One forgotten Art and Its much debated Origin
I had almost forgotten about it, till one day I found this picture in my friend's album. it was shot sometime back while dining in an ethiopian
restaurant called zeni situated in bay area San Francisco.
Yes!, in this picture, that one sitting in the front is actually me. but thats not what makes it so special and as important as to write a blog on it, its something else. Now as much as I should be hating this friend of mine for chopping my head off in the picture, is as much as I should thank him for clicking it because this made me rethink of something important and worth mentioning, that I had in mind for a really long time.
Dining experience at Zeni was my introduction to african cuisine, but what left me stunned was this awful similarity of the ambiance and food in ethipio and of my own backyard. I am talking about a small village in Uttar pradesh in India, where sarson ki bhujiya, is cooked just they way a *xyz* is cooked in Ethiopia. Sorry I missed the name of the dishes. But I can surely what we eventually ended up ordering as per the manager's recommendation was, the curries from north indian and the bread from that of south indian region. a perfect blend I'd say. The south indian bread i mentioned was nothing else but mangalorean neer dose, which i love and I fell for it all over again in there.
That was all about food and cuisine, but there was more. The pot in the image you see is made by me and my gradma. I left it half done and then my grandma finished it. this art is practiced in mostly all north indian villages. I had seen my grandma and aunts and cousins making all this stuff in long summer days, and these are used specially to keep grains and beans and all sort of food items. the resources are all organic such as, dried grass grown in fields called kaans and moonj ( their name in hindi). Kaans is used after coloring or plain (wheatish shade) for holding it up and moonj is something that goes inside.
In the hot summer afternoons, this is one of the favorite pass-time for the ladies in the villages in north India specially plain land areas e.g. flat lands of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh..as I mentioned before, I think its more or less dependent on the season of this special grass plant too.. other than the regular usage, these handicrafts make for excellent gift items for functions specially marriages, when most of the grains and even cooked food times are packed in these baskets and are sent to the groom's side.
Few interesting links and information i found :
Wickerwork: Ethiopian women made a variety of items by winding bundles of palm leaves together.
Excerpts from one of the links "These pieces included colorful straws, allowing the creation of complicated and dynamic geometric designs. Using this technique they would create: baskets, plates, 'mosav'-a table to serve 'injera'-traditional Ethiopian bread, jewlery boxes, etc. Changes in wickerwork traditions occurred when colored threads of cotton began to appear in the market. The women preferred these threads to the hard work of creating their own. In Israel today there are still many Ethiopian women practicing this handicraft."
Good work there has always been Indian interaction with east african nations, like Kenya and so on, so this might also have come from India.
ReplyDeleteYou seem to have a huge range of interests, truly a versatile personality... how do you manage?
Thanks Kumpal madrasi, I wanted to write more, but got lost in my thoughts later.. so closed the post there in.. and as for versatility is concerned.. read this one..you might get some insight on how i manage :) keep commentin..
ReplyDeletehttp://blog.poonamparihar.com/2008/07/i-wanna-be-part-1-me-and-mic.html
link doesn't work.. well let it be..
ReplyDeleteAh broken due to length. anyways.. you might like to check the label "i wanna be" on the left..
ReplyDeletethanks for ya interest.. keep visitin..
Nice post.
ReplyDelete