Synaesthesia
As I reach Bijoy Moira’s sweetshop in Krishnanagar, Nadia district the fragrance of aam ada / mango ginger hits me. Krishna Sanyasi senses my bewilderment but continues to work with the brass mortar and pestle. He pauses, looks at me and asks if I have come across this ingredient elsewhere. By now the karigars are used to my presence. While customers take pity on me, the karigars have warmed to my constant hovering and even allotted a designated tool for me to sit with my field diary. Presently, Krishna Sanyasi holds out a portion of the mango ginger for me to taste. As I oblige, he points to the aam sandesh named after the summer fruit and says, ‘this is where the taste comes from’. Then he continues to list the flavouring ingredients used in aam Sandesh – saffron, cardamom, clove. Finally, he directs my attention to the saffron to show how a pinch of it will add depth of colour and a faint fragrant touch to the sarpuriya mix.
Krishna Sanyasi is part of a “craft-based” industry that relies on a knowledge system built around developing a ‘sense’ for texture, through smell, sight, and touch. Karigari/ craftsmanship of sweetmaking is thus often about developing a synesthetic approach that combines and uses these senses in mutual association.
My work on sweetshops and craftsmanship, over the years, has taken me to explore the intricacies of this very aspect of the sweet industry. And, when the editorial team of Third Lane got in touch with me, it gave me an opportunity to return to my field diary once again.
Heather Paxson in her work on cheesemaking points to the central role of touch, smell and sight in the process – from the handling of curds to the final moulding of cheese. In her work on artisanal cheese, she argues that the craft is synesthetic because cheesemakers understand each stage only via touch, smell, sight and taste and their various combinations. What is common to sweetmaking and cheesemaking is that both are produced from milk. Milk, as many karigars would remind me, is a delicate product. It is no wonder that there are sweetshops in Kolkata that take pride in the hygienic conditions in which their sweets are produced – with phrases like ‘untouched by human hands’, and ‘mechanisation’ commonly thrown around to refer to the risks of working with a milk derivative with a very short shelf life – chhana.
The Sweet Test of Chhana
And yet, how do most sweetshops test chhana? Apart from few business establishments, most sweetshops still rely on mostly on sight and touch, and not taste, to check the quality of their chhana. At times a lump of chhana will be taken close to the nose to do a quick smell check. Across shops the owner/ manager of the shop and a senior karigar takes turns to check the chhana. Often karigars and sweetshop owners would tell me how they can ‘spot’ whether the chhana is made from cowmilk or the milk of water buffaloes. In fact, sweetshops deploy various ingenious methods to check the quality of chhana. Some shops encourage chhana suppliers to hang the chhana so that the whey water drains off while checking its weight. On certain evenings, I have even watched karigars squabble with chhana suppliers, who mostly belong to the Goala caste group, claiming that the latter have mixed various kinds of milk to meet the demand of chhana. On conditions of anonymity, one of the prominent shops of North Kolkata disclosed that for special orders they rely on milk but have otherwise resorted to preparing their own chhana because it is quite difficult to spot the cracks in this tricky milk derivative till one actually starts working with it.
How do men from neighbouring districts cope with these pressing demands of chhana? A chhana supplier’s work starts early in the morning. In case the household has cows, they can rely on their own dairy yields, – otherwise, they collect milk from other households that own cows. Most suppliers that I have interviewed told me that in order to make a living they needed to collect milk and prepare a certain minimum quantity of chhana. Depending on the quantum of chhana used in a sweetshop, the number of suppliers available, as well as the fluctuating prices of chhana, this quantity varies evidently. Many of us who are familiar with the ‘smell map’ of Sealdah and Howrah stations, would recall chhana suppliers making their way through the crowds with their wicker baskets and leaving behind stains and stench of whey water on platforms where trains came in from the suburbs of Hooghly, Burdwan and Nadia.
Now chhana, one the signature milk derivatives used across sweet shops in West Bengal, is a versatile ingredient. It can be adapted for savoury items as well, and one of the signature vegetarian delicacies in the Bengali cuisine remains Chhanar Dalna (fried balls of chhana cooked in a light broth or spice mix). Again, when mixed with sugar, chhana turns into a fine paste which can then be moulded into different kinds of sandesh. It can even be boiled in sugar syrup to create an array of syrup-based items, or as it is popularly known, “rosh-er mishti”. But despite its versatility to take on flavours, chhana remains one of the trickiest ingredients to work with – primarily because of an extremely short shelf life. Sweetshop owners as well as karigars thrive on experimenting with it to innovate house specialties with new flavours, or to create new items – but an ability to create masterful delicacies with chhana is inherently dependent on the quality of it.
