A Chidambaram Gotsu from the 13th Century

This post is for Raghu, Selvaganesan dikshitar, and Andrea Gutiérrez without whose efforts and insights it would never have come together, and for Bhavna, Swati, and Soumya, whose all-girls’ trip to Pondicherry presented that long-sought-after chance to finally get to Chidambaram.

The Gotsu & I | Does Śiva like gotsu? | The 13th century gotsu | Notes on my version

There’s this story my Amma used to tell, of a mostly bygone time when women would feed all their families before they fed themselves, of one young woman who therefore never had enough kathirikkai [eggplant, aubergine, brinjal] to enjoy herself though she picked it daily and loved it truly, and of this one woman’s visits to a nearby temple to prepare alone and relish privately just about as much eggplant as her heart desired. Only, she wasn’t alone. Smells wafted and an updraft through a shaft enticed the temple Goddess who assumed the eggplant was for Her, of course. How could it not be? She licked the bowl clean when the woman wasn’t watching—and got a tight slap for having done so. The Goddess was stunned—the cheek! [pun intended]. The slap turned her face and she kept it there, sulking. The woman went away, the Goddess’ face stayed turned, villagers were aghast. What had happened? What could set things right? Nobody knew, but the answers lay with the woman who loved kathirikkai … [& you can finish reading the story here].

The Gotsu and I

There’s this wish I’ve long nurtured, seeded no doubt by the story my Amma would tell, of cooking a kathirikkai gotsu in a temple the way many women cook pongal at Sankranti time. But not any temple—the shrine to Śivakāmasundarī at the great temple of Śiva in Chidambaram, where Bhikṣāṭana, Pitchatanadar, the beautiful mendicant, arrives with Mohini as his consort who is no less than a form of Vishnu, and the wives of the Rishis forget their penances and fall in love with Him. The rishis are enraged, but their magic and their invocations of forces and figures like the dwarf demon Muyalakan amount to naught, and they must concede in the end the Truth that is Śiva. Śiva, who holds Muyalakan down with one foot [sthita pada] while the other [kunchita pada or anugraha pada] offers refuge; Śiva anthropomorphized as Thillai Natarajar, the dancing Lord of the Thillai trees [Excoecaria agallocha] which forbiddingly fill the mangroves of Pichavaram close to Chidambaram. Chidambaram’s Śiva is not just anthropomorphized, He is also rendered formless as the “Akasha lingam” or the Śiva of air—empty space, to naked eyes, and the great, unfathomable secret of Chidambaram. Thus, the origin of both profound philosophical ruminations on metaphysical duality, the positioning of Chidambaram as a uniquely important shrine of the South, and numerous humorous quips about the “Chidambara rahasyam” [a sort-of “much ado about nothing”/ Emperor’s clothes idea].

The temple is a marvel, comprised of a series of grand Sabhāmaṇḍapas, at the golden center [Kanaka sabha] of which the One moves in perfect stillness while the Gods watch and mortals circle in joyous, pulsating rapture. Chidambaram is, after all, chitrambalam, cit+ambalam: the spinning world around the unmoving stage of consciousness that is the dancing form of Siva.

But none of this is exactly the reason I wanted to cook gotsu in the temple. The gotsu was the reason I wanted to cook in the temple at all.

Does Śiva like Gotsu?

Andrea Gutiérrez, who writes on early Indian culinary manuals and recipe writing, pointed me in a conversation once to her 2022 account of Chola-era food offerings, among them a recipe for the Chidambaram temple’s signature ceremonial and festival (and evening) naivedyam indicated by a 13th century inscription and prepared to this day: eggplant or kathirikkai gotsu. Her’s and many popular accounts of Chidambaram gotsu tell of its being accompanied by jeeraga samba rice flavored with jeera (of course) and black pepper, and prepared in the evenings, for weddings, and some festivals such as Tai Pūśam.

It is said that on the day of the pūśam star in the Tamil month of Tai (January–February), Śiva revealed his “Ananda Thandavam” to two devotees who had waited long for him in the dense Thillai forest, the only place on earth that could serve as a stable enough stage for Śiva’s cosmic dance. The two devotees were Patāñjali [a form of Visnu’s serpent Adisesha] and Vyāgrahapada/ Pulikālmuni [the sage bestowed with the tiger paws and eyes in each who would awaken before light to climb trees and pick flowers for Śiva before the bees and insects could get to them]. The event marks the inception of the temple and Kathirikkai gotsu features among the offerings that, in turn, mark that annual date.

