Profane cooks and minor condiments: Chutnification and “cooking the world” in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Abstract

The exploration of food in Salman Rushdie’s canonical novel Midnight’s Children (1981) is neither provincial nor an act of strategic essentialism. Food as a central artistic device has been understudied in the contexts of this novel, its ambitious scope and transnational implications left unexplored through a contextual lens. This article uncovers the hidden significance of “pure” or sacred cooks in the subcontinental imagination and the ramifications of such comparison for the consideration of abject embodiment as a site of creativity and transcendence in the text. It also reveals the ways in which Rushdie both reinstates and reworks a South Asian understanding of food in his use of pickles as portable magic.

The exploration of food in Salman Rushdie’s canonical novel Midnight’s Children (1981) is neither provincial nor an act of strategic essentialism. Instead, Rushdie speaks back to and repurposes hegemonic food discourses of the subcontinent, capitalizing on their syncretic capacities to represent the creation of a self-aware cosmopolitan identity. While there have been discussions regarding pickling in this novel as a central metaphor for the act of writing, little attention has been paid to the use of food as emerging from larger cultural discourse.

The implications of the “impure” and emasculated cook positioned as postcolonial hero/writer, the significance of his mysterious act of implosive self-sacrifice in the generation of his pickles, his acts of omnivorous ingestion or “swallowing the world”, the choice of marginal pickles as central food offering, and Saleem’s insistence on the permeable nature of his cooking are not unrelated aspects; they are interconnected in how they speak back to a comprehensive way of looking at food and consumption in the culture. When seen as issuing from an “impure” cook, as connected to an act of self-sacrifice, as related to what Saleem has ingested or swallowed, and as an offering that is permeable or that “leaks”, the use of pickling as central metaphor reveals a fresh articulation of the ethical and transformative role of art in the postcolonial context.

Usually interpreted as a metaphor for an act of “archivization” or “writing of history” (Giles, 2007: 182; Gopal, 2009: 100), some critics have also noted how pickling is indicative of a coming together of “astringent differences” that is “performative of nation-building” (Plotz, 1996: 29). Not just read as a preservative act, pickling is also seen as a creative one. As David Birch notes, “Chutneys are attempts at preservation — illusions of past ingredients being held unchangingly to be brought out in a present — but what appears is a different reality; the process of pickling changes the reality of the ingredients; it doesn’t preserve them, it makes new commodities” (1991: 3). Additionally, Laurent Milesi points out how “‘cooking’ [or pickling] becomes a crucial textual-historical skill whose mastery enables the successful reprocessing of the past toward the creation of a more relishable future for the community” (2001: 182−183). This suggests that pickling is a dynamic and intentional act, which does not merely record the past but actively regenerates it to produce something new and improved.

As the above critics’ readings show, there are multiple dimensions to such pickling. What remains unaddressed is the mystery at the heart of the use of food in this text as the carrier of some hidden inner essence and meaning that provokes the following question: “And what exactly is the nature of ‘leaking’, the ‘seepages’, blends and combinations of cooking, so central to the novel? Mysteries to be tasted and tested” (Clingman, 2009: 102). If food is classically seen as at the nexus of all possible concerns — cosmological, social, emotional, metaphysical, physical, as rare example of a substance that can fall in the categories of both “the improbable and the mundane” (Rushdie, 2006/1981: 4), ¹ it becomes important to investigate Rushdie’s use of it as such.

In his essay “Is Nothing Sacred?” Rushdie asks:

Can the religious mentality survive outside of religious dogma and hierarchy? Which is to say: can art be the third principle that mediates between the material and spiritual worlds; might it, by “swallowing” both worlds, offer us something new — something that might even be called a secular definition of transcendence? (1991: 420)

It is apparent that Rushdie uses the idea of the pickle and the process of “chutnification” as the grounding metaphor for a dynamic and many-sided artistic process in Midnight’s Children, but there has been no accounting for the bridging role that food plays between sacred and profane within the culture, as an accepted vehicle for “transcendence” that can “swallow” both worlds, material and spiritual.

Jean Kane has shown how an incorporative Vedic embodiment — as seen in the use of the medico−moral discourse of Ayurveda, a spiritual approach to medicine and diet influenced by Vedanta philosophy — serves as a legitimate, culture-bound idiom of spiritual transcendence and source of regeneration within Midnight’s Children. Far from being hegemonically Brahminical in its application, she argues, it is the “porous and recapitulative capacity” of the Vedic corpus ² that allows the narrative to “disrupt a singular religious, regional or even subcontinental identity” (2014: 58, 41). I argue that a similar approach is also appropriate when it comes to the use of food as multifaceted metaphor, one that is not without context. Pickling echoes and overturns dominant understandings of the gustatory and culinary within South Asian culture — those aspects that are fundamentally connected to questions of classical mythmaking, aesthetic endeavour and achievement of transcendence. Variously and innovatively adapted, Rushdie’s pickling speaks back to Vedic constructions of food as a site of transformation and transcendence; it reorients those very capacities for contradiction, openness, and ambiguity within these discourses in order to carve out a cosmopolitan position that can embrace plurality without losing distinctiveness.

In a recent article, Vijay Mishra notes that from the very beginning of Rushdie’s career, his “interest in the sensual and the spiritual, the value of the corporeal and the affective is clearly evident” (2017: 6). In Midnight’s Children, Rushdie uses the pickle as the link that connects the sensual to the spiritual and the affective to the corporeal. However, the pickle constitutes such a link by resisting extant ideas of ritual purity and narrow religious doctrine as the sanctioned mediating crux necessary for negotiating these domains. In a modern recasting of food, Rushdie challenges “proper dietary laws” (62) based in religious doctrine as a source of transcendence, instead putting forward a modern “secular definition of transcendence” through an embracing of the “impure” and the profane.

