Food Values Beyond Nutrition - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 548

her food, and do you know where she is? She has been reborn in this very town as a pig”
(2009, 25).
In the folktale “Heaven and Hell,” which Kirin Narayan recorded from a living guru and
tracked through many nations' folklore, the powerful moral is the necessity to feed others, to
which there is no alternative but to suffer starvation. In this tale, hell is a place of starvation
because its captives cannot bend their arms to feed themselves the delicacies they can see and
smell. In heaven, with arms equally stiff, souls feed one another delectable morsels. Swamiji,
the teacher on whom Narayan's book focuses, explicated the story's message: “The soul sits in
the body of all creatures, and the body needs food. Give food. Do something for another soul.
You will be serving and nourishing the soul” (1989, 203). The guru advises that the self is sus-
tained through serving others; but, as in the tale of Shakat, one's motives cannot be (forgive
the minor word play) self-serving,as is so beautifully embodied in the image of stiff arms.
To share food willingly out of pure and selfless love is a practice most highly valued in
Hindu devotional traditions. These often emphasize that such love radically obliterates
all concerns of ritual purity. The paradigmatic moment for this realization is the story—
firmly attached in popular imagination to classical Ramayana tales, although textually
apocryphal—in which Lord Rama accepts the berries offered by a poor tribal woman,
named Shabari or Shavari. She has bitten each berry to make sure she gives God only
the sweetest (Lutgendorf 2000). The power of Rama's recognition of Shabari's pure and
purifying devotion, of his grace-giving consumption of her half-eaten offering, is rooted
in Hindu notions of the ways saliva ordinarily generates pollution.
Separation
Generations of anthropologists have meticulously attended to the multitude of complex
ways people in India give, accept, and refuse food in order to enact social and ritual
hierarchies of caste and gender. Anthropologists, particularly in the 1950s-1980s, were
fascinated by the rules of purity and pollution as they affected commensality, and by
“Hindu transactions,” which could serve not just to maintain a status quo but also to
alter it through deliberate collective decisions about eating practices. Ethnographers
extensively documented rankings negotiated via food.8
Village life affords countless opportunities to observe in action how rules of com-
mensality, of purity and pollution, are both upheld and broken. Rather than offer fur-
ther examples of a domain so well documented, I exemplify food's work of separation
by turning to the words of a village poet. His verses show succinctly how producers and
eaters understand delicate but deep distinctions of class that are embedded in consump-
tion. These couplets offer a kind of “ethnosociology” (Marriott, ed. 1990).
In 1993 Ugma Mali, a middle-aged man of the gardening community, recited for me
eight verses he himself had composed in the voices of different foods, mostly grains. In
his oral compositions, grains speak of their own attributes. These are not idiosyncratic
but, rather, poetic versions of common perceptions I heard expressed in many prosaic
interviews. I offer three examples of Ugma's couplets, each highlighting the ways grain