Meet Indu, one of GPM's amazing Masala Mama's cooks, making healthy lunches every day for our Eat2Learn Program students. Indu has always been smart. From the time she was little, everyone knew – her teachers, her parents, and the people in her village. But her family, who lived in the village of Sangli, in the Konkan region of Maharashtra, India, had different ideas that did not include investing in girls’ education. They expected her, like all girls, to take care of their families, help with the household, and get married as soon as possible. And so, at the age of roughly 11, like so many of the women, Indu dropped out of school. Her teachers were devastated. One even came to Indu’s house to beg her family to let her stay in school. She offered to let Indu live with her in the next village. But that was considered out of the question.
Indu still gets angry talking about it, so many years later.Today, Indu, has two children, aged 17 and 19, and she is determined to enable both children, the boy and the girl, to get as much schooling as they want.
Indu, got married at around the age of 17 – relatively late for a girl in her village – in an arranged marriage. Right after her marriage, some twenty years ago, Indu moved to Mumbai. Her husband, whom she had just met, had a job in Mumbai in the food services industry. “I had never been to Mumbai before,” she says, “and I didn’t know what to expect.”
Life in Mumbai is different from life in the village. “In the village, our family would get together regularly and eat,” she recalls with great fondness. “In the city, everyone stays in their own houses and people don’t get together. In the village, we would cook together, and then we would sit together and eat. I miss that experience.”
Indu has many memories of village life, especially visiting neighboring villages for fairs. Even though there are no roads between the villages making the trek challenging, the village fairs were a highlight for her. She especially enjoyed the annual Nag Panchami festival – worshiping the snake god – which takes place every summer. “The men all take a snake and put it around them,” she laughs. “It was a lot of fun.”
She also remembers the food from the festivals, like the puran poli – like sweet chapattis made with gram flour – that everyone looked forward to eating. “It’s a big thing in the village.”
“And when mango season starts, the food becomes very exciting,” she says. “You can eat the pulp with many dishes – puris, chutneys, lassis, and more.”
Indu loves cooking, and she especially enjoys feeding the children. She contributed many recipes to our Masala Mama's cookbook, including carrot halwa, bharwa bindi masala, methi poori, puran poli, pav bhaji, mango lassi, and others. Her favorite recipe is biryani.
“Being with the women is exciting,” she says of the Masala Mama's cooking cooperative. “It is giving us a push. We are proud of that. People are coming to eat our food, to see what we are doing. We can say with pride that our food is good!”
Indu has a dream for a future: She wants to open a food stall in Kalwa in the evenings. But she wants to make sure that all the women are on board first. “Once you join hands with these women, there is no going back,” she says. “There is only moving forward.” But she says she can’t do it alone.
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| Indu Mane and some of her colleagues at GPm's Masala Mamas women's collective |
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