Drives, Darkness, Coalsmoke: Food in the Jharia Coalfields of the 1970s
Volume 4 | Issue 8 [December 2024]

Drives, Darkness, Coalsmoke: Food in the Jharia Coalfields of the 1970s
—Rohit Manchanda

Volume 4 | Issue 8 [December 2024]

Images – Abhishek Jha

I live in Powai, a Mumbai precinct which of late has become a hotspot for the city’s eaters-out.  It’s dotted with restaurants – over fifty of them – and they all lie within five-odd kilometres from where I live. A large fleet of cuisines is represented, among them far Eastern, South Asian, ‘continental,’ North and South American. And then there are the places that, via the likes of Zomato, send food home, with the upshot that when my wife’s or my thoughts turn to having baahar ka khana, we end up feeling a bit befuddled – for surfeit of choice. Today’s Powai is unrecognizable from that of the early 1990s, home to no more than five or six restaurants – all ‘desi’ – and no Zomato or Swiggy, either, whizzing breakneck about the roads.

It all feels a bit unreal; and I’m gripped by a still greater sense of unreality when I think of the contrast today’s Powai presents to the purlieus of my childhood – the Jharia coalfields of Jharkhand, formerly Southern Bihar, of the mid-1970s.  The restaurants we had on hand were precisely two. “On hand” is a misleading way of putting it, as well; as against Powai’s 50-odd inside a five kilometre radius, one of that brace of coalfield restaurants lay sixteen kilometres from home, the other (so Google Maps tells me) thirty-four – about the entire length of Mumbai.

I’ve begun by speaking of restaurants, their plenitude or their lack, because when one fancies sampling some particular cuisine or other, the off-the-bat way to do it is to go along to a restaurant that serves it – an easy, almost spinal reflex of modern urban living.  In the coal country, and era, I’m speaking of, with restaurants so scarce, how did one get to try the food of regions other than one’s own – even, say, the food of the state we lived in, Bihar? (My family were ‘migrants’ from Punjab.)  It was uncomplicated: it had to be at other people’s homes.  And one’s tryst with any particular cuisine involved waiting – with, at times, the patience of a saint – for an invitation to come our way for a meal, or for a wedding or festivity, where that cuisine might feature.

To cap it all, neither the restaurants nor the homes of other people, save a handful, were a breeze to get to. A small coal-mining settlement, Amlabad, is where I grew up.  Placed on one brow of the river Damodar’s valley, Amlabad held the dubious distinction of having no other town or townlet for miles together on its side of the river; we lived out the clichés of ‘back of beyond’ and ‘splendid isolation’. To get to the homes of most of those known to us, you undertook a four-leg journey – first a jeep ride down to the Damodar, then a row-boat ride across the river (there was no bridge), next a climb up the valley’s opposite slope where stood a garage, in which sat our loose-jointed, bantam Fiat. We then drove, via a desolate few kilometres of dirt track, to the nearest metalled road, and on it, the however-many kilometres it might be to the home to which we’d been invited.  ‘What expeditions we have to make, baba re,’ my mother would observe, more to the heavens than to those around her, ‘for any and every thing.  Why did they have to find coal on our side of the river, and why then only at one spot?’

Now, Amlabad and its ilk, remote, far-flung, were the sorts of places you might expect to be cloistered, parochial in their make-up, steeped in their immemorial ways. To my astonishment when I look back on them, these coal colonies were quite the opposite: positively cosmopolitan. You had people here from all over the country, drawn in by the throng of professions that attend the mining of coal, turning the coalfields into cultural melting pots – or perhaps giant melting petri-dishes is more the mot juste, given their vast, flat sprawl.

