you tell me that this religion as it is practiced in India is not relevant
#
to the questions of our time?
#
If a man can become a woman for one night, if a human can become a god for one night,
#
if you can convince yourself to walk over fire and then nothing happens to you, if you
#
can serve meat as an offering, as a prasadam in this whole vegetarian mafia countries that
#
we've sometimes become, it's all there.
#
You just need to know where to find it.
#
You know, I'm non-vegetarian, so armfuls of meat sounds really nice to me.
#
Talking now about a different kind of diversity, which is food diversity and which is another
#
sort of a positive impact of all these different sort of temples and the cultures that they
#
preserve and at one point in your wonderful chapter on Puri, which was one of my favorite
#
chapters from your book, you write, quote, it is easy to be flippant or cynical about
#
temple food, the same list of dishes cooked in the same way over centuries, feeding masses
#
of people via the Lord.
#
What other virtue does it have?
#
An important one has to do with the preservation of indigenous seed varieties.
#
At the Jagannath temple, for instance, one of the offerings is made with green paddy.
#
For green paddy to be available throughout the year, specific seed varieties that ripen
#
at different times must be grown around the temple.
#
At the very least, this promotes biodiversity.
#
India used to have one lakh varieties of rice.
#
Today, most of us eat basmati and in the south, Sona Masuri rice.
#
Temple kitchens specifically choose local and indigenous varieties of rice, such as
#
I hope I'm pronouncing that right.
#
Red rice and parboiled stop coat.
#
And this reminds me of something that, you know, the Vikram doctor, when he was did an
#
episode with me a couple of years back, spoke about Cavendish bananas, very, you know, spoke
#
about how we imported bananas out to the U.S. and then they sent us back this homogenized
#
version of the banana called Cavendish bananas, which has spread everywhere because of reasons
#
of, you know, economies of scale and marketing and so on.
#
And all the local varieties are drying up.
#
But then it strikes me that when one speaks of all these temple cultures and the food
#
that is around them, you know, one, they evolved to make use of local produce, because back
#
when you could not travel so much, that's all that you had.
#
And two, therefore, by becoming ossified and ossification is generally a bad thing.
#
And I'll come to that as well.
#
But by becoming ossified, we are actually preserving the sort of food diversity of our
#
Is there something to this?
#
Do you think religion also plays a part in a sense of keeping something alive, something
#
good like food diversity, which would not otherwise have been the case?
#
Not just food, Amit, cultural traditions, the clothes we wear to temples are mostly
#
I mean, nowadays, as somebody who loves hand-loom saris, where do young women wear saris?
#
To the temple and for weddings.
#
So Yakshagana is preserved in temple festivals in Uttarakarnataka.
#
David Shulman wrote this wonderful essay for the New York Review of Books on the Kudiyattam,
#
which happened in temple premises where you create the universe and destroy it in 31 days.
#
So this is a play that goes over 31 nights and it happens in temples.
#
So temples are cauldrons of culture and tradition.
#
And I think we who have become sanitized and removed from our faith have forgotten that
#
along with the hypocrisy and along with this preaching and becoming religious, they are
#
the ones who are preserving, as you say, the food.
#
The Parini Pancham rhythm uses a particular type of banana called Malawarapuram, which
#
is, as you said, not found.
#
You have Gelaki bananas in Bangalore.
#
But thanks to that temple, if you visit Parini, you will still get bananas that are indigenous
#
And the Ambalapura Palpaism uses the parboiled rice.
#
And so temples, I think, or places of faith, preserve music, preserve dance, preserve
#
textiles and rituals and food.
#
So yes, I think the rule that we should not throw the baby out of the bathwater in our
#
attempt to become agnostic, we forget all the good things they've done as well.
#
My next question is really about a cultural difference between countries.
#
Like, you know, religion can play the same role in all our lives.
#
You know, back in the day, it probably originated as a god of the gaps.
#
Whatever you don't understand, you use religion to explain it.
#
And over time, you understand more and more.
#
It, you know, all over the world, you know, religion plays the role of sort of, you know,
#
forming communities where people find comfort and, you know, the good aspects of being part
#
But there's something about India that's different.
#
Now, for a moment, I'll take you back.
#
And this is a diversion.
#
So I used to be a professional poker player once.
#
And I would spend a fair bit of time in Macau where I would go to play tournaments.
#
And Macau, by the way, I think about 15 years ago overtook Las Vegas as the biggest gambling
#
destination in the world, partly because the Chinese love to gamble.
#
So I remember on a weekday afternoon, I went to the Venetian there.
#
And the Venetian in Macau is not only built to be a replica of the one in Vegas, but it
#
is the largest gaming floor in the world, right?
#
There are rows and rows and rows of slot machines and all of that happening.
#
And I went there on a weekday afternoon and the place was packed.
#
And it was old Chinese pensioners who are standing at those slot machines and they're
#
sitting there for hours and hours and hours and they're gambling, gambling, gambling, gambling.
#
And it's a big part of the culture there.
#
I mean, if anyone from China is listening to this, I hope I'm not simplifying.
#
I'm just sharing an experience and not saying that all the Chinese are necessarily like
#
But I got reminded of this when I read this passage in your book where in your chapter
#
on Udupi, you write, quote, the elderly in China play mahjong, American senior citizens
#
go on cruises and play golf.
#
Europeans visit museums, tour wineries, and dine at Michelin star restaurants.
#
Indian elders visit temples, stop quote.
#
And elsewhere in your book, you've spoken about how people often have this urge towards
#
the end of their lives that they want to die in Kashi, you know, so tell me a little bit
#
about this because this does to an extent seem something that is much more an Indian
#
thing than, you know, is it because we have less sources of comfort and solace and so
#
on because not many of our elders can go around on luxury cruises and dining in Michelin star
#
restaurants like European elders may be able to do.
#
You know, it seems that in this sense, the role of religion is so much deeper here than
#
Do you think that's true?
#
So I have a theory and I don't know if it's true, Amit.
#
I have a theory that it is because of the trajectory of our economy that we are in that
#
religion still holds sway and I wonder if we become richer, like say China or Taiwan
#
or Japan, whether wealth will engender us to forget the gods because I think you have
#
to be in some senses a developing country for religion to take hold.
#
So that is my macro theory is that the reason religion holds sway in India in the way it
#
does has to do with the economic trajectory or the point in the economic trajectory that
#
Once our GDP goes up and once we become like, say, Japan, perhaps we will forget faith as
#
many rich countries have forgotten and we will find other inventions that seek to soothe
#
So that's my answer to that.
#
And I think it has more to do with economics than to do with geography.
#
It has to do with the time on the graph, where we are at that point in the graph.
#
And I think Europe used to be like that.
#
Every country in the that had, if you follow the economic trajectory of every country,
#
I feel, and again, this is my theory, that there were points in that economic trajectory
#
where the countries were deeply devout and religious as they became wealthier, they lost,
#
they gave up their faith and they became more scientific, they became more rational and
#
they found money served as well as a god as religion did when in their past.
#
So India is still not there yet.
#
No, I have spent far more time in casinos and in temples, but I sincerely hope that
#
our elderly don't go from temples to slot machines.
#
You know, that would just be horrifying, you know, which might have kind of happened elsewhere.
#
My next question is about the commercialization of religion, which you've written at in separate
#
parts of your book, like at one point in your chapter on Palani, you know, you write about
#
how the way, you know, devotees are treated and it's such an organized set up and all
#
And at one point you write quote, I have tried long and hard to make my peace with the hierarchical
#
structure of Hinduism and indeed all religions.
