Food, Faith and Gender in South Asia

The Cultural Politics of Women's Food Practices

Nita Kumar, Usha Sanyal, Nita Kumar, Usha Sanyal

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350278035
• eBook ISBN: 9781350137080
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How do women express individual agency when engaging in seemingly prescribed or approved practices such as religious fasting? How are sectarian identities played out in the performance of food piety? What do food practices tell us about how women negotiate changes in family relationships? This collection offers a variety of distinct perspectives on these questions. Organized thematically, areas explored include the subordination of women, the nature of resistance, boundary making and the construction of identity and community. Methodologically, the essays use imaginative reconstructions of women's experiences, particularly where the only accounts available are written by men. The essays focus on Hindus and Muslims in South Asia, Sri Lankan Buddhist women and South Asians in the diaspora in the US and UK. Pioneering new research into food and gender roles in South Asia, this will be of use to students of food studies, sociology, anthropology and cultural studies.

Part One

The subordination of women and the nature of resistance

1

Curing the body and soul: Health, food and herbal medicines for nineteenth-century South Asian Muslim women

Laurel Steele

I am living back in time. I am imagining the grandeur of my mother’s time. How do I narrate? Only by going back in time.

– Lal, Coming of Age in Nineteenth-Century India, 9

It is widely understood that colonial interventions in Indian society involved interventions in customs relating to women in the zenana, the space in which women lived secluded from men who were categorized as strangers. Well into the twentieth century, the colonial lens was directed at those (respectable women, both Hindu and Muslim) who were confined by the custom of purdah and who were restricted to the domestic space. The colonial critique extended to the purdah itself, the real and metaphorical veil that constructed women’s seclusion, and to the ills produced by that confinement experienced by these women. But who entered the zenana, and how? In narratives of South Asian colonialism, Western women recorded the very first encounters with the zenana. From Mrs. Meer Hassan Ali’s (1973) report on her experiences as a wife of a Muslim in India in the 1830s (and her graphic description of curing cholera with rosewater), to the sometimes titillating reminiscences of Victorian ladies invited to “purdah parties,” and to the descriptions by women doctors visiting zenanas, the reporting to the colonial authorities was done by women, who invariably remarked upon the health of the inhabitants. And yet, examining colonial writings regarding South Asian women of the nineteenth century does not necessarily reveal the women themselves or any individual woman.¹

So who was this woman a hundred years ago, so in need of help and of medical interventions? What can we know of what she ate, what she worried about, how she kept healthy or, indeed, any of the details of her quotidian bodily existence as a landed, moneyed South Asian woman in 1904? This chapter imagines that daily existence, through an examination of the relationship of food and medicine to women’s health and daily lives in late nineteenth-century South Asia. The women’s lives are re-created by means of a close reading of Book Nine of the Bihishti Zewar. The overarching goal of this chapter is to add to scholarly discussions regarding representations of nineteenth-century South Asian Muslim women, especially as individuals and in their daily lives.²

First published in Urdu in 1904, the Bihishti Zewar (the title can be translated as ‘Jewellery of paradise’ or ‘Heavenly ornaments’, among other variations) is an elaborate compendium of rules, guidance and stories written specifically for South Asian Muslim women. The work was composed by the Deobandi scholar Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi (1863–1943) during the great wave of late nineteenth-century Muslim reformist activity.³ It has proven to be enduringly popular.⁴ It is now widely available on the internet and can easily be downloaded to cell phones, in various versions. Farah Deeba Chowdhury (2017: 20), a scholar who writes about popular books like the Bihishti Zewar, states, ‘In my teen years [it used] to be very helpful in learning prayers and understanding basic principles of Islam.’

Originally, the published Urdu versions of Book Nine of the Bihishti Zewar consisted of about thirty pages of general comments on health, and then about a hundred pages of recipes for various remedies, interspersed with more advice about healthy living. There is a long section specifically on pregnancy. The Bihishti Zewar in its entirety in the oldest published version is over seven hundred pages long, so Book Nine initially made up a significant part of the work.⁵ Current-day readers of the Bihishti Zewar, whether searching for information and guidance in Urdu or using an academic English translation for scholarly motives, do not see this section on food and health in any detail, if at all. The consequences of that erasure, that is, the disappearance of the women addressed, their discussions about health and nutrition and their everyday lives, demand our attention.⁶

Book Nine was also omitted in Barbara Metcalf’s scholarly English translation, Perfecting Women: Maulana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi’s Bihishti Zewar, A Partial Translation with Commentary (1990).⁷ Metcalf’s unpublished manuscript translation of Book Nine, the material that was omitted, is over 250 pages long, excluding her own glossary on herbs and other ingredients, and it is her translation that I use in this chapter.⁸

Along with my reading of Book Nine in this chapter, with its intent of gleaning the texture of the ‘lived life’ of women and their bodily health a hundred years ago, I will look at Metcalf’s remarks on Book Nine in her Introduction to her translation, and then at two other scholars’ discussions of this material, Anna Vanzan and Usamah Ansari. Other current scholarship centring on issues that arise from this kind of reading of Book Nine will be used to see how the details of day-to-day existence captured in it overlays with this reading.⁹ Finally, this chapter will also engage with scholarship elsewhere in this book that addresses the push-and-pull of the ‘patriarchal domestic family structure where female ritual and culinary activity are situated’ (Chapter 3, here), as well as the ‘reformist spirit [that turned] the mundane into the pious … [by] … merging the Islamic ritual cycle with the rhythms of daily household chores’ (Introduction, here).