It must be said that such usage of food in the text is not direct or overt. In an interview with M.R. Sanghvi, Rushdie draws attention to the presence of contradictory codes and “levels” of meaning in Midnight’s Children, and mentions that the performativity of the opposition between these “levels” is crucial for the novel, asking for the “levels” to be made visible (Rushdie, 1983/2001: 39−45). On the surface, the act of chutnification is secular and ordinary, with no apparent connection to the spiritually transformative or to ideas of transcendence. However, food as liminal substance has routinely been treated as conduit for transcendence in various Vedic speculative and aesthetic discourses. Through the hidden interplay between the less visible level of the Vedic approaches to food and the more obvious mundane iterations, Rushdie suggests that his written narrative in the form of pickles has concrete, sensory, oral, emotional, invasive, transcendent and transformative qualities. By playing off the impure secular level against the “pure” Vedic level within the context of consumption, Rushdie’s radical usage posits a mundane food offering of minor pickles as one that can muster its own kind of “magical”, transformative power compared to that of a religiously “pure” or exalted one.

Why is this Vedic level kept submerged as an underlying structure? By keeping it unseen, Rushdie decentres the Vedic, even as he finds a way to show commonality and critical engagement with classical Indian thought and literature. In his layered and suggestive application of food, Rushdie’s modern usage of a complex Sanskritized heritage simultaneously affirms a global cosmopolitan consciousness that emerges as an alternative to the dominantly Brahminical Sanskrit tradition as well the hegemonic western one.

Parama Roy draws attention to the fact that “Saleem inhabits a world governed by appropriately strict South-Asian rules of ingestion” (Roy, 2010: 155). That said, there is a silence around how Rushdie specifically reclaims and challenges hegemonic Brahminical food discourses which play a dominant role in the hierarchization of Indian society through ideas of dietary-based purity and elitism (Smith, 1990: 187, 198). If, according to Ayurvedic thought, through their pungent and spicy properties the pickles fall into the categories of Rajasik or Tamasik — those foods that are considered to inflame passions and cause defects (Gerson, 2002: 107), and the “Bhangi [untouchable]” (455) cook, as producer of such pickles, further adds to their abject quality through his supposed “contaminating” presence, what are the implications of making such impure food offerings the main body of text that is meant to be consumed?

In the following sections, I show how Rushdie’s engagement with the Brahminical tradition is deeper than has been usually assumed, and that there are multiple ways in which he “cooks” back. A modern “chutnification” is revealed to be a subversive play on Vedic conceptions of “cooking the world” through sacrifice (an aspect that I elaborate on later in this article); the emasculated, secular cook as heroic scribe is shown as a powerful counter to the “pure” Vedic male cook as legitimate scribe; the pickle as metaphor works as a literalized carrier of rasa or dominant emotional “flavour” that acts as an avenue for transcendence in the text; and the reader as “taster” of flavour is shown as intimately entangled in the process of consuming and recreating his work.

Vedic approaches to food and sacrifice

Charles Malamoud has emphasized how, elevated in all its forms in Vedic poetry and speculation, food (considered in terms of its ingredients, preparation, rules of exchange, and consumption) becomes saturated with complex social and religious symbolism. Regarded as the loftiest of life-sustaining solid matter, food is the “highest” form of spiritual offering that one can make (Kane, 1941: 755). As a foundational element of creation and source of immortality, food plays an important role in linking together all living entities in a “chain of consumption”, with each such entity serving as “regenerative substance” for the next (Smith, 1990: 180).

Specifically, the act of cooking is fundamentally connected to ideas of cyclical birth and, most importantly, sacrifice. In Vedic thought, sacrifice (yajña) is the ultimate activity, regenerative process and moral structuring principle that is tied to ideas of ingestion, cooking and redistribution of food (Patton, 2005: 91). In this construction, it is commonly understood that when one cooks, one cooks the world (Malamoud 1996), and when one eats, one eats (or swallows) the world. Moreover, Malamoud (1996) argues that every sacrificial process is also a kind of cooking (pakti), and that Vedic thought applies the metaphor of cooking/sacrificing to all kinds of transformative processes.

The ability to sacrifice is considered to be a distinctive feature of humanity, and every sacrificial performance re-enacts the myth of the primordial sacrifice of Purusa, the cosmic man, whose violent self-sacrifice resulted in the on-going reproduction of the world (Heesterman, 1993: 5, 29). Of all humans, Brahmin males are not only the archetypical sacrificers but also the “master” cooks. They cook for others, and like Purusa they are “cooking the world” (lokapakti) through their sacrifices, and also getting “reborn” through their sacrifices, allowing themselves to be transformed by them, while lending themselves divine or immortal status through their actions. These offerings to the gods (as well as the sacrificer himself) are then redirected back to humans, transformed and relayed through nature’s “circuitous channels” to provide nutritive value (Smith, 1990: 181).

Food is, therefore, seldom looked at in isolation, but as in dynamic concert with the preparer, the eater, the nature of the food prepared, and the larger environment. In particular, the male Brahmin cook’s ³ discernment regarding his ingestion or “swallowing the world”, choice in method of preparation, the kind of food that he selects as offering for the sake of mass consumption, possesses immense moral and material significance. Attention to all of these features is considered critical for the renewal of past and recreation of future community, critical also for the achievement of spiritual “transcendence” (Heesterman, 1993: 1). Within such a larger framework, Saleem’s pickling as an offering and an act of self-sacrifice takes on deeper meaning.

