Infinite Variety

by Madhavi Menon

  More recent Supreme Court judgements have granted legal protections to live-in heterosexual relationships. The 2015 judgement by Justices M.Y. Eqbal and Amitava Roy notes that couples living together under the same roof should be considered husband and wife in the case of property and inheritance. But despite seeming to side-step the institution of marriage in matters of property for women, as sambandham does, these laws continue to presume that women need to be protected by a paternalistic State. The judgements ‘allow’ the woman to be given the status of a wife in matters of inheritance if the man and the woman are living under the same roof. Children born of such live-in relationships will only inherit if they bear their father’s name. Not only does the Supreme Court not say anything about sexual pleasure and the woman’s right to choose her partners at will, but it also insists that couples have to be living together in the same household, and that children have to bear the father’s name. By entirely ignoring the question of why couples might choose not to get married, these post-colonial laws continue to bear the trace of Svetaketu’s ancient Indian horror at women’s sexual agency. And they continue to emphasize the colonial insistence that desire should be domesticated in its household arrangements. These notions of masculine naming, sexual monoandry, and financial dependence, were all alien to the practice of sambandham among Kerala Nairs.

  All my female ancestors practised, and were a product of, sambandham arrangements. Not a single one of them was legally married. They had their own name, their own money, and their own desires. My family name belongs to my mother’s clan. And this is why I told my father that I was going back to my roots in not wanting to get married. He is still mulling over my argument.

  18

  PAAN

  Paan khaye saiyan hamaro. (My lover eats paan.)

  —Shailendra; lyrics from Teesri Kasam (1966)

  Paan stands at the opposite end of the Indian desire spectrum from yoga: it is understood only and always as a luscious and fleshly delight. Not only does no one question its erotic appeal, but the Kamasutra also sprinkles flecks of paan throughout its instructions for seduction. In fact, paan’s erotic prowess can be so fearsome that it is historically forbidden for use by celibate ascetics and students. Here is a recipe for paan: do try it at home.

  STEP 1: PREPARE THE BETEL LEAF

  Cultivating betel leaves is almost as ritualistic as worshipping in a temple. The soil needs to be loamy and the weather must be tropical and wet. Betel leaves grow as vines, and they are often shaded to protect them from the sun, much like grape vines are when grown for wine. Since they are consumed raw, no pesticides are used to farm betel; their yield is therefore rather fragile, and increasingly expensive. In keeping with ritual notions of cleanliness and purity, menstruating women have historically not been allowed to cultivate betel vines. The ostensible reason—as always—is fear of infection. Some farmers in Odisha are challenging this stigma, and now allow women to farm betel vines. But by and large, the bastion of betel farming is preserved for men. These are the men—‘naked and manure-coloured’ as he describes them in his essay on ‘Pan’—that E.M. Forster saw when he first encountered betel vines: ‘...aromatic and lush, with heart-shaped leaves that yearn towards the sun and thrive in the twilight of their aspirations, trained across lateral strings into a subtle and complicated symphony.’ Noting the solemnity of their ritualistic tending of the vines, Forster asks about the men: ‘What acolytes, serving what nameless deity?’

  The heart-shaped betel leaves have often invited comparisons with desire. Indeed, food and erotic desire have a close relation in Indian history. As A.K. Ramanujan notes in his essay on ‘Hanchi: A Kannada Cinderella’, the Sanskrit terms for eating and sexual enjoyment have a common root in the word bhuj. As the Kamasutra instructs us, paan is to be consumed before and after lovemaking: ‘As for the end of sex, when their passion has ebbed, the man and woman go out separately to the bathing place, embarrassed, not looking at one another. When they return, they sit down in their usual places without embarrassment, and chew some betel.’ Bhakti and Sufi poetry routinely enlists paan as a token of love. In one of Ksetrayya’s 17th-century erotic-devotional songs to Krishna, the protagonist highlights the use of betel leaves during the act of sex. Complaining about the fickleness of her ‘husband’—Muuvagopala, or Krishna—the dutiful ‘wife’ says: ‘...as I offer him folded betel leaves / suddenly covering my eyes for a fleeting moment, offering her slyly his own chewing paan / if he went on pressing his lips on to her mouth / Who will bear [it]?’ In some South Indian Hindu traditions, Kama, the god of Love, is himself said to reside on the outside of the betel leaf. Forster found the intensity of the betel leaf unbearable at first—‘I stretch out my hand, I pluck a leaf and eat. My tongue is stabbed by a hot and angry orange in alliance with pepper. I am in the presence of Pan.’

