Brass, Clay, Jute
The three materials that ran the Hindu home before plastic arrived: brass for cooking and storage, clay for water and slow ferment, jute for the floor and the bag, and the receipts now arriving from copper trial labs and the global zero-waste movement
A Hindu kitchen in 1980, before the polypropylene tiffin and the plastic water bottle, ran on three materials: brass for the cooking vessel and the storage container, unglazed clay for the water pot and the curd setter, and jute for the floor mat and the grain sack. Each material had a metallurgical or microbiological reason for being there. This lesson opens those three reasons. It traces brass and copper from the Taxila vessel finds of 300 BCE through the Arthashastra's metal-vessel taxation chapter to the 2012 Sudha clinical trial in the Journal of Health, Population and Nutrition. It traces clay from the Mohenjo-daro storage jars to the 2012 Rai trial on unglazed clay water mineralisation. It traces jute from the Bhagalpur looms to the modern $4 billion natural-fibre packaging market. The grandmother in the courtyard had all three. The copper bottle on the wellness app costs ninety-five dollars.
A Brass Tumbler at the Window of a Madurai House
In a small house in Madurai in 1985, a girl of seven is being given a tumbler of water by her grandmother. The tumbler is made of brass. The metal is the colour of dark honey, the rim slightly worn smooth by sixty years of lips. Inside the tumbler the water is cold. The grandmother filled the tumbler the previous evening from the matka, the fat-bellied unglazed clay pot that sits in the stone alcove by the kitchen window. The matka has been there as long as the girl can remember. It sweats faintly on the outside. The water inside is always cooler than the air around it.
The girl drinks. The water tastes faintly of the clay and faintly of the brass. She does not know that yet; she only knows that this water tastes different from the water at the city aunt's house, which comes from a plastic Bisleri bottle and tastes of nothing. She finishes the tumbler and hands it back. The grandmother walks across the floor toward the kitchen. Under her bare feet, the floor is covered in a worn jute mat the colour of old straw. The mat has been laid down because the stone is too cold for the morning sit. The mat is older than the girl.
Thirty-five years later, the same girl, now a research scientist at the Christian Medical College in Vellore, will read a paper in the Journal of Health, Population and Nutrition by Sudha and colleagues, published in 2012, titled Storing Drinking-water in Copper pots Kills Contaminating Diarrhoeagenic Bacteria. The paper will report that water stored in copper vessels for sixteen hours showed a significant reduction in E. coli, V. cholerae, Shigella flexneri, and Salmonella typhi. She will read the paper, set it down, and remember the brass tumbler. She will pick up her phone. Paati, she will say. Yes, her grandmother will say, ninety-one years old now. That is what we always knew.