Of Cakes and Ettiquettes

This post is sparked by a puzzled expression followed by an innocent question that my European friend asked me the other day. “Do people in India bake cakes?”

One day I woke up and realized that Christmas is round the corner and something had to be done about it- something that was typical of my household during the season. Considering being the baking assistant to my mother all my growing up years was my favorite Christmas memory I decided that I would bake cakes for the small family that we have set up here for Christmas. What followed was a long day of shopping that included buying everything from a cake mixer to desiccated coconut. Surprisingly my first attempt at baking was not unsuccessful at all. Not only were my cakes edible they were soft and considerably well-tasting J

So when my friend came home that evening we discussed the cake while he was having it at which point I expressed my disappointment that it did not taste like my mother’s at all. That is when the puzzled expression came. “You mean to say it is normal for you guys to make cakes at home, I mean do Indians do that?” Honestly I did not know how to respond to that. I wanted to say “Of course! We have Christmas too.” But then I was hit with a flurry of thoughts.

1.      Cakes and all those things are obviously something we learnt to make from the lovely colonials so of course we have been baking them for a few centuries!

2.      It was unfair of me to take for granted that a European would understand that.

3.      It did not make sense to say “We have Christmas too!” when cake making was never really specific to the Christian community in India. The Parsis, for example have been doing it much better than us for a long time and…

4.      Well, we are a largely globalised world, so if I can manage to find things like escargot in Mumbai city then why not something as common as cake, which for the information of all Europeans you find in even the smallest village in my country.

At this point the conversation was manoeuvered to another topic. I am not quite sure how it began but it is about an action that every Indian is familiar with if not performing it themselves. Until recently I did not even know that there was a name to it. It was then that my Muslim flat mate told me that they called it ‘bosh’ and I vaguely remembered that my Oriya brethren had a name for it too which I just cannot recall. Anyway do let me know if your community has a name for it and if so what it is. This act is simply making a hand gesture (if you’re Indian you know it) when you accidently touch something with your foot. Basically you touch with your hand what you have accidently stepped foot on, bring it (your hand) to your lips and then on your chest.

Like a true European my friend asked why we did it. It might not occur to a European or a true Indian post colonial child that the question does not make any sense. Why do we do it? Well, it is not good to touch anything with your feet. Especially not books, the popular explanation for that being that you do not want to insult Saraswati- the goddess of wisdom and learning. You are also not allowed to rest your feet on a table which is used for the purpose of serving food.  Again, the popular explanation for it being that you ought not insult Anna devata. Oh, there are plenty of explanations we will come up with as a result of having dealt with such theology based questions for centuries. But then again, leave aside the explanations for they are varied and serve no purpose (I think). What we must see is that this supposedly ‘Hindu’ practice is spread across all religions in the Indian subcontinent. The Muslims do it, so do we Christians- not the Bombay ones (yes, I have a slight disdain for them because they tend to be too non-Indian). The interesting part is, no one teaches it to us. I am not sure about my Hindu friends but I think I speak for them as well when I say that as children when we go to our places of worship or pooja we are taught by our elders many of the etiquettes that have to be followed in these places. But there are so many more, like this particular action that I am talking about, that we pick up, may be not from our parents but our friends like in my case. And they become so much a part of our general way of going about that we are not conscious about them at all until a non-Indian/Asian or an Indian ‘intellectual’ makes us aware of the futility of it.

Are these actions not quite peculiar? Maybe the action has become so natural for us that we do not feel “sorry” when we touch things with our foot anymore. It could be possible that in a way we are paying reverence to Saraswati and Anna devata unconsiously. OR maybe we ought to think what it is about our culture that makes it possible for such actions to survive centuries of colonialism, modern day secularism and the new wave of post colonial sentiments and still be performed by a varied population at large.