The Roti Making Revolution

Painting from the Dolls of India

Flour, water and oil. It’s often in mystifying simplicity that certain cultural inventions reveal so much more about our history, way of life and attitudes that the most eloquently crafted dichotomy could not. A piece of fabric worn over someone’s head or face; a symbol of a workman’s tools or a warrior’s weapon resting in a sheath on their belt are all examples of components that conjure up the most spine-tingling feelings of nostalgia, pride and spirituality without needing any further extrapolation. I hope I’m not only speaking for myself here when I say that the mere mention of the word “roti” is a trigger factor in resuscitating all of the above feelings and I would probably be right in thinking the 5,000 year old dietary staple of South Asian folk means so much more to people just outside of my window and far beyond.

Now that I’ve got you salivating at the mere mention of all the culinary and historical delights to do with this accompanying carbohydrate, I better get to the reason why I’m writing this article. I am sure by now, communities all around the world partaking in lockdown are no strangers to trying new activities and getting lost down a hole of self-indulgence that they perhaps never even knew was there. I myself had been honing my gastronomic skill set and had got around to the task of conquering the concealed dexterity exhibited by my masi (auntie) with which 10 or so perfectly shaped circular breads, cascading in melted butter would appear after not even a moment of diverted attention. Up until recently, I had not even made an attempt to fathom what technique, skill and timing went in to producing an item so common place in our lives. Perhaps this showed more about attitudes present in our community than most of us care to recognise and is the motivating factor for what I am about to say.

To the delight of Asian housewives across the world, I fell about the kitchen, splattering myself with chapati flour, rolling quite ellipsoidal shapes and incinerating my finger tips on the hob flame. This is NOT easy. Eventually I got the hang of it but only facilitated by the circumstances of quarantine entrapment that allows fixated concentration on a single task by the absence of others. It was much to my surprise when stumbling across a TikTok (yes, a TikTok video is the basis for this whole article, watch it HERE) of a British Asian guy, roughly my age displaying his own roti making prowess for the world to see with all the emphasis on his gender. A kindred spirit indeed, I had to chuckle over the fact an innocent TikTok video had made me think about the relation between gender roles and food preparation in the South Asian community.

The best Asian Chef I know, was not my own mother, nor my masi or even my mother-in-law (shock horror). No, the absolute first-class architect of comestible execution is a family friend; construction extraordinaire and a man. During my time working on a building site for my friend, I was pushed not only to excel in my building work but also in cooking a dish for my lunch that outshone whatever I had made the previous day. My fellow labourers would also practice this undertaking and every day at around 13:00, our table would be full of qeema, sabzi, chapatis, chicken dishes and biryani to our hearts content. We would taste each other’s food and marvel at what we had created with a lashing competitive streak that made us point out the pros and cons of each recipe; how we could improve for next time and who was the reigning champion that day.

My cousin and grandmother. Words can't
describe the pride felt when preparing dishes passed
down by this incredible woman.

I was the only British born worker on that site and this lunchtime experience only spurred me on to learn just how important my culture’s cooking is by learning it first-hand. Learning how to prepare various dishes to a sufficient degree ensued even more pride in me than the mere thought of consumption, though I had to ponder how my colleagues already possessed such in-depth abilities in stark comparison to all the British born Asian men I knew. The latter group of men I knew barely had any idea which way up a tawa goes on a stove let alone how to churn out the most succulent chicken biryani day after day. There are many reasons you could site for this, potentially, Asian men from back home are more in touch with the food of their home nations and having grown up there, it is easier for them to become a dab hand in the cookery that their respective mothers passed down. It’s easy to glamorise my male role models in this way but when I scratch a little deeper, I find a harsher reality. It may be more the case that the gender roles ritually enforced of women cooking while men work is more entrenched in our ancestor’s countries than my initial optimistic analysis cared to admit. It is only after making the perilous journey to the West on behalf their families for the reasons of economically bettering themselves that these men are forced to learn the ways they never stopped to think about when their wives were sweating and straining over the deep heat of the hob flame. The luxury that many British born men like myself enjoy has never been absent in our lives like it has been for our first-generation brethren…until now.

With so many working from home and having to share the child caring responsibilities; chores around the house or simply being bored stiff of the everyday quarantine routine, I would hope that myself and the guy in the TikTok are not the only South Asian men now realising how much technicality, acute study and finesse goes into what is put in front of us at dinner time. I implore that the deserving value of these undertakings is recognised and how much these qualities can not only enrich one’s own talents but completely restructure the way household roles operate in the South Asian home. I have certainly managed to warrant a huge shifting of my own views on masculinity with the food I produce now inhabiting a huge part of my male identity. I now look at the roti sitting in front of me - glistening in buttery translucence – through a lens never before equipped; the crafting of this culture defining staple from start to finish being the epiphany that will slap Asian manhood right in the face with the force of a whole epoch of entrenched gender roles. I only despair that it has taken us this long in combination with a global crisis such as Coronavirus for us to respect our means of sustenance and more importantly, the designers of it.