Karwa Chauth and Viewing History Through a Sieve

Living in Chennai, I don’t remember watching Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge when it launched, 31 years back this week. But some things must have mystified South Indian viewers. We understood the romantic reasons for running in the rain. That helped turn clothes clinging and translucent. But why run through mustard fields?

And then, the Karwa Chauth scene. What was this ritual and why all this drama about not seeing the moon directly? Simran saw the moon in water, but as other Bollywood films started depicting the ritual, looking at it through a sieve became the common image. In South Indian kitchens sieves were rather marginal. Strainers were more useful, for cooking rice or brewing coffee, or just fine cloth to squeeze out liquid.

Sieves mattered in places, like Punjab, that ground wheat into flour. The old stone mills ground grains unevenly so sieves sifted it into different grades. The oldest sieves were found in Egypt from around 3000 BCE, also when bread-making became common. In The Pharaoh’s Kitchen, Magda Mehdawy and Amr Hussein’s study of food in ancient Egypt, they record a Fifth Dynasty (2494-2345 BCE) tomb inscription from Saqqara: “Grind, grind well. I grind with all my power. The servant is sieving the flour and I baked the cake myself.”


Those Egyptian sieves were made of papyrus reeds. Different fibres have been used for sieves, like flax, wicker, palm fibres, even fish skin, but one of the most common was horsehair. This was threaded in a circular frame to form meshes of different sizes, and were tough enough to withstand considerable shaking or foods being mashed through to make purées. Today, nylon or metal wires are common, but gold embellished with diamonds were once used for a sieve shaped pendant made for a symbolic purpose.

This was for Queen Elizabeth I of England, who adopted sieves as her personal emblem. There are paintings that show her dressed opulently, but also holding a sieve. The queen would never have cooked, so why hold a cooking utensil? In The Heart-Shaped Tin, Bee Wilson’s brilliant collection of essays on the secret powers of utensils, she examines the multiple meanings involved.

Kings used swords to signify their power, and the Queen did this too, most famously wearing armour to address her troops before a planned Spanish invasion. But she also leaned into femininity, as her unique quality. Sieves were essential in kitchens for the kind of laborious, preparatory work almost always done by women. “In an era before ready-ground spices and flours and sugars, you could eat almost nothing smooth if you did not have a sieve,” writes Wilson.

Sieves signified wisdom. In one of Elizabeth’s portraits, the sieve has a motto that translates as “down goes the good and the bad remains in the saddle”. Wilson writes: “Elizabeth is reminding her subjects that she is the arbiter of right and wrong. It’s a power display disguised as a humble utensil.” Sieves also meant purity, thanks to the ancient Roman story of Tuccia, a vestal virgin, one of the priestesses of the sacred hearth that signified Rome’s safety. Failure to maintain chastity was punished by death. When Tuccia was accused of being unchaste, she proved her innocence by taking water from the river Tiber to her temple in a sieve, without a drop draining away. This made the sieve particularly appealing for Elizabeth, who called herself the Virgin Queen.

Sieves are less used in the kitchen these days. Roller mills grind flour so finely that sifting isn’t needed, and better packing means contamination by insects is less likely. Food processors make purées faster, though some chefs insist on the subtler mouthfeel provided by sieving. You are more likely to see non-culinary uses of sieves, like on construction sites for sand. Yet, every year in India they come out on Karwa Chauth, a reminder of how we have long seen history through a sieve.