Once the journeys in question had been made, I was initiated thus into Gujarati, Marwari, Maharashtrian, Kashmiri and ‘Madrasi’ (in an era of rampant stereotyping, this was the name conferred upon all food from South of the Vindhyas) cuisines … and then there was, as there had to be, the food of our adoptive state, Bihar. Singular in their ingredients and styles of cooking, the two staples of the state, and its vaunted pride, litti-chokha and sattu ki roti, had me in their thrall from very early on.  Litti-chokha, owing to its abundance of ingredients and the permutations one can perform with them (as one can with the daals of the land and their tadkas), lends itself to an endearing variousness.  There were about a dozen Bihari families, along the years, known to us well enough to have us over for the occasional meal; each played its own modulation on it.  Here you had a wealth of sattu within the litti, there a slight want of it (and the formula for the sattu itself varied not a little); here you had the litti’s flour globe fried, there you had it baked, or roasted; here you had the chokha prolific of tomato, there of brinjal or aloo; and then there were the variations in the punch of the mustard oil within the litti and the chokha, and of the hot ghee poured on at the end.  All in all, though, if of a clear winter’s midday, the air bright and amiable, the ratios among the ingredients struck the right chord, there could be no better homage to the weather or to your belly.

Because sattu in particular hit it off very well with my taste buds, sattu ki roti became much yearned-for, and when I was fourteen, two yearnings found a giddying confluence when we moved right next to a Bihari family – yearning number two having to do with the daughter of the house (call her Alka) who, by common consensus, was of distractingly pretty face and build.  A neighbourly culinary traffic ensued: of Punjabi specialities to their home, of Bihari delicacies to ours, accompanied, on my part, by fevered imaginings of a dalliance with Alka.  Before long, these fancies were shot to pieces by my getting lured into a boy-gang’s scheme to sprinkle alkusi powder, an evilly itchy creation of the plant world, onto the girls’ seats in the school bus, applied with particular ardour upon the seats of the prettiest. A roundly deplorable, wicked prank, of course, fathomable only by dint of being endemic to the time and the place.  For the pains we’d taken, and the crimsoned, rashy legs that resulted, we were summoned by Alka’s mother and given an epochal ticking-off, she looming statuesque above us on the chabutra of their home, eight boys cowering for a whole hour on the gravel below, as much under her basilisk glare and lashing tongue (‘Would you like this done to your mothers? Shall I do it?’) as at the certainty of parental castigation to follow.  Most lowering for my spirits was the thought that this was where any chance I might have had of being in Alka’s good graces, that essential first step towards dalliance, had run spectacularly aground.  There was further cause for dismay: here too, I thought, went up in smoke any further prospect of tucking into those despatches of sattu ki roti from that household. Yet somehow, flying in the face of all reasonable pessimism, sattu ki roti and sattu-aam-panna sharbat (the drink, again a Bihar / eastern UP speciality, compounded of raw boiled mango, sattu, and flavourings, that’s a much-loved antidote to summer’s baking heat) continued graciously to make their way to our door once or twice borne in by, before my goggling eyes, none other than Alka herself.  Ah, the limitless kindnesses of big-hearted, broad-visioned women! – this was among my first experiences of that wondrous quality.  Sidelight: there was another grand fiasco that I perpetrated upon myself in which food and a pretty girl figured large, this one involving exotic European cuisine (for the coal mines also had a smattering of visitors – ‘experts’ – from overseas, such as from France, Poland, the USSR) and a Polish beauty. In this debacle, too, nourishing female kindness played a starring role in my redemption; but in the interests of space and of not trying my readers’ patience too high, I shall desist from setting it down here.

A feature of the Jharia coalfields that brought particular joy to the taste buds was their being sited right beside West Bengal. The Bihar-Bengal border threaded its way only some 30 km from Dhanbad; in the coalfields, Bengalis teemed. And anticipation soared when a feast-worthy occasion in a Bengali home came along, for the promise it held of treats like shorshe maachh and aloo posto being ladled onto one’s banana-leaf plate.  Shorshe maachh, aloo posto – those extraordinary Bengali conjurings, fish in mustard-paste curry, potato coated in poppyseed paste. I re-write these names so as to relish again both the juiciness of their spoken sounds and the deluge of flavours they swamp the palate in, getting it to twinkle and sparkle. No less enticing was the promise of the vegetable dishes – gobi or beans or parwal (one of my all-time favourites, this last) – but with a difference: namely, with fish heads lovingly embedded in them à la Mughal inlay work: a Bengali culinary kink that to this day both charms and bemuses.  Can’t they have anything without doping it with the scent of fish used to be our marvelling question?

