The Museum Inside Every Indian Kitchen - Crockery
A kind of generational wealth, not made of gold or silver, but of steel, porcelain and glass. Crockery sets are carried forward through generations, spending most of their lives inside cupboards and almirahs, much like the precious gold locked away in our bank lockers. The only difference? Gold is saved for a rainy day, while the fancy dinner set is saved for mehmaanon ke aane ka din.”
In Indian households, everything has it place - steel plates for dinner, faded print glasses for chai. But tucked away in a Narnia like almirah is a portal to another world that consists of fancy fine China crockery which is strictly off limit to the people who own it.
The plates with delicate floral patterns, the teacups with golden rims, the serving bowls that look too expensive to contain actual dal. They sit neatly arranged behind glass, looking less like utensils and more like exhibits in a museum. You can look at them, admire them and perhaps even dust them every Diwali, but using them without permission is an entirely different matter.
“Toot jayegi, set kharab hojayega”
“Woh wala mat lo, woh mehmaanon ke liye hai”
Along the way, the family collectively decided that the best plates were for the ones who dont live in the house. They were meant for people who visited occasionally,stayed for few hours, had the food and left. And the family? The family would continue eating in steel thalis without ever questioning the arrangement.
And to be fair, the logic isn't entirely unreasonable. Indian cooking isn't always gentle on crockery. Between piping-hot curries, oily gravies, heavy servings and the occasional plate slipping out of someone's hand, everyday utensils have to be sturdy enough to survive a small domestic disaster. Steel plates can take a beating, delicate porcelain may not.
Good-quality crockery can also be expensive, and replacing a broken piece from a matching dinner set isn't always easy. But somewhere along the way, we have lost the original purpose of buying it - a plate is meant for food, not invitation
What exactly are we waiting for?
In the old days, bringing out the good dinner set was part of hosting. Guests want home-cooked meals, laid tables and the familiar “aap aaye, toh kuch achha toh nikaalna padega.” Today, family dinners happen at restaurants, friends meet at cafés, and guests might leave with just a cup of chai and biscuits. The plates remain untouched. The golden rims remain intact. The serving bowls continue to wait for their big break.
And then comes the annual festive season, when crockery makes another appearance in our lives, only not quite in the way we expect. Diwali arrives, and someone gifts us a beautiful dinner set. We smile, thank them warmly and immediately begin calculating which cupboard has enough space to accommodate it.
And so the cycle continues.
One family's carefully preserved dinner set becomes another family's carefully preserved dinner set. The packaging changes, the floral patterns differ, and the number of bowls may vary, but the ultimate destination remains remarkably consistent: the top shelf of an almirah, where it can live out the rest of its days in peace.
Perhaps the most fascinating thing about this tradition is that nobody really considers it strange. We inherit crockery, gift crockery, preserve crockery and occasionally argue over crockery, all while continuing to eat from the same everyday plates. We have somehow turned an ordinary household object into a status symbol.
The problem isn't that we save beautiful things. It's that we keep waiting for an occasion grand enough to deserve them.
Maybe the next time we feel like using the fancy plates, we shouldn't wait for guests. Maybe Sunday lunch is reason enough. Maybe tea tastes just as good in the cup with the golden rim. Maybe the family that bought the dinner set deserves to enjoy it, too.
Because if a crockery set can survive decades of careful storage, countless cupboard rearrangements and three generations of “mehmaanon ke liye hai,” the least it deserves is to hold a plate of hot rajma-chawal once in its lifetime.
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