PRASADAM: Food of the Hindu Gods

$34
Item Code: IDF099
Author: Nalini Rajan
Publisher: Vakils, Ferrer and Simons Pvt. Ltd.
Edition: 2003
ISBN: 8187111534
Pages: 95 (Color Illus: 52)
Cover: Paperback
Other Details 9.2" X 7.0"
Weight 290 gm
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Fully insured
Shipped to 153 countries
Shipped to 153 countries
More than 1M+ customers worldwide
More than 1M+ customers worldwide
100% Made in India
100% Made in India
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23 years in business
Book Description
From the Back of the Book :

Prasadam is a cook-book with a difference. From olden times, every community in India celebrates various festivals and the most enjoyable feature of the celebration is to eat one's favourite foods.

Every festival traditionally has one or more sweets and savouries to go with the occasion, for example, Payasam for Hindu New Year, Thengai Poli for full moon day of the month of Shravan, Pooranpoli for Harvest times, Murukku for Krishna Jayanti, and so on.

Likewise, tradition prescribes the cooked savouries and sweets that must be offered to every deity. Indeed, even different foods are offered to the same deity in different seasons.

Many legends, myths and tales of mysticism are retold in this book about the deities in the Hindu pantheon. Interwoven with the stories are recipes of sumptuous delicacies that are favourites of the Gods and men alike.

This beautifully illustrated book is invaluable to all who are interested in participating in Hindu festivals with exuberance and enthusiasm and who wish to partake of the traditional food cooked on these occasions.

Introduction

The first time an Englishman shook my grandmother's hand (she was seventy years of age at that time), her carefully constructed brahmanical world was shattered. For the next couple of hours or so, she could not be persuaded to leave the wash-basin where she scrubbed her hands so hard, that the very skin seemed to drop off.

My grandmother's sense of violation was not merely due to the fact that in all her post-puberty year no adult male except her husband had touched her. This was true enough. The outrage, however, went much deeper. As a good Brahman wife, she had no doubt whatsoever that Westerners, and all foreigners for that matter, were physically polluting and spiritually feeble, as a result of eating unclean food, apart from having accumulated an unseemly substances through heredity and bad karma.

Such a conviction in the "timelessness" and truth of the inherited Hindu tradition pervaded every sphere of day-to-day existence in my grandmother's life. However, this tendency to cast complex multicultural phenomena into a simplistic, a social and dehistoricised mould is not peculiar to my grandmother. It is a tendency that is increasingly being endorsed by individuals, groups and even political parties in the present period.

My main intention in the following pages is to analyse an important aspect of this so-called timeless heritage: namely, the myths involved in major Hindu festivals. There are various dimensions to these myths – the subjugation of women and the lower castes, the evolution of gods and goddesses from tribal origins to Aryan status, the domination of male gods and the astonishing survival of the mother goddess even in a patriarchal, brahmanical culture.

There are, conventionally speaking, two ways of viewing myths. One is to identify wholly with them; the other is to introduce a division between the observer and the observed. In the first method of holistic fusion, there is the tacit assumption that rationality and irrationality are two sides of the same reality. Thus the gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon become as much a part of the lives of the devotees as parents, siblings, spouses and offspring. When a small clay image of Ganesha fell apart, I remember my aunt (to whom it belonged) weeping and lamenting all day long in the conviction that the god was personally annoyed with her.

Doubtless there are therapeutic aspects in such a culture – and these cannot be overlooked. Myths, like popular cinema today, are largely a matter of projecting our innermost fantasies, fears and desires onto the outside world. Cinema projects these feelings and impulses onto the large screen; myths project them into the narrative form which becomes part of our collective memory.

The existence of a variety of divinities, from the most benevolent to the most terrible, is testimony to the wide range of tastes and preferences on the part of the concerned target population. In this market world of fantasy, the slightest wish may be fulfilled, the smallest aspiration granted, the least hope cherished-for there is always some deity or the other waiting to gratify them. More importantly, individual responsibility is comfortably forsaken on the altar of divine destiny.

Consequently, when my great grand-mother started manifesting signs of hostility towards her husband at the tender age of sixteen years, she was not packed off to the resident psychologist. Since the evil, it was believed, did not spring from within herself, but came from "outside", an exorcist was summoned. He undertook the task of chasing away the spirit of the Bad Woman that had taken hold of her, with the help of yet another spirit that had laid possession of the poor woman, namely, that of a sadhu or Wise Man. When the cure did take place, my great grandmother – like many others who suffered the same afflictions – was easily reintegrated into the social mainstream.

