Tag Archives: indian

The Lemon-Chilli Bad Luck Repellent

Nationality: Indian
Age: 43
Occupation: Business Owner
Residence: Mumbai, India
Performance Date: 29/04/21
Primary Language: English
Language: Hindi

The Interviewer will be referred to as ‘I’, and the informant as ‘C’. Translations for Hindi words will be italicised and in parentheses. The Informant is a 43-year-old Sindhi man, born and raised in Maharashtra, India.

C: This is like our own desi (of the country, essentially self-reference by South Asians) evil-eye. To ward off evil. 

I: Great! So, what is it?

C: We call it nimbu-mirchi (lemon-chilli), I don’t know if it really has an official name, but basically you have… you thread lemon and green chillies, alternately, and you make about a six-inch length thread, and normally, you know how you have the evil eye? I think it’s an Egyptian concept, the eye to ward off evil? That’s kind of a similar thing, this is our way of warding off nazar (the evil eye, bad luck). So that is something, even now, when people buy a new car, a new house, a new office, or during poojas (prayer), this, that, the other, a new baby is born, weddings, whatever… it’s a very standard thing to put this. You’ll find it hanging, dangling under every single truck on the road, they still have it. They’re sold at all traffic lights, you’ll see some people, street-sellers going around with nimbu-mirchi pieces. And Saturday is like a special day when everybody’s supposed to buy it and do it. Like, that shani (Saturn, and also the prefix to the word for Saturday, but it is also used to refer to negativity), right? Something like that—shani bhari hoti hai (Saturn, and therefore Saturday, is heavy, and the negativity associated with it), or whatever. You even use chillies and salt, or lemons and chillies to remove nazar from people, you take it and swish it around their entire body to lift the nazar. My niece used to have a lot of chest congestion, colds, it was like her chest wasn’t even clear for four days in a month… we did it for her, my mother did, because she believed it was nazar. I know my friend’s mother did the same thing for her grandson too, it’s very common.

Analysis:

The idea of nazar is very common within Indian culture, and so is this particular ritual of removing or preventing it. Anywhere you go, you will probably see a nimbu-mirchi dangling somewhere, from the rearview mirror of a car, to the entrance of somebody’s house. Similarly, the chilli-salt/chilli-lemon ritual along with a chant or prayer is very common to alleviate people of strange, persisting illnesses or odd, out of character behaviour—another account of this can be found in “White Things: An Account of Demon Possession”, at http://uscfolklorearc.wpenginepowered.com/white-things:-an-account-of-demon-possession. Indians are largely a spiritual people, we like knowing things are auspicious, bringing good luck and warding off the bad, often relying on cultural superstitions and practices. So, culturally, both of these things make sense: the ritual, as well as the folk object that the lemon-chilli string is. What these practices convey falls within a very prominent folk belief: negativity (that comes with Saturn, as well as with negative emotions and the evil eye) must be warded off, discouraged, and good luck and blessings can be attracted, through poojas (prayer) and physical symbols of luck like the nimbu-mirchi, along with a person’s own lifestyle and deeds (their karma).

Humility and Humiliation: A Proverb

Nationality: Indian
Age: 43
Occupation: Sole Business Owner (Gym) and Nutrition/Training Consultant
Residence: Mumbai, India
Performance Date: 29/04/21
Primary Language: English
Language: Sindhi

The Interviewer will be referred to as ‘I’, and the informant as ‘C’. Translations for Hindi words will be italicised and in parentheses, and the translation/transliteration for the proverb will be after the transcript. The Informant is a 43-year-old Sindhi man, born and raised in Maharashtra, India.

I: Could you tell me about a proverb that you feel like has a lot of significance for you and within your culture?

C: Sindhis really believe in this proverb, it’s something we use a lot, something I believe in, you can even see within me and my journey with my job. “Jainh khaado taro, tainh khey nako soor nako baro,” meaning, basically that if one eats the food from the bottom of the saucepan, he’ll not suffer from… pain or humiliation, so be humble, and proud of humble beginnings. Sindhis came to India during the partition from Pakistan, had nothing in their hands, didn’t even have proper homes, lived in tents. They worked on the street, small jobs, odd jobs, but worked hard. So, they believe in the idea that one who’s seen — one who’s seen life from the smallest point will never feel humiliated in any situation in life, will never feel small in those situations, will always rise up from those things. 