Vedic approaches to food and aesthetics

As chief accompaniment to sacrificial cooking, speech, discourse and the poetic become inextricably intertwined with the realm of food. The sacrificial rituals of cooking are fuelled by the power of spoken verses, spells and mantras (utterances) that are used to unlock the potential within such acts for precipitating transformation. In fact, the construction of eloquence in knowledge in the Vedic period begins in the context of the production of food in sacrifice and the precise use of mantras and verses become apparatus available for cooking and consumption by a master chef (Patton, 2005: 8, 116). The poet’s identity as gifted is considered dependent on his ability to describe the mysteries within the sacrifice, and therefore the cosmos, more expertly than any other (Patton, 2005: 116).

There exists a clearly acknowledged traffic between the culinary and the creative within the cultural context, wherein the act of cooking and the act of creation become interchangeable metaphors. This also becomes evident in the realm of Vedic aesthetics, wherein it is the gastronomic metaphor that is used to explain the multiple dynamics of the aesthetic experience, since the process of aesthetic creation is considered correspondent to classical Indian thinking on the consumption and creation of food. The realm of Sanskrit aesthetics called rasa draws on the Natyashastra (200 BCE–200 CE), ⁴ also called the fifth Veda, with natya (or drama), as Chaitanya points out, becoming the model of understanding and critiquing “all art” in the Indian context (1965: 2). In Sanskrit aesthetics, the idea of evoking emotion as a primary “flavour” or rasa is considered to be the prominent goal in artistic endeavour. Connected to the verb ras — meaning to taste or to savour; to feel, be sensible of — the noun rasa, as Simona Sawhney writes, “means both the juice of a fruit, and the best or finest part of an object, its essence or marrow” (2009: 178). Rasa then is the inner poetic essence of the artistic piece that becomes available through the activation of sentiment.

Just as the rasa of food is an essence extricated from cooking the raw material of the ingested food by the force of the digestive mechanisms, the rasa of aesthetics is a distilled emotion born of the transformation of the gross and mundane experience by a multi-staged extractive and concentrative artistic deliberation. The rasa or chief emotional flavour of the artistic work is, therefore, considered to be the inner essence of poetic expression, and this serves as the aesthetic revelatory conduit to the audience. Rasa theory approaches aesthetic experience as an act of gustatory relishing that is based on a permeable logic of consumption. It is sensuous and experiential, wherein rasa intimately connects the outside to the inside. Food is taken into the body, becomes part of the body, and works to transform one from the inside through such absorption. An aesthetic founded in rasa is, therefore, essentially different than one based on the “theatron”, the rationally ordered, analytically removed panoptic (Schechner, 2001: 13).

According to rasa theory, art is mainly seen as the vehicle of spiritual transcendence; kaavya (poetry or literature) is supposed to be concerned with both the transcendent and the mundane at once (Sawhney, 2009: 178). As Sawhney points out:

[T]hat a theory of aesthetic pleasure that started its career by foregrounding the sensual apprehension of the world — linking itself to the cultivated satisfaction of the tongue — should become in time the means of emphasizing the more spiritual and emotional aspects of poetry is not without irony, yet this has precisely been the itinerary of rasa. (2009: 178)

This then shows how within such aesthetics, the sensual, the affective and the spiritual can operate as expressions of each other. Importantly, the idea of sacrifice additionally carries over into this realm of artistic expression. Artistic labour is also considered to be a model for sacrifice, and the poetic experience has an essentially sacrificial foundational element marked by an “implicit dharmic ⁵ worldview” that reifies this kind of sacrifice as a cosmic process (Goodwin, 1998: xiv). Briefly put, art is the aesthetic representation of the sacrificial ritual towards regeneration of the human spirit.

The rasika or reader, through the apprehension of rasa, partakes in aesthetic relishing, a “tasting” which is considered akin to the experiencing of spiritual ecstasy. Classical theorist Abhinavagupta (10th century) argues that rasa represents a “state of enjoyment or ultimate bliss” and that the experience is similar to the moksha or release of the body from the material plane and the extinguishing of the self into the ultimate reality. It is in this idea of transcendence through unification with an expansive sense of self that we find the regenerative possibilities of rasa to liberate the audience, thereby showing radical transformative applications — both political and social.

There are innovative and blended ways in which Rushdie repurposes some of these understandings of the role of food as sacrificial offering and food as conduit for transcendence and transformation. He takes those very ideas of fluid corporeality on which a unified Hindu identity is built through strategies of containment, and reinscribes them as the source of empowering creativity and generation. Moving away from the culturally determined conventions of classical Sanskrit literature and drama, he also flexibly adapts the rasa aesthetic for social and political messaging within the Anglophone context.

Fluid corporeality

The pervasive understanding of food as not just inert and opaque commodity, but as an absorptive and dynamic substance is an important aspect that Rushdie utilizes. As commonly understood, food is a “magical” substance that can physically, emotionally and spiritually infect others, taking on and transforming the innermost qualities of the preparer and consumer through touch, bodily exchange, intention and emotional charge. This is why when Saleem states that his aunt Alia poisoned his family by serving food infused with her bitterness (395), his claim can be read as a “magical” representation of an abstract emotion that is shown to be physically infectious and communicable.

As a porous substance, food becomes the “prime” carrier of impurity at all levels: physical, moral and emotional. Malamoud, in fact, reveals how

[there is] extreme circumspection with which India regards all that concerns food:

[…] Food is the prime vehicle of pollution, and there is no time when one is more vulnerable to assaults of impurity than when eating. To put the matter more precisely, it is in the food we eat that the opposition between pure and impure emerges most clearly, and consequently, also in food that the hierarchical distinctions based upon this opposition are most highly concentrated. (1996: 7)

Underlying these anxieties surrounding permeability is the construction of the self as fluid, dynamic, interconnected and pervious. In such a worldview, the observed world is a “flowing together” or a “malleable substance”, with the environment “constantly moving in and out” of the persons it also constitutes (Marriott, 1990: 8). Saleem, for instance, absorbs and transmits the world primarily as voices, flavours, smells and fluids; as he claims, “Things — even people — have a way of leaking into each other […] Like flavours when you cook” (37).

