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Once again India’s season for prolonged fasting and feasting is almost upon us. Kashi, as the long famous land of epicures, beggars, thieves and learned affluent priests is among the top ten cities of ancient India for intertwining the cycles of ritual celebration and spiritual purification.

Kashi is the ultimate holy city for believing Hindus. Religious identity and economic structure during the medieval period is closely reflected in a small book: Geervanpad Manjari, by one Varadraj (1600-1660), a grammarian by training and a disciple of the great scholar Bhattoji Dixit. Geervanpad Manjari is a recreation of local Banarasi life in the 17th century Varanasi written in the registers that ring with common folks’ language in Sanskrit.

Varadraj’s work was followed by the treatise of one Dhundhiraj: Geervan Vang Manjari. Dhundhiraj, a man with a colourful bent of mind, while simplifying Varadraj’s tale elaborately describing the food and cooking processes for a formal feast for another scholar, gives the sedate ending a naughty twist. In the original, the guest blesses the householder and leaves. But Dhundhiraj adds a titillating bit about the host offering the revered scholar a night under his roof with his wife. 

It begins with a Maharashtrian Brahmin waking up and in an exchange laced with cuss words in the purest Sanskrit, ordering a presumably meek wife to hand him his bathing things so he can go bathe in Manikarnika Ghat. There is no lamp light in the house yet, but before he leaves the Brahmin shouts at his amazingly tolerant wife that this being a feast day, both she and her son must get busy early and invite all his relatives and hers for a big traditional feast. 

Next he turns to his late riser eight-year-old son angrily, asking him to hop out of bed and rush to the Chaukhamba market to shop for necessary ingredients. For the purchases he is to take out only two silver coins, no more, from a silver box within a wooden box hidden in the feminine quarters of the house under the charge of his........

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