I: Is there any hypothetical situation that you would use this in. Say, someone comes to you, a niece or a sibling, how would you use this and in what circumstance?

C: You can use this in a situation where somebody feels that they have failed in life and have to work from ground-up again. So, this is a good way to tell the person, you know, don’t give up, there is still a lot to look up—forward—to. So, basically, you’re telling the person that, ‘Now that you’ve hit ground zero, once you work your way up from here, you’ll never face a situation that you can’t handle.’ One thing to remember is that Sindhi culture is all about never giving up and hard work, you will see us working very hard no matter what we’re doing, no matter what we’re selling, it’s about never giving up, we will always work hard and work our way up, it’s all about that. 

Original Script: جئن کادو تارو تائين کي نڪو سور نڪو بارو

Romanised: Jainh khaado taro, tainh khey nako soor nako baro.

Word for word: There would be no cloud-nine days without rock-bottom moments left below.

Translation: If one eats the food from the bottom of the saucepan, then they will not suffer from pain or humiliation.

Analysis:

As my informant stated, this is a proverb that is apparent and relevant to Sindhi culture and history and the way they are viewed in Indian society (as hard workers and businesspeople that are extremely diligent and dedicated to their craft/work), and also applicable outside of it, since advising hard work is something that is very common, both within the broader spectrum of Indian culture, and outside of it. This has a dual idea, of humble beginnings and hitting rock bottom (essentially the concept of ‘once you’ve hit rock bottom, the only way to go is upward’), but also of staying humble and aware of those humble beginnings, since they will strengthen one for the rest of their life. It points to the idea of suffering, of this rock bottom, as a way to grow and become more resilient, a common idea expressed all through the world when it comes to productivity, especially with the idea of working under capitalism.

Maya, the Dancing Ghost

Nationality: Indian
Age: 13
Occupation: Student
Residence: Gurgaon, India
Performance Date: 26/04/21
Primary Language: English
Language: Hindi

The Interviewer will be referred to as ‘I’, and the informant as ‘V’. Translations for Hindi words, if any, will be italicised and in parentheses. The Informant is a 13-year-old Punjabi girl, born and raised in North India, attending a boarding school in North India.

I: So, you mentioned you played some pranks on your friends based on a ghost story they tell at your school. Could you tell me about it?

V: Yeah, sure, so basically, I’m in this old boarding school and this is a really old story that basically every student who ever came here knows. Maya was a dancer for the Nawabs (this refers to the royal families that would rule South Asian states, primarily during the period of Islamic rule), so she used to dance for the king and queen. She was beautiful and she used to dance really well, and slowly the king fell in love with her. And when the queen found out, she sent her guards to kill Maya, and they killed her on the thirteenth, and cut her into thirteen pieces, and she’s buried all around the school, because this is the same place where they were then. So, what we are always told is that on the thirteenth, if Maya can get all her body-pieces back in the same place at 12:00AM, like, at that exact time, then she can come back, and she will haunt our whole school. It’s kind of scary and fun because, basically, we prank all our classmates because of this, like, we scare people on purpose on the thirteenth, in the dorms, especially on any Friday the Thirteenth because everybody thinks that’s scary now. 

Analysis:

This is a particularly interesting iteration of a ghost story, because it visibly and obviously has both older, and newer elements. The idea of her being a royal dancer seems older, like a part of the story that has been preserved over the generations it has been told, especially since the location of this school in North India tracks. However, the idea of ‘thirteen’, the thirteen pieces and the thirteenth, points to a newer iteration, because thirteen, historically, is not a particularly unlucky number for Indians the way it is in other cultures. With the increasing prominence of globalisation and digital media, including social media, the homogenisation of information across cultures, and even multimedia such as horror movies and franchises, the idea of “Friday the Thirteenth”, and thirteen in general as a number that inspires bad luck and fear, has been propagated even to India. Therefore, I would hypothesize that the ‘thirteen’ portion of the story is newer, a modification, especially considering my informant here is very young and part of an especially globalised generation. There is a certain plausibility to this story, since it is rooted in a real time and place in India, even though it concerns ghosts and is largely believed by the student body of the school (or, alternatively, used as an excuse to play pranks), making it essentially a legend amongst this particular community, however niche it may be.

