Admittedly, much of the tea which is sold in India would not be approved of by the Tea Association inspectors. It is invariably milky and sweet. This makes it popular with the calorie-starved labourer. A wizened, but sinewy, bicycle-rickshaw driver from Cochin once informed me that tea was the basis of his strength. This surprised me at the time, but one cup of this milky sweet tea can contain as many as forty calories, enough to give a tired rickshaw driver a quick burst of energy.57 Indian tea-stall owners flavour their tea in a variety of thoroughly un-British ways. In Calcutta, the speciality of one stall is lemon tea flavoured with sugar ‘and a pinch of bitnoon, a dark, pungent salt’.58 The poor in villages also flavour their tea with salt as it is easier to ask for a pinch of salt from a neighbour than it is to ask for more expensive sugar.59
The tea stalls also sell that ‘unsavoury and badly prepared decoction known as “spiced tea” which the Tea Association inspector discovered being served in the Cawnpore mill district in the 1930s.60 The tea leaves are mixed with water, milk, sugar, a handful of cardamoms, some sticks of cinnamon, sometimes black pepper, and simmered for hours. The result is faintly smoky, bittersweet and thick, with an aroma reminiscent of Christmas puddings. Indians have been flavouring milky drinks with spices for centuries. Ancient Ayurvedic medical texts recommend boiling water mixed together with sour curds, sugar, honey, ghee, black pepper and cardamoms, for fevers, catarrh and colds. In the Punjab, buttermilk is often mixed together with cumin, pepper or chilli, and khir, a sweet milk-rice which uses dried fruits and aromatic spices such as cardamom, is a favourite dish throughout India.61 Spiced tea is simply a variation on these drinks. Sold as chai, spiced tea is now becoming fashionable in American and British coffee shops. It is marketed as an exotic oriental drink and yet it is in many ways the product of a British campaign to persuade Indians to drink tea.
The spread of tea drinking in India has had a surprising impact on Indian society. In British hands the practices surrounding the sale of tea appear to have had a rather negative effect. The British are often accused of worsening relations between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, due to the Raj policy of divide and rule. The rise of communalism in India during the nineteenth century is a complex and divisive subject. The British played their part in this, often inadvertently. When the British were responsible for providing food for their Indian subjects, they were usually scrupulous about respecting the caste and communal restrictions surrounding food preparation. At railway stations throughout India, Hindu and Muslim passengers were supplied with water by separate water carriers.62 The same principle was applied to tea at the railway stations, and tea stalls were often divided into Muslim and Hindu sections. The tea vans which accompanied the troops abroad served Muslims from one window, Hindus from another. The overall effect of these apparently benign acts of cultural accommodation was to reinforce the divisions between the different communities, thus creating the conditions in which communalism could thrive.
While tea in British hands could become an instrument of communal separation, in Indian hands it has often improved intercommunal relations. For many Indians tea, as a foreign foodstuff, lies outside Ayurvedic classifications and is therefore free from the burden of purity associations. The neutrality of tea makes it easier to share with impunity with members of a caste normally rejected as eating or drinking partners.
Prakash Tandon observed the breakdown of caste restrictions within his own Punjabi Khatri family as British goods began to infiltrate the household. Tandon’s father was a member of the educated Indian middle classes. Having graduated as a civil engineer he ‘joined the irrigation department of the Punjab government’ in 1898. Tandon’s mother came from an orthodox Hindu family. She was a strict vegetarian all her life, ‘consequently her food was cooked separately from ours, and while she did not mind onions entering the kitchen, meat and fish had to be kept and prepared outside. On nights when we children wanted to snuggle into her bed and be kissed by her, we would share her food. She did not say no, but we knew she did not like us smelling of meat.’ His mother was strict about intercommunal dining and when she accepted a glass of water from a Muslim household it was always with the assurance that both the glass and the water had been fetched from a nearby Hindu family.
