The second millennium BCE saw the appearance of the Indo-Aryans, who planted the seeds of what were to become some of the most unique features of Indian society: the caste system, the veneration of the cow, and the central role of milk and dairy products in food customs and rituals.
The Indo-Aryans were speakers of Indo-European languages, a family that includes Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Hittite (a language once spoken in Anatolia) and most modern European and north Indian languages. Some scholars place the origin of these languages in the general region of the Pontic Caspian steppe – a vast grassland stretching from north of the Black Sea eastward to the Caspian Sea to western Kazakhstan, the eastern Ukraine and southern Russia – between the fifth and fourth millennia BCE.1 Another theory is that Proto-Indo-European languages originated in Anatolia before the rise of agriculture and spread with Neolithic migrants into all parts of Europe and the Pontic steppes, beginning in the eighth millennium BCE.
The Indo-Aryans formed a semi-nomadic society consisting of small kinship groups who raised cattle and sheep and practised some settled agriculture and cereal cultivation. They domesticated the horse and used carts with wheels. Constantly looking for arable land and greener pastures for their flocks, they branched out from Asia Minor and Anatolia into the Middle East, Armenia, Europe, Iran, Afghanistan and eventually the Indian subcontinent, which they entered between 1700 and 1300 BCE. The old theory that hordes of Indo-Aryans ‘invaded’ India has been discounted; rather, it is most likely that small groups trickled in through the mountain passes over the centuries. One of their earliest settlements was in the Punjab, near the current Indo-Pakistani border. As they moved eastwards, they fought and subjugated the local inhabitants, called dasas, whose origin is problematic. They may have been Mundas, Dravidians, survivors of the Indus Valley civilization or Indo-European migrants who arrived even earlier. There is linguistic evidence that these earlier inhabitants were already farmers, since the Sanskrit word for plough (langala) is not Indo-European.
Bawarchi (cook) preparing food over a chula (stove). Varanasi, c. 1850. |
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Obtaining and raising cows was the main occupation of the Indo-Aryan elite. People counted their wealth in cattle, and the verb ‘to fight’, gavishthi, means ‘to search for cows’, implying that cattle raids were the source of conflict. Even today, the word for clan is gotra, meaning ‘cowshed’.
Although we know who the Indo-Aryans were and where they came from, our knowledge of their material culture is less than for the Indus Valley civilization, because their homes and villages were made of wood and other natural materials and did not survive. However, some idea of their food habits and lifestyles can be gleaned from an extensive body of written texts, the Vedas (from a Sanskrit word that means ‘knowledge’). Composed in northwestern India in the second millennium BCE, the Vedas were memorized and passed on orally for centuries, and finally written down in the first millennium CE. Even today they are revered by Hindus as the most sacred of all Indian texts. Although few people read them in their entirety, verses are recited during important Hindu ceremonies, making them one of the world’s oldest religious texts in continuous use. English translations in the mid-nineteenth century made an enormous impression on Western intellectuals, including the writer Henry David Thoreau and the philosophers William James and Arthur Schopenhauer, the latter of whom said that they laid the foundation of his philosophical system.
The oldest of these texts, composed between 1700 and 1100 BCE, is the Rig Veda (rig means ‘song of praise’), a collection of hymns and paeans to the gods, incantations, chants, prayers for life and prosperity, and philosophical speculations.2 The Rig Veda consists of 1,028 poems or hymns organized into ten books (mandalas). Although centuries elapsed between their composition and transcription, scholars believe they are very close to the original because of the elaborate mnemonic techniques that were developed and the care with which they were transmitted from father to son or from teacher to student.
The gods were forces of nature, with counterparts in the mythology of classical Greece and Rome. Indra, the equivalent of Zeus and Jupiter, was the main deity in the Vedic pantheon and ruled over the sky and heavens. Agni was the god of fire, Varuna, thunder, Rudra, lightning, Vayu, the wind, and Surya, the sun. Minor deities included Vishnu, who centuries later became one of the three major Hindu gods.