Lapsi: The Common Cold Cure?

Nationality: Indian
Age: 52
Occupation: Homemaker
Residence: Mumbai, India
Performance Date: 30/04/2021
Primary Language: English
Language: Hindi

Transcription

The Interviewer will be referred to as ‘I’, and the informant as ‘S’. Translations for Hindi words will be italicised and in parentheses. The Informant is a 52-year-old Punjabi mother, born and raised in North India.

I: So, do you have any remedies or recipes to follow when someone you know has come down with a cold? 

S: Cold? Yeah, definitely.

I: Please describe the recipe and each ingredient, and why these ingredients would help someone with a cold.

S: Well, they’re supposed to be heat-inducing, primarily. So, you… you take gramflour—besan, we call it besan, that yellow powder—you take some besan and you roast it. Typically it was done in ghee (clarified butter, a South Asian staple), but we don’t really use too much ghee nowadays so I kind of dry-roast it, and you boil milk on the side, and if you want some flavouring you can add to it. You know, depending on what and who it’s for, you can add a little cinnamon, a little elaichi (cardamom), and… but you add that at the end, cinnamon you can add at the beginning. You dry-roast it a little, some, and you have boiling milk on the other side. You mix it all together and let it cook for a little bit, so that the gramflour gets cooked thoroughly, and towards the end of it you add your elaichi, or your cardamom, more cinnamon, whatever you want to add for flavour, and I-I like to do elaichi because the flavour is nice, it goes very well with it, and then you add… honey. I add honey. People like sweet, so I add a dash of honey, and cover it for a bit so the elaichi flavour seeps in. And there you have it! That’s lapsi. And in the end, I just add a teaspoon of ghee—because I don’t roast it in ghee but that’s the usual way of doing it. 

I: Is this something you’ve been taught by family — is this a family recipe?

S: Well,  this is just what I’ve learned by… I guess, just, seeing and hearing. My nani (grandmother) used to make it, then my mother, now me. We each use different flavours, yeah, depending on who’s making it and who’s eating it, but the base is the same. 

I: And it’s always called lapsi?

S: Yeah. I guess everybody around me used it. You could call it a family recipe, yeah. 

Analysis:

When it comes to ‘cures’ for the common cold, known medically to be viral and therefore virtually incurable, only something you can wait out, I’ve found that people in India do normally describe all of their remedies as having “heat-inducing” ingredients. While there is no concrete reasoning as to why these ingredients are such, within Indian culture, there are many spices and herbs believed to be so, used within these remedies, usually hot drinks or soups—another can be found in a piece titled “Kaadha: The One-For-All Remedy” (http://uscfolklorearc.wpenginepowered.com/?p=59885)—and this is a long-standing recipe for this particular family. I have not found such a recipe for this ‘Lapsi’ anywhere else, including online, even though it has been passed down the lines of this family. Home remedies are extremely common in India, as they are in many places around the world, sometimes even preferred to allopathic medicine, because they rely on herbs, nature, spices, things that are ‘pure’ and gathered from the earth itself, not chemically processed. Even though it is common in some, primarily Western communities, to rely on allopathic/pill-based medicine and comfort food, when it comes to the common cold and other such illnesses, Indians gravitate to homeopathy and home remedies before anything else, from within the family and the community. Additionally, the common use of these hot soups and drinks makes sense, since they automatically would warm the body from the inside and cause relief from the cold.

Kaadha: The One-For-All Remedy

Nationality: Indian
Age: 52
Occupation: Homemaker
Residence: Mumbai, India
Performance Date: 30/04/2021
Primary Language: English
Language: Hindi

The Interviewer will be referred to as ‘I’, and the informant as ‘S’. Translations for Hindi words will be italicised and in parentheses. The Informant is a 52-year-old Punjabi mother, born and raised in North India.