Gotsus [gosthu, gojju] are jammy-chutney-like preparations which use a fruit or vegetable (think: eggplant, lime, pineapple), are cooked in tamarind, and typically combine all 6 tastes (sweet, spice, sour, bitter, salt, astringence). They can be eaten as condiments or used as the base for “variety” rices (think: pulihora or tamarind rice gojju).

It is unclear, however, why this specific kathirikkai gotsu is offered to Śiva at all.

“When asked why certain foods are offered to a god,” writes Ferro-Luzzi, “the majority of the devotees referred to tradition. Some affirmed that they offered what the gods liked and had instructed the rishis to communicate to them. A few more prosaic informants stated that they offered to their gods what they had and what they themselves like…” [1977a: 530]. She lists and elaborates several different, overlapping reasons why any given naivedyam may be prepared at any given temple: tradition (oral and written), ingredient availability, financial possibilities, local cuisine, convenience of preparation, preservability, season, origins of worship systems, purity/pollution [that old shibboleth], and what the foods say about the Gods and what the Gods say about the foods.

It’s easy enough to list these possibilities and harder by far to evaluate which might matter in the case of the Chidambaram gotsu. Pickles are uncommon offerings at any temple, offerings to Śiva are generally frugal and often limited just to plain rice: “the frugality of plain boiled rice without any relish, which often is Śiva’s only food, may be thought in keeping with his ascetic nature; while the affable Vishnu is a great eater and enjoys the offering of frequent and plentiful meals” [Ferro-Luzzi 1977a: 545]. If Śiva is offered spice, it is green chillies for which he has a taste [Ferro-Luzzi 1977b: 510], not the red that are typically used in the gotsu. The redness of the eggplant gotsu is hard to take as mere coincidence–“Rudra” is the word-origin of the color we know as “red,” after all–but such associations may well be retrospectively imputed to a gotsu that has such color anyway.

Whatever the reasons for the offering, Chidambaram with its sprawling temple complex and eggplant gotsu have become virtually synonymous. I’m told, funnily enough, however, that variants of this gotsu owe their modern popularity less to the temple—Czerniak-Drożdżowicz reports theological discussion on who should eat Śiva’s leftovers [2016: 178], and therefore whether they should be distributed as prasadam—than to “hotels” and lodges like the Venkata Lodge in Kumbakkonam. Indeed, it’s served in some Salem joints as an accompaniment to the meat-based biriyanis the city is known for, the same way it’s served in Chidambaram hotels as a side to pongal or idlis. Go figure?

The 13th century gotsu

The gotsu most often associated with Chidambaram is a purely eggplant-tamarind preparation, with particular emphasis laid on the fresh-ground spice mixture used: a combination of coriander seeds, chana dal, red chillies, and vendayam/fenugreek seeds. The circa 1253 inscription, however, describes what is “likely the first record of the aubergine gotsu,” refers to it as a “‘special cooked offering’, ciṟappāka amutu,” which was “made possible by a gift of land purchased (from a land-owning woman, Mātevaṉ Cātti) by a gentleman living at a math in Tiruvannamalai” and lists a somewhat different set of ingredients thus:
“10 kalams of aged rice . . . [=96 padi, 1 padi=1.5kg]
2 kalams of maṇi dal [maṇipparuppu]
4 niṟai (= 400 palams) of (less refined) sugar . . . [1 palam=35g]
100 ripe coconuts . . .
10 unripe jackfruits . . .
. . . (epigraph is undecipherable here) . . .
200 aubergines (eggplants)” [Gutiérrez 2002: 136-7]

The recipe is a fragment, and–as with most epigraphic and ancient recipes–skips “any sort of indication of the preparation method that we have come to expect in recipes only in the late modern era” [Gutiérrez 2022: 131]. So, for one, we have no real indication of whether the “10 kalams of aged rice” which amount to several hundred kilos would be used in the gotsu preparation, or cooked separately to be served alongside. On maṇipparuppu, Gutiérrez offers this in fn.75 (p.143): “The Tamil Lexicon’s Supplement, p. 382, glosses maṇippayiru as an ‘unspecified kind of gram,’ which must somehow look like a gem. Tamil informants suggest urid dal or moong for maṇi paruppu, while the modern-day Chidambaram temple prepares this offering with toor/tuvar dal”–or, as I found, Bengal gram dal. Coconut and jackfruit rarely find place in contemporary gotsus, and it’s a little surprising that “unripe jackfruit” would have been available at the time of Tai Pūśam/Jan-Feb at all–unless of course the association of this gotsu with the festival had emerged later and jackfruit eliminated from the recipe as a consequence.

