Rice Stories of a Seaside Small Town

The sub-genre of grandmothers in food is so overdone that the contiguous arrangement of the two words “grandma” and “food” begins to feel hackneyed. But it is untowardly for someone like me raised by a superbly storytelling and deliciously cooking grandmother to not do so. So, I allow past that to happen time to time. I grew up with my maternal grandmother in the dot-like shore of Bay of Bengal where the turquoise blue waters foam with ceaseless whitecaps on the country’s eastern side nearly 100 kms above the dead end of Kanyakumari. It is Kayalpatnam, a coastal town in Tamil Nadu’s Thoothukudi district that I call home. I grew up eating and living here. Of the women who came before me, the most vital in my imagination to world-making is my maternal grandmother. I say so because she has virtually handed down decades of her intangible experiences, of matters that are temporal that I’ve not lived or known, in the name of storytelling. Grandmothers immortalize their memories through storytelling. It fascinates one to think that these acts of storytelling have the power to pack all that is intangible from a different space and time that even tastes are informed, transmitted, and also carefully received. In Tamil households, there is hardly anything else before rice that could assume such centrality. My grandmother having lived years and years of life in the Tamil country has seen a seesaw of fads and choices of rice cooked in the family.

She was born in 1939 to a father who was a Tamil-Muslim gold merchant, who traded in Sri Lanka but had his home in Kayalpatnam, and mother who looked after hearth and presided over the farmlands they owned. In the families of Kayalpatnam, everything that the sea yielded was invested in land. Maritime merchants of the town invested most of their riches in farmlands. My grandmother is old enough to have seen and eaten all of this, seeing the coming and going of so many of its varieties. When it was harvest season in the 1940s, which comes twice a year, the streets of Kayalpatnam used to be lined up running for yards and yards with bullock carts carrying rice paddies, she recalls from her photographic memory. What can be more defining of the Tamil-ness of a Tamil household than the centrality of rice to life?! When a baby is teething, soaked and broken rice mixed with shavings of coconut and palmyrah palm’s Puttu (boiled and hardened in moulds that it attains a lighter brown hue) is distributed to extended family and acquaintances. When a person dies, on the 40^th day of their passing, Neichor (rice cooked in coconut milk and pandan leaves) is distributed to friends, family, and acquaintances. And anything in between that happens that marks important progresses in a human life intellectually, ritually, or spiritually, rice shows up. For instance, when a child finishes reading her/his first round of the whole Quran, Paachor (half cooked rice with grated coconut, sugar, and Moong Dal which coagulates into a spiky rice of sugar syrup) is distributed.

What rice is used in all of these occasions is a second order curiosity when one hears stories of rice. Here, the family and community I’m talking about had had different primary choices of rice at different times. For Neichor, during weddings and other celebrations, it is Ponni or Seeraga Samba today. Back then, Coimbatore Samba used to be the sought after in the 40s. Affluent families in the town also donated a portion of their yield to one of the several Masjids in the town as a part of their Nerthikadan (the Tamil word to offering anything materially or figuratively in exchange of a wish with the divine). My grandmother says Coimbatore Samba is what is offered usually to Masjids. For day-to-day eating, it is a variety called Anaikomban that comes from their farmlands near Tirunelveli, an inland southern district in Tamil Nadu. Anaikomban enjoyed a lordly status in these parts that my grandmother was often told off by her mother for her finicky choice of refusing to eat anything else other than it. My grandmother barely spares any chance to sing a paean to Anaikomban. In the 1950s, when my great grandmother was just in her 30s and diagnosed with diabetes, the nurse from the missionary hospital they paid visits to used to sing a couplet that she probably invented herself, every time she met my great grandmother. The couplet roughly can be transcribed like this: “what’s the point of sowing Anaikomban in fields across the region, now that you cannot eat a grain of it?”

In Kayalpatnam, in my family and other families, Neichor is cooked for celebratory feasts. These days, the regular par-boiled Ponni rice which is widely used all over Tamil Nadu for everyday eating is used for Neichor as well. Back then, it was Coimbatore Samba my grandmother says without any certainty because I persuaded her to recall and to put an end to that, she declared it was Coimbatore Samba for Neichor.

Influenced by popular cinema and literature, friends would often ask me for Biriyani on Eids and birthdays. That’s how I was informed of that immediate association of Muslim-ness with Biriyani rather than the reality of that phenomenon. But that’s not the case with Dakhini Muslims of Tamil Nadu. The Dakhini Muslim families like my husband’s in Madurai call Biriyani as Palavu soru or just Palavu (a distortion of the word Pulao). Seeraga Samba is the conventional choice in Dakhini circles for their Palavu. But the conventionality Seeraga Samba enjoys today isn’t confirmed by my Tamil-speaking grandmother living in the coast. Among the Dakhinis, the word “Biriyani” is rarely used. However, the word is used by them with their non-Dakhini friends. 

Coming to Biriyani in Kayalpatnam, we have our own variant called Ahani Biriyani. It is a distortion of the word Yakhni. It is white and white un-dyed with no masala. It is cooked with a heavy dosage of coconut milk, poppy seeds, cashews, walnuts, and pistachios. Pandan leaves breathe life into it and sets its tone. It’s easy to tie the Muslim-ness and imagined Persian and Central Asian connection to our Ahani Biriyani. Nevertheless, from historian Neelakanta Shastry to food scholar Krishnendu Ray, everyone locates the littoral towns and villages in the Coromandel coast with other port towns and villages in the Indian Ocean world from Basra to Batavia. It is unimaginative to conclude Ahani Biriyani’s route starting from Persia and Central Asia given the presence of pandan leaves. But how it ended up in the shore of this tiny inlet of Indian Ocean with Ponni remains a puzzle. Ahani Biriyani is not just Tamil-ised in sound but by taste as well. Coconuts and its typical curd-based sauce make this a winning recipe, impossible to dislike.