One of them looked at me quizzically, “Amma, what does that mean?”
Yes, you surely know butter comes from buttermilk. They looked at me like they knew that for a fact but felt it was such a misplaced reference in a devotional song.
There was a pause, and I realised I had to explain something that would have been completely self-evident to a child growing up a few generations ago. For children of these times, butter comes packaged neatly in little cubes or wrapped in foil, sitting quietly in the refrigerator. It is something you buy, unwrap and put it on toast.
The idea that butter could be hiding inside buttermilk and had to be coaxed out of it, quite literally, was news.
So I explained how it was done in times before machines came into play. You take thick curd, add water, and churn it in a deep vessel with a *madhani*, the traditional wooden churner. You keep churning and churning, and slowly the butter begins to gather. It separates from the buttermilk, comes together into a soft mass, and is then scooped and lifted out to be stored separately.
It is not a particularly complicated process. But it is a process that takes time, effort and, once upon a time, a fair amount of muscle power.
And perhaps there is a reason Purandara Dasa chose something as mundane as churning butter as a reference. For quite a while, it appears that you are doing the same thing over and over again without much to show for it. There is no dramatic transformation taking place in front of you. Just the same repetitive movement, performed patiently, until suddenly the butter begins to gather.
Maybe devotion is also a little like that. You chant the same shloka; follow the prescribed rituals. You sing the same bhajan. You repeat the same prayer. You go through the motions, sometimes with complete attention and sometimes, if we are being honest, almost mechanically. But repetition has a way of doing something to you. The motions may remain the same, but somewhere along the way, something changes. What initially appears to be a mechanical exercise can slowly produce something far more valuable.
Yet their simple question had me thinking. I had never actually watched the women in my family spend their mornings churning a pot of curd into butter. I doubt if my mother had also used one. But I never questioned these references, for I had heard enough stories about it to be able to picture it.
I had seen it in comic books. I had seen it in television serials depicting Krishna's childhood.
And most importantly, I had danced it. When I learnt Bharatanatyam, the mischievous little Krishna and his antics were central to our repertoire. Somewhere between the mudras, the expressions and the choreography, Maa Yashoda's hand churning the pot had become a visual image stored away in my head.
So when someone spoke about butter being churned out of buttermilk, I did not need an explanation.
I could immediately picture it.
My boys could not, and their questioning glance stayed with me.
Because perhaps this is what is quietly happening to many of the old songs, stories and shlokas we continue to pass down.
The words survive.
The tune survives.
We teach our children to pronounce them correctly and perhaps even explain their meaning.
But the world that made those words intuitive is fast disappearing.
I noticed this again when I was teaching them to recite the Mahamrityunjaya Mantra.
Aum Tryambakam yajaamahe sugandhim pushtivardhanam |
Urvaarukamiva bandhanaan-mrityormuksheeya maamritaat ||We got to the line about the *urvaruka*, and I explained the analogy: just as a ripe cucumber or gourd naturally separates from the vine that holds it, may we be released from the bondage of mortality.
The boys looked distinctly unimpressed. Why a cucumber? Of all the metaphors that could possibly have been used for one of the most profound mantras we know, why a cucumber?
I laughed seeing their expression. To them, it was a completely random vegetable analogy inserted into a very important prayer.
To someone who understood the lifecycle of a cucumber growing on a vine, the image would be anything but random.
The beauty of the metaphor is precisely in the way the fruit separates from the stem when it is ready. There is no violent tearing away. It is a natural release.
I gently explained that this was a rather wonderful, timeless analogy and, unlike many things we consider ancient, I did not think it was ever going to go out of fashion. They sagely nodded but remained unconvinced.
And I realised that perhaps the problem was not with the metaphor. It was with the picture.
We live in a world where almost everything arrives already processed, packaged and ready to use. Butter comes in cubes. Milk comes in packets. Vegetables come from supermarkets. We know the names of fruits and vegetables, but increasingly have little idea of what they look like before they arrive in a crate at the store.
A cucumber is something you buy, slice, and put into a salad. The vine it came from is another matter entirely.
This is not necessarily a criticism of modern childhood. My boys are growing up in city, in a very different world from the one I grew up in.
Their childhood has its own visual vocabulary: screens, apps, football pitches, gaming consoles, YouTube thumbnails, metro trains, airport terminals and a thousand other things that would have meant absolutely nothing to my grandparents.
Every generation inherits a different set of reference points.
But there is something rather poignant about realising that a line in a song can become unrelatable simply because the everyday experience behind it has disappeared.
Perhaps that is why some of our old songs and stories feel so vivid to those of us who grew up hearing them, even if we did not actually live the lives they described.
We inherit fragments of worlds that are long gone.
A grandmother talking about churning butter. The story about Sri Krishna stealing butter from the pots that were hung from the roof.
Television serial showing Yashoda at the *mathani*.
Traditional dance gestures, be it Kathak or Bharathanatyam, that enact the same movement.
Pictures in a storybook. A phrase in a devotional song.
None of these things, individually, amount to education on the traditional Hindu life.
But together, they create a kind of visual continuity that gets passed through generations.
We hear a word, and it conjures up that world instantly in our minds.
Our children may have to ask what it means, but it only means we need to ensure the meanings are not lost.
And perhaps that is the real challenge of passing on culture. It is not enough to preserve the words.
We have to preserve some of the pictures behind them too.
Because a child can memorise a shloka without knowing what a cucumber vine looks like.
She can sing a bhajan beautifully without knowing that butter was once something you made rather than something you unwrapped. He can recite a story about Krishna stealing butter without ever having seen butter being churned.
The words can survive perfectly well. It is the world inside the words that is at risk of disappearing.
And maybe that is where our job begins.
Not by insisting that our children live the way we did, or by making them nostalgic for a childhood they never had, but by occasionally stopping at the strange little references and saying, “Wait. Let me show you what that actually means.”
Because hidden inside one seemingly ordinary line about butter is an entire kitchen that no longer exists.
And sometimes a bhajan is not merely a song. It is a civilization's archive.
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