Between the Lines: Taste in South Asian Writing
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Published every Friday, Between the Lines is a weekly column by Namrata. This week, she turns to taste, exploring how flavour becomes labour, hierarchy, hunger, and inheritance in South Asian writing.
Sometimes memories arrive as images. And then there are those that rise to the tongue.
A green mango, sliced and salted too early. The metallic tang of water drawn from an old hand pump. Rice stretched thin with starch water. Tamarind pressed into chutney with the heel of a palm. Lentils tempered in sputtering oil. Milk just beginning to turn. The bitterness of neem forced between teeth in April. The sweetness of jaggery saved for a guest.
Taste does not announce itself with spectacle. It dissolves.
In South Asia, taste is never only about appetite. It is ritual and ration. It is caste and care. It is what is allowed to enter the body, and what must never cross the lips. It marks celebration and deprivation with equal clarity. It remembers famine. It remembers festivals. It remembers who cooked and who ate first.