#
Perhaps I should just bring them down from the pedestal, bring them down from the realm
#
of the divine to the realm of the commercial, view them as a spectacle, stop quote.
#
And much later in your chapter on Jaipur, you write quote, I haven't figured out my
#
stance with respect to offerings for God.
#
Flowers will get crushed, sweets will aid and abet India's rising number of diabetics.
#
And really does the God partake of all this stuff?
#
The offerings of money, clothes, food or flowers end up in the pockets of the priest or the
#
So why do we persist carrying these objects as an offering to God when he doesn't need
#
a thing and only wants us to be pure of heart?
#
And I'll point out to all my listeners that it is Shobha who used the pronoun he for God.
#
I always reflexively say she just to be on the.
#
So is this something that like I realized that there was a lot about this experience, especially
#
the food and the sort of, you know, the other almost mystical experiences which were amazing.
#
But at the same time, you are viewing and writing about and commenting on all this crash
#
commercialization that's happening in a separate part of the book you write about.
#
You know, I think during the Kumbh Mela chapter, you write about how everything in Haridwar
#
You know, the tourists, so you'll have an, you know, an American and a Swiss and whatever
#
and there'll be people giving them Gyan and all of that.
#
Does this commercial aspect of this whole religion thing disturb you a bit because you
#
have true believers flocking to places which may, for all you know, not be manned by true
#
But does Subodh Gupta deserve to be India's millionaire artist?
#
There are countless, does Vasudev Gaitonde deserve to sell for how much he sells far
#
So if you are an artist, as I was trained to be, commercialism is always a very stepmother
#
and you always view it with suspicion, stepfather, okay, view it with suspicion.
#
So that said, so I will answer it in two ways.
#
One is that anything that we consider pure and otherworldly comes with commercialization
#
that we will always have trouble dealing with and I used art as a very specific example
#
There are countless deserving artists who don't achieve the stature that all these so-called
#
name-brand artists do, so how do you make your peace with that?
#
The great thing, and this is true with art and this is true with temples, is that even
#
today you can go to Bhubaneswar in Orissa, you can go near a river and you will find
#
a small Yogini shrine with nobody there, not even a priest.
#
And I have visited this shrine which was destroyed and you can commune with the divine in silence
#
and solitude that is available to you.
#
Even today in Kerala, you can go to temples where there is a priest, there is no hierarchy,
#
there is no money grabbing and so then the question becomes, do you visit the rock star
#
temples of Tirupati, Haridwar, Badrinath, Dwarka, the name-brand temples or do you forget
#
So let's say if you are like the uncomfortable with the commercialization of temples, just
#
don't go to those temples.
#
Don't put your rupees as part of their coffers, don't visit the big temples that have countless
#
So then the next level becomes, if you also believe like Diana Ick wrote about in her
#
book that these stars or big places of worship carry energy and part of the pilgrimage is
#
to experience this energy and perhaps get healed by it, that's the purpose of going
#
to that big temple, the Guruvayur, the Kummela and everything is to get your energy and your
#
healing from your energy that sounds.
#
So like with art, you choose your battles and you choose if you are sick, if you want
#
to be healed by from God forbid a cancer and by all means go follow your faith if your
#
mom tells you go visit Guruvayur, go and get the healing energy from it.
#
But if you just want to commune with the divine, I mean as lovers of podcasts, Amit, including
#
yours, I'm sure you have listened to Sam Harris's podcast and how can you explain meditation?
#
It is a felt experience, it's not hard to articulate.
#
So if you want to just have the felt experience, go to Bhuvaneshwar, see the Yogini temple,
#
go to Maharashtra, every village outside the Bombay, small shrines where nobody will bother
#
So you can experience the non-commercial aspect of faith if you want to.
#
And in fact, you may experience faith in those non-commercial shrines, the roadside in Nashik
#
where there is a shivling and a beautiful banyan tree.
#
You go sit there and experience the wind and you may be touched in a way that you can't
#
And that to me is an experience of the divine.
#
And the beauty is that wherever you are, you can access it.
#
Even in Italy where Christianity played such a huge role and all the baroque images of
#
Christ are now in the museums, you go to Florence, you can go to the museum or you can go to
#
those giant cathedrals in the Vatican or you can go to a small church, listen to the Vespers
#
singing and be touched by it.
#
Well, there's such wisdom in that, you know, being able to relate to religion in all our
#
And you mentioned Sam Harris.
#
I should point out to my listeners that I'm by the way a big fan of his podcast.
#
I think I, you know, he's again a master of the craft of the interview, whatever one might
#
think of his views otherwise, but I actually downloaded his meditation app.
#
I think it's called The Waking Up App and it's a subscription thing.
#
And I've been paying for it for the last five months, but haven't actually sat down for
#
So it's like you take a gym membership for a year and then you never go.
#
Just as his writer's block, I guess his meditator's block.
#
So sort of my last big question before we get to the food, though I'll obviously keep
#
throwing up tangential questions even when we talk about the food.
#
But this last big question is about, you've spoken throughout your book and it's a truism
#
almost a cliché that Hinduism contains so much, there is so much within it.
#
But what we have seen in the last few years and building up over the last few decades
#
is political Hinduism or what is called Hindutva today, which is a very strident version of
#
Hinduism, which almost tries to mimic sort of the Abrahamic one book approach.
#
And you know, and it's strident, it's full of certainties.
#
It's also built on negatives instead of a positive view of what the world should be
#
There are negatives like, you know, no love jihad, don't slaughter cows and so on and
#
And some of their political grievances might well be legitimate, but a lot of what they
#
stand for is having a toxic effect on our society.
#
So what are your sort of feelings on what's happening out there and should Hindus be outraged
#
at what is being done in the name of Hinduism?
#
And the problem in India now, and I have a friend who's the resident editor of Times
#
of India in Bangalore, and she was saying that families in India are being thrown apart
#
because of what is happening.
#
So you have the mother who says Jai Sriram and Babri Masjid, the judgment was passed.
#
And you have the daughter who's horrified by the same judgment.
#
We didn't used to be like that.
#
I think what is happening currently is that when you promote faith over national identity,
#
it is a very slippery slope.
#
And I think it is I personally think it is a very dangerous thing what we are doing.
#
I think what I say in the book is a question in and if I can read it out, I would admit
#
is what that parliamentarian in Goa said that he's a devout Hindu, but inside his house,
#
but outside he's an Indian first and a Hindu last.
#
I feel that's a good way to view religion.
#
Faith may happen in temples and churches and mosques and public.
#
But in a sense, what are you after at the end of the day?
#
You want to connect with the divine.
#
You want to connect with your God, be it Jesus, Allah or Ram.
#
And why are you making, why are you drawing your community and warrior craft and spacecraft
#
into this, what should be a very private, solemn, sacred act?
#
And you said, you know, Jesus, Allah or Ram, and that immediately reminded me of another
#
sort of question that I had for you.
#
So I'll ask it now, which is that, you know, the thing in Hinduism is that there are so
#
many deities to choose from.
#
And indeed there are deities spread across this book.
#
At one point you speak about your experiences in the US where, you know, there was this
#
fight between South Indians and North Indians about which deity to have for a temple.
#
And the only one they could actually agree on was Ganapati.
#
And just thinking about all the different choices open to you, there's Ram, Vishnu,
#
Shiva, Ganesha, Ganapati, Lakshmi, Durga and so on.
#
And it strikes me that the way that you choose a favorite deity, like apart from it coming
#
down to you, like a football club, loyalty often comes down to some people.