In contemporary psychoanalytic talk, of course, the spirits of the Bad Woman and the Wise Man would be viewed as representing – with all the gender prejudices intact – the Freudian id and the superego, respectively. The id is usually interpreted as the unrestrained, libidinous realm of fantasy, which is present in the psyche of the new-born infant. During the very early stages of infancy, complete gratification of all desires is demanded by the child from its mother. It is only a little later that the child understands that not all its desires can be fulfilled and that there is a policeman-figure (the superego) present in the form of the father figure who will impose constraints on such gratification. This policeman or superego may be represented by the real father, or by the mother herself, or by societal dos and don'ts. In India, family and jati (caste) duties play a huge constraining role in the lives of individuals. When the child becomes an adult, the superego is usually internalized and becomes the voice of conscience.

Psychologists claim that the very early years of our childhood are deeply imprinted in our subconscious minds. The time of our childhood when we are abruptly taken away from the soothing world of our mothers and forced to conform to the more restraining world of men or of patriarchal rules is perhaps the most traumatic period of our lives. This is more so, for males than for females in every society. This is where the myths in our culture best express our deepest fears as well as our most secret fantasies.

In the Western nuclear family set-up, where the father figure is both dominant and forceful, the most crucial myth is that of Oedipus. Oedipus is believed to have killed his father and married his mother.

Surely this is the fantasy of the child of two or three years in Western culture, at the moment when he is brusquely whisked away from the mother's world and brought under the control of the father who wants him to become a "real" man?

In Hindu culture, matters are somewhat different. The child here is usually weaned away from the mother only when he is between three to five years of age. In the joint family system which is still common here, there is no single, strong father figure. There are nevertheless several men who are figures of authority for the child – like uncles, grandfathers, elder brothers, and so on (apart from the father himself). The myth which best represents the child's rage in the face of the change he experiences is an eminently Hindu one – namely, the abduction of the Good Mother Sita by the ten-headed Ravana.

In both the Western and Hindu cultures, the child reconciles himself to the changes in his life – at least in most cases. More often than not, his feelings for both mother and father are a combination of live, respect and fear. For instance, sometimes he views his mother, in her benevolent, nurturing form, as the Good Mother, and sometimes he sees her as a domineering, overpowering entity, that is, as the Bad Mother. In what proportion these feelings exist will depend largely on the dynamics of his personal experiences with his family as well as on the society in which he lives. In the West, the "average" male-child learns to emulate him father; in Hindu culture, he learns to take pride in his family and his caste identity, that is, in khandaan and jati.

It is very important to keep in mind the fact that the myths in any culture pertain largely to dominant groups – mainly because these are allowed the maximum freedom to imagine and articulate them. in our history, it was largely Brahman males who were in charge of transmitting both the oral tradition as well as the written world. Although we may boast of a robust folk tradition, the dominant culture, in terms of the transmission of knowledge, is still the brahmanical one. That is why myths usually represent male, upper class and upper caste fantasies and fears in most cultures. These arise during the formation of ego identities, while the child learns the process of tempering his desires to social reality.

This interplay of id and superego, of untrammeled fantasy and social constraints, brings us to the second method, namely, that of scientific inquiry, which demands the isolation of variables. The problem for the modernist is a somewhat geographical one. What remained "outside" – that is, the world of deities, ghosts and spirits of mythic culture – is suddenly shifted "inside" and is now viewed as the projections of the individual's psyche. For the modernist, the new-found optimism of scientific truths demands the removal of the comforting veil of mythic illusion.

Unfortunately, the tradition-modernity debate leads us to the paralyzing predicament of having to choose between a heritage that is already encoded and the position of the outsider who supposedly knows better than the native what is "true". The only way out of the impasse of incessantly oscillating and what is false is to demonstrate that myths, far from being eternal, are historically constructed. After all, new gods and goddesses usually represent new desires and aspirations. The need, then, is to intervene actively in traditional practice and to explain and understand the multi-dimensionality of our culture. There is no one true way of examining myths. Even today, we continue to re-construct the myths in our culture.

