Home Thoughts, From Anywhere

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THIS book should come with a statutory warning: if you8217;re Bengali and live away from family, don8217;t start reading without a ticket home by your side. Such is the strength of the nostalgia Chitrita Banerjee evokes in The Hour of the Goddess, re-issued recently in paperback after a five-year run in hardcover. Pop sociology in the guise of food memoirs is a relatively new phenomenon in India and, perhaps not coincidentally, the bulk of it comes from Indians settled abroad. Fortunately, though, Goddess is a cut above the likes of Sobha Narayan8217;s Monsoon Diary: A Memoir with Recipes, elevated by scholarship and underlined by a genuine respect for folk culture.

Both factors are important, because readers with a degree of familiarity with Bengal will read 8220;home8221; in every single sentence: grandmothers at their daily puja, aunts seeking out the sunniest spot on rooftops for huge jars of pickles-in-the-making, mothers snacking on fast days on soaked moong dal-and-sugar 8212; enough to make youngsters want to abandon lunch as well 8212; half-forgotten doggerels and age-old rhymes.

There8217;s little new in Banerji8217;s material: her triumph lies in constructing a matrix that beads together the little gems unconsciously passed onto every child in every culture and presenting a composite picture that makes sense of atavistic rituals, blanket bans, must-eats and don8217;t-dos.

Using her own life as a resource 8212; born into a rambling joint family of Bengali Hindus in Calcutta, she defied all spoken and unspoken taboos to marry a Bengali Muslim from Bangladesh 8212; and her training as a historian and travels for perspective, Banerji explains the unquestioned familiar and elucidates the ignored other.

At her best, she picks up a common feature of middle-class Bengali life 8212; a ritual, an implement, a custom 8212; from her own memory, sieves through folk history and recorded literature to find allusions and cross-references, trawls through its changes and serves up a chapter that is as engaging as it is enlightening.

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Pop sociology in the guise of food memoirs is a relatively new phenomenon and bulk of it comes from Indians settled abroad

In the fascinating 8220;Bonti of Bengal8221;, for instance, Banerji8217;s subject is the humble bonti, a simple wood-plank-and-iron-blade cutting implement that did all the work of fancy eight-knife box sets with greater precision and thinner discards; in the chapter on widows, her outrage with her bereaved mother8217;s submission to ancient taboos combines with a larger frustration in the knowledge that some mores are simply too deeply ingrained to be thrust out.

In her bad moments, though, Banerji can be cloyingly long-winded. Like a bad filmmaker seeking to draw out a tottering climax, she takes 10 pages in 8216;How Bengal discovered Chhana8217; to build up to the Portuguese-influenced method of curdling milk with acid 8212; and cops out at the last minute with a verbatim quote from the legendary KT Achaya!

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Such moments, though, are few and far-between. If you8217;re Bengali, or a foodie yes, the two can be mutually exclusive, do read Goddess. Just don8217;t forget the ticket home.