#
But apart from that, if you actually choose it, it sort of strikes me that it reveals
#
something about the chooser, much in the same way that we choose who is our cricketing hero.
#
So you know, my cricketing hero being Rahul Dravid, for example, will no doubt reveal
#
something about me and so on and so forth.
#
So which deity do you feel most drawn to and why do you think that is?
#
Kali, very easy, Kali, Kali Maa, because I think she's dark in a country that worships
#
She embraces her shadow in a way that Lakshmi and Saraswati and all the goody-goody gods
#
But she's more tribal and links to the fertility goddesses of yours, so she connects us to
#
who we were as a civilization.
#
And she's a fierce warrior goddess.
#
I love the female warrior goddesses.
#
And so I have to go to the Northeast, which I have not done.
#
Maybe a separate book on that.
#
Let's talk about some of the places that you visit through the book, not all of them, because
#
we do want people to kind of buy the book, which they should anyway, because I don't
#
think a podcast episode, however long can capture more than a sliver of it.
#
But your first chapter is on Udupi.
#
And of course, we all associate Udupi with the cuisine and all of that.
#
And I was struck by your beautiful description of the classic iconic masala dosa as, quote,
#
having a, quote, sly filling to stymie orthodox Brahmin priests, stop, quote.
#
So can you elaborate on what the filling of the masala dosa has to do with fighting Brahmanism?
#
So this I got from a book by Geeta Rao.
#
It is on Udupi cuisine.
#
Basically, what happens was orthodox Brahmins are not allowed to eat onion.
#
So they wanted, so the plain potato filling was kept outside and they would eat their
#
dosa and almost dip in the potato filling like a chutney.
#
So these priests, they figured out a way to slyly have their cake and eat it too, or have
#
their onion and eat it too.
#
So they made this masala filling with onions and then they would fold it into the dosa
#
so that they could piously eat this, thinking that nobody knows that they are eating onion.
#
So that was how that was invented, according to the research I did.
#
And I loved the idea of it.
#
And now, of course, Udupi masala dosa has become a global commodity, the GI tag, I'm
#
So all casteist people listening to this will now be forced to stop eating masala dosas,
#
if you are true to whatever your ideals are.
#
And I was fascinated by, you know, the description of how basically, you know, there are eight
#
spiritual centers in Udupi who run the temple two years at a time.
#
And during the transition, they do what is called Anna Brahma, where they feed, you know,
#
15,000 people, which is quite mad.
#
And you've described their delicacy as being brinjal cooked in coconut oil, which is one
#
And I was kind of amused by this, because on the one hand, you point out how they don't
#
want to use foreign ingredients.
#
So everything has to be local and sanskari, as it were.
#
But at the same time, they're cooking this with red chilies, which come from Mexico,
#
and sesame seeds, which, you know, went from Indonesia to China and then to India.
#
And that irony sort of amused me of how, you know, it is impossible to be purely Indian
#
in that sense in any way.
#
Except in Shradh cooking, Amit, I think that if you look at the death rituals around, or
#
what they call the Shradham or the Shradh, I think even today, the funerary rites, and
#
I discussed this with a scholar, actually, the funerary rites in Hinduism are better
#
preserved than the marriage rites, for example, or the other life stages, right?
#
Because people are afraid of the booths and the pishashas that we become.
#
And so this element of fear forced them, the priests and the Brahmins, who were in charge
#
of passing it from generation to generation to preserve the cooking associated with all
#
Not so much with the, as you say, the temple cooking even was diluted.
#
And certainly, marriage food at one point had certain prescriptions, which are no longer
#
valid in this day where we have stalls with pav bhaji in Indian and South Indian temples.
#
But funerary cooking is still preserved in the original form.
#
And another thing that strikes me, and this is sort of a profound observation you make
#
at different points in the book, and it seems to me is to be true of religion fundamentally,
#
that all rituals that evolve for specific local reasons, but then are given a veneer
#
For example, at one point, you point out how, again, I'll quote from your chapter, quote,
#
traditional Hindus in Udupi don't eat certain foods during the four monsoon months, a tradition
#
of abstinence that seems at odds in this age when New Zealand apples and Malta oranges
#
are airlifted to every region of India.
#
They call this Chaturmasya Vrat.
#
The phrase means four month austerity and perhaps began out of necessity.
#
You have to hunker down in one place during the monsoon and certain foods would simply
#
not have been available.
#
The protocol itself seems rather strict and forbidding, but intuitive once you get used
#
And later on, you talk about the myth that built around it where you say, quote, Narada
#
asked Brahma, the creator, about the importance of the Chaturmasya Vrat.
#
Brahma said, and now these are Brahma's words, so quote, Chaturmasya is a period of four
#
months during which Lord Vishnu is believed to take rest in the Sheet Sagar or milky ocean.
#
So quite naturally, all the oceans, rivers and ponds are believed to attain divinity
#
due to the presence of Lord Vishnu during this period.
#
And this is something that seems to crop up in different parts of your book where different
#
things evolve in the religion because of what are local factors, but then almost as if to
#
rationalize them and why they are part of the religion, all these myths and all kind
#
So is this a pattern you started noticing more and more while writing the book and you
#
And the biggest example of that, of course, Amit is the gods that were originally worshiped,
#
which was Indra, the god of thunder.
#
So every faith, even the choice of gods to worship is a pattern.
#
Every faith was invented, I believe, in the face of natural danger by roaming nomads.
#
So if you look at Deuce, for example, was the Lord of thunder and lightning.
#
And here you had Indra, who's now dropped once.
#
I think electricity was invented and houses were invented and we were not so worried about
#
thunders and rain, Indra lost his mojo, as it were.
#
And then so now the gods of the moment, Muruga is an old god who went, has tribal roots.
#
Shiva is a newcomer and Vishnu in the long span of time.
#
So I think this invention that happened around faith fascinates me because they made sense.
#
For example, again, there is one tradition where after a child is born for a certain
#
number of days, the family should not, we should quarantine essentially.
#
And even today, I know Hindus in my building complex who follow that without realizing
#
that tradition, probably that rule probably came about because of the infection.
#
And that doesn't exist anymore.
#
Even today, my mother, after going to visit, to pay a condolence visit to her friend, will
#
come back and take a bath.
#
Again, invented because if you go in a village to a place where there were dead bodies, the
#
But we have these mindless things that we follow that don't make sense anymore.
#
And once you get into this religion, you will see, as you just pointed out, that said the
#
Chaturmasya Vrita, I kind of defend it now because it's a way no different from the value
#
and the keto diet that we follow.
#
I think eating certain foods for a month will tell you what your body is capable of digesting.
#
So I have no quarrel with that.
#
But you're right in that the macro point you make of inventions becoming irrelevant and
#
still being followed exists in all over India.
#
No, and in fact, I followed both the keto and the intermittent fasting at different
#
And the thing with intermittent fasting is that all religions have some form of fasting
#
or the other built in that is actually good for the body in different ways.
#
And religions figured this out and they may have built other mythologies and stories around
#
it, but it's the right thing to do.
#
And I'll leave my listeners with an interesting exercise before we move on to the next point,
#
which is that think about it and make a list of traditions which you know of for which
#
the original reason no longer exists for why it might have evolved, but they sort of continue
#
And I'll move on to my next question, which is from your Kashi chapter, where I loved
#
So I'm going to take a tangent as we get there, where you write quote, a dead cow is floating
#
She is a black and white Holstein, freesian cow like the one I own in Bengaluru.
#
She floats sideways, legs spread eagled.
#
Half of her face is visible even though it is dark 7pm.
