Have You Eaten?
Foraging, cooking, eating are modes of study.
“Have you eaten?” (roti khayi hai?) is how guests are greeted upon entering a home in the pahars. It is a reminder that despite deep structural poverty and constraint, people still go out of their way to offer their visitors what they can. It is a gesture of warmth and relationality: you are now with me; let me take care of you. It places responsibility and expectation upon the receiver: we are eating roti together; surely you will not betray me.
Sonchal, a leafy green, grows abundantly in the pahars.
If you listen carefully, food tells a story. Food and its preparation reflect care, pride, and a sense of emplacement. It holds a community’s history and present.1 As shown in “The Mountains Echo,” my hosts went out of their way to prepare dishes made from hyperlocal ingredients found only in the pahars. Sometimes these were collected in advance; we searched for them together other times. Foraging in the forests was hard work; the intensities of circulating in the pahars produced physical and affective wounding. Heartwork is hard work. Most of my time was spent navigating the topography and getting from one location to another. Initially, this greatly annoyed me, as I thought I should be spending my valuable time doing something far more “intellectual.” But the winding pathways offered an affective mooring. The narrow mountain trails gave a certain slowness to the time spent there. They prepared me to muster up the courage to ask others for help when I was lost or too scared to cross a dangerous stretch. The trails forced me to hold on to others as they gently (sometimes amusingly) lent their hand or shoulder in support. My experiences of the pathways reminded me of how ill prepared I was to do this work.
The pahars hold knowledge—a kind of haptic knowledge that can be accessed only by traversing its trails and pathways. Hiking, stumbling, falling were opportunities to use my body as an “instrument of research”2 to develop a certain muscular consciousness, as well as a felt geography of the pahars. Tim Ingold suggests: “Surely through our feet, in contact with the ground … we are most fundamentally and continually ‘in touch’ with our surroundings.”3 Indeed, “our most immediate and intimately felt geography is the body.”4
The bruises, blisters, chafed thighs—little injuries and woundings—had a bearing on how I came to see and feel in the pahars. Katrín Anna Lund describes how the moving body—as it touches the mountain ground—affects the view because the walker’s attention shifts between focusing on the ground and looking into the distance.5 In this cycling of attention, perspective, and gaze, a unique form of seeing and feeling is enabled.
Walking on these trails, one must be acutely conscious of every step taken, every piece of loose rock; the tiniest pebble, if missed, can send you hurling. As I gradually learned to flatten my body against a mountain slope to let other pedestrians pass, the pathways prepared me to make room for others (and their stories).
Likewise, the uniqueness of pahari ingredients is a testament to the people who live there and how they are emplaced, regardless of if they are “officially” in Kashmir or Northern Pakistan. Local food traditions remind us how the pahari people are placed differently in Pakistan’s political, social, cultural, and ecological landscape. The effort and care people put into sharing with me their place-based culinary traditions demonstrated this. They did not want me to overlook that despite being in the embrace of the state and its ambitions of categorization, divisibility, and rule—the pahars are interconnected in ways that frustrate the very essence of national citizenship.
Samrin bibi spent nearly a day preparing cookies, which she slowly baked in the tandoor as her great-grandmother did. Many people shared recipes passed down from family members who lived long before the Partition that divided the Indian subcontinent and also splintered Kashmir into two. Intergenerational recipes signal another kind of inheritance that cannot be simply placed within South Asia’s authoritative histories. They show us that Kashmir and the pahars, in general, exceed the histories of Pakistan and India.
Eating as Corporeal Generosity
Initially, I was hesitant to accept people’s invitations to break bread. There was so little food to go around, and I felt guilty for taking it. I understood eating in someone’s home mostly as an act of “taking away,” as burdensome and selfish, as worsening the scarcity. There is some truth to this, as having enough to eat is a challenge for many. In my mind, declining people’s invitations made sense. There was also the social pressure to keep up. If one family invites me to lunch, others may feel compelled to do the same, regardless of whether they have the means. The thought of accepting invitations to eat made me uncomfortable, even cagey.
Baba instantly disapproved of my made-up rule, advising me to pay attention to “the heart that goes into preparing a meal in someone’s anticipation—making chai, running to the bazaar to buy biscuits, cutting up the choicest cucumbers.” I recall when Niaz requested his brother to place a squash from his garden in my knapsack. When I politely declined to take the squash, he was unable to make eye contact with me for days. Or when I first turned down an invitation to eat in Parveen’s home with her family, her face, too, fell. Baba said gently: “Their invitation is a gift for you. Your acceptance is a gift to them.” It was my heart’s turn to sink.
I have revised my position since. I realize that no amount of carefulness on my part can fully ameliorate the consequences of my entry into people’s lives and relations. Ethnographic research is a material intervention and a trespass. There is no way around this. Pretending I can predict and manage all consequences is not an honest position either. Perhaps it is even arrogance. My rigidity had more to do with the sense of safety I so dearly desired and the insecurities I brought along. The arbitrary rules provided plausible deniability—if something went wrong, I could always say: “But I worked so carefully; I had all these protocols.” It was also a way to protect myself from getting too close to people, in case they wanted something from me that was too difficult or inconvenient to provide. As Abrar taught me, relationships are never this mellow; they have chaos to them.
