Pan-Hindu ideas around food, among other things, revolve around purity and pollution. Ritual and social status of a caste is primarily expressed in nuanced and complex hierarchies of commensal relations between castes; the rules of eating, drinking or smoking are often spelt out. As against this looming context of culinary hierarchy of what to eat with who in the Indian society, Sikhism avowed for more egalitarian society, one of the ways in which it is conveyed is the tradition of commensal eating. Sikhism has a significant institution of the Guru kaLangar, a free community kitchen voluntarily run by the community members where they eats together without any distinction of caste, creed, color, age, gender, ethnicity or nationality. This commensal aspect has layers of shared experience and ritual practice based on common understandings and meaning, it is very visible and performatory. The langar space itself is intimately tied to the Gurudwara: It serves as a location not only for communal eating, but also for social education on practices of seva and as a perpetual reminder of the unacceptability of distinguishing between castes and status.
For this very reason, many years ago, I had taken my undergrad students to a langar as study in the performative aspect of commensality. However, on a recent trip to a much large gurdwara, I observed that the formatted and organized way in which seva and langar were organized has washed-out the performative aspect of commensality. This essay, through an auto-ethnographic account, seeks to capture the changes and contexts in which langar and commensality is practiced. The essay argues that routinized and formatted way of organizing the langar takes away the organic spontaneity of langar; where the lines between audiences, participants, organizers, lines are blurred. Is commensality necessarily performative is the question we ask ourselves.
