Kanji is a verb, not just the name of a dish, asserts Pooja Ashokkumar as she traces the fermented rice-and-water dish’s relevance through the migration of her community.
Despite brutal heatwaves during one of the hottest months in recent history, my family refused to forgo our annual summer visit to our ancestral village Naduvakulam in May this year—a sincere migrant family’s unskippable ritual. Ours is a small marginalised oor, or village, with a burial ground close by in the interiors of Tirunelveli district in Tamil Nadu.
It was only the first day under the beating heat, and our bodies had started craving simple, easily digestible food. I regularly woke up to three things: the smell of wood being burnt, Ponni Arisi rice being boiled, and an invitation to start the day with kanji. The last requires some spatial context.
About ten steps away from my ancestral home is a separate kitchen, with an attached store room. Before the 1980s, when the house was still thatched, the structure comprising the kitchen and store room used to be a cow shed. Today, a permanent veragaduppu (firewood) is set up in the store room along with plenty of space for sacks of grain and coconut.
Standing outside the kitchen, my periamma, or aunt, would ask, “Kanji irukku, thayir oothi thaaren, saapidriya?” (There is kanji, I’ll add some curd, will you eat?). This question—a statement, rather—was one I encountered every day upon waking up. Kanji, a cooling dish made by fermenting rice and water, was a primary choice for the first meal of the day because it is healthy, and cannot be wasted.
Selvamani, my periamma, works at a nearby preschool. But unfortunately, for as long as I can remember, most of her time is spent on demanding household chores—cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, collecting river water from the hand pump across the street, feeding the goats, dogs, hens, and taking care of the various trees and plants in our backyard—all of which she does with a bowl of kanji in her hand. Her day begins with cooking rice in the veragaduppu and ends with soaking leftover rice in water for the next day’s kanji.
Perhaps this routine makes the word ‘kanji’ a verb—it is more than just the name of a dish. While ‘rice’ is called ‘rice’ even after it is cooked, what makes it ‘kanji’ is the process it undergoes, transforming under conditions of the atmosphere and time. Elders in my family proclaim that kanji thanni, the cooked rice water, is the most nutritious water. If left as it is and for long, it becomes starchy in consistency. My maternal grandmother was adept at employing the thanni in various ways, stretching its benefit in a resource-scarce household. She would apply the leftover viscous liquid on her cotton sarees to stiffen the delicate cloth—a practice she continued in Mumbai, the city she migrated to.
The many different meanings of kanji
For three generations, my maternal family has lived in Jari Mari, a Tamil-dominated chawl neighbourhoods located between Sakinaka and Kurla in Mumbai’s suburbs. Two generations, if you consider my paternal side, including my periamma and her family. Many Tamil people who migrated to Mumbai during the mid- and late 20th century came from agrarian, working-class, and Dalit families, for whom intensive labour and hardship were irrevocably woven into earning a livelihood. Their diet was largely dictated by tight household budgets.
In these contexts, women often sustained themselves on pazhaya kanji (old or leftover kanji), prioritising freshly cooked meals for their families. In marginalised households, kanji often takes centre stage as a symbol of economic hardship.
The role of kanji as a food that sustains during dire poverty resonates across Tamil experiences. One of the oldest charity and retirement homes in Madras (now Chennai), Monegar Choultry, established in 1782, houses a kanjithotti—a large trough used to store kanji. Back in the day, this space functioned as a gruel centre started by a maniakarar (village headman, anglicised ‘Monegar’) in his garden. He established the practice for the victims of the famine caused by the Anglo-Mysore Wars, a series of conflicts between the Kingdom of Mysore and the British colonial forces in the late 18th century.
In The Famine Campaign in Southern India (1876-1878), William Digby, a colonial writer, imposes the colonial gaze on kanji by describing the food distributed to the affected people as that of “very poor character, being thin gruel or congee of rice or ragee poured into their hands and supped more like cattle than human begins.” While these histories reveal kanji’s role in periods of distress, for Dalit communities, these experiences extend beyond historical moments of scarcity. When I ask about kanji, my family responds with stories of drudgery and shame associated with its rice.
In the 1950s and 60s, it was tedious and laborious for my family just to source rice. K. Sittarasan, my periappa or paternal uncle, used to work in the vayakadu or paddy field, from where he procured nellu, rice with husk. To make it fit for eating, the nellu had to be boiled and sundried on a machi, a terrace area. Since our ancestral home did not have a machi then, my grandmother would ask around the village to use someone else’s machi.
