Food as Autobiography
Volume 3 | Issue 5 [September 2023]

Mallika Sarabhai

Volume 3 | Issue 5 [September 2023]

All my life I have had a particular special relationship to food. Taste, texture, colour, fragrance make or break food for me. During some of my life, food was the panacea to all grief; sometimes it was the enemy of what I wanted to look like, and sometimes of what I wanted to feel like; more and more it became the fuel for my physicality, the substance that allowed my high-octane dancing. Like most people I sometimes eat because I am hungry and there is no choice, but mostly I tend to skip the meal and drink several glasses of water. Food with huge amounts of masala or ghee or oil tend to turn me off, and food that tastes of what it actually is, draws me. I am not happy with the feeling of being too full and given the choice will remain a little hungry than full. Where did these preferences come from?

My father, Vikram Sarabhai, was brought up in a Jain-Hindu family, with highly progressive parents for whom the future meant being world citizens. It was an egg eating vegetarian family. My grandparents and their eight children sat on Gujarati patlas, the kind used in rituals in many pujas, and ate off silver thalis and katoris on a slightly more raised off the floor stool called a bajot. There would be the thin rotis, hot and fresh and spread with ghee, two or three vegetables, probably a farsan, like a tikki or patra, dal and rice. The dal would probably be different on different days. At night the family sat at a dining table, with an array of knives and a fork, a soup spoon, and a dessert spoon. They would start with a soup. There would be bread and butter or rolls on the table, and the children would need to learn to take the butter with a butter knife and spread it with another. They also learned how to cut with a fork and knife, to cut with one hand and then shift the fork to the other if not using the knife and so on and so forth.

My mother, Mrinalini Sarabhai, was brought up in Madras (now Chennai) in a family that was rebelling against the  strictures  of Brahminical rule. My maternal grandfather was a Tamil Brahmin who had broken rules by going abroad to study. He then married a Malayali Nair girl (she was 13), a meat eater in the Nair tradition. My grandmother agreed to the marriage if he promised to educate her. And educate her, he did. The education, besides the usual languages and Science and Maths, consisted of horse riding, driving a phaeton, tennis, and British etiquette. He then became a complete non vegetarian to show that he cared a hoot about the approval of fellow Brahmins. Amma grew up  a serious meat and fish eater who hated all vegetables except potatoes. My grandmother was very strict about all food on the plate being eaten, and Amma would manoeuvre to swoop the vegetables off her plate and into the hands of a sympathetic butler  who then took the food surreptitiously out of the dining room. Her mother would scold her when she made a fuss at every meal about not wanting vegetables and would say, “For your sins, you will marry a vegetarian.” And that is precisely what happened.

Soon after my parents got married in 1942, they left for England where papa was working towards a Ph.D. at St. John’s College, Cambridge. Soon the war broke out and the food shortages began. In those years and for many decades later, being a vegetarian in Britain, or most any European country, was difficult, to say the least. Once the war broke out it became worse. Papa steadfastly refused to eat meat or fish. I have heard stories of days on end with not even an egg in the market, living on bread or rice with tomato soup poured over it instead of dal. I am not sure whether Amma resorted to whatever meat or fish she could find or whether as a loyalist she suffered with papa. Half way through the war they managed to return home.

Used as she was to spicy delicious meals in her home in Madras, Amma was offered the rather bland and sattvic food in the home of her parents-in-law. In two months, this already thin woman lost twenty pounds. Of four of her five sisters’ in law Amma used to bitterly say, “When we went out on a drive, every time we passed an animal – a goat or cow or buffalo, or even a chicken, they would ask me gleefully, ‘Do you feel like eating it?’”. Luckily for her, she and papa soon moved to their new home where she was in charge of her own kitchen. Eggs appeared, although the home remained sans meat and fish. As Amma began traveling the world, she learned recipes from many countries, and started teaching our maharaj, cook, vegetarian versions of these. Armenian samosas, enchiladas, cheese souffles were already on the nightly menu by the time I came to eating adult food at two or three.

Amma herself had no interest in food. Papa did. So, menus were devised for him. He was also very weight conscious, so calories had to be factored in. Following my grand parents’ pattern, we had Indian lunches and non-Indian dinners. This also suited their life styles as non-Indian food tended to be lighter. Post dinner, Papa went back to his work at the Physical Research laboratory and Amma to direct plays or watch drama rehearsals at Darpana, across the garden.

