Why kheer should always be stirred: A pourquois story

This isn’t your usual pourquois or etiological story about why a porcupine has quills or how the rhinoceros got his skin. This is a part historical, part technical, part mythological, and wholly real account of one of our most basic and beloved desserts, kheer, how it is that common tasks have fantastical dimensions, what other-worldy ideas are deeply embedded in mundane, daily practices–and therefore why a simple dish like kheer must always be stirred.

Story goes that the world began in a celestial ocean of milk, the kṣīra-sāgara, deep within which lay an immortalizing nectar that of course both devas (or celestial beings) and asuras (or powerful demigods) were both driven to seek. Together, they churned the ocean with the great snake Vasuki as rope coiled around Mount Mandara, facing enormous difficulty—the sinking of the Mount, the fumes from Vasuki’s nostrils, the release of a terrible poison which Shiva swallowed, turning his throat blue—but then from their travails emerged 14 other entities including Kamadhenu, the wish-granting cow; Kalpavriksha, the wish-granting tree; the Parijat or night-blooming jasmine; the horse Uchhaishravas, the elephant Airavata, Chandra the moon, Dhanavantri the divine physician, and Mahalakshmi, Goddess of all things rich and resplendent.

Annamayya in the 15th century called her “Ksheerabdhi Kanyaka,” Daughter of the ocean of milk, and M.S. Subbalakshmi called her out in this inimitable rendition of his song in Raga Kurinji. Women repeat Annamayya’s words while circling a lamp around backyard tulasi plants, or during Varalakshmi Vratam, Shravana Shukravara, auspicious Fridays of the Shravana month, and at all other moments when one propitiates Lakshmi as “Varaprada”: the boon-giver.

The twelfth (and most beautiful) verse of Adi Shankaracharya’s “Kanakadhara Stotram” offers a similar set of poetic obeisances:

12.1: Salutations to You, beautiful as a lotus in full bloom,
12.2: Salutations to You, born from the Ocean of Milk,
12.3: Salutations to You, born alongside immortal nectar and the white moon,
12.4: Salutations to You, most beloved of Sri Narayana

— the kṣīra-sāgara being, of course, also where Vishnu lies in eternal repose on the endless serpent Ananta Sesha, so that when Mahalakshmi emerges, she becomes His consort.

The word used here is दुग्ध (Dugdha): milk + उदधि (Udadhi): ocean, but the more common kṣīra is of course also the Sanskrit origin of our common, most beloved and purest of ceremonial offerings: kheer. This is a dish with multiple consonances, from payasa (“made with milk”) which every Indian state knows and has a variant of, to the Persian shir berenj (milky rice), the Lebanese riz bi haleeb (rice with milk), the Turkish sutlaç (baked rice with milk), and the Mexican arroz con leche (rice with milk). That last is often attributed to the Moors, who brought rice and spice and sugars to the Iberian peninsula–from where the Spaniards carried them to the New World–but rice and sugar, like so-called “Arabic” numerals and ideas, came from father East long before. And whatever the specific cultural form or rices, spices and flavorings used, baked or not, they are famously minimalist: short grain, aromatic rice, softened and sweetened to the point of melting, spiced lightly and served warm or cold.

There is, however, a difference between the kheer of India and the “rice puddings” of the rest of the world. When the dish set a course for the West, it was embraced by the addition of orange blossom and rose as flavorings and fragrances–but it left its immense symbolisms behind.

Kheer is on one level just a beloved Indian sweet, one of those things that saves us when guests arrive suddenly because it needs just rice, sugar, and milk, all ingredients that are already there or within reach, even in humbler homes. But this is an incidental use of kheer, which is not a quick-fix dish as much as it is a ritual and ceremonial offering, and the purest and most special of ritual and ceremonial offerings we must ensure it to be.

Each ingredient is of immense civilizational importance: milk and rice, from a culture that has grown around cow-herding and paddy farming; sweetness from sugar, the technology for refining which originated in the cane-growing regions of the Gangetic plains, giving us jaggery or vellam (concentrated sugarcane juice without the separation of molasses and crystals), khandasari (raw crystalline sugar, the origin of the modern word “candy”), matsyaṇḍikā, mishri or kalkandu (rock candy), and śarkarā, literally meaning “granules,” pure refined white crystalline sugar (the origin of the modern word “sugar”).*

*Mishri means from Misr, which is the early Arabic name for the region now called Egypt: perhaps the art of growing large sugar crystals on string developed more there and was returned to India. Likewise, chini, the common Hindi word for sugar, means from China: Buddhist monks carried the production methods with them, and white sugar was later returned to India from China. As with faloodas, the uses of sugar were not necessarily native to India, even if the early refinement processes were developed here.