The impetus for this approach – the goal of extracting a ‘lived life’ – comes from my own engagement with Barbara Metcalf’s project of translating the Bihishti Zewar. My approach takes its inspiration from and owes a general debt to the writings of Michel de Certeau, Pierre Bourdieu and other thinkers, as well as from a movement in Germany, the Alltagsgeschichte historians, who have emphasized the importance of the practices of everyday life and what is considered commonplace, and to historians pursuing ‘history from below’. While this school of history is less in vogue now than when it emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, the very lack of discussion about the ‘lived life’ of nineteenth-century South Asian women would certainly justify this style of analysis. In this particular reading, using the detail in the text, I imagine the ‘lived life’ of a woman as she confronts matters of health in the zenana, women’s quarters, at the time of the Bihishti Zewar’s initial publication, now over a hundred years ago. The goal is to ‘see’ the woman to whom the work is addressed and to whom the advice is directed and to ‘see’ her by means of that advice. By looking through the minutiae of experience that is portrayed in Book Nine as if through clear glass, without theory, or history, or any particular opinion, our understanding of the daily life of that woman will deepen. The task will be to look at the material from the inside and move outward: moving from the specific, for example, from a recipe for a cure for a cough, to a whole, thinking about that long-ago woman, worrying about that cough.

In her second book, Ruby Lal introduces scholar Azra Kidwai as the interlocutor between Lal’s ‘investigation of respectable, modern Indian womanhood and of feminine cultures’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and Azra’s own narration of lived memories – ‘living back in time’ – as a girl-child and woman navigating a twentieth century in a northern India still heavily informed and guided by nineteenth-century writing and thinking. In parsing Azra’s recollections of explorations of texts and socio-familial structures, her ‘imagining the grandeur’ of the previous generation, Lal (2013: Prelude) allows us to see the other, inner life of the girl-child and woman, etched into a palimpsest of South Asian, specifically sharif, families living in the mid-twentieth century.

So it is possible to access the very texture of women’s lives as described in Book Nine if one approaches the material as if it were transparent; not focusing on the details of the text itself, but looking through it to imagine these women as they were, free of intervention. It was a loss, though an understandable one, when Metcalf’s published manuscript, out of practical necessity, could not contain Book Nine’s voluminous material. Not only did the medical instructions disappear, but our ability to ‘see’ the women to whom they were addressed disappeared as well.

However, if we return to Metcalf’s translation, and if we willingly suspend our disbelief, then between the lines of advice, directions and remonstrance offered by Thanvi we can indeed glimpse that long-ago woman, at first dimly, then ever more clearly. The convention throughout this chapter will be to highlight, in bold italic type, the re-creation of the woman that is gleaned directly from the 1904 Urdu text of Book Nine of the Bihishti Zewar, translated as ‘The jewellery of paradise’. For example, in the unpublished translation of Book Nine, Part One, Thanvi has this to say about water:

Do not drink water as soon as you get up (nor ought you go directly out into the air). If you are very thirsty, gulp down some water while holding your nose. Then hold your nose for some time and breathe through the mouth. If you have been walking in hot weather, do not drink water right away, especially not if you have been in the lu (hot wind). A person who drinks a great deal of water at that point would die. You should not drink water on an empty stomach nor immediately after defecating. (Bihishti Zewar, unpublished translation, c. 1982: n.p.)

A woman’s outline, her behaviours and choices as referenced by Thanvi, start to take shape within our mind’s eye as we read the translation.

She was thirsty, but she knew it would be better to not just drink from the nearest well. The times she did, she tried always to drink water from one that is filled, and not going dry. She knows to not drink water that is salty or hot. Of course, she knows that rain water is best. But as this is the dry season that will not do. She knows how to make the well water more drinkable – by cooking it until only three quarters was left. She will then cool and strain it. She knows to wait to drink water, and that it would be best if the water is filtered through a cloth tied over an earthenware jug, sipped in small quantities at a time. But she is alone for the moment at this early hour, and when she finds leftover water in a carafe that belongs to a cousin, she drinks thirstily.

Using Thanvi’s observations on ‘Movement’, we can add to the construction of an individual woman’s life. Again, we can see this vision:

She drinks thirstily and contemplates her day. She knows she must get up, be busy about the quarters – and no one will appreciate her just letting others do the work. She reads, ‘Too much rest not only upsets the household, but even causes illnesses.’ Work was healthy. Movement was healthy. And, if she wanted, she could make her way to the roof. And it was true – her aunt, who was not even that old, lay in bed, and said she was sick, and took medicine. But wouldn’t her aunt feel better if she moved around?

As the woman begins to emerge, using this kind of visualizing on our part, we may think further about why there is this general omission of Book Nine from reprints of Bihishti Zewar. The most obvious reason is that the material in Book Nine is very long and very specific – it is, after all, an extremely detailed herbal medicine manual within the larger body of the very lengthy Bihishti Zewar. Another reason for omitting it could be that Book Nine in its entirety is not now relevant to the reader for practical reasons. While its comments about food and health are of interest, the scores of herbal remedies might currently be of little immediate use. Women nowadays would probably not be responsible for concocting antidotes for snakebites or severe fevers, as is suggested in Book Nine. These remedies have been replaced for some by what is referred to commonly as Western medicine – the current system of medicine as practiced in modern medical schools and hospitals. Others in South Asia, who consult hakims (doctors) and still use the yunani (Graeco-A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Also available from Bloomsbury
• Title Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction: The politics and culture of food: South Asian women and their agency
• Part One: The subordination of women and the nature of resistance
• Part Two: Boundary-making, the construction of identity and commensality
• Part Three: Everyday life, power and agency
• Index
• Copyright Page