Belur Diaries: Memories of food and change
Summer vacations, no matter where I lived, always came with the excitement of finally being free of homework, unlimited playtime, and a visit to meet my ammamma and thatha (maternal grandparents) in Belur. The first thing to do after I reached my grandparents’ house there, after a five-hour long bus journey from Bangalore, would be to go around the house inspecting every room to see what had changed since my last visit the previous year. Over the years, a lot has changed in the house — the doorways, the colour of the walls, the fruits in the backyard, the people in the house — and the town it is located in. Food, like every other aspect of life in Belur, has not been immune to changes brought about by the nudge of time and shift in culture.
The cool and breezy summer days in Belur, punctuated by light showers of rain, were mostly spent running around the house with my cousins, climbing Mangalore-tile roofs to harvest fragrant mallige huvu (jasmine) and ripe guavas, and rushing through meals to make room for more time play. Occasionally, our parents would take us to the 12th-century Chennakesava temple in town to offer prayers and give us a change of playground. The walk from our home to the temple would take less than 15 minutes, even when us kids slowed down the adults with our complaints about the ‘long’ walk. The flour mill on our street that has supplied our family kitchen with freshly ground wheat flour and powdered spices for decades and the Iyengar’s bakery on the main road, from where my mother fondly remembers buying coconut and salt cookies for herself as a kid, were few among the many small-scale shops and eateries that we would pass by on our walk. We took a few strides closer to the temple, we would also notice a few roadside vendors selling packed chips, biscuits, or fresh tengina neer (coconut water) to the people boarding or deboarding the buses at the local inter-city bus stand. Baring these few scattered road-side vendors and small restaurants that turned fully vegetarian as we entered the pete area (the old temple forted area), there weren’t many others that catch your attention.
However, during my recent pre-pandemic visit in September 2019, I was surprised to see not only the number of street vendors and small-scale restaurants to have grown, but also the variety of available food and beverage options to have expanded to include paani-puris, fried meat and lassis! Even though Belur has always been a popular tourist destination for people in Karnataka, this sudden availability of food choices that could be considered quintessentially ‘North Indian’ is suggestive of a growing influx of tourists from the northern states and changing patterns of food consumption.
That day, after my aunt and mother offered their prayers to lord Vishnu at the Chennakesava temple, we walk around to the weekly market laid out on the road adjoining the temple complex. As we enquired at a vegetable stall on the side of the road, a light breeze blew across and with it, it brought a whiff of freshly fried chilli pakoras and memories from my mother’s childhood. “This smells like the chutney my nainamma (paternal grandmother) used to make for us,” my mother shared as she dipped into her fragrant memories of watching her nainamma (paternal grandmother) grind the chutney ingredients on her grinding stone.
Before transforming into the modular kitchen that it is today — with smooth and shiny black marble flooring, white wood laminated cupboards and a gas burner stove with chimney — my ammamma’s (maternal grandmother) kitchen in Belur not only looked different, but also smelt, sounded, and tasted different. When one entered the kitchen in the morning, one would hear women chatting in the kitchen, as is the custom in many south Asian households, preparing the day’s meal. Accompanying their chatter would be the slow but consistent grinding of chutney ingredients in the huge grinding stone set in the red and grey rough cement floor and the clanks of steel kadchis steering the pot of sambar or meat set on the mud and kerosine stoves. As my mother recollects, “the chutney and spices not only smelt fresh but also tasted much fresher. The grinding stone added the flavour which is now lost since we started using the mixer grinder.” However, on the bright side, as my ammamma’s kitchen evolved to incorporate more ‘mordern’ appliances, the women got more time to themselves as they were now spending significantly lesser time in the kitchen.
These fragments of memory stirred in with the texture of the everyday visuals try to put together a picture of how food and life in Belur is transforming. While writing this article has left me with more questions than I can answer at the moment, I hope the reader finds in it flavours of everyday life that they can relate to and ask questions about.
References:
- Chambers, C. (2021). Desi delicacies: Food writing from Muslim South Asia. Picador India, an imprint of Pan Macmillan Publishing India Private Limited.
- Mintz, S. W., & Christine M. Du Bois. (2002). The Anthropology of Food and Eating. Annual Review of Anthropology, 31, 99–119. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4132873