As I slowly opened myself to the intensities of others, I accepted gifts; I also gave gifts. I offered assistance; I also asked for help. I went to eat in people’s homes, cook in their kitchens, and collect vegetables from their gardens. I also arranged meals for them when possible or brought ingredients along with me. This significantly changed the way I witnessed life in the pahars. I was welcomed into a new world altogether.
The Kitchen Is a Window to the Domestic
The kitchen is not simply a gendered space. It is where people enact intimate knowledge, values, and relations. It is a site of relationality and deep social ties that supersede the conceptual constructs I hoped to use for my research. The kitchen and what it summons—cooking, eating, chatting, collaborating—offer an opportunity to engage with people on their terms while on their turf, as embedded within a site of practice where they have uncontested expertise.
It is in the kitchen that women exert their power in the everyday, challenging stereotypes of their lack of participation in pahari political and social life. Amid the chopping of tomatoes, the clanging of pots and pans, and the swirling dust of masalas (spices), women conversed with me with confidence and pride. Giving the kitchen its due importance is about privileging the domestic sphere, where familial life unfolds, where gendered labor is primal, where children and relatives freely enter, and where all kinds of relationships ebb and flow.
Being in the kitchen is not always desirable either. Safiya hates cooking: “It blackens my hands and clothes with soot. And my hair smells of the fire.” She was referring to the open flame on which most people in the pahars prepare their food. “The pots and pans also go black,” her mother added. “When I married, I brought these shiny pans as part of my dowry. Now the fire has blackened them all.” Safiya reminds me: “Cooking is not always fun. To get rid of the smoke from my hair, I must go through several sachets of Sunsilk [shampoo].”
Men, too, cooked. A very nervous Shakoor welcomed me to his home for lunch one day. I arrived early while preparations for the meal were ongoing. Shakoor sat with me and requested his wife, Nazish, to begin cooking. She was not too pleased with the idea. A choreography unfolded: Shakoor conveyed each needed step through the movement of his hands or quiet gestures of his eyes. But Nazish could barely keep up. She could not contain herself, dropping the steel plate she was clutching: “I don’t do the cooking,” she burst out. “That’s his job!”
Shakoor was embarrassed. “I thought it would be odd to cook in front of you. After all, I am the man of the house,” he said sheepishly.
We burst out laughing.
Mealtime Is an Invitation for Dialogue
Mealtimes are invitations for dialogue outside formal research practice in “unstructured time.” Mealtime offers opportunities to learn other rules of engagement. It enabled me to converse with my hosts more openly, even while being adversarially placed in the mountains as a Pakistani citizen and an urban elite. It allowed people to ask me the same challenging and demanding questions that I posed to them. It also became the space where gentle nudges and advice were offered after I had put away my notebook for the day. People reminded me that the quest for life in the pahars is essentially theirs and that my role was rather modest. It was not to come up with grand theories extracted from their lives or, even worse, to force their lives into an existing conceptual framework—but to recognize that the urgency and genius of their struggles exceeded any of these frames. My role, as I slowly understood, was to amplify their lived and felt experiences within the institutional spaces I was a part of so that existing systems of theorization, witnessing, policy, solidarity, and action are challenged and called out. Mealtime was perhaps one of the few daily occasions where our relationship could be distilled to something other than “researcher” and “researched” and where we were joined by something far more carnal, such as the urgency of hunger.
We often prepared meals in the kitchen and ate together. My most riveting and insightful conversations took place in the kitchen. It is a site of hospitality and warmth. It also doubles as a venue of insight and learning sustained outside the pressures of the research encounter. The kitchen is at once many things. It is a performative space where everyday sociality is organized and replicated. It is a revealing space where the family unit’s innermost dynamics are rendered visible. It is an intimate space where the contours of relationships between domestic partners and their children come to life. However, the kitchen is also a decentering space, a place of undoing; it can generate as much discomfort and instability as warmth and sustenance.
Most homes in the pahars have not one but multiple kitchens. This is not an indication of opulence. The seasons and topography are so varied that people need several kitchens. There are winter kitchens, summer kitchens, exterior kitchens, interior kitchens, temporary kitchens, permanent kitchens, kitchens for guests, kitchens for family. An invitation to the kitchen is based on trust. The kitchen is intimate, an entry into a household’s heart. One host remarked: “We don’t let just anyone enter our kitchens. After all, the kitchen reveals the inner workings of the home.”
I was permitted into kitchens after months of difficult and awkward conversations. The journey to the kitchen helped me recognize my complicity with the oppression of the Kashmiri people. The experiences continually animate my thinking and inspire accountability in both the content and form of my work. As a Pakistani writing on Kashmir, I am aware that my research interests and career are a problematic extension of the objectification and romanticizing of the Kashmiri people by the Pakistani state and its citizens. The realization keeps me on my toes and continually prompts me to revise my understanding of ethical ally relationships. While, for the most part, I have attempted to write about the lives of my interlocutors on their terms, perhaps it is I who was so “out there” all along; the ajuba as Abrar called me.