It wasn’t just the meat and veg that enthralled. In Bengali homes, we occasionally came across a variety of rice that was little known, yet rivalled in redolence any shorshe maachh or machher jhol that it crouched beside. A few encounters were all it took, and my parents had become lifelong devotees of it.  This rice came also from Bengal; a variety that for aroma and for flavour clean outclassed, for our senses, the greatly more feted basmatis of the land. Called the Gobindbhog (or Gobindobhog with a third ‘o’ to it), to us it seemed to merit its exalted name richly: bhog, or consecrated food, for Lord Krishna: and to stand unequalled as a foil to fish or mutton curry (it was not to be had with chicken curry, a lowly dish by comparison and on which it was deemed wasted).  So fond of Gobindobhog did my parents become that when my father got transferred to other fields, out in Orissa or in Madhya Pradesh, and after he’d retired, too, all the way in Delhi, my parents still made it a point to somehow or other reel in the odd kilo or two of Gobindobhog, requesting, or calling in, favours from friends and confreres coming over from their former haunts.  If this is starting to sound like a plug for Gobindobhog, I say, unabashedly: it is.  See if you can taste it for yourself; you will be hooked. It appears to be more readily gettable now; I’ve seen it pop up, of late, on ads on Facebook.

Dark Drives

However ravishing the delights of home food might be, eating out has its own induplicable charms.  Other than the sensual refreshment of a change in setting, it’s to do, I believe, with the pure indulgence of being waited upon from start to finish, not having to move a finger towards one’s nourishment save in the act of chewing.  (I’ve often been prompted to wonder: is this also why the notion of hospitality, in the subcontinent at any rate, involves not expecting one’s guests to move the smallest muscle by way of rendering help, either towards laying out the food, or serving it, or cleaning up afterwards?  To make someone feel truly special – atithi devo bhava, as the credo goes – unqualified exemption from effort is the paramount thing.)

To return to point: as I’ve indicated, if we wished to go in for that sort of indulgence, there were but two options before us.  The one nearer us, in the town of Dhanbad, was Vegis, that Madrasi eatery (it might, for all I know, have been an Udupi joint) where I first discovered the charms of a well-turned uthapa.  And on the far side of Dhanbad, by the storied Grand Trunk Road that ran some 35 kilometres distant, lay the second, where an enterprising Sikh had set up a dhaba – this, too, in grand isolation. With the result that the food we travelled that sizeable distance to eat, on roads that for the most part weren’t roads at all but lumpy ribbons of earth merely cleared of vegetation, was, ironically, the food of our state of origin.  I needn’t say much about the fare to be had there; it was exactly that which you’d expect a dhaba to offer. Tandoori chicken, seekh kabab; tandoori naan, kaali daal … so pervasive, indeed such a commonplace, have these names become as to rob them of any special charge they once held, turning haplessly into nonsense words.  Two other attributes of the place, instead, dominate recall. One was its ambience. You sat, in time-honoured dhaba tradition, on coarse-rope cots that bit into your hindquarters even as you bit into the chicken’s.  Up above us vaulted the open sky, nothing but the trees around to impede the view of its intense starriness, unobscured in the 70s either by light pollution or by high AQI.  An integral part of the ambience was the aural: the plaintive wails of jackals emanating from the farmland and scrub about us, infusing the meal with, as those who’ve heard jackals keening at close quarters will agree, solemn intimations of mortality. Luckily, their melancholy was counteracted more than adequately by one of my father’s friends who had recourse to such nimble wit, and such ear-witheringly foul language to go with it, that even the other men of the party were left stupefied and, in equal measure, regaled (the women could do little but take elaborate mock offence and beseech the gods to curb his tongue; the children, little but shrivel up in hiccupping mirth).