Life and nature were uncertain, and the way of placating the gods and winning their favour was by rituals, yajna in Sanskrit – a word that can mean worship, prayer, offering, praise, oblation or sacrifice. Vedic Indians did not have temples; yajnas were conducted either in the home, where each family had a sacred hearth, or in the open air around a fire. Fire was considered the purest of elements, and still plays an important role in Hindu ceremonies; for example, in the marriage ceremony, the couple walks around a fire seven times. Agni, the god of fire, was considered the mouth through which the gods eat the sacrifices; he was both the priest of the gods and the god of the priests. One of his favourite foods was ghee (clarified butter), a divine substance exalted in many of the hymns of the Rig Veda:
They pour over the fire, smiling,
Like beautiful women on their way to a festival.
The streams of butter caress the logs,
And Jatavedas [meaning obscure], taking pleasure in them, pays them court.
I watch them eagerly; they are like girls,
Painting themselves to go the wedding
There where the soma juice is pressed, where sacrifice is made,
The streams of butter run down to be clarified (IV. 58)
The formulae and rituals were the monopoly of the priests, called brahmins, and paid for by the yajamanas, the patrons of the sacrifice. There were three kinds of yajna: cooked food offered on the domestic hearth; public sacrifices; and the soma ritual. The sacrifices entailed killing animals and offering the meat to the gods, after which it was eaten by the patrons and their guests and later by the person performing the sacrifice.3 (Similar rites took place in classical Greece and Rome, and in Persia.) The meat was cooked in a cauldron or baked in a chula, a U-shaped mud fireplace with an opening for inserting firewood, still used today. The animals sacrificed included goats, sheep, oxen, castrated bulls, horses and barren cows. Some sacrifices were bloody; the most important sacrifice of Vedic times, the horse sacrifice, required the killing of more than 600 animals and birds.
Although cows were the mainstay of the Vedic economy and were held in high regard, there is textual evidence that they too were sacrificed. Some argue that this evidence stems from mistranslation, and that the ancient Indians never ate beef.4 The subject is politically contentious in present-day India.
Later, as we shall see, there was a reaction against sacrifice, expressed in the doctrine of ahimsa, or non-injury. Some scholars see the seeds of this reaction in the Vedas themselves, which state that any animal killed is not really killed at all but ‘quieted’, and where the people performing the slaughter turn away from it – ‘lest we should become eyewitnesses’. Occasionally a figure made of flour (pista) was substituted for animal victims. This ambivalence becomes even more apparent in later texts, as is discussed in chapter Five.
A traditional stone for grinding spices.
The sacrificial ritual required a great many specialized utensils, including devices for straining and filtering the soma juice (see below), large earthenware pots for heating milk and ghee, mortars and grinding stones, pots for boiling meat, clay ovens for roasting, wooden skewers for grilling organs, pottery shards on which to bake bread, ladles and spoons to hold butter, milk and water, and leaf cups and plates.5
Many rituals, especially those honouring Indra, involved the use of an intoxicating, perhaps hallucinatory substance called soma. Soma (a word borrowed by Aldous Huxley for the drug in his novel Brave New World) is the name of three things: the plant, the drink made from it, and a deity. The identity of soma is one of the great unsolved mysteries of culinary history. The Rig Veda contains hundreds of references to soma, including an entire chapter of 114 hymns dedicated to it. During rituals, soma is offered to the gods and ingested by the priests and worshippers, who are inspired with confidence, courage, faith, even a feeling of immortality. Soma’s effects appear to be both stimulating and hallucinogenic:
Like impetuous winds, the drinks have lifted me up, like swift horses bolting with a chariot . . . One of my wings is in the sky; I have trailed the other below. I am huge, huge! Flying to the cloud. Have I not drunk soma? (X.119)
We have drunk the soma; we have become immortal; we have gone to the light; we have found the gods . . . The glorious drops that I have drunk set me free in wide space. (VIII.48)
The plant, which is described as yellow with long stalks, grew in the mountains and was collected by women, who extracted juice from its stalk by pressing it between two stones or pounding it in a mortar. The juice was filtered through lamb’s wool and stored in jars or wooden tubs. It was brown or tawny in colour. Before being drunk, it was mixed with milk or yoghurt. From various references, we know that soma became increasingly difficult to obtain – one prayer even apologizes to the gods for the use of a substitute – and after 800 BCE no references to it survive at all. It has been suggested that the need for a substitute for the conscious-altering soma may have led to the development of other ways of creating unusual psychic states, such as yoga, breath control, fasting and meditation.6
Some writers think soma was a leafless shrub called somalata, which means soma leaf or branch (Sarcostemma acidum), a stimulant used as a bronchodilator in Ayurvedic medicine. Another candidate is the plant Ephedra sinica, which was used by Iranian Zoroastrians in their rituals as late as the nineteenth century. It contains the alkaloid ephedrine, which is a stimulant similar to amphetamine but is not hallucinogenic. Another, less likely, possibility is Cannabis sativa (hemp), a plant native to Central Asia that today grows all over India. The leaves and flowers of the female cannabis plant make bhang, which nowadays is mixed with milk and drunk during the spring festival Holi. Another candidate is the fly agaric mushroom (Amanita muscaria), which produces hallucinogenic effects and is used by Siberian shamans in their rituals.7 The debate remains open.