#
I wish I could say that she looks peaceful, but her teeth are bad as if hurt, stop quote.
#
And this is a delightful para by itself and partly because of, you know, that half sentence
#
like the one I own in Bangalore.
#
And that's of course something that you've written an entire book about.
#
So you know, so that our listeners can get familiar with a little more of your work and
#
Let's take a brief tangent while you tell me about your fascination with cows and how
#
Thank you for plugging my previous book, which is called The Cows of Bangalore in India and
#
Milk Lady of Bangalore in foreign countries.
#
The book is about how a woman who sells milk in Bangalore to the army contornament opposite
#
She would bring a milk can and sell it, approached me one day and said, do you want to buy fresh
#
And I was used to Nandini milk packets and I decided I would buy fresh milk from her
#
And later she approached me and said, I want a loan for 60,000 rupees to buy a cow.
#
And she does the hard sell and says, you know, you should be lucky that I approached you
#
because the Jane family below who live below you would have killed to get a cow, but I'm
#
So there was all the hard selling happening.
#
And then here is where the long arm of tradition touches me.
#
My father and father-in-law at that time were both turning 81 and everybody in my, the extended
#
household was all my aunts were saying, you should do Godan, which is very, very important
#
for this particular life stage.
#
So I said, maybe God is handing this Godan thing in my hand.
#
And of course, all these prescriptions say the Godan has to be the desi cow to a Brahmin.
#
Sharla was not a Brahmin.
#
She was a woman and part guy from a desi cow, but I did it anyway.
#
So what I did was I gave her a loan, which ended up becoming a gift of 75,000 rupees
#
to buy the cow and then continue her business.
#
And I gave her the advance that was paid for the book as a kind of a thank you as well.
#
And it was a wonderful exercise in writing the book.
#
And it also began as a series of columns.
#
I think it really touched people because I had readers who came in from Delhi and who
#
said, I want to donate 30,000 rupees to this woman.
#
And I suddenly thought, Oh God, am I, they shouldn't think I'm doing this commission
#
So we've had people who met Sharla, who are from my readers and donated to her.
#
So this book is about Sharla, but it's also about why cows are so important in Hinduism
#
to the point where the common word in which trees begin an invocation by asking for your
#
Gotra means cow shed, which cow shed do you belong to?
#
That's the root of the word.
#
And of course, all the rivers, Godavari, Govardhan, Gokul, any word that begins with go has a
#
And that's why cows, if once you start looking, are steeped in India.
#
And again, the fascinating thing is why are we obsessed with cows and not that the bo
#
storage is a species that originated in Turkey.
#
You go to Turkey, nobody cares about cows.
#
So again, why have we preserved this, the Vedas begin with a verse about the cow and
#
the sun rises portrayed as the sun rose like the cows walk out of cow shed.
#
So in poetry, in scriptures, in colloquial language, cows are everywhere and we have
#
somehow managed to preserve it.
#
And now cows are part of politics, which is the sad part.
#
But you know, the rhetorical question that you just asked, is there an answer to it that
#
you've, you know, why are cows so sacred for us?
#
You know, why do cows play such a, you know, a big role in our society so much so that,
#
you know, even Mahatma Gandhi wrote about it in, in Swaraj and so on.
#
So it was a political issue for a lot longer than recently, in fact, all of the pet issues
#
of modern political Hindutva, whether they are love jihad or cow slaughter or whatever
#
have been issues for like more than a century now.
#
But what's the big deal, like I'm trying to think of the proximate local cause for it.
#
Like was it the one domestic animal from which they got milk and they played a lot of, placed
#
a lot of value on that and there was all those factors fed into it.
#
So the nomads worship the horses because when horses eat grass and they pull it by the root,
#
so you have to move on.
#
Every civilization, whether it is Indus Valley or Mesopotamia had animals that were part
#
So ostensibly you could have the goat as the primary animal instead of the cow, because
#
the goat gives milk as well.
#
I think in India, the reason we worship cows is that we figured out ways to use cow dung
#
to use the, we figured out ways to make every aspect of the cow count.
#
A fermentation, I think, using the dahi, not just the root, but the dahi and the buttermilk.
#
I think the killer app was the ghee.
#
I think Indians invented ghee and enshrined the cow.
#
That was the fork in the road.
#
We created ghee and that forever, then since then, the cow was holy and sacred.
#
So again, it comes back to food.
#
As someone who's just gotten back on the keto diet and was on it for a long time, a couple
#
of years ago, I'm happy to say that I'm quite happy to consider ghee as something holy.
#
But I'm not sure that, you know, my reverence would extend to the source of the ghee.
#
My next question is about the Ganga.
#
Now, you've kind of pointed out about how, you know, in your chapter on Kashi, about
#
how the state of the Ganga, which we don't need to elaborate upon, you start the chapter
#
Later, I think there's a dead buffalo somewhere and people are dipping themselves with a dead
#
buffalo right next to them and so on.
#
And you talk about the different myths and origin stories like the Bhagavata Purana myth
#
And again, I was kind of wondering about this deification of the Ganga as a holy river.
#
Would it possibly come about because the people whose narrative version of Hinduism, quote
#
unquote Hinduism, won out over the centuries were the people who lived in the Gangetic
#
Like I did an episode with Tony Joseph who wrote that wonderful book, Early Indians,
#
and in that he points out how that, you know, basically till 2000 years ago, till about,
#
you know, zero BC or zero AD, I don't even know what to call it, but till that year there
#
was actually, there were centuries of intermingling between all the people on the subcontinent.
#
But then a particular school of thinking about religion wins out and that's a school of
#
thought which is strong in the Gangetic Plain, which is why when you look at the DNA records
#
from the back then, you see there's a lot of endogamy, which is why, you know, David
#
Reich once said that the Han Chinese are one big population, but Indians aren't one big
#
population, they are a collection of many, many small populations because of the endogamy
#
brought about by the caste system, which was a profound and mind blowing insight for me
#
when I heard about it from Tony and its scientific fact.
#
So could part of the reason for why the Ganga, you know, got this holy status is because
#
of that, because of people who were living there, their narrative was a winning narrative
#
for, you know, all these centuries.
#
Yeah, history is written by the winners is what you are saying and you're saying I hadn't
#
quite thought of it in that way because once when you live in South India, the Ganga does
#
not loom as large in your imagination as it does if you live in the Gangetic Plain.
#
But it totally makes sense Amit.
#
And as you know, in the book, I've also asked if you venerate the river so much, how can
#
you handle this pollution, how can you pollute?
#
And I think the thing I came up with was the idea of Pavitrata and Gandhiji, the river
#
can be dirty, but she's still pure.
#
And in India, as with many cultures, including Russia, we have this iconic image of a bird
#
with two heads facing in opposite directions.
#
We call it Gandhabeirunda in the South.
#
And I think that idea of Pavitrata and Gandhiji is an excellent example of two headed bird
#
who is able to hold two contradictory ideas in your head.
#
And I also asked in the book, I said, would the Ganga have been better served if she had
#
been a he, if it had been a son instead of a daughter?
#
Because again, with this whole focus on the boy child in India, would we have taken better
#
care of this river had it been a male?
#
But these are speculations, all our rivers are women, and we call her Mother Ganga, and
#
a mother is somebody you take for granted, you don't fear a mother.
#
So had it been a father or a son, would we have taken better care of this river that
#
And so again, I don't know the answer, but I raised the question in that chapter.
#
And that image that you painted in that chapter about, you know, all these people taking a
#
holy dip in the Ganges as there's a dead buffalo floating just beside them, it also struck
#
me as a powerful metaphor for how we normalize all that is ugly about our society, that for
#
these people, the buffalo is invisible to them, because they're in the holy Ganges.
