Blood and Beehives: Culinary Ingenuity of the Marginalised

This article was originally published in Goya Journal. Cover image by Harsha KR.

Growing up in his village in Khamgaon, Maharashtra, Shahu Patole remembers sitting on the ground at the butcher’ shop, an empty vessel in his hand. It was meant to collect goat blood. “We would ask the butcher what time to assemble — which depended on the time of slaughter. Then we would pay him for the quantity of fresh blood we took home,” says Shahu Patole, a former journalist who currently lives in Nagaland. 

His family belongs to the Mang community (a Dalit sub-caste), and uses blood in the preparation of Lakuti, a culinary delicacy in his region. “First, the blood is simmered on a low flame — not high, because it will catch at the bottom. Then, we add salt,” says Patole, describing the process. The liquid eventually assumes the colour of mahogany, and solidifies — “like a dark, Cadbury chocolate,” he explains.

The thickened blood is then set aside to rest, and later cut into small pieces. In a deep pot, thickened cubes of blood, along with diced onions, crushed chillies and fresh coriander, are mixed with a homemade spice mix called yesur. Yesur is a special masala common to Mang households, made by pounding a mix of 14-20 spices. These include black stone flower, bay leaves, dried onions, cloves, dried coconut kernel (copra), coriander and poppy seeds.

Relegated to the periphery of Hindu society, the Dalits (a term that literally translates to 'broken people') have been discriminated against, and have endured generations of systemic marginalisation. For centuries, they were considered ‘untouchable’ due to the nature of their menial work, which often involved cleaning latrines and sewages, sweeping, getting rid of carcasses, and cremating corpses. The Dalits did not have access to many things, including the right to water, land and food. Caste hierarchy was enforced by upper-castes, not only by forbidding inter-caste marriages and practicing untouchability, but also through controlling access to food. 

When an animal was slaughtered, the Dalits were left with discarded bits — stomach skin, intestines, blood, tongue, feet and ear — parts that upper-caste Hindus would otherwise throw away. Clever dishes emerged. Fashi, for instance, is a culinary gem. Its hero ingredient is the epiglottis of a bullock or goat.

Refrigerators were out of the question, so nothing could go waste. As a preserving technique, whatever meat could not be consumed immediately was cut lengthwise and left to dry in the sun over many days. This sun-dried meat was stored in pots, sometimes in paper wrappers, and saved for later. When roasted, they transformed into crackling, wafer-thin strips of protein called chanya.

The ingenuity of these dishes is rooted in survival. “A lot of our meals were made without oil, because we could not afford it,” explains Patole. Instead of oil, beef or pork fat was used.

Indian culinary history has been dismissive of Dalit food practices. There is little tactile material available documenting their food history and tradition. “When I was young, I noticed that newspapers and cooking shows featured a variety of foods and recipes. But we were invisible in these stories. Dalit food was never talked about,” Patole says. In 2015, he released Anna He Apoorna Brahma (which loosely translates to ‘our plate has always been incomplete’), a book that chronicles the culinary tastes of two Dalit communities in Maharashtra between 1950 to 1972. It features the Mangs and the Mahars; the latter community distinctive from the Mangs as one that ate carcasses.

Statistically speaking, Dalits comprise 16.6 percent of India’s population. Certain practices like foraging — presently in favour as a contemporary fad from western restaurant culture — were in fact, a prominent source of survival for countless Dalit families. Patole describes how his mother would make a dish using larvae from a beehive. “To make Mohol chi poli, honey bee larvae were cooked with red chilli powder and onions. It tastes a little like cooked egg white, and you have to eat it while it is still hot. Otherwise, it sticks to your tongue,” says Patole, who still makes the dish at home.

It’s crucial to note that Dalit food practices are not a single homogenous entity. There are culinary variations from region to region, across Dalit communities, depending on the availability of resources.

Yogi Choudhury, who belongs to the Dom community of corpse-burners in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, says that they cook their meals on wood procured from cremation grounds. “We can’t afford gas or fresh wood. So, we pull out charred firewood from funeral pyres, once they die out, and carry them home,” he explains. Batti Chokha is a popular dish in his community. To make the chokha, vegetables like aubergine, tomatoes and potatoes are thrown into wood fire and roasted. No utensils are employed — only one’s hands. Once the seared vegetables are removed from the fire, the outer layer is carefully peeled to reveal squishy innards. These are mashed and sprinkled with salt, and laced with mustard oil. “We don’t use any other spice,” says Choudhury. 

