Onam Sadhya
Volume 3 | Issue 9 [January 2024]

Shashi Tharoor

Volume 3 | Issue 9 [January 2024]

What can a Malayali writer think about when asked to write about food and eating? The answer is, inevitably, the Onam festival and its famous feast, the sadhya.

Artwork – Vaishnavi Ramesh, 2024

A typical image the advent of Onam evokes is that of the sumptuous Malayali sadhya spread out over fresh green plantain leaves, packed with colours as vivid as the shades on a Kathakali actor’s elaborate costume and makeup. It is at once an image of natural simplicity and glorious cooking, what with its medicinal navara rice and sambar and parippus, or the ubiquitous avial (now the name of a rock band) and pachchari. Depending on which part of Kerala you find yourself in, you’d be in for a treat of up to 30 dishes in one serving, each following the next in a delightful mess, with the sweet payasam poured right into the leaf at the end, leaving those of us unaccustomed to eating liquid desert with our bare fingers racing to deal with the repercussions as things slowly swim, drip, and fall right out of an edge we neglected to lift up.

As my former colleague Manu S Pillai explains in his magisterial history The Ivory Throne, historically, the great laboratories of Kerala cuisine were in the royal palaces or kovilakams that lorded over the coastal landscape, vying with one another to set new standards through food during Onam. Then there were the great temples of the land, each serving one distinct (and divine tasting) concoction or another. You have, for instance, the Ambalapuzha milk payasam sanctified by Sri Krishna in the shrine there, or the Sabarimala appam and aravana, the favourite of its bachelor god Ayyappan. Our gods, like more mortal Malayalis, love this time of the year, and Onam spirit was best expressed through not only more food but better food.

Before Independence, the Senior Maharani of Travancore, Sethu Lakshmi Bayi, in the 1930s presided over grand Onam banquets that fed her family as well as the 300 servitors in her palace establishment. As Manu S Pillai tells it: seated on a silk rug in a large green marble hall at the head of the assembly, she would have plantain leaves served to her in a large silver tray, following which Brahmin attendants would call for the feast to begin. What followed was a fascinating royal procession. The kitchens at the Maharani’s palace were staffed by 24 cooks and at lunchtime the royal servants, in all their livery, would form a disciplined line and arrive at the dining hall carrying massive copper vessels on their turbaned heads, full of hot, freshly cooked food.

Then there were rules about who was served what. Under the matrilineal system for which Kerala is famous, the Maharani’s poor husband was only a commoner, and while his exalted royal spouse was served four varieties of payasams at the end of her very elaborate Onam meal, the consort was treated only to two. Of course, others received only one payasam, which in itself was still a delight since the palace cook was considered the best in all Kerala.

Artwork – Vaishnavi Ramesh, 2024

While culinary grandeur and fine dining was a daily affair at the palace, ordinary Malayalis waited eagerly for Onam every year when they too could partake of feasts like kings and queens. I remember as late as the 1960s and 1970s when, on Onam day (or perhaps the birthday of a magisterial great aunt or family matriarch), we would be served massive lunches at our ancestral home in a village in Palakkad district, with all of us children gathered together around the principal courtyard, the kitchens abuzz with activity and excitement.

Onam, celebrated both as a harvest festival as well as in memory of the great king Mahabali (who one presumes had a maha-belly!), was also special in other ways. Legend has it that he once ruled over Kerala and brought it such tremendous peace and plenty (with perhaps too many sadhyas!) that even the gods grew jealous. It was not merely about the food but about the complete cultural experience, where tenants and farmers called at the “big house” and received presents of cloth and money, and were feasted at the expense of their feudal landlords who took the occasion to express their gratitude and thanks.

The feast, certainly, was the most critical part of the celebrations, and to this day all one needs to do is attend a wedding anywhere in Kerala and listen to venerable elders sneer at the quality of the sadhya, which is never “like in the good old days.” Such was the importance attached to feasts in fact that in Travancore, on state occasions, the cutting of the vegetables was always begun with the Prime Minister or Dewan arriving in his palanquin, or later his limousine, and ceremoniously chopping a cucumber or whatever vegetable most appealed to his exalted status.

Clearly, food has always meant a great deal to the Malayali!

But this is all a vegetarian affair that I describe—there is also Onam by the streetside with its remarkable variety of non-vegetarian options, from various meen (fish) curries to what I presume (since I am vegetarian) are delicious meaty delights. Anyone visiting practically even the most obscure village in Kerala, down in the plains or up in the hills, in the north, the south, or the centre, will be treated to the presence of the ubiquitous thattu kadai with its principle staple of parotta (not ‘paratha’) and beef curry. Kerala street food has a sanctity and identity of its own, and generations have grown with the most heartfelt love for the puttu and kadala, or appam with stew (mercifully with a vegetarian version for someone like me), our own local version of the noodle called iddiappam, fish preparations like karimeen pollichathu, prawns curry, or kozhi varuthadu (even if you can’t pronounce it!). Then of course there is the most simple but utterly delicious of them all- rice with yogurt and a simple coconut chutney.

It is easy to think of Onam as a vegetarian festival, but it is that primarily to Hindus. Christians and Muslims in Kerala celebrated Mahabali’s memory with their own fare, including kappa and fish curry. Tapioca has today become an integral part of food in Kerala—steamed, fried, turned into chips or a pasty mix, and so on, usually accompanied with a spicy dip. It is a popular dish, though one would perhaps be surprised to learn that, for all its popularity and existence as a close and integral constituent of the Malayali kitchen, kappa arrived in Kerala as recently as the 1880s. Troubled by famine and determined to substitute rice with a cheaper option for the poor in his state, it was a Maharajah of Travancore who first brought to the coast from Latin America what has today become a favourite dish among Malayalis across the board.

Such international influence is hardly a novelty. It is using Chinese nets that our fishermen have been catching fish for centuries as a passing glance at the sea outside Cochin will still show; fish that would then be fried in the cheena-chatti or chinese pan. Spices grown locally were transported by Arabs to the rest of the world, while the Muslim Moplahs of Malabar imbibed Arab influences into their own cooking. Throughout history, from the times of the Phoenicians and Romans down to the age of the Europeans, Kerala has traded with the world and welcomed every cultural experience the seas brought its way. And each trading visitor has left a mark on its local cuisine, which is at once quintessentially Malayali and dynamically international. The colours of the Onam sadhya are also the colours of Kerala’s global heritage.

This perhaps explains why tourists descending upon the state make it a point not only to visit its beaches and benefit from its ayurvedic traditions, but also to taste local foods, which often constitute an integral part of that ayurvedic regime. Even within India, as someone recently told me, in Bombay, for instance, Malayali housewives have been throwing open the doors of their suburban flats and welcoming guests to partake of home-cooked sadhyas, earning an income this way and leaving many thoroughly delighted and cleverly craving for more of the plantain leaf and its delicious contents. And that is on a regular day. Onam means the number of people streaming into these drawing rooms is in the dozens.

Kerala food is a very fulfilling affair, and it must be added that if there is such a thing as a Keralite belly, its dimensions owe much to the sheer sumptuousness of what we Malayalis are accustomed to eating. As I ruefully contemplate my own expanding girth, giving me the Maha-belly that is commonly associated with Onam and Mahabali, I am resolving that this year, if at all possible, I will skip the Onam sadhya– which always leaves its partakers richer in culinary experience but heavier around the waist!

Artwork – Vaishnavi Ramesh, 2024