My brother and I went to Shreyas, a Montessori school run by my aunt, Papa’s older sister Leena. The school day included a compulsory lunch and I loathed the food and the need to eat everything. My food habits and preferences were clear by the time I was five. Bread and butter, white sugar on most things, potatoes, and rice. So being served ‘healthy’ but over cooked vegetables and watery dals at school was misery. I kept a packet of sugar in my pocket and sprinkled it over everything. I also learned sleight of hand, like Amma’s childhood butler, and could hide uneaten food in the hand holding the thali as we went to wash it.

I was thirteen and a plump child when it hit me that I wanted to be svelte. Amma’s advice was useless as she never had to watch what she ate and didn’t eat much anyway. Papa, on the other hand, balanced food and water and exercise. He took me under his wing and slowly changed my palette. In a year, I was eating healthier and better and had learned how to count calories. Health was not my concern at that stage; being able to carry off any clothes I wanted to wear, was. Over the next twenty years I tried diet after diet, starvation, living on one glass of Complan and one orange a day, binge eating, bulimia and all manner of crazy things. (More about this in my book, In Free Fall: My Experiments With Living). It was only when I decided to dance professionally that the idea  that my body needed to be healthy and fit, not thin, dawned on me. It has taken several decades for me to learn to listen to my body, respect it and what it does as a dancer, trust it to tell me what it needs in terms of nutrition.

I am an egg eating vegetarian and I am a foodie. I love tasting new cuisines and varying taste palettes. I also love cheeses, crusty breads, salads, and wines. And I cannot cook. I am clumsy, cut myself, get impatient. Luckily all the men in my life love cooking. I provide dish washing talents. And when there really is no one to cook, and no take away or delivery possibilities, I tell myself it is a perfect time to go to salads and fruits.

In 1994, we built Ahmedabad’s first real performance venue and called it NATARANI, as a celebration of Amma. In 1999, we built an open-air Gaudi inspired cafe. It is open to the public and serves healthy and mostly organic food. There are ten signature rice dishes – from tamarind to coriander and from tomato to lemon, all served with a delicious side dish, a raita or a chutney. There are straight sandwiches and grilled ones besides eclectic eggs and different pastas. I have created a salad series that will be launched soon. It is one of the few public places that is not monitored, so couples come and spend hours. And during our season post monsoon, at the next table you may find Varun Grover or Rekha Bhardwaj or an entire Kathakali team.

In 1996, having been talking and dancing environmental consciousness for long, I decided to try organic farming. I looked for a piece of land that was so bad that no one could farm it any more. Just beyond Gandhinagar I found a village full of farmers no longer farming. No water. No electricity. Over use of chemical fertilisers. I began my experiment, unaided by wise people. We found water, and for the first three years I planted protein rich beans and dals and pushed them back into the soil. Today it gives the family organic vegetables and salads and close to 750 kgs of organic wheat, moong and bajra. When I entertain the food comes either from the cafe or from what I still think of as Amma’s kitchen. At Darpana, birthday celebrations mean dal wadas and green chillies rather than cake with the candle stuffed into a pile of dal wadas.

On my many tours internationally, I have often been in the homes of very enthusiastic diasporic Indians. They go miles out of the way to give me ‘ghar ka khana’. And that is exactly what I dread. When I am traveling, I want to taste local food. When in Nigeria I want to try the fried plantain and red-hot chilli sauce. In Japan I want to go to the temples to eat the amazingly delicate Zen cooking. And I get stuck with paneer. I am still developing nice ways of telling hosts that I would prefer asparagus or a big bowl of salad to dal chawal.

In 2012, my interest in food and the increasing rubbish available in the packed food market,  pushed me into doing some research for a  documentary on food called Let’s Talk About Food. Made for the Public Service Broadcasting Trust (PSBT), it spoke to experts on nutrition, agriculture, health, environmentalists, and visited organic farms and food research laboratories. The film is available on PSBT’s website and is an eye opener. What was bad then is so much worse now.

Over the last two decades, I treat myself to a fifteen-day Ayurvedic treatment – a cleansing and rebooting. I go vegan or on to a five- or seven-day liquid fast of vegetable soups and juices, and frequent glasses of coconut water. My skin clears, my eyes get brighter and I feel rejuvenated. Aches and pains disappear with the various targeted treatments.

Today I have a good relationship with my body and with food. I know what my body likes and what my palette craves. I know what I eat or drink that is awful for me, and I try and find ways to balance the negatives with the positives. I do not get guilt ridden if I occasionally binge or drink too much. I just correct it or balance it out. The environment, food, one’s body and mind are so interlinked that balancing all of them becomes important, and if balanced, very satisfying. I go on trying to achieve that.