This idea of permeability, then, is a source of deep anxiety, asking for a preservation of embodied “wholeness” constantly under threat, an anxiety that Saleem himself articulates:

Because a human being, inside himself, is anything but a whole, anything but homogenous; all kinds of everywhichthing are jumbled up inside him, and he is one person one minute and another the next. The body, on the other hand, is homogenous as anything. Indivisible, a one-piece suit, a sacred temple, if you will. It is important to preserve this wholeness […] uncork the body, and God knows what you permit to come tumbling out. (270−271)

Injunctions on diet and social codes on purity become ways to “preserve this wholeness” in which one is wary of “uncorking” a complex chain of consequences, both personal and cosmic, through indiscriminate consumption or seepage, since quite literally “what you eat becomes who you are” (Khare, 1992: 11).

It is primarily through this focus on the “osmotic” (483) exchange between the inner and outer, eater and environment, that through private food acts the microcosm gets directly implicated in the macrocosm (Khare, 1992: 28), best reflecting what Saleem refers to as “the ‘mode’ of the ‘active-metaphorical’ […] those occasions on which things done by or to me were mirrored in the macrocosm of public affairs, and my private existence was shown to be symbolically at one with history” (273). When Saleem informs the reader that “to understand just one life, you have to swallow the world” (121), he is highlighting this intertwined relationship between the porous individual and his absorptive world. By serving up what he has ingested for consumption, also becoming the tale by leaking himself into his pickles, he allows himself to be understood in his particular entanglement with the world. Thus it is through the offering of his “leaking” pickles into which Saleem “pours” himself that he remains “inextricably entwined” (273) to the past, present and future.

Cook as “master”

How can Rushdie equate the act of writing the grand story of the new nation with the creation of mere condiments by an ordinary cook? Saleem is the first to pre-empt this question:

I, Saleem Sinai, possessor of the most delicately-gifted organ in history, have dedicated my latter days to the large-scale preparation of condiments. “But now, a cook?” you gasp in horror, “a khansama merely? How is it possible?” And, I grant, such mastery of the multiple gifts of cookery and language is rare indeed; yet I possess it. You are amazed; but then I am not, you see, one of your 200-rupees-a-month cookery Johnnies, but my own master. (37)

Saleem can be regarded as both a Muslim “khansama” and Anglo-Indian “cookery Johnny” due to his Muslim upbringing and Anglo-Indian origins, but he rejects these appellations of colonial servitude and ordinary professionalization through the assumption of the role of the cook as his own “master”. This assumption of a different kind of agency sets him apart, linking him to an ancient pre-colonial heritage wherein an elevated sense of “mastery” and cooking were often seen in conjunction with each other and in conjunction with the sacred.

Saleem is no stranger to this Vedic “world of ancient learning and sorcerer’s lore” (222), especially in relation to his knowledge of food as magical potion. As part of “the wild profusion of his inheritance” (136), Saleem admits to learning Vedic magical spells surrounding ingestible potions from Parvati the Witch: “It was as though the Brahmin’s ‘secret book’, the Atharva-Veda, had revealed all its secrets to her […] All this, in a series of extraordinary night-time displays, she revealed to me” (461−462). ⁶ It would therefore be strange for Saleem not to know that the cook as his own “master” in Vedic terms suggests male Brahmins who are considered to be the valid cooks in Hindu society (Dumont, 1981/1966: 186). The Brahmin cook, however, is a problematic hero in the postcolonial context:

The condition of personal purity (suci) was concerned with the “competence” (adhikara) of a master to act with respect to his domain […] Thus women and Sudras were, in Brahmanism, impure in relation to the Vedic sacrifice because they did not possess the competence to perform it. (Inden, 1985: 34)

“Mastery” and competence are key terms that define this cook wherein otherness is deployed in terms of fixed ideas of impurity, which term is constructed as a mark of incompetence. It is through his assumption of ritual purity that the Brahmin male cook acquires a heroic status in the culture: as chief officiator at ceremonial rites, as exclusive transmitter and compiler of the Vedas (secret knowledge), as well as by definition a “man of sacrifice” and magic (Malamoud, 1996: 27−28).

Cooking as a sacrificial rite performed by Brahmin cooks is considered to carry profound magical powers. These culinary practices were magic in the sense that if the correct ritual techniques and formulas were used, the supernatural powers, or the forces of nature, could be tamed and harnessed by the practitioner. This kind of control over nature and culture through cooking also required an application of both word and sound during the sacrificial act in order to create meaning in the culture, a discursive and poetic mastery that went hand in hand with a gastronomic one.

According to the Vedas, the world order is fundamentally grounded in the act of cooking as sacrifice, which is why cooking is regarded as an activity par excellence. If the idea of sacrifice is synonymous with the act of cooking and is central to Brahminic thought, then what does it mean to sacrifice in this context?

It is the re-enactment of the primal sacrifice of the Purusa [a primal being associated with creation in the Hindu Brahmanas] who, by means of the creative oblation which he made from himself, set in place both the model of, the necessary conditions for, the accomplishments of the sacrifices offered by humans. (Malamoud, 1996: 31)

The one myth of origin from the Vedas that remains buried in the novel is that of Purusa, or original cosmic being, and his violent self-sacrifice and dispersal for the sake of ongoing regeneration through the production of food.