#
And similarly, in our society, we are surrounded by so much that is ugly and toxic.
#
And it doesn't exist, it's unseen as it were, you know, do you think that it makes sense
#
I've thought about this a lot, Amit, I think, why are we so outraged by Catholic priests
#
becoming being pedophiles?
#
I think anything that religion does, we tend to think of it as the purveyors of faith to
#
be more pure, more holy, more good.
#
We ascribe a morality to the people who are surrounding faith, that perhaps it doesn't
#
exist as we have discovered time and time again in every faith.
#
It is the mullahs who are issuing the fatwas, it is the holiest of men who are raping children.
#
And here it is the, you know, the, what was the Hinduism correlation to exist at multiple
#
So is it a fallacy is what I'm asking.
#
Maybe we shouldn't, maybe we should say that humans who practice faith and are devout are
#
just as bad as the rest of us.
#
Maybe that's the argument itself is flawed, or the what we ascribe to them, we expect
#
them to be holier than thou when they are not.
#
Let's move on to the slightly more cheerful subject of food now, where in this chapter
#
on Kashi, at one point you write one among many delightful sentences in the book, you
#
write quote, Chopin's nocturnes have nothing on the twin sounds of a jalebi and a kachori
#
sizzling in oil right next to each other.
#
And a little later you write quote, an impassive man ladles aloo sabzi into one leaf bowl and
#
the kachori in another.
#
Now comes a dilemma, how to stand balance these two bowls in one hand and eat with the
#
The others around me are doing just fine, having years of practice.
#
And obviously, mouth is already watering, even though I'm on keto and I can't have
#
But this is, you know, tell me your experience, you know, eating this food and you know how
#
I wish I could be a Kashi wasi.
#
I would move to Haridwar or Allahabad or any of I think I could live there and just for
#
And Kashi, especially you go to the Sankat Mochan Hanuman temple, you have the Vedas
#
and every morning you have these beautifully dressed male priests who wear just the dhoti
#
as it should be worn with the kachori in between your legs and little Ls on top, which is again
#
for makes sense for a tropical country like India.
#
And on a tangent, you go to Tamil Nadu, which is the hottest state and you have these men,
#
young boys with tight jeans and full sleeve shirt and you're thinking, what are you thinking?
#
Why don't you wear a dhoti like all your ancestors did?
#
But that's my pet peeve with respect to textiles.
#
The food at North Indian temples to me was amazing, perhaps because I grew up here in
#
the south and I used to the payasam and the neyapam and everything.
#
I found Jaipur to be a fantastic food town.
#
I found Kashi definitely Haridwar.
#
They would be my top three picks.
#
Puri, the vogue is what is most famous about it.
#
But again, because they make an attempt to hold on to the root vegetables and tubers
#
that are indigenous of India and also the spices that are indigenous, I would say it
#
is simple food and not the spicy food that I like.
#
Puri was a Puri as a food town, as a food temple.
#
It fell a little below Kashi, but Kashi was a gastronomic paradise.
#
And you've also spoken about how, you know, payasam can be considered by some as a fertility
#
And you know, someone told you quote, a good pera should make your tongue clap, a stop
#
I'm not, I'm not one who likes sweets.
#
I think if my, like you said earlier, my desert island food or last meal food would be a samosa
#
or a kachori, but I would make an exception to this pera.
#
I'm not a desert person either, but if I ever go to Kashi, I promise to try the pera.
#
You also talk about the sesame rice, besan ka sheera and thandai with bhang.
#
So you know, there was a time and then, you know, I'll take this tangent to ask you a
#
question that, you know, thandai with bhang gives an impression and bhang of course is
#
from the cannabis plant and gives the impression of Hindus and the religion as being really
#
chilled out, having fun.
#
And you go back and you've spoken about how there is so much erotica, not just in Khajuraho
#
and Ajanta Ellora and wherever, but even in our myths and you've quoted some stuff about,
#
you know, very raunchy action between gods that is happening, which I won't read out
#
now because who knows, we might have a family audience, are there children listening to
#
And so what kind of happened because you know, you get the sense that there is sort of one
#
way of interpreting Hinduism or living Hinduism or living the culture of our land, which is
#
full of fun, which is joyful, which is, you know, embracing the sensual pleasures as they
#
often still do with regard to food.
#
But at the same time, there's also a clash between a certain kind of almost a new Puritanism
#
that has kind of come up, which frowns upon all these pleasures.
#
What's your sense of this evolution?
#
Are the two coexisting or is there actually a kind of a clash between them with one losing
#
So I think it was a clash, my answer and my theory would be it was a clash of the civilizations
#
and I would blame to a large extent being colonized on it for the reason for the Puritanism.
#
I think that when you had colonial masters whose gaze was very different and who ascribed
#
value judgments to the way we dress and the way we live, even today, the white man as
#
an immigrant, I can tell you when you live around white men, you develop a complex that
#
somehow you have to live up to them and there's a certain sense of inferiority.
#
So I think colonizing India could say the British gave of the railways and tea culture
#
But they just took away a lot and one of the things they took away was our sense of unselfconsciousness
#
about our body and the clothes we wear, you know, this prudishness about the breast and
#
the body and the sarees and everything.
#
And as you point out in the book, the sensuousness of faith was lost, was shorn, was cut off
#
literally because our colonial masters would not have any of it.
#
The Victorian norms that they were used to where if the body was bound and corseted and
#
sort of, you know, we say in India today that the girls are asked to, you know, cover their
#
I think that the Victorians, they handed it down to us before that and you see some of
#
the old photographs of tribal women, it's very self-confident, it's very accepting of
#
So I would blame the clash of the civilizations when the colonial colonization of India happened
#
that led to this, as you say, call it puritanism and prudishness.
#
And this is something many people don't realize, the thing that this prudishness is somehow
#
sanskari as it were, part of our culture.
#
I read a great episode on Kerala with Manu Pillai where he spoke about this as well that,
#
you know, till we were colonized, the women used to walk around bare-breasted and, you
#
know, it wasn't thought about as something erotic or something that will make the men
#
lose control or something that should involve any kind of shame and all of that changed
#
with the Victorian values of the British which somehow magically then became part of our
#
sanskar, so I'll kind of not look at the next couple of chapters in detail, though I love
#
You know, in Ajmer you talk about kesariya bhaat which is all vegetarian but there's
#
also the story about how Shah Jahan mixed, you know, the blood of a Nilgai or a blue
#
bull in there and you also talk about how Akbar started this tradition of the barideg,
#
a cauldron so big that you could feed 15,000 people from that one cauldron which was delightful
#
in Palani, you write about the panchamritham or the five nectars and again how they are
#
composed is all local circumstances and it's all automated production now which is, you
#
know, with the changing times or once upon a time, you know, people used to prepare it
#
Now, I was interested by something that I read in the chapter after that which is about
#
Mumbai and which is about the Israelis and there right at the start you speak about how
#
you were talking to an aunt of yours about Jewish people and she wasn't so familiar with
#
them and then you had to tell her that you remember in Kochi there was a place called
#
Jew town where the Jews were from and she remarked, quote, Jew town where good cardamom
#
was available, stop quote and that association of a people with the food, you know, how strong
#
is that in different parts of the country and I don't just mean a religion with a food
#
but different peoples in different places with certain kinds of food and the other danger
#
that then comes about is the danger of essentialism.
