Cooking, like translating, sits at the liminal intersection between what can be measured and what is driven by instinct.
It began with a simple question, and an approximate answer. Early last year, while I was invited to be on a panel that constellated around the many questions of translation across cultures, I was asked about my process as a translator. As an emerging translator, I always find myself on uncertain grounds when answering questions about the “process”. Is there a formula? Is there a template? I know not, and this very uncertainty was blurted out with much conviction, “Andaaze se.”
Andaaze se? What do you mean?
“I mean”—I paused briefly, scrambling to locate appropriate and intelligible words from the meridians of my brain. I mean that I think of my act of translation as equivalent to the act of cooking. I could see the expressions on the sea of faces ahead of me tweak—some nods, some shakes—very much following the choreography of salt and pepper shakers. Cooking? How? I had guessed the subsequent questions with an instinctive ease. Instinctive, gut-driven, andaaze se—a trait that I trust the most while cooking, and while translating.
* * *
I came to cooking later than I came to translating. I could, and would, of course, be able to prepare tea, asymmetrical but very edible rotis, and the occasional paneer makhani. However, it was only after my move to Sonipat in 2022, faced by the imminent crisis of place, and taste, that I could fully comprehend the necessity and the virtue of being able to cook.
The move happened right on the heels of the receding Covid-19 pandemic. I had a new job at a university, and having to live in a new city after three years of being accustomed to homely comforts implied shaking off the congealed inertia of being a dependent. I was away from home, out of place, and disconnected. This disconnect was further pronounced by my body’s rejection of the food I was eating. It was difficult to stomach the oily and bland fare—neither the university mess nor restaurant takeouts could whet or fulfill my appetite. This failure naturally translated into eating (and cooking) by myself.
It was to enliven the connection to home, to the familiar grammatalogy of taste inscribed on the tongue, that I became resolute in my endeavour to cook. In a genuine spirit to structure the chaos that the shift in place had elicited, I made a deliberate attempt at cooking khichdi—nothing could ever go wrong with this dish. Instead of relying on my mother’s abstract instructions on WhatsApp text—ranging from mutthi bhar dal (a fistful of pulses) to andaaze se namak (salt, according to taste)—I relied on the first five-star-rated recipe for khichdi that a Google search showed up.
The Google-endorsed recipe was more exacting than my mother’s. It was straightforward, a delight to my obsessive desire for precision while cooking. However, this harsh devotion to exactness proved to be gruesome.
What emerged from that two-hour long ordeal was a chunky brown-crusted dish bearing no semblance to the original. As I narrated this accident to my mother, the embarrassment was only exacerbated. Her advice, “sab kuch padhke nahi aata” (not everything comes by studying) made evident what I already knew: practice and craft cannot simply be picked up by following instructions. Quite to the contrary, empiricism and the senses culminate logically as a means of knowledge; this reckoning made me think about the role of the senses—intuitive knowledge—and its application, not only in cooking but also translating. Both acts—cooking as well as translating—require a mingling of bodies and the senses.
* * *
Tongue. Zabaan. The relisher of rasa. The originator of taste. Tongue as the framer of language, the framer of palate. In my concerted effort to reconnect with one of the crucial life-sustaining activities, I had renewed my relation with another life-defining activity of mine: translating.
I had been a minor translator for a better part of my life, translating a line or two out of sheer fancy, but had never seriously considered it as a professional path until the Covid-19 lockdown. The vast expanse of time sharpened my attention to the words around me. I began to earnestly consider translation as a purposeful activity, intentionally inhabiting the Hindi books that I was reading. Hindi, which I otherwise spoke and read with the casual muscle memory of inherited language, became a deliberate field. The languages were the loci upon which my dyaana (concentrated attention) rested.
However, the connection and the relationship between these two acts concern more than a mere maternal inheritance. In cooking, and in translating, I dwell in the world of words—the books, the recipes. Both acts require an interplay of wonder and deviation. I am reminded of the time when, while translating Harishankar Parsai’s Premchand ke Phatte Joote (Premchand’s Torn Shoes), I decided to play a pun on the word “sole”—a deviation, a liberty. Such liberties spark joy while translating.
As art forms, reliance on definite rules, on definite mechanics, fails the magical. Translation is more than grammar, syntax, and rules. It is listening, it is tasting, it is smelling, it is feeling, it is an awakening of the senses to the familiar and the extraordinary by immersing deep in the words.
* * *
The case of the khichdi is not a singular case. Translating within the kitchen is an art of ongoing ingenuity, a whole new geometry of knowledge that privileges a method of appropriateness and approximation to a method of truth. Much like translating a piece, translating recipes across geographies within an 80 square feet space is no ordinary feat. The limitations are not just dictated by space but also by availability—how must one conjure red peppers or parsley in a kitchen that is closer to a highway between Sonipat and Delhi than either cities? By approximating ingredients, am I sacrificing the ornate for the ordinary, a lazy attempt at forgoing? Or, does the process of extemporary substitution generate space for attuned experimentation? What is the mark of an authentic translator? Who is a true cook?
