Growing up in India, I didn’t come across many, if any, couples who sat down together at the dinner table. I suspect that my observation is not out of the norm because it is based on dozens of families- friends and family alike. Aside from meals at restaurants and marriage-type functions, these married couples ate serially– first husband, then wife. And the wife always served her husband, the reverse never took place. This continues to be common practice in hinterland and modern settings alike. Whether eaten from banana leaves or stoneware, on floors-mats or at tables, with bare-hands or utensils, by bare-chested or suited husbands (or other elders), food is served by the Indian wife.
As a kid, I paid little heed to this dining-room dynamic beyond assuming that it demonstrated affection, and imagining that it strengthened the matrimonial (or familial) bond. I might even have rationalized the ritual’s origins to the demarcation of gender-roles, echoes of which strongly persist from caveman days. All in all, considered in isolation, it seemed a reasonable transaction.
But is it really? For the described dining room dynamic, as it turns out, is not a simple two-body problem. A whole host of other related customs exist that transform it into a special case of the n-body problem. These customs come into play in group settings and have to do with batching and queuing of eaters, server hierarchy, leftover policies, and server etiquette. Without belaboring these customs or going into details (and outliers), let me directly summarize each: Men (family and guests) are served first, senior women come next (served by younger women), young-women eat last (self-serve). Left-overs, on the other hand, are disbursed in exactly opposite order. The serving of traditional multi-course meals is elevated to art-form and instruction imparted exclusively to young girls– nuances of demeanor and hand-movements (with serving spoon), arcane rules of eccheyal-pathu-payadhu (and some think the Laws of Kashrut are tricky!), ordering of courses, etc.
In light of this set of ancillary customs (specifics will vary from family to family), the benign looking dining-room dynamic assumes more sinister antecedents and (future) implications. A menacing and far-reaching set of practices with interlocking mechanisms emerges…<stop>
I began this piece, expecting to make a few points, and perhaps even slip in a humorous anecdote. That’s not how this is unfolding. What was meant to be light reading has turned quite heavy. So…I am going to directly jump to a pithy conclusion and then let you join the dots.
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The journey to the boardroom begins in the dining room.
Epilogue: In 1956, Mr. and Mrs. Krishnamurthy named their newborn daughter Indra.
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