An Appetite for Maternal Care
by Sushmita Samaddar

Ingredients

1 kg chicken

4 potatoes

1 cup plain yogurt

2 tablespoons ginger-garlic paste

1 teaspoon garam masala powder

1 teaspoon turmeric powder

1 teaspoon cumin powder

1 teaspoon red chili powder

Whole garam masala

A couple tej pattas (Indian bay leaf)

1 cup sliced onions

1 cup minced tomatoes

Handful kasuri methi (dried fenugreek leaves)

Salt to taste

Pinch of white granular sugar

Marinate chicken in curd, little salt, a tablespoon of ginger-garlic paste, and a pinch of garam masala powder for at least half hour. Keep aside.

In oil, put a couple of tej pattas and some whole garam masala (ok if you don’t have). Fry thinly slice onions till translucent. Put a tbsp of ginger-garlic paste. Fry for 2/3 minutes, stirring the entire time. Add minced tomatoes, masalas and salt, plus a pinch of sugar (marinated chicken also has some salt, so be careful). Fry till oil comes out (add little water if necessary). Add potatoes until slightly cooked. Add chicken. Fry till water dries, stirring frequently. Add water till chicken is soft, potatoes are cooked, and gravy thickens. Add crushed kasuri methi (crush by rubbing between palms) a couple of minutes before switching off.

-Indrani Samaddar

This recipe begins with a crackle. It is a loud undertaking (as most Indian recipes can be). The sizzles speak loud, the spices smell loud, the smoke dances loud. This is not a quiet food, communicating to the household its presence long before it is set on the table. Ultimately, it will settle as a burnt golden umber, tasting of earth and of umami, of home and a treat at the same time. Its culinary experience will demand the dust of a chapati or the gluiness of Basmati rice to complete its identity. This is the staple Samaddar family Sunday chicken.

My mother has cooked this recipe every Sunday ever since I can recall. At first it was once a week, because we could afford meat only once a week. Then it was once a week, because that is how traditions are born. For a conservatively patriarchal household, where nutrition fell in her locus of duties, Sunday chicken was a safe win for my working mother When Ma first met Rita Didi, now the guardian of our kitchen for over 18 years, Didi didn’t know how to cook. But Ma hired her still because Rita Didi needed to become financially independent to escape her abusive husband struggling with alcoholism. And the first recipe Ma taught Rita Didi was the Sunday chicken. When Baba suffered a heart attack, and our house only consumed boiled, unsalted food in solidarity with him, the only allowed outlier was the Sunday chicken. Sunday chicken has been an experiential consumption process for my family. It has been a recipe for stability. It has been an act of care from Ma.

“Meet the Politician Who Wants to Make the Cow ‘India’s National Mother’”
-Headline of a news article published Vice, 2019

“Now, HP Congress MLA wants cow declared ‘Mother of the Nation’, Assembly passes resolution”
-Headline of a news article published The Print, 2019

“Cow Vigilantes in India Killed at Least 44 People”
-Headline of a news article published in Bloomberg, 2019

Like most children, India too is a child fraught with parental trauma. A surrogate mother to Hinduism’s political and religious tenets, the cow, in all its oedipal glory, is the most controversial animal in the country. Twenty out of India’s 28 states have a regulation against her slaughter. Her maternal nourishment lies in her milk as a mother, in her plows as a co-farmer, and in her dung as a biofertilizer. This is her care, her bovine tenderness to her children. Cows may stop traffic on the streets in India, but not as ubiquitously or as exclusively as Western media would have you believe. Cows may stop traffic on the streets because India coexists with her domestic animals, and sometimes they need to cross the streets too.

This tenderness which her children compete for, most notably in parental rivalries with Muslims and Dalits, who desire their mother as well, is ultimately compromised. They are most threatened by those who act upon this desire in consumption as they could not do themselves. In vying for exclusive maternal affection, her children practice violent protective instincts: “I had promised that I will break the hands and legs of those who hesitate in saying ‘Vande Mataram’, those who feel pain in saying ‘Bharat mata ki jai’, and also those who do not consider cows their mother and kill them” (former member of the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly and Bhartiya Janata Party member Vikram Saini, as reported by NDTV).

Saini’s slippage between Vande Mataram (I praise thee, Mother), Bharat Mata (Mother India), and cow as a maternal symbol in a linear consciousness is not accidental. Neither is the aggression expressed in performance of his vigilance. Each of those identities – that of a mother, of female cattle, and of nationhood – map around the same paradigm of gendered fragility for India.

In 2018, I returned to India as a newly minted master’s student from the UK, and I confessed to my mother over our first meal together that I could no longer eat her Sunday chicken. In fact, I was abandoning all meat and dairy products entirely. They disagreed with my newfound ecological morality. While in the UK, I was jerked into the reality of climate science, and it left me feeling so singularly inconsequential as a social participant that the only thing I could grasp for control was my own dietary consumption. For the first time in my life, I was going to grocery stores, picking up food, and turning it over to check what made it guilty – where was it produced, how far had it traveled, what had gone into its packaging, and how was I going to be complicit? By the time I was ready to head back to India, I was resolute that I needed to alter my relationship to food.