This mythic idea of origins in the Vedas is maintained by the conception of ongoing ritual sacrifice through cooking as performed by a priestly class or a chain of “pure” male cooks, “eventually translated into terms of cosmological significance by a process identifying microcosmic with macrocosmic elements” (Embree, 1988: 18). For Brahmin cook–priests, the entire sacrificial strategy follows from the domestication of this notion of violent mythic sacrifice through the use of cooking as closed ritual. This includes metaphorically making an offering that really counts — that of one’s own person — and then taking that body back again after having produced a substitute for it through the creation of food as sacrifice (Malamoud, 1996: 45). By partaking in such sacrifice, others bear the responsibility of reciprocity and further continuation of sacrifice (Heesterman, 1993: 38−39).

There are multiple ways in which Saleem as “master” cook echoes yet overturns the role of the Vedic “sorcerer” cook–sacrificer. Given his own “grand” ambitions regarding storytelling, historicizing and mythmaking, all of which he connects to “pickling”, Saleem assumes that he is a “master” cook with magical powers. Through a triggering of “teeming” regeneration based in the culinary, poetic and gustatory, born out of concentrated effort and a labour of sacrificial love, as he calls his acts of pickling, Saleem’s aspirations echo (yet subvert) the Vedic model of regeneration through sacrifice.

Saleem declares that he is a “rare” kind of powerful cook: “And, I grant, such mastery of the multiple gifts of cookery and language is rare indeed; yet I possess it” (37). Saleem’s appropriation of magical powers such as those of “transmutation, flight, prophecy and wizardry” (229) is similarly grandiose to what the Vedic cook as “man of magic” claimed to possess. He refers to his pickles as related to the casting of spells such as “Abracadabra” (525); his pickling always accompanies “words” (531) and as a cook he has mastery over “language” and cooking. In fact, Saleem mysteriously mentions the chutney in conjunction with oratory: “Chutney and oratory, theology and curiosity: these are the things that saved me” (243).

Saleem’s eventual self-sacrifice in the process of pickling becomes an example of the ability to ethically penetrate the existence of a wider community through acts of “cooking the world” through sacrifice. Like the Vedic cook–priest, he too is plagued with “the notions of purpose, and meaning” (174), an aspect that becomes primarily connected to his pickling: “I reconcile myself to the inevitable distortions of the pickling process […] The art is to change the flavor in degree, but not in kind; and above all […] to give shape and form — that is to say, meaning […] believe don’t believe but it’s true” (530–531). Saleem is fully aware of the sacrificial nature of his role, insisting that as “a swallower of lives” (4) he is ultimately expecting to “eventually crumble into (approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous dust” (37). In tandem, his pickles contain regenerative capacities:

all the six hundred million eggs which give birth to the population of India could fit inside a single, standard-sized pickle-jar; six hundred million spermatozoa could be lifted on a single spoon. Every pickle jar (you will forgive me if I become florid for a moment) contains therefore the possibility of the chutnification of history. (364−365)

As this suggests, the pickle contains the potential for life and is a fertile medium.

Cooking as a rite is considered to be primarily a “displacement of substances and energies”, an exhausting activity of substitution and inner processing that results in “painful overheating (tapas)” (Malamoud, 1996: 32−33). Saleem’s ongoing cracks and fissures can be also read as a form of disintegration implicit in this kind of concentrated creative effort and toil, one in which he transforms himself or what he has swallowed into his own sacrificial oblation, getting pickled in the internalized fire of digestion, or, as he claims, getting “emptied, dessicated, pickled” (531) from within so he can pour himself into his offering.

Sacrificial cooking as a creative act is primarily regarded as an act of repetition and revision with the first act of Purusa’s self-sacrifice working as an original template for the priestly class to continue modifying (Malamoud, 1996). Saleem, for instance, is aware that he is not an isolated actor in the realm of such pickling: “perhaps the story you finish is not the one you begin” (491). The last empty jar that Saleem keeps aside indicates the ongoing nature of this work: “the future cannot be preserved in a jar; one jar must remain empty” (532), because, as Saleem says, “new myths are needed; but that’s none of my business” (527). For Saleem, the contents of this final jar must remain open to “revision” that is “constant and endless” (530), an idea that is also contained within Vedic sacrifice as a repetitious act of reconstitution. ⁷

Most importantly, cooking is mainly connected to the achievement of immortalization through the transcendence of the physical self in Vedic ritualistic terms (Heesterman, 1993: 5−6). In Saleem’s language, “to pickle is to give immortality” (530); Saleem’s ambition is no less “exalted” than the Brahmin cook seeking to transcend the physical through mastery of ritual and domestication of fire, even if his own secular attempt admits to “distortions”: “Every pickle-jar […] contains […] the most exalted of possibilities: the feasibility of the chutnification of history; the grand hope of the pickling of time […] in words and pickles, I have immortalized my memories, although distortions are inevitable in both methods” (529).

Apart from establishing ironic comparisons with other great Brahmin storytellers (and experts on Vedic sacrificial rites) like the sage Vyasa who narrated the epic Mahabharata, the adoption of the role of “master-cook” by the narrator becomes yet another way in which Rushdie shows Saleem’s substantive embeddedness in a particular collective and its mythmaking. Through this hidden analogy of the “cook as own master” and the idea of pickle as regenerative offering based in self-sacrifice, the midnight moment of postcolonial India’s birth takes on the significance of a primal scene — a scene of terrible innocence and ambivalence, as was implicit in the Vedic mythical story of creation itself. This echoes a common question that is at the forefront of such sacrifice, one that Rushdie often echoes in his own novels, as, for example, in The Satanic Verses’ narrator’s famous question: “How does newness enter the world?” (Rushdie, 1988: 8).