  The betel leaf must be trimmed before eating: cut off the stalk, trim the edges, and scrape the veins of the leaf to make it as smooth as possible.

  STEP 2: APPLY CHUNA AND KATTHA

  The next step is to make this hot leaf even hotter by applying chuna—a mixture of lime powder and water—and kattha—a paste made by mixing catechu and water—to the trimmed leaf. Lime powder (calcium carbonate) is considered highly efficacious as a cure for male and female impotence, as well as menstrual cramps (which is ironic, given that menstruating women are usually not allowed near betel leaves). Catechu (or kattha) is an extract of the acacia tree and is rich in vegetable tannins. These seem to be rather unpromising ingredients to produce effects that are ‘unattainable anywhere else, even in heaven’, as described by one of the characters in Almond Eyes, Lotus Feet: Indian Traditions in Beauty and Health (by Shalini Holkar and Sharada Dwivedi). According to him, the combination of these three ingredients produces a paan that ‘sweetens the breath, aids digestion, reddens the lips, and tastes divine’.

  It is the chemical interaction of chuna and kattha that forms the trademark red colour associated with paan. The betel leaves themselves—which grow in various shades of lighter or darker green—do not contribute to the red colour except as the vehicle for mastication. Indeed, the deep rust-red colour caused by the combination of lime and tannin is extremely attractive to paan-chewers. A historically documented fan of such paan-created red lips is the Empress Nur Jahan (1577-1645), the most beloved wife of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir. She apparently loved her paan-stained red lips to such an extent that she initiated the fashion for elaborate paandaans or paan containers so the ingredients for paan could always be at hand for a touch-up of her red ‘lipstick’. If you are rich, then these paandaans are in intricately-worked silver with compartments to house all the separate ingredients. But if you are poor, then any container will do.

  Among the British colonizers, though, the redness of paan inspired outrage. Mocking their reaction, Forster says of the typical specimen: ‘Another shock has to be borne: golly, I am bright red! Why this happens, when the betel was green, the areca brown, and the lime white, I do not know. It is easily rinsed away, but there is always a danger that one may forget, go to play bridge at the Club with vermilion jaws, and be ruined forever.’ The British response is quite the opposite of the Indian one, where the red-staining chuna and kattha are desired as great aphrodisiacs. In fact, one of the many varieties of paan available in India today is the palang-tod paan, or the bed-breaking paan, also known as the Honeymoon paan—its name clearly outlines the sexually vigorous virtues contained within its leaves.

  In popular legend in Kerala, yakshis—female earth spirits associated with sex and fertility—are said to haunt forests in the form of beautiful, seductive women. The yakshis ask men for chunnambu (the lime used to turn betel leaves into paan) and, driven to a sexual frenzy on consuming the chuna, proceed to kill the men and drink their blood. The yakshis make clear the link between betel juice, passion and blood. The 17th-century Italian traveller Niccolao Manucci, too, makes this connection in his Storia do Mogor. Shocked at the ubiquitous sight of bloo
d-red lips on men and women in the western port city of Surat, he notes: ‘I was much surprised to see that almost everybody was spitting something as red as blood. I imagined it must be due to some complaint of the country. I asked an English lady what was the matter...she answered that it was not any disease, but due to a certain aromatic leaf, called in the language of the country, pān.’ Manucci goes on to note the addictive nature of paan: ‘It happens with the eaters of betel, as to those accustomed to take tobacco, that they are unable to refrain from taking it many times a day. Thus the women of India, whose principal business it is to tell stories and eat betel, are unable to remain many minutes without having it in their mouths.’ Perhaps fittingly, ‘katha’ (pronounced the same way as kattha) is the Hindustani word both for an essential ingredient of paan, and for story itself.

  ‘Cold Sweet Paan’ by Biswarup Ganguly.

  Source: Wikimedia Commons

  Apply the chuna and kattha onto the betel leaf with a stick or the back of a spoon or a washed, damp, betel leaf.

