Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
In other words, wheat brags neither of its nutritional prowess, nor its tastiness, but rather
of the social status of its eater: the proverbially fat shopkeeper who does no physical labor.
Today almost everyone eats wheat, and the shift from cultivating barley and millet to
wheat is emblematic in rural Rajasthan of both agricultural and social change. However,
wheat itself is hardly a monolithic category; there are many varieties of wheat. The hybrid
seeds promoted by government agents and requiring five waterings have seductive names
like Golden Well-Being. These contrast with indigenous wheat—often just called local or
red—that may be grown like barley on unirrigated land. Red wheat is treasured by the
elderly for its special taste, texture, color, and healthful qualities; but it is less-often sown,
and in ever-smaller amounts—only for home consumption, only in those rare house-
holds willing to sacrifice profit to nostalgia, as I will discuss in the next section.
In Ugma Mali's couplets, the three grains—barley, corn and wheat—signify multidi-
mensional differences in class, in labor, in sense of self. A prosperous farmer might pre-
fer corn bread, whereas a merchant would choose wheat, even if both eaters measured
up equally according to their economic means. Poor day-laborers may well eat bread
made of barley and, simultaneously, value the stamina it supplies while they remain sen-
sitive to the lower-class identity they consume along with it. Such reflections on food
and self, on the substances from which identities are made and altered, may be just as
revealing of subtle social distinctions as a record of who eats at whose feasts.
Indian literature, questioning society's strictures, also plays brilliantly on themes
of food, class, and gender. In Premchand's classic wrenching tale, the “Price of Milk”
(1969), the orphaned son of an untouchable wet nurse to a landlord's child is driven by
hunger to accept scorn along with leftovers, even though he is acutely aware that his
own mother's milk nourished the healthy boy who now abuses him (1969). Premchand
shows the ways that untouchability is malleable in the service of privilege. When the
boy needed her milk to survive, an untouchable woman's feeding him, and her intimate
proximity, carried no pollution, lowering neither his ritual nor his social status.
In a very different context and era, Gita Hariharan's much anthologized, “Remains
of the Feast,” portrays an educated granddaughter who complies with a dying widow's
tragicomic demands for sweet and spicy foods denied her during long years of the
ascetic regime rigidly prescribed for widows (1997). Both fictions in different ways
deconstruct ideologies of separation imposed by rigid food rules to highlight hypocrisy
and oppression on the one hand, and individual emotions and resistance on the other.9
Decline or the Tastelessness of Modernity10
During several research periods in India (1993, 1997, 2003) I recorded extensive
open-ended interviews with farmers, herders, and artisans—most of them over 50—
asking them to reflect on many aspects of changing times. One theme that frequently
emerged was decline in food quality, a decline with multiple causalities, unanimously
pronounced, and applied both to flavor and to nourishment. Many expressed a sincere
preference for bread made with grains grown with organic manure and ground by hand.
They regularly critiqued both the taste and healthfulness of new grain varieties grown
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