In contrast to his wife, Tandon’s father was uninterested in the preservation of caste and community divisions and he would bring his Muslim colleagues home from work to eat at their house. This posed his mother with a problem. She was reluctant to serve the guests on the metal plates and mugs that the family used as these would be indelibly polluted. ‘Interestingly, this problem was solved in our home, as in many other homes where a similar change was at work, by the introduction of chinaware. Our women . . . willingly shared china plates, cups and saucers. These were somehow considered uncontaminable. Their gleaming white, smooth surface, from which grease slipped so easily, somehow immunised them from contamination. My mother would not at first use the chinaware herself and reserved it for the menfolk and for Muslim, Christian and English guests, but she soon began to weaken.’ Once she had made these concessions his mother was prepared to accept unpeeled fruit from non-Hindus. ‘Then followed the acceptance of tea and manufactured biscuits and the English bottled lime cordial.’ These British packaged goods appeared neutral foods which were less contaminating. However, his mother never relaxed her guard to the point where she was prepared actually to eat with her husband’s Muslim and English colleagues.63 In general, women were far less prepared to abandon caste restrictions than men. For them, being made outcaste meant the probable loss of kin and friendship networks. Men had much to gain from free and easy social exchanges with their colleagues; women had everything to lose. Tea, and its associated products such as cordials and biscuits, as well as chinaware, all assisted them in accommodating to the breakdown of traditional social divisions.
Tea has also played a role in encouraging intercaste and community socialising in less westernised circles. In the 1950s, an anthropologist came across old men in a Rajasthani village lamenting the fact that caste rules were regularly broken without consequences. ‘A visible sign of the demoralised state of society was the willingness of young Brahmans, Rajputs and Banias to sit with their social inferiors, drinking tea in public tea-shops.’ Shri Shankar Lal, a Brahman from the village, freely admitted that he often took tea with men from all castes. If one village group manages to raise its status, the standing of another inevitably declines. This knock-on effect in village hierarchies means that there is a strong tendency towards inertia in the system.64 But tea shops provide the men with a separate, compartmentalised space where they can form intercaste and intercommunal friendships and alliances without necessarily affecting their traditional standing in the village.
There are, of course, limits to the willingness of villagers to bend caste rules. Although Shri Shankar Lal was happy to drink tea with men from all castes he did not extend this accommodation to the ‘lowest sudras’. All the men in his village admitted that they would suffer immense ‘internal distress . . . at the thought of having to sit and eat and drink with members of the lowest “untouchable” castes’.65 Although the legal position of the untouchable castes has improved since independence, old prejudices are difficult to overcome.66 As one Punjabi villager remarked, ‘if throughout your life you have been taught to regard someone as filthy, a mere statute is not going to make you want to sit down and eat with him all of a sudden’.67 Tea in India is often served in small earthenware cups which are smashed on the floor once they have been used. This ensures that no one is polluted by drinking from a vessel made impure by the saliva of another person. Earthenware cups are standard in urban areas where the caste status of the customers is unknown to the stall owner. But in the villages these earthenware cups are often reserved for the untouchables, while the other customers are given their tea in glasses. In one village in northern India an anthropologist came across untouchables asserting their modern rights over the way they were served a modern
drink. He was told that, these days, the untouchables throw away tea given to them in a clay vessel, demand a glass and threaten the owner with litigation.68
The spread of tea by means of modern marketing and advertising techniques was just one of the ways in which technology and industrialisation were beginning to change Indians’ eating habits. The Muslims of India have always had a strong tradition of eating out, or buying food in from bazaar cooks, but high-caste Hindus have traditionally avoided anything other than home-cooked food. But the changing political and economic circumstances of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries meant that increasing numbers of Hindus were confronted with the need to eat outside their own homes. More and more Indians travelled around the country on business. Single men left the villages to seek work in the urban areas. Crammed together on buses and trains it was hard to maintain the principle of separate dining arrangements, although stations did provide separate Hindu and Muslim restaurants. In 1939, a group of educated merchants told an American visitor to India that ‘trains and motors have put an end to all this affair of special food and separate meals’.69 At the Victoria rail terminus in Bombay there were three restaurants: Divadkar’s for vegetarian Hindus, Karim’s for the non-vegetarian Muslims, and Brandon’s, for the British. For inquisitive young Hindus, Divadkar’s was dull and predictable. One Brahman from an orthodox Bombay family remembered his nonconformist uncle taking him to the Muslim restaurant to try out the mutton biryani.70