Yet, when I ask time and again how this all-important quality is assessed, I hit the same response – ‘We can spot and understand’. This emphasis on the look and feel of the milk derivative in different stages of processing is simply another affirmation of how the sensory work in the sweet industry relies primarily on ‘touch’ and ‘sight’. Often while illustrating the consistencies of a poorer quality chhana, a senior karigar would pass a lump to me and ask me to run it between my index finger and thumb, at times he would press it against the bottom of right palm to assess the lack of moisture. Sometimes, when I would identify ‘good quality’ chhana, he would chuckle and say, ‘see, you are getting there’. Phrases like ‘you will know when it is okay’ and ‘you will understand when it is ready’ abounded readily in my field trips, and in fact, understanding the significance of this prevailing sentiment is integral to building the synaesthesia of sweetmaking as a craft. For this sensuous ordering of labour in a sweetshop reveals how sweetmaking draws upon a sensory labour of touch and feel, sight and smell to create a ‘taste’.
The Sixth Sense: The Politics of Sensory Labour
It is not that the senses never found a mention in discussions on laboring lives. David Howes shows how Marx relied on the ‘senses’ to describe working conditions rather than attributing to them a centrality in the history of labor. Today’s consumer capitalism lies at the intersection of ‘modern hyperaesthesia’ resulting in desensitisization and the Western ocularcentrism which has led to privileging within senses and a studying of/ on senses requires an open-ness, to move beyond observation and listening. Senses, according to Ingold are skills and central to self and personhood .
Vannini, Waskul and Gottschalk, too, in their discussion on somatic work begins with a proposition that ‘humans sense, as well as make sense’. Sense-making practices lie at the core of ‘somatic work’ where the body becomes the vehicle and site of work and the work in turn is guided by somatic rules or the ‘rules of the body’. Somatic work enables us to understand the reflexive ‘cultural practices’ through which “sense-making” takes place beyond abstract symbolism – the ‘meanings’ emerge from ‘the perceiver’s sensory biography’. What happens when this sensory biography is standardised as part of a labour process? In a special collection dedicated to the theme of sensory labor, Christy Spackman and Jacob Lahne show that “taste, smell” is produced and normalized through acts of sensory labor. ‘Taste’ as they illustrate, in a thought proving essay on sensory labour, points to the need to move beyond looking at taste as a matter of aesthetics. They argue that senses produced by mouth and nose carry more than class and carries ‘economic value’. They emphasize that if we need to evaluate food beyond its aesthetics it is important to pay attention to ‘perception as a form of labour’ to understand food cultures such as sweetmaking with roots in craftsmanship. Perception as a form of labour allows us to make room for sensory labour practices based on idea of andaj which has yet not transformed into scienticised tasting practices as is in the case of tea tasting, wine tasting and other food commodities.
The Hierarchies of Andaj
How do we understand the sensory labour of andaj in an industry that has its roots in a caste based occupational hierarchy? Is andaj hereditary and part of a tacit understanding of the ‘sameness’ of lineage ties? Despite diversification of sweetmaking as a profession, the Bangla word for a sweetmaker is Mayara which is interestingly ,also the name of the confectioner caste; one of the nine artisanal caste groups or nabasankha in Bengal’s caste hierarchy. Mayaras as census reports and other documentation indicate, enjoyed the ritual status of making sweets. Early 20th Century newsletters of the Mayara Samaj indicate various debates about exclusionary politics, legends of origin and laments over loss of sugar mills. The origin story of sweetmeats in Bengal, as I discuss in various other works of mine, point to the critical role that Mayaras played as artisans, and artisan entrepreneurs. Their artistic tradition of andaj is practiced to this day in the everyday machinations of the labouring bodies of karigars, chhana suppliers etc. But today, andaj for a karigar implies years of apprenticeship often as a helper before transitioning to developing a sense of the workings of oven (ununer karigar) and finally onto the coveted pata (wooden board).
As I have demonstrated in my doctoral dissertation, karigars prefer to switch jobs after three years so that they can pick up new skills. As one of the karigars recount, ‘in this line of work you have to wait for the senior karigar to trust you’. Most karigars like any other profession begin as “helpers”. One of the helpers explained this further. “You learn while you observe…it requires immense patience. For instance, boiling milk is about control of temperature”. On asking a karigar about consistency of sugar syrup he tells me, ‘Of course you know when it is ready… there is a change in colour, consistency…but it cannot be taught, you need to develop an andaj’.
And it takes years to develop an andaj.