  A silver paandaan. Photo courtesy Jonathan Gil Harris;

  Location: Lucknow Mahindra Sanatkada Festival, 2018

  Empress Nur Jahan eating Paan.

  Source: http://www.vimlapatil.com/vimlablog/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/6.-Noor-Jehan-eating-paan.jpg

  STEP 3: MIX IT UP

  Once the chuna and kattha have been applied, the two have to be carefully mixed together so that they sink rapturously into the dampness of the betel leaf. This intermingling of the chuna and kattha into the betel leaf is essential to laying the ground for all paan, no matter what one adds to it later on. It also symbolizes the multiple ways in which paan has resonated across the centuries in India, mixing together borders of region, religion, caste, gender, language, taste and sexuality. Everyone in India, or so it seems, has always eaten paan. It is first mentioned in classical Sanskrit erotic and medical texts, and later taken up enthusiastically by Muslim texts and practices. In the Kamasutra, courtesans are advised to lace their cultured conversations with lashings of betel leaves and betel nuts. In tawaif or courtesan culture, the serving of paan plays a crucial role in setting the stage for the erotic arts. No matter what else they might or might not have, every market, every village, every city and town in India and Pakistan will have two shops, often joined together: one selling sweets and the other selling paan.

  Ruth Vanita points also to the sexual varieties of paan eroticism in her translation of Chocolate, by Pandey Bechan Sharma Ugra. In these short stories, the homosexual protagonists tend to place their desire in relation to paan: ‘The groups of urban young men who are his protagonists eat both in public and private. They give parties where they consume sweets and other delicacies. They also court their beloveds at pān stalls, which even today are public places where men hang out together. In Ugra’s stories, feeding pān to the beloved is a prelude to kissing him. In one story, the protagonist insists on feeding a beautiful boy pān with his own hand and then kisses him just before putting the pān in his mouth.’ In Bankim Chandra’s 19th-century tale Indira, paan is repeatedly evoked as a symbol for erotic beauty and desire. Mixing up hetero- and homo-sexual desire, Subho, Indira’s female friend, teaches Indira how to seduce her husband by feeding him paan. By way of example, Subho feeds Indira paan before kissing her. For Indira, this kiss resonates excitingly for the rest of the tale, even as she is trying to woo the husband who does not recognize her. Among Bengali Hindus, the bride covers her eyes with two betel leaves that she removes only to look at her husband; in Maharashtra, the impending sexual consummation of the newly married couple is signalled by the bride biting off half the paan that the groom holds in his mouth. In nikah ceremonies, the bride is given paan as a symbol of auspiciousness and guests are always served both paan and sharbat. When Ksetrayya’s female protagonist is shunned by a Krishna who has moved on to another lover, she knows she has been rejected because ‘When I say, without thinking, / “Give me a bit of that betel in your mouth,” / he yells at me and says “No!”’ The betel leaves that signal the beginning of a sexual liaison also signal its ending: ‘He vows never to speak / nicely to me again. / Arguing, he says / “I want nothing to do with you”—/ and gives me the betel—/ this same Muvva Gopala / who once so lustily / made love to me.’

  Paan is eaten both at the beginning and at the end of transactions. It is popular among both Hindus and Muslims. It is eaten by rich and poor alike—from the refined tawaif to the quotidian maid. It is both a sacred and an erotic object, offered to gods and lovers, especially in erotic poetry that blurs the boundary between the two categories. Paan is prosaic and poetic. It is the least expensive and the most exalted of aphrodisiacs in India.

  The best instrument with which to mix the chuna and the kattha is the index finger.