It is a well-known fact that the Chidambaram temple was built, expanded, and physically altered over the centuries in ways that reflected the proclivities of the times, both priestly and royal. Paul Younger breaks down the progression thus: “worship [at Chidambaram] has been associated successively with a primitive Kali cult (Stage One), a peasant hymn-singing cult (Stage Two), a royal cult (Stage Three), a priestly linka cult (Stage Four), and a meditative Vedanta cult (Stage Five)” [1986: 224]. The recipe fragment belongs in Stage 4, “in the thirteenth century as the hold of the Chola court weakened and the forces of orthodox
Saiva priestly tradition grew stronger” [222]–also the time when it appeared to have become important to reconcile linga worship with that of dancing Siva worship. Significantly, it is also the time when the legend of Patāñjali and Vyāgrahapada, who worshipped a linga in the Thillai forest until Siva revealed his Ananda thandavam to them, comes to be written and these saints depicted in the south and east gopurams, both of which were renovated and relocated respectively in the late Chola period. It is difficult to say just from this what the impact of such orthodoxies and attempts at reconciliation must have been on the emergence of specific naivedyams; nonetheless, these were the contexts in which the gotsu recipe was outlined.

Not only is the naivedyam recipe a fragment, therefore, it’s also something of a historical artefact as Gutiérrez also suggests. The only thing we can hope to fathom is what the Chidambaram gotsu might once have been, and maybe also what its present form reveals about the Chidambara rahasyam, so lost and yet so much still within reach.

My version of the Chidambaram Gotsu

The recipe for Chidambaram gotsu given below is a kind-of amalgamation of the contemporary methods of preparation and what indications the 1253 CE inscription does give.

• It being the start of jackfruit season, I’ve incorporated raw jackfruit alongside eggplants and found it a welcome addition for both taste and texture.
• Making some assumptions about the sizes of raw jackfruit available in the 13th century, I’ve taken jackfruit and eggplant in roughly the same proportionate quantity. Note here that cooked jackfruit retains its volume, while cooked eggplant appears to shrink considerably.
• I’ve also used coconut. The inscription calls for fresh coconut; in the interests of longer preservation I’ve chosen to use copra or dry coconut. But there’d be no harm in using fresh grated coconut, toasting it a little with the other spices, and adding it in place of dry. The gotsu will spoil faster, but fresh coconut will bring in new dimensions of taste, too.
• I’ve also stuck to the use of Bengal gram instead of any other dal as maṇipparuppu, though I imagine there’s no harm in using the others for welcome variations in taste. The primary purpose of dal as I see it is for flavor and as a thickener. The latter purpose is served universally by all the dals. The former is where the differences would lie.
• Finally, I’ve used red-chillies which of course wouldn’t have been around before the 1500s or so, but it would be a lot harder to achieve the same levels of spice with black pepper and we’re all so used to seeing gotsus in shades of red now, so that’s inevitable.

Post Script

I never got to make Chidambaram gotsu in the temple and I don’t have a Nataraja murti at home to whom to make an offering. But it didn’t matter in the end because I did have friends who humored my every whim, I did get to go to the great temple in their company and to taste the local gotsu—and then I carried the temple home with me in the empty cup of my two hands, time-travelled to the 13th c., offered my Chandrasekara a spoonful of the gotsu I made there, and watched as He made my heart dance.

Sources Consulted

Czerniak-Drożdżowicz, Marzenna. 2016. “The Food of Gods – naivedya/nirmālya in the Pāñcarātrika Sources.” In Cinzia Pieruccini and Paola M. Rossi (eds.), A World of Nourishment: Reflections on Food in Indian Culture, Milan: Ledizioni, pp. 177–190.

Ferro-Luzzi, Gabriella Eichinger. 1977a. “The Logic of South Indian Food Offerings.” Anthropos Bd. 72, H. 3./4., pp. 529-556.

Ferro-Luzzi, Gabriella Eichinger. 1977b. “Ritual as Language: The Case of South Indian Food Offerings.” Current Anthropology 18/3, pp. 507-51

Gutiérrez, Andrea. 2022. “Medieval food as deity worship: The elaboration of food offerings in Chola-era ritual practice.” In The Routledge Handbook of Hindu Temples: Materiality, Social History and Practice. Ed. Himanshu Prabha Ray, Salila Kulshreshtha, Uthara Suvrathan. New York: Routledge, pp. 126-144

Younger, Paul. 1986. “The Citamparam Temple Complex and Its Evolution.” East and West. 36(1/3), pp. 205-226.