It is no coincidence that all three ingredients of kheer are white, or valued especially in their white forms, and each one associated with purity or the processes of purification. We speak these days of the importance of the colored bran layers of rices to diets so damaged by industrial ways of eating, but the whiteness of rice is itself not unimportant: it is the culmination of a process of turning inedible paddy into rice free of impurities (the silica-rich husk, the phytate “anti-nutrients” in bran) and fit for consumption. Likewise, the transformation of sugarcane juice into its white crystalline form is nothing short of fire-treatment. The Buddhist Saddharmasmrtupasthana Sutra likens a monk’s progress to the refinement of sugar. The first boiling removes basic impurities, produces an ‘inspissated juice of sugarcane’ or phāṇita; the second boiling makes it heavier, produces guda, the third boiling makes it white, produces sarkara. So sugar is as the monk should be: progressively refined by the “fire of wisdom,” as sugar is refined by successive boilings, into white crystalline purity [Kieschnick, 2003]. And finally, the milk — kṣīra is literally milk, but symbolically it is undifferentiated prakriti or primordial matter prior to the emergence of the universe. It is naturally white, but it hides a richness that must be coaxed out in cooking.

“Just three ingredients,” we say about kheer, reducing it to a beguiling simplicity. But the point is much more that those three are our purest forms, each one a product of human endeavor and striving, each one a metaphor for what we are, and what we aspire to be.

Now we think of churning as the common act which produces butter from milk, but before butter there is cream which rises, coaxed upwards by the stirring of rice grains so they absorb all the milk’s water, soften, break, and thus allow the cream to emerge, meeting the milk’s richness with their own. Perhaps Airavata emerges, too, and the luminous white moon; perhaps the night-blooming jasmine showers her fragrant blossoms—but what we most readily perceive is the creamy richness that is Lakshmi herself.

So, while most recipes will make it easy and say that it’s enough to soak your rice ahead of time to soften it, that you don’t need to stir your kheer except at the end maybe, really the mixing, churning, stirring, turning of kheer is like the samudra manthan: you are, with rice and sweetness, calling to the Goddess who resides within, and you are bringing the world into being.

So it is that the Goddess is both within kheer, and offered to Her as the only thing she will eat.

Near Srinagar in Kashmir is a temple called the Tulmulla temple, because it’s near the Tulmulla village, but the presiding deity is Ragnya Devi, a form of Durga. Here, on Zyeshta Astami/ Jyeshtha Ashtami, the eighth day of the bright half of the month of Jyeshtha, which falls between May and June, Kashmiri Pandits mark the Goddess’ prādurbhāva: coming into existence. Kheer is the customary offering for, it is said, She will accept only offerings of milk, sugar candy, and ghee–sa kshira-kharuladi bhojanam–and kheer implies and contains all these. No wonder then that Ragnya Devi is known here as “Kheer Bhawani.”

Ragnya Devi is an adi parashakti, an originary power like Kanyakumari at India’s southern tip. Another story tells of how She was drawn to Lanka by Ravana’s penances to Shiva. Pleased with Ravana’s devotion, Shiva granted him his wish to bring Adishakti into his kingdom and She remained the force behind Lanka’s prosperity until the abduction of Sita, which angered the Mother. She cursed Ravana with defeat, and asked Hanuman to take her to Kashmir. The places where she stopped mark all the sacred spots of the region: Raithan, Pokhribal, Lok Bhawan, Mazgan, Tikker, Shadipur, Logripura in the Kashmir Valley, and finally Tulmulla in Ganderbal District in Jammu and Kashmir, not far from Srinagar. Rama visits her on full moon days, it is said, and Hanuman resides here permanently as her attender. Around the shrine of Kheer Bhawani mata runs a spring, fed by mountain waters and said to change color in accordance with the moods of the Goddess–and very likely also with the changing mineral composition of the mountain springs.

But the kheer we offer Her remains white, and while Bengalis may say that the mother of all kheer is a pink-white or a cream-white chaler payesh [rice kheer] sweetned with mishri, not sugar–the colors perhaps reflecting the Goddess’ changing moods as much as the purity of the mishri itself; while a Kashmiri kheer will likely use dry coconut bits for some crunch and flavor while a Tamilian payasam will use a bare pinch of edible camphor, the best kheer will always be one that is slowly, attentively, painstakingly stirred.

Sources

Kieschnick, John. 2003. “Accidentals and Incidentals.” In The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pp. 220-280.