It is fair to say that I held the balance of power in my favor. However, this does not mean that I was not challenged. Abrar, for example, went out of his way to keep an eye on me. He was very concerned about whether I drank alcohol (illegal and immoral for the place). He would sweep my room for any empty bottles whenever he had the chance (there were none to be found). One day, I used a cheap cologne as an air freshener. It had a strong smell of alcohol. Abrar rushed into my room, bewildered, sniffing the air. “I can smell a strange smell,” he said. He then spent the next ten minutes going through my things until he found the perfume bottle. I asked him if he wanted it. He said it was a pungent smell. Who in their right mind would willingly wear such a scent?
The winter kitchen.
The Ambient
We are planning to have sonchal, a seasonal leafy green that is unique to the pahars, for lunch. The mood is tense. Zahida is furious at her elder brother Naveed. I have gotten to know Naveed over the years. Naveed recently failed grade ten for the second time and decided to drop out. “The conditions at home are not such that I can study,” he sighs. His mother is the only earner, and he feels compelled to support her. Naveed is unemployed but occasionally manages to pick up a day job as a laborer in the nearest town.
Zahida is academically gifted; she excelled in school, earning top marks in her class despite the difficult conditions at home. As soon as she completed grade five, her mother, under pressure from Naveed, pulled her out of school. “My brother doesn’t let me study,” Zahida complained as she rinsed the greens. “Naveed has forbidden my mother to send me to school.”
Naveed defended himself: “We are a respectable family; we don’t send our girls to school. People take photographs of our women and put them on the Internet. Some weeks ago, someone leaked a girl’s photograph online, and boys from the neighboring village came looking for her. This is unacceptable.” These were likely rumors, as there was no Internet connectivity in the area at the time.
Zahida did not back down: “He has threatened our mother that if she sends me to school, he will run away from home. He is jealous of me; I am smart, he isn’t. He can’t stand that I, a girl, gain an education while he, a man, remains illiterate.”
Naveed went silent.
“They keep me home so that I look after the goats, cook, and clean.” Zahida looked her brother in the eyes: “I will never forgive you.”
Jessie Cox and Isaac Jean-François describe (Black) breathing as an unrepresentable motile practice.6 “Breathing, in everyday Black life, is a spectacular event,” they remind us.7 Hence, we must “sit with breathing, listen to it and the stories it might touch.”8 Cooking, eating, foraging are opportunities to sit with breathing. They offer mediations on affective resonance, backgrounds, and foregrounds. They help us think about not just life, but its pulse and pulsations, not about the heart, but the velocity of its beatings, not about violence, but the sensorium of its injuries. Food and its entanglements lead us to the ambient and the atmospheric, offering glimpses of the saturatings of violence, its ineffable textures and tonalities, as well as a deeper ambient of political and ethical life therein.
A Bloated Stomach
Annemarie Mol asks: “What if our theoretical repertoires were to take inspiration not from thinking but from eating?”9 She contends that we are transformed as we taste, chew, and swallow food: “With each bite, I incorporate yet another fragment of the world that had still been outside me a moment ago.”10 While the walking body (described earlier) moves through the world, the world moves through the eating body. Rather than rising above our bodily emplacement, Mol argues, eating enables us to enter a fleshy relation with others. Eating, if anything, suggests knowing as entangling and relating as inescapable.
Angela Meah and Peter Jackson situate cooking and eating within the “complex, temporal topography of domestic life” as repositories of future dreams that mobilize the sensory, the haptic, and the kinetic.11 Parin Dossa reminds us that food offers traces of the past and documents its presence in a context of erasure.12 Food’s corporeal and visceral logics offer productive crisis and interruption to how we think and write about violence. Foraging, cooking, eating can enable us to think further about life’s porosity to violence. This is in conjunction with other attempts to recuperate the contradictions and compromises of life as it is lived and deeply felt. Within the entanglements of food lies the potential to expand the very frames of violence—by allowing a glimpse into forms of life where one may not be actively resisting power structures—around the verve and joy of living, and the various modes of relationality, self-introspection, and witnessing eating together can engender.13
Tim Ingold suggests that anthropology, like art, should be committed to the “reality of a world of life, one that is never finally formed but ever in formation.”14 To do so, Ingold suggests, we must approach the world “from within,”15 that is, by “enter[ing] into the relations and processes that give rise to things so as to bring them into the field of our awareness.”16 Ingold understands this as a process of unwrapping, “of peeling away the layers of interpretative context so as to restore the work to presence.”17 The push and pull of food provides such entry points. Natasha Myers asks: “What might be possible if we were to alter the conditions of possibility for what we can see, say, imagine, feel, and know?”18 She further questions: “How might we embrace the incompleteness of our descriptions and analyses, and the indeterminacies of things and relations, in order to find ways to pay deeper attention to the excitable matters of life and death?”19 Naveen Minai and Sara Shroff encourage us to identify counterspaces, where knowledge is “less as a lone, or lonely, and linear project” and more as relational, reflexive, and playful.20 In the kitchens of the pahars, I stumbled onto cooking and eating as entangling and joyous invitations to listen, learn, think—feel.