A popular beverage of the time was an intoxicating liquor called sura, made by fermenting barley or rice. There are many references to sura in later works. But unlike soma, drinking sura was frowned on by the priestly compilers of the Vedas, who listed the consumption of alcohol as one of seven sins, along with anger and gambling.
After soma, the item most frequently mentioned in the Rig Veda is the cow, the subject of more than 700 references and three hymns. There is textual evidence that cows were occasionally killed in ceremonies honouring ancestors (shraddhas) or to honour distinguished guests. But at the same time the cow was venerated as a cosmic symbol, the universal mother and the source of life and nourishment:
The Cow is Heaven, the Cow is Earth, the Cow is Vishnu, Lord of Life
Both Gods and mortal men depend for life and being on the Cow
She hath become this universe; all that the Sun surveys is she. (X.10)
This quasi-religious attitude was the starting point for what later became the veneration of the cow, an end to its role as a sacrificial victim and, indeed, a ban on eating its meat at all. The cow’s products – milk, ghee and yoghurt – became part of religious rituals since they were pure foods that could be offered to the deities. Starting in the nineteenth century, the protection of cows became a symbol of Hindu identity, and today many states ban the slaughtering of cows.
Hymn 187 of the Rig Veda is a charming if somewhat obscure address to food. At the beginning and end of the hymn, the poet praises food as the essential support of both gods and men, and compares the juices of fruit dispersed throughout the realm to the life-giving rains. The rains in turn produce food in the form of plants and animals and are returned to heaven by ritual offerings. The waters and plants mentioned in Verse 8 become the milk and grain mixed with soma in Verse 9, and are asked to ‘become just the fat’, which is clearly considered the choicest part of the food substance.
Although wheat was grown and consumed in the Indus Valley, there are no references to wheat in the Rig Veda. Barley was the main grain. It was ground in mortars and pestles or between two stones, then sifted to make flour and kneaded into a dough. Several texts mention apupa, a kind of cake made of barley or sweetened with honey and fried in ghee over a slow fire. Professor Achaya speculates that it could be a precursor of the modern appam, a South Indian bread made of fermented rice flour, and the Bengali malpoa or malpua, a fried pancake soaked in sugar syrup.9 Although sugar cane was grown and apparently chewed, the technology had not been invented to convert the juice into sugar.
Hymn 187 of the Rig Veda (Food)
Now I shall praise food, the support and power of the great . . .
O sweet food, honeyed food, we have chosen you: for us be a helper.
Draw near to us, food – kindly with your kindly help
Joy itself, not to be despised, a very kind companion without duplicity.
These juices of yours, food, are dispersed throughout the realms, adjoined to heaven like the winds.
These [juices] are those that yield you, O food, and they also are part of you, sweetest food.
Those who receive the sweetness of your juices press forward like strong-necked [bulls]
On you, food, is the mind of the great gods set.
