Makaranda Madhukar Anand Mahendale Festshrift

Author(s): M A Dhaky, Jitendra B Shah
Publisher: Shardaben Chimanbhai Educational Research Centre

Page 196

Vyāsa's Leftovers : Food Imagery in Indian Literature
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it generates innumerable myths and stories of rewards of pious actions such as guest-feeding, and gift of food, and stories of gory consequences to wrong food-consumption or food-theft. Such an attitude is crystallized in a celebrated definition of meat with reference to the reciprocity of dinner and diner. Manu, the most influential lawgiver (circa 1st c. A.D.), declares that the animal whose meat I am eating here and now will eat me later. That is why meat is called “me + eat” by the wise thinkers'.
In most literature, food remains a central metaphor spanning the poles of life and death and encompassing everything in between. It is obvious that food is associated with life, since experience tells us that eating of food sustains life. This fact leads to the belief that food actually generates life, annād bhavanti bhūtāni, to quote the Bhagavad Gītā 3.14. The idea is found in many texts such as the Taittiriya Brāhmaṇa10, the Taittirīya Upanişad 11 etc. Later on in the epics and purānas, this idea of the life-giving potency of food is stretehed to the point of literally positing certain foods as producing progeny. Many variations on the theme are found, where oral consumption of actual semen or of rice, ghee, mango etc. leads to the birth of a baby, eating multiple portions of a dish leads to multiple births, as in the case of the twin princes in the Rāmāyaṇa, and eating of half portions leads to incomplete births as in the case of Jarāsandha, or the king who was put together by the Demoness Jarā, when he was born in two halves from his twin mothers' eating half a mango each. The transformation of food into progeny is a theme exploited innumerable times in the epic and purāņic literature12. On the other hand, progeny may be viewed as food, either by human or divine diners, albeit in very rare instances. Myths centering upon cannibalism, ritual or real explore the darker side of the food/progeny complex13. In the eleventh canto of the Bhagavad Gītā, when Lord Krsna manifests his cosmic form to the warrior Arjuna, he appears as Kāla or Time which devours the entire universe. This cosmic vision of the Almighty manifests his multiple molars, chewing and pulverizing the multitudes of beings that enter the hungry hole. The triple world becomes a divine morsel and all people simply become sesame seeds on top. Food thus comes to be connected with death, in more ways than one. From the point of view of dietary commonsense, if a person has indigestion, then food is detrimental