Above all else, there was the darkness. Dinner (it was always dinner at the dhaba), owing to the nonstop power cuts, was most often had by lanternlight.  For that matter, this sort of thing – eating out-of-doors by the glow of the lantern, encircled by shimmering haloes of moths and mosquitoes, prodigally starry sky above – happened routinely at home as well: power cuts were copious, and many dinners were had on the chabutra. The situation’s irony wasn’t lost on anyone. What joy, coal fielders used to snort, to be running the collieries that keep power plants going along and across the nation – and ourselves have no current sixteen-sixteen hours a day.

The other standout recall about the dhaba meals was the drives we undertook to get to it.  Between Dhanbad’s outskirts and the G.T. Road the going was lightless and desolate; hold-ups along this longish stretch weren’t unknown.  So, seeking comfort in strength, families banded together, and we’d go in small or large convoys to the place, a string of car headlamps cleaving asunder the rebarbative dark of the countryside.  About a decade later, my father was posted to the adjoining Raniganj coalfields of Bengal. So much more desolate still were the drives here, and so likely to be enlivened by robbers ambushing you and relieving you of the burden of your valuables, that outings to friends’ homes or restaurants often involved precaution at another pitch altogether: shadowing our car to and fro would be a car with an armed escort.

Unsurprisingly, then, whenever I’ve cast back to eating out in the coalfields, two facets that have been synonymous with it are those longish or long car journeys and an ever-present air of hazard, of menace.  Not the most appetising of preludes to a meal, one might sniff; and yet, it worked in fact the other way around, the sense of deliverance at journey’s end magnifying the relish of the hard-won sip and bite.

Smoke and Mirrors

After my schooldays, I spent several years in Britain. On my return, after a brief interlude in Delhi, I came to Bombay, where I’ve lived since the early 1990s.  Over an entire decade –   and I couldn’t put my finger on precisely why – I felt the food I was having didn’t taste quite the same as before, even though it comprised the old, long-accustomed dishes and recipes of yesteryear. This may sound trite, a cliché of our times spurred by lazy nostalgia – ‘Oh, the food of today (or cinema, or news, or sense of civic decency) isn’t a patch on what it used to be’ – but nor can its kernel of truth be denied.

The answer came unlooked-for about a decade later, through stroke of chance.  My wife and I had driven over to a relatively unknown wildlife reserve situated some five hours east of Bombay, spread over a chain of forested hills.  Up on the hills, at the reserve’s Rest House, we were informed by the resident forest guard, a youth in his mid-twenties, that there was no food to be had there; the Rest House had no kitchen. Ashok – his name is inerasably stencilled into memory because he, living completely alone in that wilderness and with not a single ‘knowledge resource’ on hand (this was in the early 2000s), turned out to be perhaps the most consummate amateur ornithologist I’ve ever come across. At one uncommon bird-call, he exclaimed, ‘Ah, the white browed Indian scimitar babbler!’, and I thought it an outrageous bluff, only to be proved wrong – young Ashok said he was guard, wildlife guide and cook all rolled into one, and could prepare us our meals, but on the condition that we got the provisions for ourselves; he hadn’t a mite to spare.