A deed was done at your signal; he smashed the serpent with your help.
When yonder dawning light of the mountains has come, O food,
Then you should also come here to us, honeyed food, fit for our portion.
When we bite off a full share of the waters and plants,
O you friend of the winds – become just the fat.
When we take a share of you when mixed with milk or mixed with grain, O Soma,
O you friend of the winds, become just the fat.
Become the gruel, O plant, the fat, the steaming suet
O you friend of the winds – become just the fat
We have sweetened you with words, O food, as cows’ milk does the oblations
You as feasting companions for the gods, you as feasting companions for us.8
Ripened barley seeds were parched in fire and eaten with soma juice, fried in ghee, or ground into a gruel mixed with yoghurt, ghee, soma, water or milk. Barley seeds were also pulverized into a powder called saktu, the forerunner of sattu or chhattu, a dish still widely eaten by poor people in eastern India. Although rice (vrihi in Sanskrit) was apparently known in the Indus Valley, it is not mentioned in the Vedas (nor was cotton, another Indus Valley crop).
Milk from cows and buffaloes, and its products, played an important role in the Vedic Indians’ diet and, indeed, in the Indian diet generally from this time onwards. Milk, raw or boiled, was drunk, or cooked with parched barley meal to make a porridge called odana. Since milk left out in a hot climate quickly ferments and coagulates, it was converted into yoghurt. The process can be speeded up by heating the milk and adding a starter, which could be more yoghurt, certain barks, or fruit. Yoghurt was eaten by itself, flavoured with honey, mixed with barley (a dish called karambha, similar to modern curd rice) or folded into fresh milk.
The widespread consumption of milk distinguishes South Asia from Southeast Asia and China, where milk and its products are rarely consumed. This reflects not just differences in regional agricultural economies, but also the prevalence of lactose intolerance (the inability by adults to digest lactose, a sugar, in milk). An estimated 90–100 per cent of east Asians and 70 per cent of south Indians are lactose intolerant, but this falls to just 30 per cent of north Indians and 5–15 per cent of people of northern European ancestry.10 However, yoghurt made with active and live bacterial cultures can be consumed by lactose-intolerant people, and this is the way that most Indians consume milk today, especially in the south and west of the country.
Yoghurt was and is churned to make butter (unlike in Europe, where butter is made from cream), and the leftover liquid became buttermilk – a favourite drink in rural India, sometimes flavoured with cumin or pepper. If butter is boiled to evaporate the water so that the milk solids fall to the bottom, the melted butter becomes translucent ghee (clarified butter), the most valued of all Indian condiments. When the impurities are filtered out, ghee can be stored for six months or more, an important quality in a hot climate.
Bring water to the boil, add chana dal and mix well. Cook for 2 or 3 minutes. Drain the water and keep the pot covered for several hours. Drain through a cotton cloth and let it cook. Heat a kadhai (a wok-like iron pot), add sand, and dry the chana dal together with the sand, adding a little at a time. Use a sieve to separate the dal from the sand, and grind it into a fine powder.
Scholars disagree over whether the ancient Indians made cheese by separating solids from milk with a souring agent. The Vedic texts contain a single reference to something called dadhanvat, which some translate as cheese and others as ‘abundance of curds’. But panir, the Hindi word for curds or farmer’s cheese, is Persian in origin and probably arrived much later.
Today, milk, butter and ghee are used in many Hindu rituals, since only cooked food can be offered to the deities and milk was considered by its nature to have been cooked in the stomach of the cow. These products were also considered to be intrinsically pure, and to have purifying powers. The supreme purifying material, panchagavya, combined five products of the cow: milk, yoghurt, ghee, urine and dung.
Sattu is a simple dish of ground cooked chickpeas served with onion and chilli, and is often eaten in the state of Bihar by poor people.
400 g (14 OZ) grated gur/jaggery
(available at Indian grocers)
400 g (14 OZ) brown sesame seeds
Grate the jaggery by hand. Dry-roast the sesame seeds over a low heat until they start to crackle. Put the warm sesame seeds into a food processor with the jaggery and pulse several times until the mixture does not move, then scrape the sides and pulse again several times. Transfer the mixture to a bowl and make small balls (around 5 cm or 2 in. in diameter). Store in an airtight container.
