Eating together could strengthen our national consciousness

livemint.com:

You might not have noticed it, but it is extremely difficult to find a restaurant in India that can seat a dozen people around a single round table. If you have more than six diners, you have to ask the restaurant to join two or more tables to create a long rectangle. While this allows several colleagues or family members to technically sit at the same table, conversation and sharing of food is limited to groups of four or five people sitting next to each other.

Compared to many East Asian countries where big round tables are commonplace in restaurants, communal dining in India mostly caters to rather small groups. In fact, both eating out and with others are relatively new phenomena in Indian society. The oldest restaurants date back to the mid-19th century and until a few decades ago, were either not open to all or not acceptable by all.

Before independence, there was hardly any communal dining that cut across caste and religious lines. Festivals and weddings could be very large, with thousands of guests, but scrupulously avoided mixing of caste groups. Indeed, India’s lack of a culture of communal dining is ancient.

Over two millennia ago, Megasthenes noticed that Indians “always ate alone" and this was not good for social and civic life. A thousand years after him, Alberuni not only observed the same thing, but also documented the sophisticated caste rules that caused it. In her brilliant doctoral dissertation, Divya Narayanan recounts the story of how Anand Ram Mukhlis, a Mughal-era chronicler, took his home-brewed beverage to the new coffee houses of Delhi so that he could enjoy the conversations without crossing dietary borders.