Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry on food as a character in plays and flavours of storytelling

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. — Virginia Woolf

Taste and smell are linked to memory, storytelling and culture. So, it’s inevitable that theatre companies and individual artistes explore the relationship between food and art in myriad ways. Food imagery has been used countless times in art. Food as food, food as metaphor, food as image, food as empowerment, food as expression, food as sustainability and food as an artistic medium.

Some of the plays that have impacted me involve taste, smell, touch. These productions have engaged the audience in multi-sensory ways. I read about a play where an actor fries pork chops on an induction cooker, while another makes popcorns that blast into the air. Through the smoky kitchen, with popcorns flying in the air, the actors talk about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I cannot recall the name of the play, but just reading a review gave me goosebumps. The image continues to haunt.

The images of food in films, theatre and in the visual arts do not function as fictional characters, but are sometimes drivers of the narrative. I remember a scene in Deepa Mehta’s film ‘Fire’, where actors Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das breathe together the fragrance and flavour of cardamom as an expression of their attraction towards each other. This simple exchange was loaded with meaning that exploded on the screen with an unbridled intensity.

‘Song of Solomon’, one of the five wisdom books in the ‘Old Testament’, doesn’t teach wisdom in the traditional sense. It teaches erotic love and intimacy. The literal interpretation of ‘Song of Solomon’ is that a man and woman are expressing their love for one another through images of fruits. Although several fruits are referred to, pomegranates are mentioned several times:

Your lips are like a scarlet ribbon; your mouth is lovely. Your temples behind your veil are like the halves of a pomegranate. (NIV, ‘Song of Solomon’ 4:3)

In Shakespeare’s plays, food is frequently used as a metaphor. Falstaff’s sarcastic description of cowards as “toasts-and-butter” in ‘Henry IV’ and Helena from ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ using the image of a “double cherry” to describe her intimacy with Hermia are two examples.

Food brings to mind the theatre of Ariane Mnouchkine, the artistic director of Theatre du Soleil in Paris. Dressed in baggy pants with tousled hair, she welcomed each member of the audience with bread and soup before the show. Breaking bread with strangers dissolved the lines of segregation in one stroke. The reservations that we carried within us about being young or too old, rich or poor, black or white were swept aside by the simple act of sharing food. Suddenly, the audience from India, Spain, France and Britain became one by the experience of eating together, underscoring the central principle of art as being as basic as bread is to life.

Roysten Abel says that the inspiration behind his play ‘The Kitchen’ came during a visit to Rumi’s mausoleum in Konya (Turkey). “Adjacent to his tomb was his kitchen and as I walked in the hall, I saw a raised platform, which was the area in which Rumi sat with his fellow dervishes to meditate and pray. Below this raised area were two vessels in which food was cooked for all the people in the hall. While savouring this experience of eating food and seeing the cosmic dance, I tried to understand the connection between cooking and evolution of the soul.”

These experiences stayed within him for many years and finally manifested in a grand production. I saw this play at the International Theatre Festival of Kerala. It had 12 drummers playing mizhavu, one of the oldest percussion instruments, which is an integral part of the performing temple arts of Kerala. It consists of a large pot-shaped vessel resembling a Chinese or Grecian urn, made of copper and covered with stretched hide. The musicians sat within a tiered steel framework resembling a vessel. The stage front had a huge metal degchi where two actors cooked payasam, stirring it with massive steel ladles.

The entire play, seen through the billowing smoke screen with the mizhavu players beating on their copper drums, was an unforgettable experience. The note of dissonance was seen in the narrative where the two actors, playing husband and wife, squabbled furiously, while throwing fistfuls of condiments in the payasam. The burgeoning tension between the two with moments of reconciliation matched the beat and tempo of the magnificent mizhavu players.

For many years, I had been toying with the idea of cooking live on the stage to celebrate the potential of plunging into another world — a world filled with the aroma of mustard and cumin seeds, red chilli and asafoetida, fennel and turmeric. I wanted to see if the actors could perform while peeling onions with the sting of the juice in their eyes, or if the musicians could sing and play musical instruments while cooking.

The protagonist of the play ‘Kitchen Katha’, Tara, was born on the kitchen table. Her family wondered if the tears flowing from her eyes were due to the onion smell that clung to the kitchen walls, or were these tears of a newborn? Tara, unable to marry her lover, poured her unsatiated love into cooking. The story became a journey through sensual memory, in which the boundaries between food, love and appetite got blurred.

Amritsar, the city I grew up in, made the Golden Temple an extension of one’s life. The main attraction was the daily langar. I loved doing seva or voluntary service as a child. The massive cauldrons, open fires, rows of gunny bags filled with salt, sugar, flour and rice, tins of ghee and oil fascinated me. I recall clouds of atta hanging in the air, the rolling of the flour balls, slapping of the rotis — all these became sounds and sights that coloured my world. The transformation of grain into flour, flour into dough and then into rotis seemed magical. The kneaded dough being slapped into shape seemed to come alive as I made tiny dolls and birds with the malleable dough. My inspiration for ‘Kitchen Katha’ was based on this community kitchen of my childhood. I tried to capture the atmosphere, the amber light, the sounds of kneading, pounding, churning from the images I had absorbed.

For me, the langar is a special space, a sacred space where the secular and the sacred meld together. It is a national table where everyone eats together, with equality and dignity.

— The writer is a Chandigarh-based theatre director