Flavourings used in Vedic times included mustard seeds, turmeric, black and long pepper, bitter orange and sesame seeds. The Atharaveda, a collection of spells and remedies against diseases, mentions black pepper as a cure for infections caused by wounds. Sesame is mentioned in many texts, both as a food and as a ritual item that was part of every major life event. Sesame-seed balls (pinda) were offered to one’s ancestors during the Hindu rite called shraddha. The seeds were boiled with rice and milk to make a porridge, cooked with vegetables, or roasted and pounded to make a crispy bread. The seeds were also crushed in an animal-powered device to produce an oil that remains a common cooking medium in southern and western India.
Fruit and vegetables mentioned in the Rig Veda include three varieties of jujube, bael, dates, Indian gooseberry, mango, cucumber, lotus stalks and roots, bottle gourd, bitter gourd, water chestnut and other aquatic plants. Archaeological excavations have found charred or cut bone fragments of sheep, deer, pigs, fish, river turtles, dogs and such wild animals as leopard and blue deer (nilgai). Relatively little is known about the cooking techniques of the time. Meat was roasted on spits, perhaps over charcoal, or was cooked in liquid in a clay oven. Cooking vessels were made of clay, wood, stone or metal. Some scholars speculate that the use of oil as a cooking medium may have been adopted from the non-Aryans.
A verse in the Rig Veda indicates that people ate their meals sitting on the ground. Men did not eat with their wives, nor did women take their food in the presence of their male relatives. Hospitality was considered a prime virtue, and feeding a guest was as meritorious as performing a sacrifice or even worshipping God.
Originally the Vedic Indians were divided into two classes: their own, which they called arya (‘noble’), and the people they conquered, the dasas (servants or slaves). Internally they were organized as clans under a raja, or chief. His leadership was legitimized by his patronage of the sacrifice, a tradition that continued for centuries.
By about 1000 BCE, however, social divisions had become sharper, and there gradually emerged one of the most distinctive and controversial features of Indian society, the caste system. The English word caste (from the Portuguese casta, ‘pure’) is rather confusedly used to refer to two separate, although related, institutions: varna (‘colour’ in Sanskrit), which refers to four basic divisions of society and may be translated as ‘class’, and jati (birth), a more narrowly defined group related by occupation or ancestry.11
The earliest mention of the fourfold division is a hymn in the Rig Veda that gives a mythical sanction to its origin (X90):
When the gods made a sacrifice with the Man as their victim . . .
When they divided the Man, into how many parts did they divide him?
What was his mouth, what were his arms, what were his thighs, and his feet called?
The brahmin was his mouth, of his arms were made the rajanya
His thighs became the vaisya, of his feet the sudra was born.
The brahmins were priests, the rajanya (later called ksatriya) were warriors and rulers, and the vaisya were the providers of wealth through herding, agriculture and trade. Those in the fourth category, the sudra, were artisans and service providers. Later a fifth category was added for people who did jobs that no one else would perform, such as tanning hides, collecting rubbish and burying the dead. They may once have been dasas. Today these communities are officially known as Scheduled Tribes but prefer to call themselves dalit (from a Sanskrit word meaning suppressed, crushed or broken in pieces).
In the centuries that followed its inception, the caste system came to have many ramifications, especially for the two most fundamental human activities: sex and eating. People could not marry, accept food from or eat with someone outside their caste under pain of ostracism, banishment or even death. Caste became closely associated with ideas of purity and pollution, with the brahmin being the purest of the pure and the dasa the least pure. For a brahmin to dine with a dasa or a non-Aryan was considered a sin. In Vedic times the priests shared in the fruits of the sacrifice (it was not until later that many brahmins, although not those in Kashmir and Bengal, became vegetarian). Vegetarianism as a widespread ethical and moral idea came with two movements, Jainism and Buddhism, and later became central to some branches of Hinduism – a subject that will be fully explored in subsequent chapters.