So down we drove (drives again!) the half hour or so it took to get to the nearest town, carried the necessaries over, and ended up having dinner cooked unfussily, but sure-handedly, by Ashok. From the first bite, we found ourselves eating slowly, ruminatively, savouring in each mouthful the unexpectedly beguiling flavours. What made the meal so out of the ordinary didn’t dawn on me for a bit, for the fare was simple – fish, daal, aloo-gobi, roti – rustled up with the simplest complement of spice and condiment: salt, haldi, chilli, dhania, jeera.  And then it hit me.  It was the fire over which Ashok was cooking. The reserve had no kitchen, no cooking gas either; the fire was al fresco, wood-and-coal within a clay-brick brazier. This was the bouquet of flavours that was ravishing the senses; this the bouquet I had been missing all these years. The earthiness imparted by woodsmoke and coalsmoke and clay, rendering the simplest of foods otherworldly.  And it struck me at once that back in the coalfields, this is how meals had without exception been prepared: over wood-andcoal fires, the wood used for tinder, the coal for bulk fuel.  LPG hadn’t made its way into kitchens yet, not in the hinterland, and wood and coal fires were the only kind around (there were kerosene stoves, too, but they had little place when you had swaths of coal lying about you).

At the time, though, in the 70s, we didn’t give so much as a passing thought to the rich smokiness that those fires kneaded into the food, for it was merely the everyday, the habitual. It’s the novel and the scarce, no matter how shabby, that we crave; to the commonplace, no matter how precious, we give short shrift.  Like the planet’s foliage or its purity of water – they’re taken as a given, as factory-fitted standards only to be expected, and supplied.  Until the time that they’re withdrawn, or degraded.  It was only when coal and wood gave way to LPG that we began to long for the redolence bestowed by lignite and ligneous flame and smoke.  Witness, today, how coveted the tang of smoke and earth has become, the high premium that a ‘woodsmoke pizza’ or a ‘genuine handi dopiaza’ now command.

That, then, beyond the domesticity of most food experience and the drives, was a third leitmotif that made the food of the coal belts what it was: the primordial smoke, its sulphurous, tarry tones. It couldn’t have gone on, of course; within the bookends of the 20th century, coal had gone from being miraculous energypacked rock to criminal defiler of air and waters, and had had to be retired from culinary service.

***

8 Comments

  1. Subir

    Superb piece. I grew up in Dhanbad, Jharia was close to my school, so I can relate to a lot of this.

  2. Tinku

    Being a bengali, a passionate food maker, and a gobindobhog+ sattu fan, i devoured this piece more quickly than i usually do. Down it goes with a gulp of water now!
    Will read many times more.

    • Rohit Manchanda

      What a hilarious vision you’ve conjured up here, Tinku: of gulping the essay down.
      I’m moved to hear that you mean to read it again, perhaps more than once again – thank you very much indeed. I can only hope it doesn’t induce literary dyspepsia on multiple devourings!

  3. Shonali Goswami

    So much of this article resonates with my childhood, I grew up in Jamshedpur which while it may have been more urban, it still had all the challenges of a small town!

    • Rohit Manchanda

      So glad my essay resonated with you, Shonali. Thank you. Certainly, Jamshedpur was more urban – also a lot more orderly – than the rather anarchic spaces of the Jharia region. I’d been to Jamshedpur as a child. But I can well imagine that, as you say, we were subjected to very many of the same idiosyncrasies by virtue of living in Jharkhand’s industrial regions.

  4. Radha

    Brilliantly evocative. Good food is not about the ingredients it is about the associations and environs and history the author has captured something bigger than the food… the whole circular arc of experience of growing up in the coalfields, it was both the center and boundary of his growing up years and infused so much in between, and discovering the missing embers as coal slowly disappears from food and life.
    Coal chula fuelled food is rare for us now, and soon coal might be in relegated to history.

    • Rohit Manchanda

      Thank you, Subir! How nice to know that you grew up in those environs as well, and that the piece struck a chord with you.

    • Rohit Manchanda

      Absolutely, Radha. My strongest memories of food are also tied inextricably to, as you pithily put it, associations, environs, history. Those dimensions are at least as prominent in my recall as the purely culinary ones. Which is why I felt I should portray as much the atmospherics surrounding the food as the food itself. Very glad that the angle I took chimed with you, and many thanks for your very generous thoughts!

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