Except, “I” is a collective pronoun. My consumption process was not exclusively my own. I had gone vegan “for the planet”, sure. But, in the process, I had disrupted my intimate, stable Samaddar family tradition. How was Ma to show her joy in having me back if she could not save the coveted leg piece for me? I had robbed her of her gesture of care.

When 90-year-old M.F. Hussain painted his “Bharat Mata” in 2004, he envisioned a bare breasted female taking the shape of India’s body. With her naked thighs folded over South India, Delhi just over her shoulder, and her right breast pointed into Gujarat, she struggles to reach over to the North-Eastern states. Hussain’s Bharat Mata is so slim-waisted, her embodiment of India barely fills out the curves of Madhya Pradesh. Crying tears of Yamuna, she is shackled around the neck, hands, and feet. Hussain’s India is a trapped woman. A contentious rendition, Hussain never ended his self-imposed exile even after the Supreme Court exonerated legal charges against the painting.

Years later, a young 20-something Sujatro Ghosh would embark on his “Cow Mask Project”, a photo series chronicling Indian women wearing a large cow mask over their heads and asking, “Do women need to be cows to be respected?” Ghosh’s models are sexual violence victims, and they are unassuming. They are mundane – they are in classrooms, in trains, on the streets – they are everywhere, and they are every day. And, according to Ghosh, their bodies are more at risk of assault than bodies of cows in India. In morphing the bovine and the human, Ghosh’s female portraits are a collapse of identities. Having received threats to his and his family’s safety, Ghosh is currently in self-imposed exile in Germany.

Who is “India’s National Mother” then? Is she Hussain’s nude mistress, or Ghosh’s assaulted everywoman? And what form of care can her harmed body be expected to extend? This maternal, sexual, domestic pursuit for fertility of cows tethers them to repeated motherhood. In order to keep lactating, cows are impregnated over and over again. In that sense, they may well be the national mothers since their bodies are never left to explore non-maternal personalities. And don’t let the agential rhetoric fool you; the jury is still out on whether cows have wished for this parental responsibility at all.

Even so, if global beef production accounts for a majority of the greenhouse gases in the food industry, banning its consumption in a country of 1.4 billion people seems wise. Surely, our family trauma can be forgiven in light of global ecological wellbeing?

Ma had a difficult time reconciling how our food culture, the one she had shared with me all my life, could suddenly become dissonant with my morality. To her, veganism was this “western fad” I had adopted. She wasn’t entirely wrong. I was punishing a part of the world for a problem I had come to terms with in another.

I had reckoned with environmental degradation in England. The language I had digested that information in was very particular, very dystopian particular. Crucially, it was collectively self-flagellant. We were all responsible in equal ways for the ecological healing process. But the redemptive performance I had learned in England was irresponsible of me to perform verbatim in Behala, Kolkata.

Ma adapted her care culture for me. She put more potatoes in the Sunday chicken for me, made it more gravy heavy, and downloaded delivery apps for my special groceries. Gour, our trusted local grocer of 17 years down our street, who did not keep soy milk or tofu, was no longer meeting her finicky child’s needs anymore. So, every morning, a delivery person would ride down on their motorcycle from a large retail store kilometers away to drop off MNC-produced, heavily packaged, alternate protein products.

Over time, Ma began adding her own list of groceries to the app with more and more internationally branded products. She relied less and less on Gour, calling him only if an ingredient was unavailable online. My emotional dietary transition had successfully reconstructed my mother’s consumption patterns. That pattern solidified into normalcy when she met me at my consumption paranoia during the pandemic. Earlier, Rita Didi would buy vegetables, fish, and chicken from the local market on her walk to our home. Now, she takes home the packaged milk Ma gets for free as a regular, bulk-purchaser from the apps.

In some ways, the act of maternity itself is the fated martyrdom of an Indian cow. In a heartbreaking narrative, Yamini Narayanan’s spectacular monograph, Mother Cow, Mother India, recalls a cow at a gaushala (cow shelter) in Kolkata, India, which suffers severe seizures during lactation because of repeated impregnation. When Narayanan raises concerns with the gaushala manager, he asserts, “she is a mother; mothers can sacrifice anything for their children” (85). In this maternal bondage, the cow’s relentless suffering is a natural consequence expected from her practice of motherhood.