#
Now, when we are describing something, it is natural to try to get to the essence of
#
For example, when you write about the Sikhs that one of the beautiful things about the
#
Sikhs which we think of and which fills even me with emotion when I think of all that they
#
have done is their lungers, their, you know, that whole tradition of service of feeding
#
people and all of that and you've pointed out different things about each of the religions
#
which, on the one hand, you can look at these sort of these attributes that you associate
#
with a religion or particular foods that you associate with a religion but where do you
#
cross the line into essentialism where you're simplifying too much and perhaps do a disservice
#
to the complexity of a tradition?
#
Is that something you've thought about?
#
Yeah, I think the essentialism comes about when you have to explain the faith to a mass
#
audience, not a follower or a group that is local and standing in front of you.
#
I think what happens with television, the media or now with YouTube where people are
#
looking for takeaways and I do that too in my book, I end each chapter with a takeaway.
#
So once you get into this takeaway culture or life hacks or anything, you are forced
#
to explain, you are forced to leave out the nuances for the sound bite.
#
So I think that when you get into that culture, what you see becomes the norm and the question
#
is, is that good or bad?
#
And I don't think you've raised it but I haven't made up my mind about it because on the one
#
hand, it would be great for me to understand the Parsi faith in one paragraph but that
#
is what that would be essentialism.
#
It would leave out all of the nuances out of it but at least I would have a semblance
#
of some knowledge on it.
#
I think unfortunately or fortunately, we are moving towards the time when this will become
#
more and more Amit because as you know, there are apps that say, oh, don't have the time
#
to read a book, here, read the paragraph and we'll condense it for you.
#
Don't have the time to scan magazines, we will give it to you and there's one called
#
Blinkist where you blink and you'll get some knowledge.
#
So essentialism is a feature of our time, I think, it is hard to escape it.
#
Yeah, perhaps both a feature and a bug in different ways and in that chapter on Jews,
#
we talk about how they share halva with us, you know, and a delightful little throwaway
#
line about how chicken soup is sometimes known as Jewish penicillin, which speaks to the
#
medical properties and how a particular ritual that they have involves what might well be
#
So that's interesting to me and also how, you know, Chitravan Brahmans might actually
#
be Bene Israelis, you know, similarities such as, you know, Aptekar and Apte and Apte is,
#
by the way, a name from there and we might have adapted it to Apte.
#
So that's a very interesting speculation which listeners might enjoy.
#
Let me move on to now talking about…
#
If I can interject, so to your point about chicken soup and penicillin, in Tamil households,
#
when a child falls sick, we give them rasam and one of my pet projects is to find out
#
what different states or regions have as their chicken soup, quote unquote, I mean, what
#
would a sick child in Maharashtra get, for example, or not even Maharashtra leave, say,
#
Kolhapur or Nasik or a different part, for example, what would a child in Kerala get?
#
Probably a fish gruel, some thought.
#
So that would be a fun exercise to go to different parts and find out what is the equivalent
#
food that you give when a child is sick, the gruel or the rasam.
#
What did you get, Amit?
#
When you were sick, specifically to when you were sick.
#
Shobha, I'll confess to you that I got chicken soup, you know, that's the privilege of growing
#
up in a certain kind of family, I guess.
#
But you know, I love rasam and I'm interested in finding this out and can I ask our listeners
#
if they have answers to these questions to maybe write to you on Twitter or something,
#
tag you on Twitter or something?
#
That would be fantastic.
#
What did you eat as a kid when you were sick?
#
What did your mom give you, not even what you ate?
#
What did your mother give you when you were sick?
#
What a wonderful question.
#
Yeah, so please, guys, you heard it here, please tag Shobha and let her know.
#
Maybe we'll just start a thread with it so it's all in one place.
#
I'll now move on to, you know, another of my favorite dishes, which is again now just
#
talking about it and reading your description of it is tempting me to come out of Keto,
#
which is when you talk about Madurai and you're talking about the prasadam there, you talk
#
at length about dosa, why the dosa there is so incredibly unique and all of that.
#
Tell me a little bit about that.
#
In Madurai, it was one of the few temples where it was a savory prasadam.
#
And I, as I've told you before, I prefer savory to sweet.
#
So that's what blew me away, but also that it was unusual.
#
And this, I asked the priest there, why have you chosen the dosa?
#
The dosa is the one that's offered to God is about the size of a tire, a car tire.
#
The one that is sold as prasadam is about the size of a personal pan pizza or maybe
#
But the one that is offered is huge and it is deep fried in ghee and contains all good
#
It was my favorite prasadam to eat.
#
So I asked the priest there, why did you choose this dosa?
#
And he said it is a larger version of the Tirumal Vada that is given to Lord Balaji
#
So it was kind of a borrowing of a tradition and making it your own.
#
And the other thing that I loved about this Madurai Azhagar Koval is that it is not a
#
rock star temple, but it is a Hori, it has a Hori history.
#
So I went with all good intentions to write about Meenakshi, the warrior goddess who rode
#
a horse and conquered armies.
#
But then somebody told me about this other temple, but the more interesting prasadam
#
and that's what made it to the book.
#
And what's your favorite kind of dosa?
#
Because my friends in Bangalore and Chennai will often argue about what is the best kind
#
of dosa and so on and so forth.
#
And I love having dosa in Bangalore whenever I go there, especially MTR and all because
#
and actually any place out there, Adigas, MTR, I just love the dosa there.
#
You don't get stuff like that in Bombay.
#
You should go to CTR or Central Tiffin Rooms, they have a very good benne dosa.
#
You should have idli in Brahmin coffee in Shyamraj Peth, but the dosa you should go
#
to Vidyarthi Bhavan or CTR.
#
And I'll again take another tangent from sort of the subject of food and, you know, quote
#
a paragraph that you've written in that chapter on Madurai, which I found fascinating because
#
it underscored a point I kind of keep making that the kind of work that you do shapes you.
#
For example, I wrote a post about this in my newsletter about how the form that you
#
choose to work in will shape your work.
#
And therefore the work that you choose to do will shape you.
#
So a simple decision about what form you take can change the person that you are.
#
For example, I have to think differently when I'm doing a three hour long form conversation
#
podcast and if I was doing like 15 minute things, I think, you know, my thinking on
#
any subject would be far shallower then.
#
And I was reminded of that by this fascinating paragraph from that chapter, I'll read it
#
Quote, in a 2015 paper published in the journal NeuroImage, a team of scientists from the
#
Center for Mind Brain Sciences at the University of Trento, Italy, studied the brains of professional
#
Vedic Sanskrit pundits in India who were used to memorizing and reciting 40,000 to 100,000
#
word oral texts and discovered, and now this is a quote from the study, massive gray matter
#
density and cortical thickness increase, you know, that quote stops in the brains of the
#
Vedic priests, somewhat similar to what was seen in London taxi drivers in previous studies.
#
The paper which is available online is fascinating not only because it describes how the Vedic
#
priests brains changed, but also because it talks about the subjects and their training.
#
And I don't really have a question here, but I absolutely loved your observation after this,
#
that these are not people who could have gotten that gray matter because they got it in their
#
genes and they descended from some particular family or whatever.
#
The boys were more or less picked in a kind of a random way.
#
They could just come from anywhere and obviously these are boys only and they could really
#
And their brains changed because of the kind of study and the work that they did, which
#
is so fascinating to me and something that I just wanted to point out to listeners that
#
the things that you do shapes who you are in, you know, fundamental ways that can even
#
So this was quite a sort of a TIL moment for me.
#
Do you have any, you know, further thoughts on this?
