This is the traditional way of making cooking oil: using a pattni, a kachha (village-made) oil press. It’s a two-stage lever press, with the mash from which the oil is to be pressed in those bamboo baskets you can see in the middle. The mash is made in the dheki, then steamed and pressed while still hot. The baskets are woven diagonally so they can be pressed like this.
The mash might be made from almost any seed or nut. In this case it was dori nuts from the mahua tree, very popular in this area.
I’ve written pattni with a double T to distinguish it from patni with a single T, which means wife. To an English ear, the two sounds are almost indistinguishable, because we’ve not grown up to think of them as different; but to an Indian ear, they’re as different as P and B are to us. Both are normally written T when Hindi is transliterated into the Latin alphabet, but they’re completely different letters in Hindi.
©Clive K Semmens 2002