A few years after the tetrapartite struggle between Japan, Korea, China and Italy over the origin of noodles, invoking everyone from Marco Polo to Nissin, two Eastern Indian states sparred over India's hallmark sweet delicacy, the Rasgulla, or rather the Roshogulla, or in fact, Kheer Mohan. Hegemonic and lingo-chauvinistic catapults engaged and bipartite, vitriolic exchanges ensued. Historians to pedestrians and socialites to vagabonds on tea-stalls and railway platforms partook in this war, fought on all fronts, through many media.
The sweet is a softball to orange-sized ball of semi-consolidated cottage cheese ( chhena ) and semolina dough, immersed/cooked in sugar syrup.
Odiyas contend that the sweet had been offered to the Jagannath deity as holy edible offerings ( prasad ) since the early medieval times, and have an elaborate mythical backstory to substantiate the same. Bengalis just as staunchly and unflinchingly hold their own version of history of a legendary hereditary sweet-maker by name Nobin Chandra Das. Both sides defend their respective propositions with fervour, self-initiative and borderline aggression.
To paraphrase a classic conundrum: Did the chicken come first or the egg? The seeming paradox, once frustratingly irresolvable, dissolves as soon as we abandon conventional reasoning which assumes chicken and egg to be absolute definitions. Conventional wisdom dictates them to be inflexible objective constructs. However, language, semantics to be precise, itself is essentially a gross generalisation, a chimera of assumptions to devise shorthand that help us communicate ideas and natural phenomenon time-efficiently but not necessarily accurately or scientifically. To call chicken and eggs absolute is an oversimplification. An arbitrary assumption of platonic definitions, as in whether an ideal chicken or an ideal chicken-egg exist somewhere as perfect, model entities. Just as the colour blue came from describing azure, cyan or turquoise during Newton's time (while violet denoted later common understanding of blue) to denoting what we call the deeper, darker, ink-like shade today (Remember, Roses are Red, Violets are Blue?), the meaning of any word is a diffused fringe of lamina pinned to a centre, that itself keeps shifting with our upbringing and newly amassed experiences, subtly ever so-slightly readjusting it, and varies from person to person. Thus, words are innately individualistic constructs, and dynamic thereby as well.
So in the question of whether the chicken preceded the egg or vice-versa, it’s the egg, which came from the last chicken-like organism, where you draw a threshold demarcation, chalk a line for it being just barely not so chicken like as to be labelled a proper ‘chicken’.
But what if we slightly tweak the definition? What if we craftily rephrase the original question, posing it instead as: Did the chicken come before the chicken-egg, or is it the other way round? Now our answer would be a chicken: one that hatched from the egg laid by last chicken-like limiting non-chicken evolutionary ancestor. Thus the egg was a non-chicken egg but bore a chicken, owing to mutation or epigenetic or accumulation of just enough tipping-point genetic drift. A chicken egg is laid by a chicken. But a chicken, that is, fulfilling the minimum criteria of chicken-ness, say sharing 90.6% of its genetic makeup with the modern, mean chicken's genetic composition, can hatch out of a not-so-chicken predecessor's egg by an arbitrary fluke. All in all, it's an evidently naive exercise in foolhardy discretisation, a tad frivolous, and not really of intrinsic utilitarian-epistemic value.
The point is to trace the bare criterion for being a chicken, at what of several successive evolutions, do you draw the line. Wherein the evolutionary history of an organism, do you say “It's the most liberal I can go with calling an entity a chicken with my definition of chicken.”
Then we might draw a line to include those with 98% of shared genetic make-up and beyond, or specimens with 96% similar genetic makeup or a 93%, and so forth. The point is to trace the last ancestor (who might as well be a quasi-dinosaur, for that matter), calling whom a chicken won't be “pushing it”.
It is akin to what do you call circular and what do you call ellipsoidal or picking ellipsoidal and oval. At what eccentricity do you deem calling an irregular round shape a circle as “stretching it(s definition)”. This is analogically the very concept Wittgenstein tried to establish with his beetle boxes a tour-de-force of illustrative simplicity.
Say, I ask you a simple question “How many kinds of leopards exist?” Is this generality a simple question. or is it vague, broad and ambiguous, by virtue of its generality. It is unspecificied what is meant by leopard, which of its many meanings of differing specificities and contexts. Some might answer it as African and Asiatic. Yet others might classify on a different dimension or echelon, going for the leopard, snow leopard and the clouded leopard. Is a black panther too similar to be counted as separate? Is a jaguar too different to be accounted in? We succumb to the one too many open ends at one too many tiers. Our reasoning and definitions invariably become circumambulation or incoherent, diffused dissipations.
Just as the penumbra fringe of a shadow, each word has multiple annular definitions. Whether I am an atheist, depends on how the question-poser defines atheism, which if a negation or disjoint complement set of theism, leads us to ask to clarify theism, in turn passing the interrogative parcel to God, inquiring what is meant by God: exactly what all of the traits of “Omnipotence, Omnibenevolence, Priormostness and Ultimate Causativeness" does he possess? I may rule out one combination while I might believe in another. These intersecting, overlapping fringes are merely metalinguistic fundamental inabilities, rather than flaws of human languages of interpersonal communication to define objective reality by subjective ideas and symbolic, iconographical expression of felt perceptions.