Many Indian businessmen seem to have compartmentalised their working lives in the cities and towns from their home lives in the villages. While they might have rigidly observed rituals of purity at home many businessmen tended to abandon them when travelling, even though restaurants and hotels in the cities employed Brahman chefs which provided careful Brahmans with a pure and safe place to eat.71 One anthropologist was ‘asked by informants not to disclose in the village how they eat when in town’. The further away from home they travelled, and the more anonymous the place, the less fastidious they became. A Brahman from a small village might not have eaten food cooked by a Muslim in the closest town, ‘but in Delhi he might’.72
Some even sought out these opportunities, and used the railway restaurants and hotel dining rooms as clandestine spaces for experimentation. While he was staying in Nagpur (in Maharashtra) in the 1930s, Prakash Tandon observed ‘dhoti-clad, vegetarian-looking small business men’ shuffling into the railway station restaurant. He discovered they had come ‘to indulge in secret vices. Some drank beer and whisky but most came to eat savoury omelettes with potato wafers, or even mutton chops. The darkened verandah of the station restaurant provided a safe place for indulging these newly acquired tastes that would have horrified their women at home.’
Single men looking for work in the new industrial and commercial spaces, such as the mills, factories and offices, arrived in the cities in their droves. At first, special eating houses were set up which catered for men from a particular village or from a particular caste. But the new pressures and conditions of life created by capitalist enterprise made it increasingly difficult to observe the rules regulating food consumption. As one Punjabi villager commented, in Delhi ‘I never used to bother much about caste, in fact in the town it is not always even possible to know for sure what caste a man really comes from’.73 Gradually, a new civic culture developed in India’s cities which inhibited the open expression of caste prejudice.74
Changes in eating habits and the growth of eating houses was particularly pronounced in Bombay, which at the beginning of the twentieth century was the centre of India’s textile and iron and steel industry.
In the 1890s, the working men of Bombay were provided with tea and snacks by Parsee immigrants from Iran who set up small tea stalls on street corners, selling soda water, cups of tea and biscuits, fried eggs, omelettes and small daily necessities such as toothpaste, soap and loose cigarettes. When Bombay’s Improvement Trust embarked on a programme of urban renewal after the plague epidemic of 1896, new roads were cut through the most congested areas of the city. The Iranian tea-stall owners moved into the shops which were created as a result and ‘Irani’ cafés became a Bombay institution. They had a particular interior aesthetic and were usually furnished with white marble-topped tables, spindly-legged wooden chairs and full-length mirrors. They were often plastered with officious and habitually ignored little notices, instructing the customers not to comb their hair in front of the mirrors or forbidding them from discussing gambling. Labourers and office workers of all castes and communities came to the Iranis to drink tea and snack on English buns, cream cakes and biscuits, and potato omelettes. They also included on their menus Parsee specialities such as dhansak, green chutney and patra fish, and a hard Iranian bread known as brun-maska, so crusty that it needed to be dunked in tea before it could be eaten. Newspapers were provided, divided up into separate pages so that as many customers as possible could simultaneously read the same paper. At first the café owners respected communal sensibilities and Hindu customers were served their tea in green cups, Muslims in pink, Parsees and Christians in other colours. But this practice gradually died away.75
During the 1920s and 30s the number of eating houses catering to middle-class office workers increased. These were functional places where the principle was to eat as quickly as possible. At the Madhavashram near the Girgaum Police Court, the customers had to bolt their food, as the next line of diners stood impatiently behind their chairs.76 Most cafés, eating houses, street stalls and bazaar cooks provided food for hungry working people and travellers. Very few Indians went to a restaurant simply to eat good food in a pleasant atmosphere. This was reflected in the simple decor of the majority of Indian eating houses. There are still many such places in Bombay where the food is eaten from plain metal thalis at smeary Formica-topped tables, and the kitchens beyond the swing doors look as though they could do with a thorough scrub. Indeed, it was partly the unhygienic reputation of eating houses which prevented the spread of restaurant-going among India’s population. Other hindrances included the reluctance of women to dine out in public, although some Irani cafés encouraged families to patronise them by providing special family cabins which meant that the women felt less exposed. Dietary preferences, rules and restrictions also meant that most Indians would have visited a restaurant which served the sort of food which they ate at home. And given that home-cooked meals, even today, are still generally tastier than anything served in a restaurant, the idea of a meal as a leisure experience did not catch on.
