‘Why do we know so little about Dalit food?’: A Wknd interview with author Shahu Patole

If we are what we eat, then shouldn’t eating sattvic (plant-based or “pure” food) make one sanatan like a Brahmin, asks Shahu Patole.
It’s a rhetorical question, of course. The 62-year-old former civil servant and author does not wish to be a Brahmin .
But it is a question that has rattled around in his head since his years growing up in the town of Khamgaon near Osmanabad, the son of a peon at a tehsil office, and a farm labourer. As a young man from the Mang caste, he began to notice the secrecy and shame associated with some of his culture, particularly its food. It troubled him to see people aspire, somewhat meaninglessly, towards vegetarianism.
Traditionally, the Mang and Mahar were responsible for disposing of cattle carcasses, when a cow or buffalo belonging to an upper-caste villager died. In lieu of payment, they were given leftover food or small amounts of grain or produce.
With only this to subsist on, and no other avenues of work open to them, the community took to consuming the meat they were disposing.
Unusual recipes evolved that also used weeds and wild plants; stews were made from a mix of jowar paste and offal.
Amid the rise of urban living and migration to cities, Patole says he represents the last generation that remembers the days when the community subsisted on “tamasic” (literally, dark or impure) food.
This is one of the reasons he wrote Anna He A-purna Brahma (Food is the Incomplete Truth; 2015). This book has now been re-released in English, as Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada, translated by Bhushan Korgaonkar.
With the Marathi book, Patole says, he was trying to ensure that there was at least some record of the sustenance his people had once turned to in desperation, and learnt to enjoy as part of a rich culture.
Having an English translation certainly helps in that mission, he adds.
***
What is the food like? It is often devoid of oil and ghee, and heavy on leafy vegetables but not ones that most people would recognise or find in a market. Meat is the main source of protein.
Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada offers recipes as well as a look at the cultural elements that built up around them, including folk songs and stories of how the Mang and Mahar came to live and eat as they did.
“I have only written about what I have eaten and experienced myself, because that is what I know best,” Patole says. Still, there is a vast array, including recipes that substitute ghee and seed oils with crushed garlic and peanut; dishes that treat coriander as a core ingredient; others dedicated to marrow or knuckles.
Patole hopes the book will encourage people from other Dalit and non-Dalit communities and other regions to start writing about their cultures and food habits “without any shame or guilt”.
“The problem in India is that, unlike in the West, we associate food with religion and morality,” he says. “This association has, in fact, strengthened in recent years, with food being used as a weapon with which to revive and strengthen the caste system. Meanwhile, no matter what I choose to eat or not eat, it is not going to ever make me a Brahmin. People don’t seem to realise this, and they blindly follow what the people in power say about clean and unclean food.”
***
Patole has been trying to challenge misconceptions about Dalit food for about 30 years.
In the 1990s, after completing a Master’s in economics and journalism, he qualified for the Union Public Service Commission and began stints with the Press Information Bureau, Defence PRO, Directorate of Field Publicity, All India Radio and Doordarshan.
At the time, he started noticing how food columns in Marathi newspapers never mentioned any of the dishes he grew up eating. He did some digging and found that there were no mentions in classical religious and social literature either.
From the Bhagavad Gita to the writings of the Vaishnav saints, texts categorised food into sattvic, rajasic (royal; the food of rulers and warriors) and tamasic, Patole says. “But while the first two categories are expounded on in great detail, there are no descriptions of the tamasic food of my people anywhere. Except to say that what we ate was ‘stale’.”
He submitted stories about the Mang food of Marathwada to Marathi newspapers, but they were uniformly rejected, underlining, in a way, he says, why it is still so hard to find references to Dalit food culture. And so he wrote his book.
“We also eat. We also live in the same society, the same country. And yet our food culture is never recognised,” Patole says. “Now, if future generations ever wonder what their forefathers ate, they’ll find it here.”
SUM AND SUBSTANCE
* Shahu Patole, 62, was born in the town of Khamgaon near Osmanabad, to a peon and a farm labourer. He has a Master’s degree in economics and journalism, and worked for decades as a civil servant with the Press Information Bureau, Defence PRO, Directorate of Field Publicity, All India Radio and Doordarshan.
* Now retired, he lives in Aurangabad with his wife Anita Patole, 56, a homemaker, and son Srujan Patole, 19, a college student. His daughter Sanchita Patole, 25, is a finance executive in the UK. Patole is currently working on his next book, a look at the socioeconomics of Manipur.
* The English translation of his 2015 book, Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada, has just been released by HarperCollins India. Translator Bhushan Korgaonkar says one of the key challenges was finding the right words for certain cuts of meat. “Patole’s tongue contains words not spoken outside his community. Just as the food has been neglected, so has the language,” Korgaonkar says. In a telling detail, every animal part was so precious, it had a distinct name. “There are up to 16 terms for the different joints,” he adds. Korgaonkar wasn’t familiar with most of these, he says, because in mainstream Marathi, the joints don’t even matter. “All we say is ‘haad’ for ‘bones’.”