Kamal Ghorui
What was once a food meant for those who could afford nothing else is back as a superfood of choice. Millets are now seen as a food for those with evolved tastes. As are jowar, bajra and ragi. Millet and so many other grains that an earlier generation had striven to leave behind.
Handloom now has a special sheen, and the surest way to sell something at three times the price is to put the word ‘artisanal’ in front of it. Is this nostalgia, this reaching back into the recesses of the past to retrieve something and attach a new value to it?
It might appear that we are nostalgic about the past, that we are recovering lost memories, but something else might be at work here.
For what we are enacting is not a replay of tradition but a simulation of memory.
None of the people raving about millets had any in their past.
They did not grow up eating that, perhaps even their parents did not.
There is a recognition that this is part of a collective past, quite detached from personal memory. It is a memory of a self that never existed, of someone else’s past.
What this simulated memory does is to provide a new kind of anchor that looks as if it has been there all along. It is appealing because it has the appearance of authenticity, of groundedness. At a time when we construct and perform ourselves through acts of consumption, every choice is a statement.
We become who we are through choices that must be continuously performed. This is a world where consumption is organised around verbs rather than nouns, around doing and experiencing rather than having and holding. The simulated past provides gravity.
This gives us a past without the complications that an actual past brings.
No obligations, no constraints, none of the entanglements that actually coming from somewhere involves. The craft gin with the regional botanical, the revived festival with the curated ritual, the heritage grain with the origin story on the label: all these offer depth without roots, connection without cost.
But this is only the surface of the layers that make up the country. A large part of the country does not need to perform a retelling of the past, but continues to be embedded in it. Caste, for instance, is a structure that operates at a subterranean level.
It sits in our surnames, mediates marriages, influences residential clusters, governs implicit rules about who can do what where. Even in the parts of the country which think of it as invisible, it appears in the way household help is treated, what spaces they are allowed to share and what aspirations they are allowed to have.
One does not need to believe in caste, or to notice it, for caste to structure one’s life.
Gender operates similarly. The distribution of labour within the household, who waits and who is served, who speaks and who is consulted: these are not remembered traditions.
They are inhabited structures. They persist not because anyone is reviving them but because nobody needs to. They were never lost.
The past in India takes three different forms. The first is the past thatcontinues largely unhindered: habit, custom, practice that feels instinctive. Here, no one is consciously making a choice. The second is actual lived memory. The past that one has experienced growing up.
When one made pickle at home, and every festival meant weeks of preparation, cooking foods consumed specifically at that time. The third is simulated memory: the past as conscious retrieval, deliberate, performative, available to be put to work in the service of present-day needs.
The deepest irony in contemporary India may be this: the revivalist project, the conscious, loud, assertive retrieval of tradition, is most active precisely where tradition is feared to have weakened.
The people most embedded in structural continuity, the rural, the lower-caste, the poor, are rarely the ones singing odes to millets. They do not need to.
They are still living inside the past in the most literal sense.
This is not to say that all revival is false. It is based on a reality that has been transposed from its original setting and customised to meet the needs of the present.
But the mechanism through which it operates, the simulation of a memory one does not possess, is identical regardless of what it is put in the service of. A beautiful textile and a bruising political campaign can both draw on the same simulated past. The structure is the same. What differs is what gets done with it.
The past is always, in some ways, imagined to serve the purposes of the present. We make the past what we need from it. Today, it seems that we need the past largely to fulfil our identity needs. At one end of the spectrum, it takes the form of self-conscious consumption of a curated past.
At the other, the certainty that comes from defending something we believe we have always been. Neither is more authentic than the other. But not every act of recovery is as gentle as choosing a grain.
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