Today, office workers in Bombay can have a home-cooked lunch delivered to their workplace. This service is supposed to have been started by an Englishman who arranged for his bearer to bring lunch to the office. The idea caught on and developed into a lunch-delivery pool which now employs about two thousand dabba wallahs, or tiffin carriers, to deliver over 100,000 lunches every day. Early in the morning housewives all over Bombay city and its suburbs start preparing their husband’s lunch. Bachelors and working women rely on contracted cooks who supply home-style lunches. By ten o’clock the meals have been dished into three separate aluminium containers: one for rice, one for a meat or a vegetable dish, and the other for chutneys or bread. The three containers are then clasped together and loaded into a tin outer case which keeps the food warm and prevents it from spilling. This is the dabba or tiffin box. This is handed over to the dabba wallah, who calls at each private house at the same time every day and then hurries to pass his tiffin boxes on to the next dabba wallah in a long relay chain of carriers until each box reaches its designated office worker in time for lunch. Every box has a series of symbols painted on it which tell the wallahs where it needs to go at each stage of its journey. A yellow stroke signifies Victoria terminus, a black circle the Times of India offices, and so forth. After lunch the wallah returns to collect up the cases and they travel along the same route in reverse until they are delivered to the housewife to wash up in preparation for the next day.
The dabb
a wallahs’ job is a hard one. The trays, which they carry on their heads, can weigh as much as fifty kilograms when crammed with tiffin boxes. They have to struggle on and off the overcrowded suburban trains and bicycle through the heavy traffic of the Bombay streets, and they are always in a hurry to get the dabbas to their destination on time. It is an amazingly complex system yet it is very rare for the vegetarian Hindu to open up his tiffin box to discover a meat curry. The only real threat to the proper delivery of the lunch are the dabba thieves who occasionally make off with a selection of assorted lunches. Although a Muslim non-vegetarian meal may be transported alongside a vegetarian Hindu one, the system ensures that clerical workers need risk neither their health nor their caste purity, at the reasonable price of about US$3 a month.77
Thirsty office workers in Bombay can choose from a range of drinks. These days many people will drink a bottle of soda with their lunch. This was another British introduction to India. The British began manufacturing soda water at a factory in Farrukhabad in the 1830s and the Indian population soon grew to like it. As a child growing up in the small Punjabi town of Gujrat, Prakash Tandon was impressed by the rows of ‘coloured aerated drinks’ for sale in the soda-water shop. This particular shopkeeper offered fifty different flavours, in a variety of garish colours, including a mix of beer and pink-rose sherbet, which he made up specially for ‘a local barrister who had been to England’.78 Many of the Iranians in Bombay started off by selling sodas, as well as tea, on the street corners. But new drinks have not entirely ousted more traditional Indian fruit juices. Bombay street corners are dotted with fruit-juice sellers offering freshly squeezed orange and pineapple juice, and the Bombay chain of Badshah Cold Drink Houses sells grape and watermelon juices. Every café and eating house supplies the refreshing and rehydrating nimbu pani (lime water), made with sweet lime juice mixed with salt, pepper and sugar. And Indians still retain their taste for milky drinks such as Persian faloodas and lassis of yogurt whipped together with iced water and flavoured with either sugar or salt. Nevertheless, virtually every office worker in Bombay will finish off his or her lunch with a cup of tea: a symbol of the way eating and drinking habits have changed in an ever more industrial and modern India.
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