Skip to main content

Aunties and spaces of care: Familial spaces of sustenance

With choto pishi and pishemoshai, enjoying a meal she prepared. These meals are a part of the journey home.

Familial spaces of love and care, extending to wide networks of familial connections, offer powerful registers of sustenance. 

Reflecting upon my childhood and my large joint family, Dutta Bari, I grew up in, I am drawn to the pedagogy of care that has shaped the ways in which I relate to the world, anchored powerfully by my mothers, aunts, and grandmother. 

Within this broader ecosystem of care, my aunts (father's sisters) played salient roles, upholding us, their eighteen nieces and nephews with love, joy, and friendship. 

From our aunts, we learned the practices of eternal kindness, knowing we could go to them with whatever requests we had, big and small. From our aunts, we learned the power of our collective, connecting us to land and place, tying us to the roots that shape our everyday lives.

Choto pishi is my youngest aunt, beautiful, soft spoken, and kind. A teacher of Biology at a local village school that was built on Gandhian ideals, she dedicated her earnings to care for our large joint family. 

The wellbeing of her family anchors choto pishi's life journey. This deep-rooted connection to familial wellness is intertwined with the everyday prayers, celebrations of food, and gifts that have come to represent her practices of care.

For all these years of my life, on the occasion of my birthday, I wake up knowing that my choto pishi would be offering prayers for my wellbeing. She does so for the whole extended family, meticulously remembering the birthdays of each family member, and chanting the blessings my nana (grandmother) passed on to her to recite. As we have welcomed the next generation into our family, the number of birthdays to remember and to offer prayers on has multiplied manifold.

Choto pishi introduced us to the enchanting world of diverse food practices. In the middle-class pre-liberalization Bengal of the 1970s and 80s, eating out was an annual celebration. The whole family, across two generations, waited in anticipation for the annual trip to New Restaurant, a small restaurant in Gole Bazar, the shopping area of the town. 

Eagerly sifting through the menu of fish fry, devilled eggs, egg rolls, etc., ordering the food, savoring and sharing it brought immense joy, staying with us for the year and in anticipation of the next family outing.

The enticing flavors of cuisines beyond the borders of Bengal would travel home with choto pishi as she experimented with different recipes over the weekends. We, her nieces and nephews, would line up with bowls in our hands, to try out the flavors drifting through our house with open courtyards.

The time of the year we would receive new clothes was during Durga Puja, the annual celebration of the Goddess among many Bengali households. Building up to the Puja, choto pishi and boro pishi would make weekly trips to Gole Bazar, visiting different stores to buy clothes for us. The clothes would be handed out by nana to be then put away by boro pishi to be taken out on the days of the Puja.

Just as much as Hindu religious festivals shaped our childhood, we participated in celebrating Eid and Christmas. On Christmas eve, we would put our stockings on top of the mosquito nets covering the beds we slept on. 

The next morning, the stockings would be full of lozenges, candies, biscuits, and cakes. We would wake up early in the morning to open our stockings, to collectively explore the goodies we received, and to share them with each other.

My aunts anchored these powerful memories of childhood. 

Their eternal love, care, and rootedness taught us the precious gifts of family and connection, that wherever we live, we must connect with these roots to find our anchors, to discover the values that form who we are in the world.


Popular posts from this blog

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe

  The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...
Read more

The Suit Walks the Corridor

  The Suit Walks the Corridor At ten past nine on a Monday the corridor on the top floor of the administration building fills with the sound of expensive shoes. The carpet up here was laid in the last refurbishment and still gives slightly underfoot, the way a good hotel lobby does, and the doors along it close with the soft, well-engineered thud of a German car. Along this carpet, in the direction of the lift marked Executive, comes the suit. It comes in navy and in charcoal, in the odd daring pinstripe, in the female version too, a tailored jacket over a silk shell, and heels that announce themselves on the tile of the lift lobby a full three seconds before the person arrives. The suit carries a flat white from the good cafe, the one that closed the student cafe to open, and a lanyard that swings with the confidence of a thing that opens doors. The suit passes the framed founding professors, who were photographed in gowns and look, at this distance, like a row of disapproving pe...
Read more

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems with w...
Read more