The Vedic cook–priests struggled with the paradoxical nature of sacrifice which on the one hand was defined by a longing for hermetic form, for consistency and closure, yet on the other was dependent on the invocation of multiplicity, open-endedness and fragmentation through violent transformation. Saleem recognizes how sacrificial violence and fragmentation are paradoxically part of the processes of creation in the context of the birth of the nation as well: “a new myth to celebrate, because a nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom […] and would periodically need the sanctification and renewal which can only be provided by rituals of blood” (125). He is aware of such tensions within his own culinary efforts of pickling as sacrifice, wherein the production of his regenerative pickles is dependent on his experience of fragmentation.

Chutnification: a postcolonial recasting of “cooking the world”

As we saw in the above section, there are multiple echoes of the Vedic in Saleem’s appropriation of master-cook status, but there are also fundamental differences, chief among them being his embracing of impurity and imperfection. Through such an embrace, chutnification is revealed to be a distinctly postcolonial recasting of the myth of creation or act of producing “newness”, one that resists the “closed and unalterable system” of rules governing acts and utterances that approach sacrificial ritual as a motor for regeneration (Heesterman, 1993: 1). If cooking is an elevated concept applied to the idea of sacrifice in that “it replicates the divine world, is set apart and made extraordinary or special (which is, after all, one definition of the sacred) by actions that [are] ‘godlike’, ‘perfect’, and ‘successful’” (Smith, 1996: 289), Rushdie’s answer is to replace it with the mundane and ordinary process of chutnification — as a very human and uncertain endeavour.

In a direct challenge to “how newness enters the world” as invoked through precise, pure, sacred sacrifices and formulas which sanitize the fact of heterogeneity, impurity and fragmentation integral to the process of creation, Rushdie foregrounds the act of creation as “Melange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world” (Rushdie, 1991: 394), foreshadowing his own answer to the question he would later pose in The Satanic Verses: “How does newness enter the world? How does it get born? (1988: 8). He also declares that novels are “the most freakish, hybrid, and metamorphic of forms” (1991: 425). As a “grotesque creature” (515), a freakish, hybrid being, or profane cook, Saleem is a willing and inescapable source of imperfection, impurity and ambivalence, unlike Brahmin cooks looking for protection against these sources of contamination. By all standards he is undeniably “impure”: born out of an illegitimate and difficult-to-trace union, of mixed race and abject class, with impulses towards incest, emasculated through his castration, seen to use mixed languages and aesthetic traditions, and also omnivorous, he cannot aspire towards centrality, authority, precision and formal mastery. He thereby fits the description of the “profane” cook who produces acts of sacrifice through cooking which are prone to failure, ambiguity, and meanings that shift even as they are being performed (Malamoud, 1996: 50). As he confesses, his pickling comes with “shadows of imperfection” (529) and with “inevitable distortions” (529), and can never qualify as “infallible” or perfect as “pure” sacrificial rites were assumed to be (Malamoud, 1996: 81).

In its uncontrolled and open capacity, without any taboos or dietary rules applied to it, pickling helps embody a multitudinous and diverse world. The force of overflow or excess, the transgression of boundaries that underlines such enterprise, however, also becomes that flaw which dooms Saleem to premature disintegration, since “unscrupulous” ingestion and imperfect sacrifice were understood to shorten life, according to such belief (Khare, 1992: 7). Midnight’s Children departs from Vedic ritualistic philosophy by not allowing the permeable embodied subject any immunity from the risks of permeability and contamination. Through such an adoption of risky chutnification and imperfect sacrifice, Rushdie depicts the fostering of pluralism and hybridity as possessing creative, ethical and political value, though one that comes at a price. Through his embrace of the ambivalent and contradictory, the human and abject as generative components, he alternately shows how elitism, exclusivity and self-preservation are sterile virtues.

Neil ten Kortenaar asserts that Midnight’s Children is “a story that has seemed to himself [Saleem] and perhaps to his readers as large as the world” (Kortenaar, 2002: 765). Saleem not only exhibits a transnational, pluralistic inclusiveness in the way he “swallows” and then pickles the world, but he also resists claiming any singular authority on meaning and discourse even while showing a specifically individual agency and achievement. It is through his role of such a “rare” cook and maker of multitudinous pickles that Saleem transcends a “national longing for form” (344) demonstrating his — and the novel’s — cosmopolitan consciousness.

Invoking the witch as opposed to the sorcerer–cook

It has been said that Saleem is mainly interested in the “obsessive proliferation of alternative origins through metaphorical fathers intended to structure and make sense of the events of his life” (Mijares, 2003: 133). According to Charu Verma (1991), for instance, Rushdie’s portrayal of women in Midnight’s Children is misogynistic and marginal. Largely represented as “monstrous wives, witches and widows”, women in the novel are shown to stand out in their capacities for transgression and ambivalence (Weickgenannt, 2008: 72). However, as I argue, women in Midnight’s Children are the ones who function as personifications of Saleem’s identity as a postcolonial writer/cook, often possessing “a distinct oppositional creativity” (Hai, 2009: 17). It is through those very attributions of illegitimacy, marginality and ambivalence that are also assigned to Saleem as abject and grotesque cook that women acquire an oppositional and subversive quality; their falling short of idealized notions of purity and respectability are in keeping with the recasting of creativity as issuing from something more complex.

Nicole Weickgenannt points out that witches in Midnight’s Children function as a major leitmotif that underscores the ominous aura of women in the novel. Almost all the female characters are associated with the witch leitmotif, with only a few exceptions such as Amina and Padma (2008: 77−78). Why this odd evocation of witches and witchcraft? The witches become the opposing figure to that of the sorcerer–cook. Rushdie establishes an alternate feminine lineage of, what he calls, “culinary witchcraft” (380), both in Saleem’s choice of marginal female cook mentors who complicatedly resist patriarchy and also in his choice of marginal pickles (usually associated as a female-centric food preparation) as main offering. ⁸ In this way he undermines a masculine enclosure of knowledge and transmission, challenging a predominant understanding of the linguistic, narrative, sacrificial, magical, culinary and creative act as decidedly male.