I: Do you have any common notable remedies or medicinal recipes for a fever, maybe a flu?

S: Yeah, for virals! For flus, fever, cough, cold, we call it kaadha (decoction). It’s pretty generic… and everybody calls it kaadha.

I: Are there different recipes of kaadha, depending on where you go, who you ask—

S: Yeah, yeah, yeah! There’ll be different recipes, and I’m not really a master of them, but I used to make a lot of it when my daughter was younger. Now, today, I do not remember really the exact ingredients of what went into it, you know, which was the primary ingredient at which point of the recipe, but there used to be things like… dhaniya (coriander/cilantro) powder was for stomachache, and god-knows-what… no! Dhaniya powder was primarily for fever, but basically you have ginger—again, what goes into it is mostly heat-inducing ingredients, again, so you won’t have the cooling things going in there—so, primarily you’ll have ajwain (carom seeds, a very common ingredient in Indian foods and folk remedies), ginger, you’ll have dhaniya or dhaniya powder, long (cumin), cinnamon, tulsi (holy basil), haldi (turmeric), very importantly… a lot, depending on what the problem is and where you’re from. But, let’s say you take two glasses of water, you put it on to boil with all this stuff in it, all these spices and herbs, you put it to boil, and you allow it to boil till you reduce to quantity to about half on a slow flame, and you let it sit. Kaadha basically means, like, brewing, so you allow it to become a kaadha, like a brew, so you brew it enough to reduce the liquid to about half the quantity that you started with, and… cool it a little and then you add a dash of honey, because it’s very bitter and you give this to children too, and then you serve it. You have it, a few times a day, and it’ll help!

I: Did you learn this recipe from anywhere, that you can remember?

S: No, not really, it was, again, something we all kind of had in our childhoods, through our lives, so I learnt it from my mother. However, actually, there was this homeopathic doctor, Dr. [Name], he’s the one who guided me with some ingredients and varieties of kaadha, he streamlined the one that I would make, catered to my daughter, like, ‘oh, you add this, these are the primaries for fever, these are for stomachache,’ and whatever else. And… I also remember, I remember him telling me that with little ones, with children, when it comes to fever, you don’t give… immediately, like allopathy promotes that you immediately give the Crocin or Calpol when they hit, like, 99 (degrees) or 100, but he stopped me from doing that. He said that fever is very important, because you don’t want to treat the symptom, you want to treat the problem, and fever is your body’s way of fighting the problem. So, your body is heating up so much that the problem is being fought, being killed, but when you bring down the fever, you’re not allowing the body to fight. And, he said, basically, ‘kids can handle high temperatures far better than adults can,’ so he said, ‘no matter the temperature, do not panic, it doesn’t mean the same thing as an adult having the same temperature. You can stick to cold swabs and homeopathic stuff, but you don’t need to use allopathy unless it gets into… an emergency situation.’ It’s always worked for my daughter.

Analysis

Kaadha is a very common remedy in India, and there are many variations of it, depending on the illness, and the person making it and the region they’re from. Kaadha (काढ़ा) essentially means, as the informant states, brew, or literally, decoction, a medicine derived from plants. Here, the plants differ, but the main ingredients always have similar properties: they are heat-inducing. This belief in and use of heat-inducing ingredients can also be seen in, “Lapsi: The Common Cold Cure?” (http://uscfolklorearc.wpenginepowered.com/?p=59861), except this is a very common remedy, and usually makes use of more spices. Where ‘lapsi’ would provide relief and usually taste pleasant due to its fewer spices and bitter herbs, kaadha is known to be bitter and a pure decoction, the ‘pain’ part of ‘no pain, no gain’, and many Indians swear by its effectiveness in helping cure most common illnesses, including stomachaches, fever, the common cold, a cough, a sore throat, etc., even in children. It is a hot drink, had multiple times a day, just as the informant states, and since it is hot and also has spices in it, it would heat the body from the inside out, but it is even used to treat a fever: this is why it is often recommended by homeopathic doctors, and since it uses heat-inducing ingredients to fight off, well, a fever, it can be classified as a homeopathic remedy as well, all while being a classic, Indian folk medicine, that has been used and trusted for decades upon decades.