In Set Theory we don't deal in subjectivism: we don't enumerate the proportion of 'healthy' chickens, we would rather go for, say, proportion of chickens with a mean normalised XYZ fitness index of five or more.
If noodles are a metonymy for "instant noodles", Japan gets it with its army commander's wartime ergonomic invention. If the term is a common synechdoche for Ramen, Korea might have a better stake, categorising and sidelining Chinese chow as distinctive.
If noodles are used in the most generic sense, one of China and Italy gets it, depending on how far early you're willing to go, how original the definitiveness is, pre- or post-Marco Polo's epic excursion, to be precise.
Culture and communitarianism is a really sensitive topic in India, divisive, and prone to provoking violent outbursts. Cuisine, Inventions and belongingness of historic figures (cue for Kerala and Bihar tug-of-war over Aryabhatta) is particularly touchy.
In Jagannath Puri, an elaborate sweet delicacy ritual offering tradition is claimed to have been going on since the 12th century. However substantial evidence exists only for late 17th or early 18th century. Legend has it that Pahala village had copious bovine-cattle affording a surplus of milk, which often perished. A Jagannath priest, lamenting the wastage, taught them curdling, and Pahala Rasgulla thus materialised. This is better evidenced. Many culinary experts have attempted to demonstrate evidence that Odiya kitchen-workers and cooks brought the chhena sweet-making technique to Bengali homesteads and shops. However, a good number of reputed credentials on the other side attempt to disprove this notion as well, citing an absence of the very existence of chhena in the 17th century, based on abject lack in historical records, as well as the ‘unholiness’ in Hindu tradition, of offering spoilt milk-products to deities.
The spongy white rasgulla is believed to have been introduced in present-day West Bengal in 1868 by a Kolkata-based confectioner named Nobin Chandra Das. Odiyas propound he introduced Semolina to the original Pahala Rasgulla, in order to make it less perishable and susceptible. Bengalis defend his recipe as original and a product of ingenuity.
A synechdoche is where a part represents the whole or the converse. If Rasgulla is used in its modern connotated, generalised, majoritarian-perceptual sense, Bengal is the clear victor, as if victory here is tantamount to any watershed in a syncretic continuous evolution. Sure the devision constitutes a leap in the usual pace of epicurean evolution, but it's still not an "origination".
If Rasgulla is used to denote the absolute, narrow contemporary inflexible image or concept, the mention of the name conjures up, Bengal's claim is vouched. If Rasgulla entails a level of generality and breadth, Odiyas created and prevailed the first appreciably Rasgulla-like thing a good time before Bengal. The precursor of the Oriya Pahala Rasgulla, Khir Mohana, say is parameterised by somehow devising a yardstick to roughly quantify "likeliness to the average, modern idea of a Rasgulla". On that scale Pahala Rasgulla would be 300 year old and say, 98% similar to the modern Rasgulla while the NC Das Rasgulla, 150 years old, would be 99.9% similar to the mean, modern Rasgulla conception in our minds or the practical statistical average physique of it. We mistake infinitesimal progresses for discrete origins: that's precisely the fallacy in all such arguments. Assumption of complex composite concepts as objective, concrete, pure models and platonic entities.
In 2016, the West Bengal government applied for a Geographical Indications (GI) tag for the variant called ‘Banglar Rosogolla’ (Bengali Rasgulla), clarifying that the Bengal and Odisha variants were different in "both in colour, texture, taste, juice content and method of manufacturing.
Although, In 2017, West Bengal was awarded its Rosogolla's GI status, an event celebrated by everyone from national media outlets to the Chief Minister of the state, the Registry office of India clarified that West Bengal was given GI status for Banglar Rosogolla and Odisha can claim it too if they cite the place of origin of their variant along with the exact colour, texture, taste, juice content and method of manufacturing.
But in the debate for whether Roshogulla is Bengali or Oriya, it is easy to let slip a more attending, crucial and pertinent question at hand in the first place, whether all of Bengal is Bengali and all of Orissa is Oriya, after all a 107 years are but little time for synecdoches to absorb unto themselves; Orissa and Bengal were segregated in 1912 and the exact demarcations for the former state were drawn as late 1936, six years after the second generation of the NC Das shopstead had created a Rasgulla-frenzy all over the nation by the introduction of the then-revolutionary vacuum-packaging, capitalising on their anti-perishable crusade. Is the time ripe that we should now argue if 1912, the date when a chunky state called Orissa-and-Bihar was cleft out of erstwhile Bengal, seven years into the wake of the communally-divisive departure of East Bengal, or 1936, when Orissa was further carved out of Bihar, is the pertinent date of Orissa's birth. Shall we finally discuss which viceroy shall claim credit for the creation of Odisha? Is the division even creditable?
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Printable version | Jun 28, 2022 6:36:42 pm | https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/some-sweet-disputes/article27171582.ece