Urban longing, original affluence, and Bassaru

There is this beautiful novella by Katherine Paterson, The King’s Equal, in which a poor girl shows a King she is wealthier than he is—because he desires so much and she wants for nothing. There is this idea of the “original affluent society,” a counter to modern notions of prosperity, by which the scholar Marshall Sahlins once demonstrated that foraging communities were a veritable model of affluence because they found what they needed most in the natural world and wanted for little else. Then there are our modern yearnings for that “lost” life, our presumed prior ways of being, to which we are striving in so many ways now to return, but which are themselves hyper-romanticised artifacts of our present, mostly-plush-but-disconnected, urbanized existence.

I know the critiques of Sahlins’ arguments, and yet I find myself wanting to return to him now, at a time when we seem to be wanting to reclaim that original affluence, not at all as a theoretical construct, but in actual practice. So many people, in so many places, all speaking of the importance of native ingredients, older cooking technologies, heritage cookware, and against packaged foods, the use of plastics and overpackaging, and modern consumption patterns. The arguments are traditionalist, amorphous, often evoking “what our ancestors said” and “what our ancestors did” in loose terms that are both believable and impossible to verify. There’s an enormous and growing respect for the knowledge and creativity of the humblest kitchens, an affirmation of Anton Ego’s closing realization in Ratatouille: “Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.” That is starting to reshape the restaurant industry, encouraging “unkown” home cooks and budding Instagrammers to do pop-ups to widen the spectrum of eating out experiences–though that thus far has not spotlighted the village cooks whose “true” knowledge is being extolled, but more prodigal urban children who can play with food at their leisure. And all sorts of focus on regional micro-cuisines (prime examples: Sheetal Bhatt writing about Gujarat, Sushma Bhat on Karnataka, and Shravani on Telangana), forgotten foods, and of course native ingredients. Tamil channels on YouTube are almost crowded with videos extolling the medicinal virtues (maruthuva gunam) of local herbs and weeds, and full of recipes and stories from village kitchens. A comment about how local (read: village, less-affluent) women would be the sources of knowledge on edible varieties of bamboo in Assam is assured to bring applause.

Were I to sum up these various trends in a single line, I’d say it’s a growing belief in that very idea of original affluence and a wish to reclaim it.

But my second line is as important: there are urban-rural and class/community divides here that it behooves us to be sensitive about, and mindful of. In the euphoria of the “food-connects-us” logic, we can’t forget that food divides us, too–and we want it to, for that’s also the source of innovation, creativity, local specificity and so much more.

So the reaching for original affluence goes wrong in several ways. It throws open doors to the marketing of heritage as never before, as I said in my eeya chombu post, to the point where one doesn’t know whom to trust less: the savvy e-commerce middleman or the old-world wily merchant. The heritage market can return to a genuine revival of craft traditions, or the the newest form of crass consumerism, masquerading as something far nobler. Sahlins would have added that consumption is itself the problem, placing all things within reach–but never all things within our grasp (p. 7-8). Modern capitalist societies “dedicate themselves to the proposition of scarcity” which then becomes an absolute, a sentence, rather than a “relation between means and ends.” If we buy the cookware without rethinking the act of consumption, then it’s a logic reproduced. Old wine, new bottles. Some soul-searching would help here, to keep things simple, starting I suppose with ruthlessly separating one’s wants from one’s needs. And learning that original affluence is not just another sort of wealth, but another sort of life.

Then there’s the romanticization of village life and (less obviously) its poverty, ironically at a moment when villages are being urbanized of their own volition at breakneck speed. The critics of Sahlins had a point, after all: life in the bush was downright hard, not idyllic at all, and even though the natural world had everything, getting all that together and harnessing that plenty was very likely an exacting and risky daily affair. It was also very probably a precarious life subject to chance and circumstance: the chance of finding plenty, or of nothing at all. Just where we live, we’ve had people come foraging for tamarind from the tree in one corner (“just enough for one kuzhambu”) and workers collect weeds after finishing work. Living closer to the earth has its costs and its many instabilities–to which many communities and newer generations of farmers per force have had to learn to adapt. There’s much to learn from them, but no denying the fact that it’s all grit and little romance.

Finally, there are the ways in which the reconnection of urbanites to this so-called “lost world” happens, which are sometimes gimmicky (think: village tours; Masaai on the lawn-type performances), sometimes far more genuine (think: weed walks and foraging expeditions that re-educate participants on the natural world) but with varying impact on bringing about truly meaningful lifestyle change, except for the already-converted.

In the end I’m saying two things. First, that the reaching for roots and reconnection is a truly wonderful thing. Sahlins was onto something when he identified original affluence and we’re discovering that in our own ways. But it’s also an artifact of urban experience, let’s not forget. There are really no “lost recipes”–just a whole suite of practices and ideas that are lost to us because we moved away, literally and figuratively. Second, that the belief in original affluence cannot come with the naive pretense that that was a simple, idyllic life. It was–and it wasn’t, very much like our own is–and it isn’t, just in different ways.

What we need therefore is to find ways to return ourselves to the wild world that give us everything, but without romanticizing the lives of those communities and individuals who foraged at the brink of survival, and found that world for us in the first place–and kept it safe so we could return to it someday. In the US there is much talk of “food deserts,” which are themselves artifacts of a landscape now so dependent on large-scale production, supply chains, consumption, and profitability that the idea of a self-sustaining biome seems far out of reach. Please let’s not get there. But let’s not also forget in the process that while foraging is a fun activity for us, it’s also a very real way of coping with poverty, destitution, and hunger. It’s a peculiar irony of our modern existence that while we long for those rural, rooted lives with less buying, others very often aspire for plush urban ones where there is money enough to buy it all.

With all that in mind, consider this basaaru or vanchina chaaru made from long bean/barbatti cooking stock, and a big bunch of foraged greens. The list of just what I used is in the image caption (identified with the aid of Nina Sengupta’s book on local edible weeds, pictured below). It’s a dish that both widens my world and teaches me humility–and a richer, earthier rasam I am yet to have.

The Recipe

The recipe for bassaru is identical to that for vanchina chaaru & it produces both a rasam and an accompanying koora or paalya. But while vanchina chaaru typically uses toor dal, the idea here is to use any freshly harvested lentils or beans, obtain the cooking stock for rasam–and prepare the paalya from the cooked beans. It’s a rustic farmer’s food, after all. Origins apparently in rural Karnataka, but also the speciality of Karnataka-Andhra border regions.

Any fresh beans are fine: barbattis/long beans, black eyed peas, butter beans, avarekkayas, tuvar/toor, or whatever is local to your region. If you don’t have access to any freshly harvested pulses, then fall back on dried (soak overnight and cook until tender) but never ever use canned.

Here’s what I used, in decreasing order of volume & all just cleaned well and chopped roughly:

• Alternanthera brasiliana
• Alternanthera sessilis
• Alternanthera ficoidea
• Amaranthus spinosus
• Passiflora foetida (wild passion vine leaves)
• Krishna kamal (passion flower) leaves
• Thoothuvalai keerai (solanum trilobatum)
• & some valla keerai or kang kong from our pond

But the point would be to find what wild greens grow in your area, and use a combination of those. There’s no recipe for this, beyond the actual process of making rasam.

Just some principles, guidelines, and food for thought.

Here’s the video to follow–just substitute fresh harvested beans and pulses for toor dal, and use any combination of edible wild greens.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Deepa (@paticheri)