  STEP 4: ADD SUPARI

  Supari is the final basic ingredient necessary to making a paan. It is the term used to describe the areca nut, which is a hard berry rather than a nut. When fully ripe, this offspring of the areca palm has a consistency as hard as wood, and can only be sliced with special cutters that are often as elaborately designed as the paandaans themselves. Sometimes called betel nut because it is eaten most often in India along with the betel leaf, supari is not to be confused with the betel leaf, though, which is the product of a vine rather than a palm. The supari is the most stimulating of the four basic ingredients that go into a paan. Taken in small quantities, its effects are similar to that of nicotine and caffeine. And taken in larger doses, the impact can be as strong as that of cocaine. Supari heats up the blood. According to Forster—who describes the nut as ‘fabulously hard, darkling without, and radiat[ing] spokes within’—‘To have even a fragment of areca in the mouth is alarming.’ In his description of the first-time user’s response to paan, Forster notes that ‘the leaf is mild enough, the crisis coming when its fibres tear and the iron pyrites [his term for the sharp heat of the supari] fall about and get under the tongue. Now the novice rises in disorder, rushes in panic to the courtyard, and spatters shrapnel over the bystanders; it is as if the whole mineral kingdom has invaded him under a vegetable veil, for simultaneously the lime starts stinging. If he can sit still through this a heavenly peace ensues; the ingredients salute each other, a single sensation is established, and Pan, without ceasing to be a problem, becomes a pleasure...the formidable areca yields, splinters, vainly takes refuge in the interstices of the gums, and is gone.’

  The heat generated by supari makes it the ideal substance to incite a passionate encounter. Neurological studies explain the science behind the symptoms that mimic the body’s state during euphoria and stimulation: an increase in heart rate, and heightened alertness. Keeping these effects in mind, the Kamasutra repeatedly invokes betel nuts as both a prelude to and a marker of lovemaking: ‘When the woman has accepted his embrace, he gives her betel with his mouth. If she does not accept it, he gets her to take it through conciliating words, oaths, repeated requests, and falling at her feet. (Even a bashful or very angry woman cannot resist a man falling at her feet; this is a universal rule.) While giving her the betel, he kisses her softly, calmly, without a sound.’ In the section on ‘Making Advances’, Vatsyayana again resorts to the betel nut: ‘When he has understood her signals and uncovered her favourable feelings for him, he uses her possessions as they share one another’s objects of enjoyment... When she takes betel from his hand as he prepares to go to a social gathering, he asks for a flower from her hair... By degrees, he goes with her to a place where they are alone together, embraces her, kisses her, takes betel from her, and after giving it to her exchanges things with her and caresses her in her hidden places. Those are the advances.’

  The areca nut makes amorous advances possible. It is also the most essential stage in the production of the paan. Supari is the hard core—it is the part that lasts the longest and is the most resistant to being owned by the eater. One has to coax the supari in much the same way as Vatsyayana teaches us to coax a lover. The final s
ubmission of the supari marks what Forster—himself a paan aficionado—describes as both a problematic pleasure and a pleasurable problem. Supari is the staunchest ingredient in the paan.

  Areca nut has to be boiled and then dried in the sun for several days before being diced in preparation for its journey as supari into the heart of a paan.

  STEP 5: EMBELLISH, FOLD AND SERVE

  Several other ingredients can be added to the paan after this stage—tobacco for the more addictive personalities (or a tobacco and spice mix called kimaam), dried dates, cardamom, ginger, cloves, saffron, preserved rose petals, saffron, grated coconut, dried fruit, nutmeg; edible silver foil is often placed on the outside of the paan to give it a shimmering finish. A paan leaf is capacious enough to accommodate several ingredients, and finished paans can be quite plump. But there is an etiquette—a tehzeeb—to eating paans both plump and skinny. And the first rule of this etiquette is that one has to put the entire paan in one’s mouth rather than biting off a part of it. In order to secure all the ingredients within the paan, then, artistes need to learn the arts of folding the paan skilfully and using a clove to secure the end product in place. As Dwivedi and Holkar describe it: ‘We folded all the various ingredients into these leaves. The whole thing was an art and a solemn ritual; we took the eating and offering of paan very seriously in the palace.’ In fact, the folding of the paan—what Forster calls ‘a gracious and exquisite performance’—is important primarily in the erotic sphere. All religious uses of betel leaves and supari tend to serve the leaves open-faced rather than folded. It is in the sphere of eros that paans enclose the secret of desire. Almond Eyes, Lotus Feet goes on to lay bare the intricacies of the folded paan: ‘On festive occasions, it was the task of the zenana women to prepare the paans that were offered to the guests after the banquet. We had a lot of fun. We sat in a large circle, laughing, gossiping and teasing each other as we worked. We washed the betel leaves, snipped off the stems, and laid out the leaves in rows. We piled on the various ingredients and finally folded them in different shapes: cones or triangles or little squares held together with a clove. In the old days even the way a paan leaf was folded could convey a message such as, “He’s away, so I’m free tonight!”’