Translation is more than grammar, syntax, and rules. It is listening, it is tasting, it is smelling, it is feeling.
Cooking, too, becomes an act of translation. You need to inhabit the recipe, and shake your stupor off by refocussing, and reorienting your senses. Cooking, like translating, becomes an act of active seeking.
When I think about the process of preparing a dish in my tiny kitchen in Sonipat, it mostly seems like a back-and-forth—with the ingredients, the place, the ‘truth’ of the dish. I am reminded of poet and translator Mireille Gansel’s Translation as Transhumance, most effortlessly rendered into English by Ros Schwartz. Within the book’s foreword is a recollection of novelist William Gass on translating Rilke. Gass suggests that what is arrived at after translation is “a reading enriched by the process of arriving at it, and therefore, really, only the farewells to a long conversation”.
I have often thought of Gass’ quote as crucial to my act of cooking and translating. To arrive at an enriched reading means to depart from reliance on the mercies of mechanics. It is to be more attuned to the charms of risk-taking and inspection and to the world of experimenting. To see in myself the potential to examine and adapt to the requirements of each situation in the moment. As Gansel suggests, “The stranger was not the other, it was me. I was the one who had everything to learn, everything to understand, from the other”. As I rethink how my decision to employ the pun on “sole” enriched the meaning for myself as well as my readers, I began to understand Gansel. The reader is not the (only) other—the stranger is myself. From my experiments with words, practice of playing with food, I learn.
* * *
In my own kitchen, I have arrived at creamy textures through cashew nuts and pistachios instead of employing whipped cream. In moments when I missed cilantro’s citrusy nature, I have made peace with a combination of coriander and lemon. When my dish was threatened by a grain of similarity between cumin and carom seeds, a quick Hindi translation of the recipe came to my rescue.
On the other hand, when a Hindi-translated recipe’s enthusiasm distorted clarity, I had to yield to my imagination. The instruction read: फिर, घोल को चर्मपत्र कागज़ से ढके 8×8 इंच के बेकिंग पैन में डालें। रबर स्पैचुला की मदद से इसे पैन के चारों तरफ फैलाएँ और ऊपर से चिकना करें। मिश्रण बहुत गाढ़ा होगा – इसमें कोई हर्ज नहीं है। (Translation: Then, add the mixture into an 8×8-inch baking pan hidden covered with parchment paper. Use a rubber spatula to spread it around the pan and smooth the top. The batter will be very thick—that is not a problem.) It was hard to imagine pouring the mixture into a pan lidded with parchment paper. The instruction was unsound—are the sides of the pan lined? Do I have to line the pan with the mixture by spreading it around? The instructions, though vague, triggered my curiosity. I was quick to make amends of my own accord.
It is these encounters and exchanges—the meditation on invention with intention—that relates the art of cooking to the act of translating. There is an almost intuitive, instinctive note to these acts.
Between cooking and translating lies, neatly slotted, the evergreen question of authenticity—of fidelity. And the answer, through my experience as a body both embodying and practising these acts, resides in their rasa (quite literally meaning ‘juice’). Broadly understood, rasa is not just what is created by the artist, but also what is experienced by the audience. A dish is determined not only by its original maker, but by every subsequent maker and taster that interprets it. Similarly, a text is formed not only by its author, but by every translator (reader), and reader that embodies it.
Between cooking and translating lies, neatly slotted, the evergreen question of authenticity—of fidelity.
The rasika or the competent viewer (here, the competent reader and experimenter of the recipe and the text) must actively participate, for rasa cannot be evoked in a passive state of mind. All the senses have to be necessarily and actively evoked to experience and transfer its enchantment; using maatras—both measurements and diacritical marks—and with our bodies as paatras, vessels and characters, the ingredients are known.
Gansel’s understanding of translation is a departure from the fixed, egoistic interest of a writer or interpreter, towards language as migration. With the memories of my migration to Sonipat still fresh, I now understand the crafts of translating and cooking as the art of unselfish seeking. The estrangement that is anticipated by the translator at a new text is also felt by the cooking body in a strange kitchen, when ingredients are sparse, or when it is faced with an unfamiliar recipe. This estrangement—bargaining with a distance—is the process; to be negotiated and navigated with a right sprinkle of searching, of andaaz.
Sonakshi Srivastava is a senior writing fellow at Ashoka University, and the Translations Editor at Usawa Literary Review. She is interested in food writing, and has previously been shortlisted for The FoodLab Residency by Serendipity Arts Foundation. Her writings have twice been recognized by Indian Culinary Agenda Food Writing Prize.
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