Saleem confesses that it is women who have made the narrative possible, but from their very position of peripherality:

(Women have always been the ones to change my life: Mary Pereira, Evie Burns, Jamila Singer, Parvati-the-witch must answer for who I am; and the Widow, who I’m keeping for the end; and after the end, Padma, my goddess of dung. Women have fixed me all right, but perhaps they were never central […]). (220)

As a cook, it is not from the men that Saleem picks up any culinary knowledge. Rather, he absorbs the subversive and “magical” power of food from the women in his life, women who are from across religions, classes, and castes. Unlikely and unassuming muses such as Mary the Catholic housemaid from Goa, Padma the unlettered pickle-woman named after the Dung-Goddess, and Parvati the slum “witch” are the ones who provide the conditions, inspiration, audience and secrets for Saleem’s “pickles” to reach their potential for dispersal. Additionally, it is Reverend Mother’s “curries and meatballs of intransigence” (158), Amina’s “hot lime chutney which never failed to bring tears to the eyes” (200), Alia’s “birianis of dissention and the nargisi koftas of discord” (378) that show him the power of emotion as infectious flavour that can travel through cooking as medium.

In particular, Saleem chooses to follow the lead of those female cooks, who are successful through their radical acts of love that find reflection in their realm of everyday work, as mainly reflected in the example of Mary’s acts of sublime pickling. Saleem’s uncle Hanif, who obsesses about making a serious movie on the pickle factory and its workers, is somebody who picks up on yet another important aspect about such pickling:

Hanif Aziz, the only realistic writer working in the Bombay film industry, was writing the story of a pickle factory created, run and worked in entirely by women. There were long scenes describing the formation of a trade union; there were detailed descriptions of the pickling process […] And Pia, “What do you think, village people are going to give their rupees to see women pickling Alphonsos?” (279−280)

To which, Hanif replies: “this is a film about work, not kissing” (280). Mary’s pickles are at best examples of public work and collaborative enterprise, not restricted to hidden expressions of domestic labour and private caregiving.

Such pickling follows its own kind of expertise, and not one that is grounded in formal or text-based sources. As Saleem notes: “Look into the eyes of a cooking ayah, and you will see more than textbooks ever know” (235). This is a conception of work with a difference, though it cleverly incorporates classical ideas about the aesthetic endeavour through a focus on the power of emotions: “‘I told them nobody makes achar-chutney like our Mary’, Alice had said, with perfect accuracy, ‘because she puts her feelings inside them’” (528). This is what sets apart Mary’s pickles from the rest and makes them “Braganza Pickle; best in Bombay, everyone knows” (525). Mary as the “Catholic ayah” (256) assumes her namesake’s qualities that find expression mainly in her pickling. The pickle becomes the primary conduit for her feelings of unspoken love and compassion, a factor that holds tremendous power over Saleem’s memory and his actions across time and circumstances, providing a vital and sensual thread for him to follow and replicate. For him, “chutney [is] more than just an echo of that long-ago taste — it [is] the old taste itself, the very same, with the power of bringing back the past as if it had never been away” (525).

Unlike those women who are “obsessed with purity”, such as Jamila Sinai, Indira as India, and Naseem, it is Mary, Parvati and Padma, those who learn to unconditionally work for the dispossessed and the illegitimate, who are most closely associated with the art of pickling as a site for expressing love and self-sufficiency. In a story of surprising reversals, Mary exclaims on seeing a destitute Saleem who has come back to her through her pickles:

“And baba, what do you think. How could I believe the whole world would want to eat my poor pickles, even in England they eat. And now, just think, I sit here where your dear house used to be, while God-knows what-all happened to you, living like a beggar so long, what a world, baapu-re!” (528)

This is the figure of the “cook as master” that Rushdie instals as bearer of the creative legacy, as opposed to the male Anglo-Indian “200-rupee cookery Johnnies”, or the male steward figure of the Muslim khansama, or the sorcerer Vedic male Brahmin cook. As the unassuming maker of the best pickles in Bombay by dint of her hard work and her talent for embodying powerful emotion, it is as Mary sings: “Anything you want to be, you kin be; you kin be just what-all you want” (144). ⁹ Stuti Khanna writes that in Midnight’s Children “[p]aternity, lineage, purity of blood and religion become secondary to affective bonds forged in community settings” (Khanna, 2009: 406). As a member of the otherwise wholly feminine Pickle Collective, Rushdie paints Saleem as a feminized cook: as castrated, as feminine in his choice of pickling as medium of sacrifice, and lastly as being a cook “that is no longer obsessed with purity” (531) — for purity is often regarded in Vedic discourse as a male virtue.

An unreliable pickler, like Mary herself, Saleem’s pickles are also filled with emotions of “guilt, fear and shame” (164). Saleem fully admits to the unstable effect of his pickles, but also reminds us about one key transformative flavour in them:

One day, perhaps, the world may taste the pickles of history. They may be too strong for some palates, their smell may be overpowering, tears may rise to eyes; I hope nevertheless that it will be possible to say of them that they possess the authentic taste of truth […] that they are, despite everything, acts of love. (531)

The female picklers mark a sharp paradigm shift in the way alternative creativity and egalitarian, non-hierarchical community is suggested through such chutnification. In contrast to showing aggressive attitudes to establishing power over the environment and supremacy over others as seen in Vedic ideas of sacrifice (Smith, 1990), such pickling highlights the redemptive, unifying, and transformative powers of food and sacrifice, aspects that constitute an equally important part of these food discourses. As R.S. Khare mentions, even though food expresses power and hierarchy within these discourses, there are also other powerful ways of conceiving food wherein “food flouts normal social rules by valuing love over hierarchy, informality over formality, and feeling over reason and rules” (1992: 12).