And once her reproductive duties have lapsed, her noble suffering reveals itself in the sacrifice of her body itself. India is one of the largest dairy and beef exporters in the world. The domestic shame in its consumption sits snug within national boundaries. India also, unsurprisingly then, houses some of the world’s biggest slaughterhouses. When “mother” cows are no longer able to give birth, they are moved into bovine old-age homes, slaughterhouses. And our relationship with them turns industrially amnesiac in its adoration. As a child, India cherishes a rich inheritance to bovine legacy, and she works hard to cling to it. Although dairy cows are not feeding fast-food joints in India, their low-quality beef makes them a competitive contender as fast-food beef internationally. From leather to gelatin to the sugar industry, the care of our nation’s mother is extracted long after she ceases to be a maternal figure.

I practiced veganism for four years before I was medically advised to return to dairy and meat consumption. And because I had begun my vegan practice in India, having acquired its tenets in the UK, the failure of my body to keep up with its regimen changed my own relationship with Indian cuisine. Even though much of our food is inherently vegan. That transition was much harder for me, because of the guilt I nursed every single time I consumed meat, every single time I savored my Sunday chicken. As an early preteen atheist, this was the closest to religious penitence I had felt.

My atonement, my repair with my food culture, was my ecoanxiety.

Recently, Baba retired. And, in that decision, his locus of duties as the primary provider retired as well. He has returned to an alternate performance of breadwinning, though. The time off from the corporate world has given him emotional space to come back to that rare act of domesticity he learned from his father – purchasing “quality” products from the local market to bring home for a fresh meal. He takes personal pride in well-cut meat, or crisp fruit. “Look”, he’d say to me when I went back from the States, where I now reside, to Kolkata, “look. The fish is still moving. They just caught it a couple hours ago. There. That vegetable only grows for a few weeks at this time of the year. Let’s get that. Maybe we can ask Ma to make it with our Sunday chicken”.

~

Sushmita Samaddar is the Assistant Director of Composition, an Associate Instructor, and a doctoral candidate of Literature at Indiana University. Her research focuses on environmental justice and seeks to decolonize mainstream Western ecopsychological frameworks. She is currently focusing on the production and manifestation of ecoanxiety and ecotrauma within postcolonial Indian communities, encompassing both human and nonhuman perspectives. With an MA in Poetry and Poetics from the University of York (2018) and a BSc (Hons) in Economics from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata (2014), Sushmita’s eclectic academic background fuels her interdisciplinary approach to inquiry. She is the recipient of the Guy Lemmons Award (2023) and is a former Young India Fellow (2015). Sushmita’s work hopes to reshape how we engage with discourses on emotional wellbeing arising from ecological challenges by centering postcolonial realities.

Featured image: Photograph by the author, 2024.

Author’s note: This essay is part of a broader scholarly project aimed at decolonizing mainstream ecopsychological frameworks which often overlook the nuanced experiences of postcolonial nations in the Global South. “An Appetite for Maternal Care” serves as a creative response to this oversight, exploring the intersections of food, maternal care, and national identity. Its narrative weaves together personal and political dimensions, illustrating how postcolonial perspectives shape a distinct framework of ecoanxiety that challenges Western notions of an apocalyptic, universalist ecoanxiety. Particularly, Western “savior” strategies—often steeped in centrist guilt and shame—tend to exacerbate the layered ecoanxious experiences of postcolonial communities.

In this essay, my transformation as a vegan is fraught not only with my reckoning with the globalenvironmental crisis, but also by a pervasive experiential realization of my inaccessibility to reachwestern reparations, imagined for the crisis, as a postcolonial Indian. In other words, this writing has been a practice in decolonizing my own internalized shame at failing to deliver a western resolution.

~

Citations

Jones, Leander. “Exiled Artist Sujatro Ghosh: ‘I Didn’t Know Who to Trust.’” Exberliner, Apr. 2021, www.exberliner.com/art/sujatro-ghosh-interview.

Khan, Zeyad Masroor. “Meet the Politician Who Wants to Make the Cow ‘India’s National Mother.’” Vice, 15 Apr. 2019, www.vice.com/en/article/evy4be/this-politician-wants-to-make-the-cow-indias-national mother-elections.

Marlow, Iain. “Cow Vigilantes in India Killed at Least 44 People, Report Finds”, Bloomberg, 20 Feb. 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-20/cow-vigilantes-in-india-killed-at-least-44-people report-finds#xj4y7vzkg. Accessed 7 May 2023.

Narayanan, Yamini. Mother Cow, Mother India. Stanford University Press eBooks, 2023, doi:10.1515/9781503634381.

Sanyal, Anindita. “In New Hate Speech, BJP Lawmaker Says ‘Hindustan Is For Hindus.’” NDTV.com, NDTV, 2 Jan. 2018, https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/in-new-hate-speech-bjp-lawmaker-vikram-saini-says hindustan-is-for-hindus-1794689.

Sharma, Ashwani. “Now, HP Congress MLA Wants Cow Declared “Mother of the Nation”, Assembly Passes Resolution.” The Print, 16 Dec. 2018, https://theprint.in/politics/now-hp-congress-mla-wants-cow-declared-mother-of-the-nation-assembly-passes-resolution/163140/. Accessed 7 May 2023.