A thousand kilometres south, in Zaheerabad, Medak district in Telangana, Dalit women farmers mix uncultivated hibiscus (gongura) to the scarce sorghum (jowar) they have access to, to fatten the dough and make flatbreads. As accompaniment, they gather fresh green blades of gongura, payala kura and sannavayeli, to be stewed in a wide-mouthed vessel. Salt, red chillies and crushed turmeric are stirred in for seasoning. Sometimes, to increase the bulk of the dish, lentils are thrown in. Their diet is deeply reliant on roots, flowers, millets, cereals and tubers. Gums and barks are also consumed, depending on the season, since vegetables and spices are usually prohibitively expensive.

If you pan the lens toward Kerala, it has its own story to tell. “The caste practice here is entirely different from other parts of India,” says Vinil Baby Paul, a PhD candidate at Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He has done extensive research on the Dalits of colonial Kerala, where linguistic caste hierarchy was prevalent. The ‘outcastes’ were forbidden to speak certain words: “They dared not say ‘I’, but ‘adiyan’ (your slave) or ‘adiyangal’ (one who lies at your feet). They could not call their food ‘choru’ (rice), but ‘karikkadi’, which means ‘charcoal rice’,” says Paul. If words like ‘uppu’ (salt) accidentally rolled off their tongues, instead of ‘pulichatan’, they were bludgeoned, sometimes to death, he explains.

Certain castes, like the Musahars in north Bihar, were named after what they ate — rodents. In Bhojpuri, Musahar translates to ‘rat seeker; or ‘rat hunter’ (‘musa’ means rat, while ‘hera’, seeker). 

Dalit literature has vividly recorded food memories. In his memoir, ‘Growing up Untouchable in India: A Dalit Autobiography’ (2000), Vasant Moon takes great pleasure in describing the making of paper-thin chapattis called mandes, which are unique to his community. Mandes were traditionally made on an overturned, clay pot, where women laboured before the fire for hours. They were eaten with spicy chicken or mutton curry.

Moon writes, “If a proper dough has not been made, it will break apart. If there is too much or too little salt, the consistency of the dough will not be right. But if everything is done correctly, and the consistency is right, a nearly transparent chapatti, like the thin paper of a kite, will result. Not just any wheat will do. You must use a certain howra wheat.” The art of making a perfect mande was passed from mother to daughter. It is said, that if a mande is well-made, you can hold it in front of your eyes, and look right through it.

In his autobiography, Moon writes, “Mandes were a traditional art of Mahars.” There is deep sensitivity in this personal relaying; it is steeped in pride.

It resonates with Sharan Kumar Limbale’s celebration of bhakri, a flatbread made with millet flour, which is cheaper than wheat. Its dough is stubborn, and requires laborious kneading, folding and rolling. “Bhakri is as large as man. It is as vast as the sky and bright as the sun,” writes Limbale in ‘The Outcaste’ (Akkarmashi, 2003). Gratitude for this tough, insipid-tasting bread is deeply linked to the hell-bound severity of hunger. Limbale continues, “Hunger is bigger than man…Hunger seems no bigger than your open palm, but it can swallow the whole earth and let out a belch.”

Eating leftovers was also an integral part of Dalit sustenance. In fact, within the Chuhra community (who were manual scavengers), it was treasured. In Omprakash Valmiki’s memoir, ‘Joothan: An Untouchable’s Life’ (1997), he provides a visceral account of how members from his community, in the 1950s, would patiently wait outside upper-caste weddings. They would humbly accept half-eaten, leftover food from the guests’ dirty pattals. “The little remnants of pooris (puffed bread), bits of sweetmeats, and a little bit of vegetable, were enough to make them happy,” writes Valmiki. The Chuhras would carry the pattals home in large baskets.

If the Chuhra family could not finish the leftovers, they would leave the pooris out to dry on a rope-string bed, and preserve them for months. “These dried-up pooris were useful during the hard days of the rainy season,” he recalls in Joothan. “We would soak them in water and then boil them. The boiled pooris were delicious with finely ground red chilli pepper and salt. Sometimes we mixed them with gur (jaggery) to make a gruel, and ate this dish with great delight.”

These poignant narratives reflect the complex relationship between caste oppression and gritty acts of survival. “My children don’t understand my book,” says Patole. “They’ve read it, but they can’t believe the life I lived. When I was writing the book, my brothers and sisters, my community — they did not like it. They’d ask: ‘Why do you need to publish such details about us?’ They wanted to hide who we are. But I chose to document our food practices, because we cannot go on living in shame. No one will let us become a Brahmin. So, we have to accept who we are and embrace it.”

Author note: I would like to acknowledge that Rajyashri Goody's artwork helped point me towards exploring some of this literature further.