Those who come to India from other countries are baffled by the extraordinary practice of jootha. This practice, which Indians learn when they have scarcely stopped being babies, is not known anywhere else in the world. It may be described as another abomination which India has created, the principal one being caste (and its extreme form, untouchability).
So what is jootha? “Something that has come in contact with someone's saliva” is the definition offered by urbandictionary.com. “Soiled by saliva and thus not suitable for somebody else to eat from,” says wiktionary.org. This is overly strict, as the presence of saliva may be implied rather than real. If I have eaten with the fingers of a hand and then touch your food with that hand, your food is rendered jootha. However, your food may be taken to have been made jootha even if I have not earlier used my hand for eating. (Here I am concerned only with the common people's understanding, not with the professional nit-picking and hair-splitting of “learned” ritual specialists.)
All the same, saliva and the mouth would appear to be the chief villains. They are “impure” and therefore “polluting”. But only “pure” substances may be put into the “impure” cavity: eating jootha would presumably make one's mouth “impure” beyond redemption. My saliva has the power to pollute the food of others, yet I pollute nothing when I spit all around me wherever I may be.
Why do these people not lick postage stamps? Because that would pollute them or because it would pollute others? The former, I suspect, because if I practised this particular religion I would be concerned exclusively with my own soul: the souls of others wouldn't count for anything.
Pain and humiliation
It may be argued that jootha is an institution designed to give expression to, and to cement, the realities of social hierarchy and subordination.
“India's untouchables have been forced to accept and eat joothan for centuries, and the word encapsulates the pain, humiliation, and poverty of a community forced to live at the bottom of India's social pyramid.” This is from the description, on the Columbia University Press website, of the book Joothan, written by Omprakash Valmiki and translated into English by Arun Prabha Mukherjee. Joothan is a noun and means food which is jootha.
We see the instrumental use of jootha not just in the subordination of “untouchables” but in many other instances of subordination. A married woman may be expected to eat from the soiled thali in which her husband has just eaten – and perhaps also washed his hands – because that is one among several ways of acknowledging his innate superiority. The mother, but commonly not the father, will without trouble eat the jootha of a child.
Just why is jootha polluting? I have put this question to many people, including some from the patrilines which produced me. These are educated people who include medical doctors and academics and lawyers, not to speak of poultry farmers. Not one said that jootha food let out harmful radiation, not one said that it was, even at the sub-microscopic level, any different from untouched food. Despite the absence of a rational explanation, though, they would not eat it because it was “dirty”. I see this as dirt in the mind, not on the dinner plate.
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So what is jootha? “Something that has come in contact with someone's saliva” is the definition offered by urbandictionary.com. “Soiled by saliva and thus not suitable for somebody else to eat from,” says wiktionary.org. This is overly strict, as the presence of saliva may be implied rather than real. If I have eaten with the fingers of a hand and then touch your food with that hand, your food is rendered jootha. However, your food may be taken to have been made jootha even if I have not earlier used my hand for eating. (Here I am concerned only with the common people's understanding, not with the professional nit-picking and hair-splitting of “learned” ritual specialists.)
All the same, saliva and the mouth would appear to be the chief villains. They are “impure” and therefore “polluting”. But only “pure” substances may be put into the “impure” cavity: eating jootha would presumably make one's mouth “impure” beyond redemption. My saliva has the power to pollute the food of others, yet I pollute nothing when I spit all around me wherever I may be.
Why do these people not lick postage stamps? Because that would pollute them or because it would pollute others? The former, I suspect, because if I practised this particular religion I would be concerned exclusively with my own soul: the souls of others wouldn't count for anything.
Pain and humiliation
It may be argued that jootha is an institution designed to give expression to, and to cement, the realities of social hierarchy and subordination.
“India's untouchables have been forced to accept and eat joothan for centuries, and the word encapsulates the pain, humiliation, and poverty of a community forced to live at the bottom of India's social pyramid.” This is from the description, on the Columbia University Press website, of the book Joothan, written by Omprakash Valmiki and translated into English by Arun Prabha Mukherjee. Joothan is a noun and means food which is jootha.
We see the instrumental use of jootha not just in the subordination of “untouchables” but in many other instances of subordination. A married woman may be expected to eat from the soiled thali in which her husband has just eaten – and perhaps also washed his hands – because that is one among several ways of acknowledging his innate superiority. The mother, but commonly not the father, will without trouble eat the jootha of a child.
Just why is jootha polluting? I have put this question to many people, including some from the patrilines which produced me. These are educated people who include medical doctors and academics and lawyers, not to speak of poultry farmers. Not one said that jootha food let out harmful radiation, not one said that it was, even at the sub-microscopic level, any different from untouched food. Despite the absence of a rational explanation, though, they would not eat it because it was “dirty”. I see this as dirt in the mind, not on the dinner plate.