Lyallpur kitchens and journeys

Food packed for a journey from Lyallpur

Sadhona Debi Chatterji’s 2015 memoir describes childhood train journeys from her family’s home in Lyallpur to relatives in Calcutta. Her father worked for the Imperial Bank of India, and the family travelled with a cook and maid. Her mother carried fruit, biscuits and a cake baked at home, supplementing meals bought from the train’s dining car. Those meals included chicken curry with rice and egg curry with roti.[1]

The home kitchen appears through food packed for travel as well as through the labour accompanying it. This is a comparatively comfortable bank employee’s household: its servants and railway meals should not stand in for the circumstances of agricultural labourers or every colony village.[1]

A remembered kitchen in Lyallpur

Jatinder Sethi remembers a courtyard tandoor and his mother’s double-hearth kitchen in pre-Partition Lyallpur. Dried dung and wood supplied fuel; churning butter and making lassi were daily tasks. This is a particular household’s remembered arrangement, not a standard floor plan or menu for every colony home.[2]

Cooking during departure from Lyallpur

P. Virdee’s study of Partition describes the September 1947 departure from Lyallpur as involving people from different occupations, travelling with carts and livestock as well as on foot. Within that disruption, the account identifies pauses for cooking and milking cows, including milk for infants. It also records food relief. These practical details show meals being sustained during movement, when the household could no longer rely on its usual cooking space.[3]

Virdee cites the Civil and Military Gazette of 8 October 1947 for this passage. It is a historical synthesis of a specific departure, rather than a recipe or proof that displaced families all carried the same ingredients. The account links food work with continuing the journey: tending animals, making use of pauses and obtaining provisions, alongside the loss of settled domestic routines.[3]