My periappa’s voice grew soft and pained as he narrated: a thatched house without a terrace was a sign of an economically backward family, struggling through poverty. “Appolam romba kashtam ma,”—those days were really difficult, ma, he told me. After drying for two days, the sack of rice was taken to the mill where the husk was removed. This process cost two rupees for a large sack of rice.
Since our ancestral home did not have a machi then, my grandmother would ask around the village to use someone else’s machi.
In Tamil, kanji carries different meanings depending on the context. Kanji can be a simple porridge but it can also mean a whole meal. In our oor, when we say “kanji thaa,” it means: give whatever there is to eat. In the popular folk song Panjumittai Seela Katti from Ettupatti Raasa (1997) sung by Malaysia Vasudevan, the line “Kanji Kondu Poravale, Nenjukulle Nee Variya?” (“O girl carrying kanji, will you come into my heart?”), kanji signifies a meal carried by a woman to a man working in the fields.
“We had only kanji then, there was no such thing as a rice meal [with fresh rice, sambar, and costly vegetables] for us,” my periappa recalled, sitting in his home in Mumbai’s Bhandup where he had just shifted. “That is the kanji that sustained us this long; otherwise it was difficult,” he added. Even in locations far away from these experiences—in Mumbai’s suburbs or in cinema—the agrarian reality of kanji, an experience of backbreaking labour and caste-based scarcity, persists.
Karuvadu, dried fish, is the mother-of-all sides for kanji
Sittarasan periappa’s family recollects these memories and associated traditional village practices better than my own. Despite all the kitchen appliances and amenities, S. Paapa, Sittarasan’s wife, still prefers to cook using firewood when she visits Naduvakulam. On this trip, I even witnessed her daughter-in-law, A. Manoranjani, born and raised in Mumbai’s large chawl settlement in Dharavi, using a blowpipe to intensify the fire. Both my periamma and Manoranjani find the smoky flavour of rice cooked using firewood and river water to be more tasty. Those flavours are now rarer, owing to cramped living space in Mumbai’s chawls or small residential flats, and a lack of access to freshwater streams making traditional kanji almost a delicacy.
The traditional taste of kanji is incomplete without sides such as thogayals—thick, coarse, and slightly dry chutneys that can be mixed into mild, earthy kanji for some punch. In Tirunelveli Tamil, we call it ‘thovayal’, often made using horse gram or kanam which grows “not in wetlands, but in dry agricultural land,” according to Paapa permiamma. Its grainy texture reflects the landscape. But there can be no mention of accompaniments without the mother-of-all kanji sides—karuvadu. “If we had to eat kanji in the afternoon, we would have it with dried fish roasted in palm or coconut leaf,” my periamma said. Karuvadu, or dried fish, is a celebrity in many Dalit Tamil households like mine. Nothing beats the combination of a bowl of fermented kanji with a spicy, hot karuvadu curry during peak summers.
Tamil Catholics from the chawls in Jari Mari gather for the feast of St. Sebastian Chapel, held annually in January, where kanji is served to all attendees.
Smelling this combination is not for the faint-hearted or so-called purists, let alone eating it. For a population that deals with animal skin and carcasses for its livelihood, the smell of karvuadu is manam, aroma. What might otherwise be considered a stench—the raw or roasted karuvadu with fermented kanji—is the epitome of delicious comfort. The hydrating kanji, with muscle-repairing fish, is especially nourishing for those doing hard labour.
While the type of work and context transformed over the years—from the paddy fields of Naduvakulam to Mumbai’s mills—kanji as a source of sustenance for the landless, wage-labouring castes continued. In a practice dating back to the 1960s, where Tamil mill workers who migrated from Tirunelveli and Coimbatore were a huge part of the local population in Mumbai, Tamil Catholics from the chawls in Jari Mari gather for the feast of St. Sebastian Chapel, held annually in January, where kanji is served to all attendees.
My mother Anbuselvi Ashokkumar swears it is the best kanji she has eaten outside her hometown. “Simple and savoury, it is garnished with some chopped shallots,” she recalls. Even today, many Tamil Catholics who have moved to other parts of the city return for the annual feast. Clearly, while it reminds us of times of dearth and shame, kanji is a part of us, a food we return for. It offers satisfaction and pleasure: a cool, full belly, mouth-watering sides, before and after a hard day’s work.
Pooja Ashokkumar is a public historian, researcher, and storyteller. In 2024, she founded Bombay Tamil History, an archival initiative documenting Mumbai’s Tamil community, their unrecorded narratives of migration and labour, and associated intersections between food, caste, cinema, and folk histories. Her passions revolve around Babasaheb Ambedkar’s clarion call “Educate, Agitate, Organise”. With a postgraduate degree in History, she currently works at Sarmaya Foundation.
Login with Google