Fit for the gods

A book on sacred food offerings sheds light on the popularity of two elements that continue to dominate cultural conversations in India—food and religious sites

My father was in the railways and vacations meant packing a lot of food [the kind which didn’t spoil easily] and taking a train to places like Allahabad, Varanasi, Puri and Kanyakumari,” author Sujata Shukla Rajan tells us over the phone. “He would tell us a story at every temple he took us to.” In her recent book Bhog Naivedya: Food Offerings to the Gods (Rupa Publications), which explores sacred foods served in temples across India, weaving them with mythology and history, she relates one such story. She remembers that the sand at the beach at Kanyakumari had traces of yellow, red and brown. Her father had said these were remnants of the ingredients of the wedding food the Kanyakumari Devi had thrown out in her fury at Lord Shiva who had not turned up for the wedding. “Even today, shops near the temple sell tiny stones which represent the rice, mustard, etc. that the Goddess is believed to have flung on the beach,” she writes. Her father’s mythological tales, she says, invariably featured food. “I must have unconsciously imbibed them.”

Durga Puja bhog at Kolkata’s pandals comprise pulao, sweets, vegetable and lentil curries, several varieties of bhaja (fritters) like potato and pumpkin, chutney such as from pineapple and raisins, payesh (kheer), luchi and most importantly, khichuri made of Gobindobhog rice and moong dal

Bengaluru-based Shukla is a chartered accountant nearing her 40th year of practice. She has had an abiding interest in food, her audit trips offering frequent opportunities to sample a region’s flavours. About six years ago, she started PepperOnPizza.com, a food blog, entertaining at the time the thought of developing a cookbook. But when her publisher suggested the idea of documenting the food made at sacred sites in India and not the more commonly known preparations made in homes during festivals, focusing on details of the offerings rather than recipes, she sensed its distinctiveness. “Food as well as places of worship are an intrinsic part of India’s cultural heritage. I thought it would have a broader appeal for the public.”

She explains that the book deals with bhog/naivedya, which is not quite what we understand as prasad. “Naivedya comprises the various items offered as food to deities. Prasad is just one or a few of these items—those that are distributed to us as devotees.” Visitors to temples are not permitted to see this naivedya, let alone taste it, and hence, information about them is not readily available. Travels to these sites thus constituted a significant part of the research Shukla undertook for the book, work on it taking about a year. While the first lockdown disrupted a part of this itinerary, what proved key were direct introductions facilitated by acquaintances to the chief priests of the Sriranganathaswamy Temple in Tamil Nadu, the Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Thiruvananthapuram and the Badrinath Temple in Uttarakhand, among others. “Throughout this book-writing journey, the temple authorities, priests and cooks were extremely generous with the sharing of knowledge,” she informs, her familiarity with food as well as with Tamil and Hindi, encouraging her interviewees to be forthcoming with information. With most temples forbidding the use of cameras and phones, her notebooks, she says, were her salvation in these crucial conversations.

Pongal naivedyam being prepared on the streets of Thiruvananthapuram

The book is divided into chapters assigned to deities like Narayana and Shiva covering temples dedicated to each and their bhog practices. It also includes the ‘maha-kitchens’ feeding thousands like the Sai Baba temple at Shirdi, Durga Puja pandals and langar at the Golden Temple. Laced into the discussions around ingredients and rituals are tales drawn from the Puranas, which combine food with well-known attributes of a deity, such as the one about food-loving Ganesha drinking up a sea of honey. 

Shukla’s research also revealed common features in the offerings made to deities across the country. “From Badrinath to Kanyakumari, Puri to Nathdwara… the offerings follow the regional cuisine,” she writes. “[The] ingredients are local and seasonal; red chilli and chilli spice are usually not used and black pepper is used to bring in the spice quotient; vegetables like tomatoes, potatoes, capsicums and cauliflowers are ‘vilayti’ [foreign] and hence not used…  onion and garlic are normally excluded; cow’s milk, butter and ghee are preferred; and the cooking medium [other than ghee] is the oil prominent in the local cuisine,” she writes. 

Sujata Shukla Rajan

At the same time, her travels made personal connections more poignant. She recalls the milagu jeera rasam, a flavourful preparation made with cumin and pepper, that her aunt would pack with rice in her school lunchbox. In Tamil Nadu, it is a dish frequently prepared for those recuperating from fevers. At the Shiva temple in Thiruvarur, she discovered that a deity called Jurahareswarar —who is, interestingly, worshipped by devotees to allay sickness—is offered the same rasam, a domestic item, not usually used for such purposes. “I felt nostalgic,” Shukla recollects. “The god and I had a favourite food in common.”

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