Indo-Pak culinary divide: A bridge too far?
The Mumbai Mirror ( http://www.mumbaimirror.com/net/index.aspx ) recently reported on how five young Pakistani contestants on the Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Challenge 2007 TV show were finding it hard to deal with the vegetarian food being served to them. They had, apparently, had to resort to smuggling in eggs when their Brahmin cook was away.
These five dudes may not realise this, but in this they are following the rather more distinguished footsteps of Bade Ghulam Ali Khan. In Sheila Dhar’s book of essays on life, food and Hindustani music Raga ’n’ Josh (silly title, delightful book) she recalls how Khan once stayed in Delhi as a guest in a strict vegetarian house.
When a lavish vegetarian thali was put before him the maestro unbelievingly put “the large and rather shapeless thumb of his right hand into each bowl in turn, hoping against hope that it would encounter a piece of meat on the bone.” Finding none, he exploded: “Ai khana, te ai gana?” How could he make his music on “grasses swimming in fluids of various kinds?” All music stopped until ingredients were procured for a rich chicken curry which Khan himself cooked on a makeshift stove set up in the courtyard.
The opposite narrative is also common. Indians visiting Pakistan nearly always make note of the near absence of vegetarian food. Meat eaters love it, though tend to get overwhelmed by the richness and meat intensity of it all, while vegetarians are left forlornly eating raw vegetables and paneer since they note that even the dhal usually has meat in it. These narratives of flesh-fanatic Pakistanis versus ghaspoos Indians have solidified into national myths, firmly believed to be responsible for particular traits on both sides.
For example, it’s evoked to explain Pakistan’s demon bowlers, as cricketer Aaqib Javed does to Indian writer Rahul Bhattacharya in Pundits from Pakistan, his excellent book on the 2004 Indo-Pak series: “See, you can get protein from dal and eggs, but that is incomplete protein. The aggression you get that from beef.” Presumably as a concession to his Indian guest, Javed graciously notes that beef doesn’t have to come from cows, but can be from buffalos as well. Why these notoriously placid animals should induce aggression isn’t clear, but Javed insists that their red meat is responsible. It is not, he notes, just about speed: Srinath and Agarkar bowled faster, yet lacked the Pakistanis’ aggression. Javed felt that only Pathan, although not as fast, had this aggression. “He may be eating beef. I’m telling you it makes a difference.”
But how accurate is this culinary divide? We know, of course, that India’s non-vegetarian traditions are huge, but what about Pakistan’s vegetarian food? Did all Punjabi sabzis and Sindhi dhals just vanish with Partition? What about the ‘meatless days’ that Pakistan decreed after Independence, forbidding meat sale on Tuesdays and Wednesdays in order to conserve the country’s diminishing livestock? This rather rebounded, as Sara Suleri notes in Meatless Days, her wonderful collection of autobiographical essays. Those who could afford meat could afford to refrigerate it, so it simply made Mondays particularly busy for butchers. Special dishes of long cooked meats were made for meatless days, like “goat’s head and feet cooked with spices into a rich ungual sauce.” Instead of increasing vegetarianism, writes Suleri, “meatless days rapidly came to signify the imperative behind the acquisition of all things fleshly.”
I’ve sadly never been to Pakistan, but I asked Pakistani friends or those who’ve lived there about vegetarian food. “Good vegetarian food and Pakistan — absolutely wrong cocktail,” said a Brisbane-based Pakistani restaurateur with emphatic colour. He’s a Sindhi whose family was a rare pure vegetarian one in Pakistan, and traveling through the country he learned how hard it was to get vegetarian food. But others point to a distinction between restaurant and home.
There’s no doubt that meat is aspirational in Pakistan: people who go to a restaurant want to eat it so there’s no incentive for restaurants to have vegetarian sections. But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t cooked daily at home. A diplomat tells me of suffering indigestion from the amount of meat being fed to him. When he told his hosts, they said they had the same problem: “You don’t think we eat like this every day, do you?” They were piling on meat because it was expected for a guest.
But this isn’t so different from how it was in India 25-30 years back (and still is in small towns). Most restaurants served meat since hard core vegetarians were distrustful of food cooked by unknown hands and didn’t eat out. It was only when this fear was overcome that vegetarian food really took off in restaurants. Pakistan, it is true, has more allegiance to meat through the Islamic world, but here one could argue that it’s India that is the exception in the importance we place on vegetarian food.
Most of the world eats both meat and vegetables, and Pakistan has just fallen in line with this. But the Islamic world also has excellent vegetarian cuisine, such as the herb and lemon flavoured dishes of Morocco or the pickled and grilled vegetables of Lebanon, and maybe in time Pakistani restaurants will start serving these. Another friend tells me that some places with a reputation for gourmet food are already serving more vegetarian dishes.
The governments of India and Pakistan have fitfully tried many ways to bridge their divides, from buses to cricket to heart surgeries for kids, and perhaps its time for them to tackle this stereotype of a culinary divide. We could have festivals of Indian non-vegetarian food in Pakistan, and of Pakistani vegetarian food here. In time that might make more real the unity that Bhattacharya glimpsed briefly in Lahore after India won the ODI series. Fans flooded into Gawalmandi, Lahore’s famous food street, to feast on paya and mutton chaaps. “Sitting there in a sea of Indians and the odd Pakistani it was well obvious that cricket had not brought the countries closer together. Food had.”