The intention of this work is not to probe the reasons why, for instance, there are unequal relations between men and women or between social formations – that would require a whole new book in itself – but to take them for granted and proceed from there. Once these hierarchical patterns are established in the psyche of a cultural groups, certain "timeless" symbolic structures emerge. Thus water is perceived as a female element, while fire is seen as a superior, male principle. The myths underlying the festivals discussed in this book nevertheless provide evidence of the transcendence of these static equations and of comparisons our time.

Incidentally, even the recipes presented at the end of each chapter reveal much in the nature of daily life. Traditional cooking need not be considered exclusively a culinary art. In reality, it provides deep sociological insights into the lifestyles of the men and women who were in charge of the cooking process in rustic societies. Scattered across this work are some of my grandmother's most tested and tasted recipes of festival delicacies. These have been compiled here by her daughter (that is, my mother), Rajalakshmi.

As far as possible, an effort has been made to simplify the cooking process. Due to pollution taboos and the tyrannical pressure of social obligations, my grandmother herself would insist on undertaking the grinding and other complicated processes, stubbornly refusing the use of artificial aids like electric blenders and other gadgets. The result was that we seldom saw her careworn face and wasted body outside the kitchen area. This is obviously too high a price to pay either for the sake of tradition or of catering to the palate.

Finally, although the overall perspective adopted in this work is non-religious, it is not anti-religion. The intention is not to ridicule, but to try to understand, and then explain, the mythic dimensions governing Hindu cultural patterns. After all, myths have their own logic. When people are concerned about the fertility of the soil for their livelihood, it is natural that they venerate earth-bound phallic deities. But it is one thing to study myths as part of the lives of the common people or even to believe in them; it is quite another to claim superiority on this basis for one's own culture and consequently attempt to suppress or put down other cultures.

By analyzing the myths surrounding Hindu festivals from a historical perspective, it is possible to see the dynamic processes at work in the creation of culture and counter-culture. There are many variations – depending on the region one comes from or the caste to which one belongs – in the celebration of Hindu festivals. It would be impossible to go into the minute details of these variations. But to do so, even if it were possible is certainly not my intention.

What I hope to do instead is to discuss in more general terms some of the fascinating principles around which Hindu myths are constructed and upon which the major Hindu festivals are celebrated. Even such a limited discussion is likely to bring out the grand multiplicity and polyvalence of interpretations as to what exactly constitutes Hinduism. I would like to demonstrate that, far from being one people and one culture, we are several people and several cultures possessing the genius and humanity to live together.

This is the modest aim of this work.

About the Author :

The author Nalini Rajan has a Ph.D. in Social Communication and is an Associate Professor at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai. She has a passion for traditional delicacies, and her desire to share with her grandmother's culinary art and knowledge, as handed to her by her mother, Rajalakshmi Rajan, led her to writer this book. She has other publications on academic subjects to her credit.

CONTENTS

Introductionix
Chapters
1.Moon Symbolism and sun worship1
Pal Poli6
2.Fluid ties and the mother goddess7
Thengapal payasam11
3.Lakshmi worship - Paradigm of our times12
Idlis16
Sambar16
Chutney17
4.Rites of Passage18
Thengai Poli22
Clarified Butter22
5.Krishna Jayanti - Dionysian Overtones23
Basic flour29
Murukku (Chakli)29
Karchikkai30
Uppu cheedai31
Vellacheedai31
Tengozhil32
Payatha Laddu32
6.Ganesh Chaturti - Pest to Pacifist33
Thengaikozhakattai39
Ellukozhakattai40
Ulundukozhakattai40
7.Navaratri or Mother-right41
Sundal47
Seeyam47
8.Festivals of lights - Two-in-one48
Sooji laddu51
Somashi51
Chivadu52
Muthusorai54
Gothumai halwa54
Gunja laddu55
Pori urrundai56
Appam56
9.Shiva - destroyer and regenerator57
Kalli61
Vegetable Vadai61
Kootu62
10.Harvest times63
Pooranpoli66
Amaivadai66
Chakkarai pongal67
Venpongal67
Meduvadai68
Sambar powder68
Puliodarai70
Molagapodi70
Thengai Chatham71
Kesaribath71
Vangibath72
Thayir Chatham74
Potato Bonde74
11.Savitri and Sita - Good Wives75
Karadai77
12.The Message of Love78
Glossary for Culinary Terms80
Glossary for Mythological Terms81
Selected Bibliography82

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