One of the senior karigars spreads out the cooked mix of sandesh on a wooden board called pata. He alerts me that it has taken him at least ten to twelve years before he became a pata r karigar. Pointing to the norom pak / cooked paste of chhana and sugar he takes a small amount and presses it between his index finger and thumb to explain the soft texture. He rubs the cooked lump between his thumb and index finger to explain that from the texture he would know whether or not it is ready. I ask him if he has come across any instance when things have gone wrong. He chuckles and remarks affectionately, ‘Didimoni, we can close our eyes and make a pak. It is for a reason that I am sitting at the pata. If a new karigar is working on chhana and sugar, there would of course be someone to oversee him.’ He takes the cooked paste, spreads it out carefully on a pata and then takes an old, frayed ruler to mark the lines. I interrupt, ‘Can’t you ask the owner to give you a new one? It must hurt your eyes to check the numbers and inches…’ He looks at me keenly, ‘I am using the ruler simply to mark the lines, I have a sense of measurement…’. He slices the sandesh and neatly arranges the pieces in a tray while a helper waits around the corner to carry it to the sales counter.
When the helper returns, he finds that the karigar has taken a break. He waits around. Another karigar who was boiling milk, goes to attend a phone call. In this case, the helper steps in and starts to stir the milk with a taru. Curious, I ask him if he has ever touched the pata. He responds, ‘No. I will… one day…once I know how to work the oven/unun’. Working at the oven entails boiling related work – preparation of sugar syrup, boiling of milk, preparation of cooked paste and milk derivatives. Each of these activities, as one karigar summarises to me, is about developing a sensibility towards control of heat and temperature. “It is very important to know how to control temperature. Milk and milk derivative chhana have an extremely short shelf life. In this line of work it is important to use good quality chhana”. Preparation of pak, again, is a delicate task. Pointing to a helper he adds, ‘he will be ready in another two years to work on a good pak… Without knowledge of the consistencies of sugar syrup, you cannot suddenly work on chhana.’
Bipradas Mukhopadhyay in his recipe book dedicated to sweets Mistanna Pak cautions the readers that there are different kinds of sugar syrup for different kinds of syrup-based sweets and adds that different temperatures of boiling could also yield different textures of sugar syrup. He writes, once the sugar syrup turns slightly red, take it off heat and strain it. Boil this strained sugar syrup and the moment you try to stir it with a taru (a paddle used in sweetshops for boiling related work), the sugar syrup will stick to the taru. Then, depending on the elasticity and thickness of the consistency, the syrup could be ‘single string’, ‘double string’ or ‘triple string’. Bipradas Mukhopadhyay calls this ektar bonder ras, dotar bonder ras etc named after the number of strings; each of them with its own unique functionality. Despite meticulous recipes, however, in the everyday workings of the sweetshop, it is the synesthetic reason of sight and touch that guides workers to assess whether the sugar syrup is ready for rosogolla.
Crafting of sweets cannot be understood in isolation of senses. Touch, taste smell, sight is integral to making of sweets and vocabulary of craftsmanship. Synesthetic reason cannot be understood by isolating any particular sense. Most karigars at sweetshops due to notions of purity and pollution don’t go on to taste every stage of sweetmaking. But, they do use words such as andaj/ sensibility, obhyash/ habit to indicate how they know when the milk is ready, or cooked paste of a particular mishti is ready. Day after day as I watched karigars working with chhana and sugar to arrive at a right consistency of naram pak and kara pak, I would often watch them taking a piping hot portion and feeling the paste between the two fingers. Similarly, while explaining to me the consistencies of sugar syrup, karigars would point to the string and elasticity of the sugar syrup.
Across Epar and Opar Bangla, karigars point to the role of repetition and habit that shapes their synesthetic reason. One of the senior karigars I interviewed in Chandannagar reminded me that a sense of touch and feel is what separates a ‘good’ karigar from simply a ‘karigar’. How does one acquire this sense of touch and feel? According to the karigars, it is unavoidably through rigorous practice and close observation. Most karigars come to the trade without preconceived ideas and develop their knowledge systems as they go along in their apprenticeship.
Mistimukh: The Last Course
What is interesting is how the romanticisation in Bengali culinary discourse is mostly around ‘changing tastes’. Yet, sweetmaking draws upon a sensory labour aesthetic which essentially maintains minimal relationship with ‘tongue’ probably due to the existing notions of purity and pollution associated with tongue in Bengali Hindu culture. Sure enough, when a new product is created, it undergoes a taste test but rarely I have observed karigars tasting all the way along in the production chain. Sensory labour of sweetmaking is instead ordered around masculine bodies and years of training and observation of the two main tools –oven, and pata. The everyday sensory labour of craftsmanship of sweetmaking shows that techniques of sweetmaking revolve around development of a certain sensibility of the labouring body.
Illustration : Suman Mukherjee