Swami Vivekananda and food

In a recent speech Prime Minister Narendra Modi reminded students of the achievements of Swami Vivekananda. This column, written some years back, explored a lesser known area of the Swami’s life, but one that perhaps people can relate to more easily – his love of food.
I had a small book of Swami Vivekananda’s teachings and found the maxims sounded worthy, but also a bit bloodless, more resonant than real and touching, at least for me.
And that was the impression I formed of Vivekananda, from what I read of his teachings, from the museums and monuments devoted to him, and the way he was treated in popular culture. They all seemed to show him as a heroic, yet rather remote reformer and defender of Hindu values.
The one exception is a book by Sankar, the Bengali novelist, originally published as Achena Ajana Vivekananda in 2003, and brought out by Penguin India in an English translation as The Monk as Man.
It’s subtitle ‘The Unknown Life of Swami Vivekananda’ might seem to hint at lurid revelations, but in fact it is a very effective attempt to bring Vivekananda to life, depicting the context he came from and the contradictions that he, like anyone, was full of, but which did not come in the way of, and may even have aided, his ultimate achievement.
Perhaps a novelist was needed to pull off such an act of imagination that involves neither hagiography nor denigration. Sankar writes in the introduction that he went through approximately 200 books on Vivekananda, and in particular drew on letters and reminiscences by his associates. No sources are cited and the stories sometimes verge on wishful anecdotes, but overall it hangs together, as a vivid portrait of Vivekananda’s character, if not entirely orthodox history.
Sankar treats his life through themes. The first is Vivekananda’s family problems, including the endless property related court cases that caused him much stress through his life. The details can get as tedious as these cases were, but they do give a realistic image of Vivekananda’s family life. The fact that he never quite escaped his family’s demands on him makes one appreciate the real-life basis of his teachings.
But much more entertaining are the next two chapters which deal with Vivekananda’s love for food and cooking, and his passion for tea. The big surprise here is that Vivekananda wasn’t vegetarian and didn’t just eat fish, but also mutton (though he drew the line at beef).
This is less surprising when one leans he came from the cosmopolitan Kayastha community and while his mother’s family was vegetarians, his father’s family was not. The Ramakrishna Mission, which he set up, mostly serves vegetarian food in its different centres, but this is more reflective of what people who go there expect from such places, and also the practicalities of running large kitchens. There was no original decree about vegetarian food, and the decision on what to serve is left up to individual centres and monks.
Sankar writes that in his youth Vivekananda set up a ‘Greedy Club’ and did “extensive research on cooking.” He bought books on French cooking and happily invented new dishes, one of which Sankar describes as a dish of khichuri (rice and dal) to which eggs, peas and potatoes are added.
One of his brothers, who was then vegetarian, recalled being forced by his brother to eat meat for the experience. All this was from the happy eating phase of his youth, which then gave way to long periods of near starvation, when he became a wandering monk, not begging, but accepting whatever was given to him.
Sankar devises an engaging way of conveying all this information, which also conveniently blurs the distinctions between strict facts and vaguer anecdotes. He puts it in the form of conversations between himself and an older, rather overbearing friend, who wants him to write a six-volume book on “Swami Vivekananda and Contemporary Eating Habits.”
This friend has apparently been researching Vivekananda’s love for food, and also tea, particularly in his years abroad and imparts the nuggets of his research to Sankar. This includes Vivekananda’s observations on foreign eating habits, and his attempts to get Indian ingredients to cook dishes for his hosts, though they tend to be appalled at the levels of spiciness that he loved.
All this parallels the experiences of other Indians abroad at that time, though Vivekananda was rather more open than most – an aspect, perhaps, of his practical approach to life. It probably also helped that in crucial aspects he was able to find acceptable alternatives abroad, most notably for the hilsa that he adored.
This was almost definitely shad, an American fish of the same family which was as relished on the East Coast of the USA, as hilsa is in Bengal. He wrote from New York to his gurubhais in Calcutta, “These days you get hilsa in abundance and one can eat to one’s fill…. They use a variety of spinach which tastes like nate, and what they call ‘asparagus’ tastes like the young stalk of dengo.”
Being able to find hilsa and Bengali-like greens was vital since Sankar concludes by debating which was Vivekananda’s favourite food. The ice-cream that he encountered and loved in the US comes close, but doesn’t make the final cut “because, after Swami Vivekananda developed diabetes, he could no longer have it.”
It comes down to shukto, the characteristic Bengali dish of bitter greens, with banana flower curry (mochar dalna) and hilsa with Indian spinach, which is the creeper called pui-shaak or Malabar spinach. Sankar decides that the latter wins, due to an incident when Vivekananda was traveling down the Ganges and found hilsa, but insisted on looking for the spinach as well. One man said he had some and would happily give it, if he could get some wisdom from the Swami, who willingly gave him some in exchange for the leaves.
There’s a lot more of interest in the book, including Vivekananda’s thoughts about the healthfulness of Indian food which, like Gandhi later on, he would come to question after exposure to the health food movement in the West.
It all adds up to a suddenly vivid picture of Vivekananda which, frivolous as it may seem, does more to interest me in larger teachings than all the lifeless memorials to him.