Food and Cultural Bond
Weaving tapestry of memories,
cultural identities and geographical abundance, ‘food’ has always been the
universal bond between tradition, nutrition and storytelling. Every household
has secret Sunday recipes, lunchbox stories, festive and community meals
nourishing generations with its gastronomic delights. Stories were woven during each harvest and
passed on to generations in the form of intriguing narratives. “We sun dry the
mustard plants, grind and blend with a traditional rice soup during the winter”,
recounts a group of rural women of Purulia, inheriting the recipe from their
ancestors. The culinary conversions transcending generations preserve the
family meal practices ensuring nutrition strengthening family and societal
bonds.
Rural women narrating food stories
Sun dried mustard greens
An enthusiastic Instagram food
blogger recounts how her grandparents managed to feed the uncountable migrants
during the 1971 partition even during the acute shortage of food. It is through her Instagram page she narrates
these stories and even after decades
those recipes were rediscovered and has effortlessly managed to be a part of
the transgenerational platter surviving the test of time. More than sustenance,
food and communication have achieved a stature of empowered narratives of
abundance & love, scarcity & hardship, migration & resilience
influencing food preferences and cultural identity. A group of craftsmen travel
from Chhatna (Bankura, West Bengal)
to the outskirts of Purulia to make data palm jaggery. Living in makeshift
setups made of bamboo and palm leaves, they engage themselves in a tedious process from collecting the
syrup to finally making the jaggery, narrating the stories of how they learnt
the skill from their fathers.
Jaggery (nolen gur)
artisans at work in Purulia
Metaphorically, food remains an eternal touchpoint in the cinematic narratives of Ghatak, Rossellini and Chaplin. Ghatak’s protagonist in ‘Meghe Dhaka Tara’, Neeta, skips meals representing the turmoils of the partition narratives; food serves as connection between the communities during theatre rehearsals symbolising food as a metaphor for memory, identity, gender, and displacement. When the impoverished localites stone the bakery in Rossellini’s ‘Rome-Open City’ tells stories of hunger, and oppression under a fascist regime. A poignant depiction of starvation in the tragicomic moment of the shoe-eating scene in Chaplin’s ‘Gold Rush’ epitomises the desperation for food.
Documenting food in media texts
captures the essence of cultural identity, family and societal history. The
social media driven communication archives and embraces the story of culinary
traditions honouring the past and enriching the present and future, resonating
the flavours of heritage through storytelling. Narrating stories of food goes
beyond culinary instructions; capturing the essence of history and traditions.
No comments:
Post a Comment