#
So this is something Wendy Doniger points out in one of her books, I mean, is that she
#
says India as a civilization has Shruti literature, does she differentiate between Shruti and
#
Shruti literature is just heard literature and that's how it was transmitted for hundreds
#
And Smriti is when it started being written down.
#
And her point was that the Shruti literature was preserved unchanged with the meter and
#
the way of intonation for hundreds of thousands of years, contradicting the point of view
#
that says if you want to remember something and if you want to preserve it, write it down.
#
So India was a living example of how culture preserved many texts, all the Brahmanas, all
#
the Vedas for hundreds of thousands of years just by listening.
#
So we as a culture have a propensity for remembering things and we should not squander it.
#
Even the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is one of the oldest books in the world, it was preserved
#
as writing on stone tablets.
#
There was no oral passing on, whereas here in India, we passed on orally our music.
#
So as a culture, if you believe that there are traits that belong to a culture, oral
#
listening and remembering is one of ours and we should seize it and embrace it and make
#
And maybe we should kind of make a conscious effort to do it.
#
You know, like my writing students will often tell me that there are so many good apps.
#
I can use Grammarly or the Hemingway app and should I do that?
#
And my answer always is that if it helps you, please use it.
#
If it brings value, please use it.
#
But at the same time, you have to learn to think for yourself about what is good writing
#
and what isn't and how you want to write.
#
And you know, you can't lose the ability to sort of think for yourself as you know, you
#
and I have been forced to do for so many years in writing hundreds and hundreds of columns.
#
So after your Madurai chapter, you had a great chapter on Jaipur, an interesting brief chapter
#
on Goa where I was struck by this quote, which I'm going to ask you to elaborate upon, where
#
you quoted Gerard de Kuna once telling you quote, Portugal did Goa a great favor.
#
We were cut off from the shackles of Indian tradition.
#
We were forced to look outside.
#
Tell me a little bit about this and I presume at least part of this is in the context of
#
food and just another aside, I remember when I would spend time in Macau, Macau was also
#
once colonized by the Portuguese and I'd actually noticed some similarities in certain items
#
of theirs and what you could get in Goa.
#
So you know, but you know, just elaborate on his point for me because again, I found
#
this quite fascinating.
#
So, I mean, Goa is a place that all of India loves.
#
I think my view into Goa was shaped largely by the late great Wendell Rodricks, the designer
#
who showed me how in his own village in Golwale, the ancient tribal traditions coexisted with
#
the Hindu past and a Christian present and what Gerard de Kuna said about Portugal.
#
I think what my takeaway was from his quote is that any time you have Portugal in a sense
#
made Goans immigrants in their own land because you come in as a conqueror and you enforce
#
certain norms on the people.
#
And then what happens is as citizens, you're forced to choose between your master and your
#
And a lot of Goans shows Portugal as their mother tongue.
#
I quote Mario Miranda saying Portuguese is my mother tongue.
#
So what ends up happening to differentiate it from say Kerala, where the colonizing was
#
more religious with St. Thomas and everything was that Goans felt very adept and easy about
#
adopting music from Portugal, clothes, the language, and it cuts off the shackles of
#
the past and what he was saying.
#
And I could and anyone who goes to Goa today can even today see it because you see they're
#
very avant-garde in their thinking, in the fashions they follow, restaurants they open,
#
It's a very symbiotic culture, which has a little bit of the Portugal influence, a little
#
bit of the Hindus, a little bit of the Christian, so it's a very joie de vivre.
#
And I think that's why most Indians love Goa and go there often.
#
Yeah, it's a fascinating example of being exposed to the world without actually having
#
It's almost kind of right here.
#
You said it better than me.
#
No, no, I can't say it better than you.
#
Your book has so many wonderful moments.
#
I'll quote another bit about food to get back to food because who can resist it.
#
And this is from your chapter about Tiruvanthapuram, which has a subtitle of the elephant gods
#
And you write here about Uniyappam and you say quote, before I embark upon this quote,
#
all my South Indian listeners, please forgive my pronunciations, do remember that I am after
#
Okay, quote, Kottarakara temple is known for its Uniyappam or fried dumplings made with
#
rice flour, coconut, jaggery, ghee, dry ginger, cardamom and quiche banana, a local variety
#
known as palayam thodan.
#
They are loosely mixed in giant wats and fried in ghee or oil on a slow day.
#
The temple makes 50,000 such dumplings, a number that can rise to a hundred and seventy thousand
#
during festivals, according to Mohan Thirumeni, unusual for temples.
#
These Uniyappams are cooked in front of the deity in an alcove rather than in a separate
#
And in another part in your chapter on Puri, you know, you've written about the sort of
#
elaborate work that goes into making their chapun bhog.
#
The chapun bhog, by the way, has 56 ingredients, which is why it's called chapun bhog.
#
The Amit in me is useful now chapun is 56 in Hindi.
#
And you speak about how quote, no outsider is allowed inside the temple kitchen except
#
the 1000 male cooks who make 56 different kinds of offerings called chapun 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 along with his family likes variety.
#
The sweet dishes alone are of over 50 types, including several types of laddus, malpua,
#
kheer and roshgulla, making this a diabetics nightmare.
#
Thankfully, there are also boiled rice dishes, lentil based ones, vegetable curries and their
#
permutations and combinations.
#
Food is central to worship in this temple because you see Lord Vishnu dines here.
#
And I'm just fascinated by the scale of this.
#
Like we often read about how, you know, churches in Europe were built to be so grand because
#
they wanted that to give, you know, devotees a sense of how grand religion is so that they
#
would feel that sense of awe towards their God.
#
You know, and just reading about the kind of scale at which this kind of cooking is
#
And it's not just these 1000 cooks later on, you point out about how the kitchens are spread
#
And you have 200 junior cooks who are not allowed to enter the kitchens who are doing
#
the prep work and they're grating hundreds of coconuts while chanting the name of the
#
And they're also chopping vegetables.
#
The scale is mind blowing.
#
Although you didn't go into the kitchen in Puri, you did enter many of the other kitchens.
#
What was, and you also, of course, in the West entered the commercial kitchens of some
#
of the best restaurants in the world.
#
You know, give me a sense of how that feeling was about entering these kitchens, seeing
#
So remember that experiment I said go to a temple during the course of this year if you
#
just want to see if you have it in you to become faithful or devout.
#
I would say start with Puri because it is a majestic, marvelous temple in every sense
#
It is a temple with a history and an amalgamation that is so fantastic.
#
It is has every faith that was prominent in India of the time being part of the temple.
#
And as far as the cooking goes, it was, it is very tantric, you couldn't enter, but they
#
have 752 chulas or wood fired stuff underneath each of the chulas I'm told is a tantric design
#
And the cook, one of the most poignant things during that trip was one of the priest cook.
#
I mean, the Suvaras told me that if I think even for a moment that I am the one cooking,
#
the nine pots will shatter because actually it is goddess Bimala who is cooking the food.
#
And he, you know, it's hard to convey that in a book, but he actually believed that he
#
wasn't, you stand his eyes told me.
#
So to me, that is a sublimation of ego.
#
You know, in many temples, the priests become holier than thou.
#
They think I'm doing Lord's work and therefore I am holy.
#
Whereas in the, I think when you are cooking temple food, you don't have the grandiosity
#
of coming that comes with the priest who stands and does the chanting and throwing of flowers
#
So in a sense, I found, remember we talked about being holier than thou and not having
#
the hypocrisies and the petty egos, temple cooks have that.
#
That you want to experience divine sublimation of the ego through humility in the presence
#
of the divine talk to the temple cook.