Towards an embodied, emotion-based poetics

As a “central” food offering, the choice of a side condiment or pickle ¹⁰ is unsuitable for many reasons. Not a ritually “pure” food, but a minor, passion-inducing condiment with diverse influences and global reach, Saleem himself draws attention to the “myriad” or unstable and “dirty” quality of his pickles. These condiments are further considered impure due to their handling by an impure or “untouchable” cook:

[T]here is also the matter of the spice bases. The intricacies of turmeric and cumin, subtlety of fenugreek, when to use large (and when small) cardamoms; the myriad possible effects of garlic, garam masala, stick cinnamon […] not to mention the flavorful contributions of the occasional speck of dirt. (Saleem is no longer obsessed with purity.) (531)

The pickle’s impurity is balanced out by the fact that, as Saleem says, it is a concrete expression of an act of love. This rendering of love as also procured through active self-conscious labour and sacrifice carries its own truth, “the authentic taste of truth” (531; emphasis added) as Saleem says; a kind of truth that is not objective or factual, but one whose message, for instance, somebody like Saleem cannot viscerally deny when he responds to the taste of Mary’s pickle.

Encoded within such chutnification, then, is an innovative and adapted understanding of rasa or dominant emotional flavour and sensual perception of meaning, an expansive and dynamic application in which the hidden inner essence of the pickle or Saleem’s art is made palpable through a kind of tasting. Sawhney elaborates that in indigenous poetic traditions such as that of rasa, it is the role of art to join in the work of creating community by rendering abstract categories sensible or palpable:

Poetry must be given the task of making us sensible to inner beauty, the task of creating and sustaining a real interiority that at once depends upon and negates the external, visible, or sensible realm to which it remains bound. If creating an equitable and moral community becomes part of the project of metaphysics, it must be perceived as that which itself has a hidden, invisible, powerful interiority — a soul or essence. In this way, poetry is the harvest of a high-intentioned, generous and selfless heart. The true poet is the one who causes beauty to flow in the heart of the human being. In his gaze, the king and the pauper are all equal. (2009: 70−71)

As a vehicle of this hidden essence or the rasa/flavour of an ideal love, pickles thereby produce a shift in consciousness. Via the ingestion and apprehension of such love as dominant flavour, the pickles inspire feelings for a new kind of cosmopolitan identity. It is through the recognition and relishing of such “truth” that the novel becomes a crucial realm of postcolonial self-realization wherein the sense of inferiority and abjection is transcended and overcome.

In Indian aesthetics, without a good receiver, art sees no reasonable purpose. It is for these reasons that Schechner claims that “partakers” (2001: 31) is a more accurate term than “spectators” or readers for such art. The reader as “taster” of pickles is not passive but intimately and dialectically implicated in such a porous process, which critics such as Ursula Kluwick have identified as a “reading back” (Kluwick, 2011: 175). More specifically, this partaking involves having an affective capacity to be permeated or suffused on the part of the empathetic reader. This kind of transformation through permeability, even though originating in the sensory, is ultimately seen as of a spiritual nature: what lies at the core of aesthetic appreciation or absorption and savouring, as developed in the Indian theory of rasa, is the principle of advaita, which refers to the non-duality of all things; the aesthetic experience “is viewed as that state of joy where differentiations cease […] All duality of subject and object is lost, distinctions of physical time and space are eschewed, the finite and infinite merge” (Vatsyayan, 1998: 167–168). Thus literature in the rasa tradition allows us to see deeply into the nature of things in a way that transcends the egotism of everyday emotions.

As a postcolonial model for creative action, chutnification emerges as far from a passive, one-sided, objective recording of the past. Instead, it is revealed as an ongoing, dynamic adaptation and act of co-creation; an infectious, fluid, palpable act of collective “imagining” that contains multiple dimensions: of sacrifice and risk, of reciprocity and dialectical exchange, and as having capacity for regeneration and transformation.

Conclusion

By uncovering the density behind the usage of food as cultural discourse, one can arrive at a more holistic understanding of how it works as multifaceted metaphor within literary texts. Through a hidden interplay between mundane and spiritual understandings of consumption that are embedded within indigenous food cultures, the novel is shown to be a revelatory textual pickle containing radical liberatory potential. Presented as a profane sacrificial food offering meant to be incorporated and ingested as a kind of mobile magic, carrying with it the dominant sentiment or flavour of radical love, the pickle stands in contrast to examples of disembodied, cerebral, “rational” masculinity. It is what Saleem as impure, secular scribe cooks up as a substitute for his own miraculous life — his highest yet imperfect sacrificial contribution that will in turn endlessly impact him and the world around him through multiple interlinked acts of interpretation and permeation, transcendence and transformation. Rushdie confirms: “But the story is told in a manner designed to echo, as self-regeneration. This is why the narrative constantly throws up new stories, why it “teems”. The form — multitudinous, hinting at the infinite possibilities of the country — is the optimistic counterweight to Saleem’s personal tragedy” (16).

Timothy Brennan argues that in Midnight’s Children, “We get protest, but not affirmation except in the most abstractly human sense” (1989: 166). However, Saleem has “cooked” or “chutnified” the world in his fecund pickles, and the result is both abstract and concrete. By embodying a multitudinous world and by infusing it with the permeable flavour of radical love, chutnification keeps in motion an ongoing process of regeneration and renewal that draws strength from aspects such as porosity, open-endedness, and multiplicity. In this way food becomes a central artistic device through which Rushdie breaks out of the confinements of authoritative, metropolitan, linear, monologic western historicizing, as well as purity-obsessed, androcentric, supremacist Brahminical mythmaking.