#
And in Jagannath Puri, especially because it's a very, they believe fairly deeply in
#
the tantric notion that are nine pots, nine is a very prominent number in Hinduism.
#
You have Navaratna, Navaratha, Navagraha, the planets, and they have nine pots stacked
#
on top of each other and on these wood fires and they each cook.
#
And each of the families are able to sell it and make money off of it.
#
These temple cooks, I found what I was looking for in what we talked about earlier, which
#
is where you're truly humble, authentically humble and not kind of showing off and saying,
#
I'm a messenger of God and therefore I'm better than you.
#
These guys actually had a taste of the divine literally and figuratively.
#
I can just cooking, just chopping endless vegetables or whatever the processes are is
#
a kind of sadhana in itself, I guess, you know, if you're just like a physical meditation
#
almost, you're just, you know, doing the same thing again and again.
#
I also loved the chapter on the Kumbh Mela and I have a question based on that, where
#
at one point you quote this gentleman called Swami Avdeshanand where he's talking about
#
diversity which is spoken about before and he says, quote, Hinduism is a very diverse
#
religion with many paths to God, Pooja, meditation, yoga, pranayam, pilgrimages, fast, chanting
#
The Kumbh is where all this diversity comes together.
#
But more than this, I was struck by something that again the same Swami Avdeshanandji said
#
a little before that, where he says, quote, the Kumbh Mela is a symbol of a secular democracy
#
For example, most of the Hindu religious offerings used in the Kumbh are packaged by Muslim craftsmen
#
and the music bands have Muslim and Christian performers, stop quote.
#
And elsewhere you speak about how, you know, at Ajmer Sharif when you go or in the churches
#
of Goa, Hindus are taking part everywhere and they are kind of sort of involved.
#
And so it seems to me that whereas in politics we have developed almost an exclusionary view
#
of religion, in our culture there is an embrace of, you know, of everything and this seems
#
to me to be a strange kind of contradiction.
#
I mean, I remember I once had politician and thinker JP Narayan on my show episode 149
#
and I said something about India being an illiberal society because of the misogyny
#
and caste and whatever.
#
And he said, no, it's also, if you look at it another way, it's also a very liberal
#
society because in our lived experience, the way we assimilate everything from everywhere
#
in that there's also a lot of tolerance there and both of these are of course true.
#
But what is your sense of going to all of these places that, you know, is the only view
#
of religion you see this open, warm embrace that takes everybody in or do you also sort
#
of see the other side of it?
#
Yeah, I'll go back, first of all, I'm blown away that you remember that JP Narayan was
#
So you clearly have a phenomenal memory for things, compliments on that.
#
But to answer your question, I'm going back to the Ganda Berunda, which is the eagle
#
who's with two heads looking and on either direction.
#
And I think that we are, I would agree with Mr. JP Narayan that intrinsically, if you
#
are born in this earth in India, you are raised, it's part of the water we drink and this tolerance.
#
And I'll give you specific examples.
#
I think revealed preference, they call it in economics.
#
My mother, for example, when the Babri judgment was passed, said Jai Sriram, and you see her,
#
But because my brother had many Muslim friends, she visited their homes and became friendly
#
So I think that if you look at the way these festivals are done, I wish I could attend
#
Bombay's Ganesh Chaturthi, but I'm told it's the same there, where the craftsmen of all
#
states make different parts of the giant idols, and for example, the chariots are made by.
#
So I think that, on the one hand, we have the politics of religion that is being used
#
But in the Bangalore where I live, Hindus attend infant Jesus and pray to their mother
#
when they want children.
#
The Ajmer Dargah is Ganga Jamuna Sanskriti, as they call it.
#
If you see our lived experience, it's hard not to be tolerant and embracing of all faiths
#
They have so much to offer.
#
How can you not partake when it's available to you on offer?
#
And in India, we have the glory of multiple faiths and their invention.
#
You'd be stupid to not absorb, and I think Indians do.
#
And I think all the Indians who live in communities where all the major faiths are jostling side
#
by side, their experience of India is very different from ours, who watch the news and
#
therefore form opinions about the politics of religion and without much of a lived experience.
#
So I think, yes, I agree with Mr. Naira in that, as a nation, we are deeply tolerant,
#
and that will eventually be our salvation.
#
Yeah, I did an episode with Aanchal Malhotra recently.
#
She's written that remarkable book on partition.
#
And one of the sort of points that came up there was that, you know, when we hate each
#
other, what we are hating is abstractions, you know, an abstract notion of the other.
#
But what we embrace of the other are all the concrete little things.
#
And to me, a lot of these concrete things are, you know, they're in the food where,
#
you know, what we eat is actually the most assimilative melting pot that you can possibly
#
And you know, one would hope that one day Indian politics can become a little bit more
#
So you know, I've taken enough of your time and I'll let you go soon.
#
And also, you know, just direct all the listeners to please partake in the feast that is in
#
your writing in this wonderful book.
#
Despite writing this book sort of, you know, what were your big learning moments during
#
You went in obviously already knowing a lot about food, having a deep sense of the history,
#
having a sense of the nation as well.
#
You've been to many of these temples before, but you know, are there any big sort of learnings
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for you or revelations for you or insights for you or anything that deepened your understanding
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in the process of going to all of these places and immersing yourself in these experiences?
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For me, it was that the importance of ritual and I saw it in temples, I saw it in the church,
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I saw it in the one Islamic shrine that I visited.
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And I think that if there was one thing that I have changed my attitude towards, it is
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that I believe that humans invented rituals to mark milestones in life, to mark transitions
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from one stage of life to another, to mark a celebration or a sorrow.
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And in urban India, certainly, and if you are of a certain rational, I would humbly
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say Amit, much of your audience, much of your listenership, such as myself, where you live
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in the mind of the, in the cerebral world, we are in danger of giving up rituals.
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And again, you are throwing out the baby with the bath water.
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Rituals have superstitions.
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Let me seem nonsensical to you.
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But when you are disdaining ritual as I once did, and when you are saying they are superstitions
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and intolerant and, you know, are based on planetary transmutations and things like that,
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you also give up rituals that are linked to when a daughter leaves home or when a son
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goes to college, something to mark that.
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It is so much a part of us.
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If you go to Chennai airport, people welcome somebody with a garland.
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And we don't do that, so-called educated people, we've stopped that.
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When a woman is pregnant, the neighbors bring her favorite food.
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So I would say if I had a plea or an entreaty to your listeners, I would say find your rituals
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and, you know, figure it out and make it up if you must.
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That we have such a rich vein of rituals in our culture.
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Find one that you like.
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Okay, if you are not a Shiva worshipper, find a rock, collect a few rocks, every day pour
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some water over it and then pour it on your two seed plant.
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That's the ritual that will give you calm, it will give you the meditative state that
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You've given me, you know, through the book and through this conversation, you've given
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me so much to think about and process.
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Shobha, thank you so much for coming on this show.
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Thank you so much for having me, Amit.
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Yours is a podcast I've enjoyed so much as a listener.
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It is a privilege and honor that you invited me to come on it and I'm deeply grateful.
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If you enjoyed listening to this episode, head on over to your nearest bookstore online
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or offline and buy Shobha Narayan's wonderful book, Food and Faith, A Pilgrim's Journey
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This will be linked from the show notes and our other books will also be linked there.
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You can follow Shobha on Twitter at Shobha Narayan.
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You can follow me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A. You can browse past episodes of The Scene
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and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in.
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Thank you for listening.
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Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen?
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If so, would you like to support the production of this show?
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You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep
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this podcast alive and kicking.
