Around the beginning of the first millennium BCE the Vedic Indians began to move into a region called the Doab (‘two waters’) between the Ganges and Yumuna rivers, near the site of present-day Delhi. From there they migrated eastwards to what is now the state of Bihar and west-wards into Gujarat. Their earliest form of political organization was the gana-sangha (people’s assembly), a clan headed by a chief who governed with the help of an assembly. The members of these political entities, sometimes called proto-republics, belonged to a single clan or a confederacy of clans and were mainly ksatriyas. From the gana-sanghas emerged the founders of two major reform sects, Jainism and Buddhism, both of them the sons of clan chiefs.
The most powerful of these political entities were the sixteen mahajanapadas (kingdoms or republics), which ranged from Afghanistan in the northwest to Bihar in the east and as far south as the Vindhya mountain range. Their rise was driven by the discovery of iron deposits, especially in Bihar, and the manufacture of iron weapons, ploughs, nails and other objects from about 800 BCE. Iron axes made it easier to clear forests, while iron hoes and ploughshares increased agricultural production. Tools were developed for digging wells, canals and ponds for irrigation. New farming techniques included double cropping and crop rotation.
Rice cultivation, which originated in China, came to northern India in the third millennium BCE, expanded through Orissa and Bengal and reached Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu by 300 BCE. Although labourintensive, it gave high yields, making it possible to grow two or even three crops each year.
The dietary staple in the western Doab (modern-day Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and Western Uttar Pradesh) was barley. Wheat was grown – perhaps brought by people from the Indus Valley, since some varieties are the same as those found there – but it still played a relatively minor role in the local diet. Excavations have unearthed kodon and pearl millet, chickpeas and other pulses. Oil seeds included mustard, sesame and linseed. Seeds were ground in a large mortar and pestle driven by an ox, a device still used in Indian villages. There is evidence of the use of bhang (Cannabis sativa).
The development of agriculture led to a rapid increase in population and migration into new areas. In what historians call ‘the second urbanization’ (the first being the Indus Valley civilization), towns and cities were built, many on rivers or the coast. The most important were Champa in West Bengal; Kashi (modern-day Varanasi); Mathur and Kaushambi in Uttar Pradesh; Pataliputra (Patna), the capital of the Magadha kingdom in Bihar; Taxila in the Punjab; and the port of Bharuch on the west coast. Urban craftsmen and artisans made textiles, pottery, ceramics, glassware and metal artefacts and tools for domestic use and export. Merchants traded local products for horses and woollen goods from Afghanistan, Persia and Central Asia. Outside the towns, most people lived in small and medium-sized villages.
By the sixth century BCE Magadha had emerged as the most powerful kingdom. Its ruler Bimbisara (558–491 BCE) created India’s first standing army and expanded his empire eastward. His inspiration may have been Cyrus the Great (580–529 BCE), founder of the Persian Achaemenid Empire, which conquered parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan and north India. Two centuries later, Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE), having conquered Persia, invaded India, lured by tales of its fabulous wealth. After a hard battle he defeated King Porus in the Punjab, but in 326 BCE he was forced to turn back when his men, weary of decades of fighting, insisted on returning home. Reports of the strength of the armies massed against him may have been another reason.
After Alexander’s death, his generals became rulers of independent kingdoms, among them the Indo-Greek or Hellenistic kingdom of Gandhara in Afghanistan. Some of the rulers converted to Buddhism, and the region became home to a brilliant syncretic Greek-Indian culture. Gandharan coins and sculptures combine elements of Greek and Indian art; for example, Buddha is depicted as a classical Greek deity. The brahmins called the Greeks yavanas (from Ionians), a term that came to mean ‘barbarian’.
According to the first-century BCE Greek historian Plutarch, while in India Alexander met a ‘young stripling’ named ‘Sandrocottus’, who was probably Chandragupta (340–298 BCE), the founder of India’s first nationwide dynasty, the Maurya. In 321 BCE the twenty-year-old Chandragupta defeated the armies of the short-lived Nanda dynasty (345–321 BCE), sometimes referred to as India’s first empire, which stretched from Bengal to Punjab and as far south as the Vindhya mountain range. His advisor and later chief minister was Kautilya (c. 370–283 BCE), who is also known as Chanakya and sometimes called the Indian Machiavelli. Chandragupta took advantage of a power vacuum in the territory ruled by Alexander’s generals to absorb the Punjab, Gandhara and most of Afghanistan, and also expanded his domain west to Gujarat and the Indian Ocean. In 298 BCE he abdicated to live as a Jain ascetic in the south of the country. He was succeeded by his son Bindusara (320–272 BCE), who conquered land as far south as Karnataka.
The Maurya emperors were in close contact with their Greek neighbours and relatives. Chandragupta had a Greek wife and Greek ambassadors served his court. However, there appears to have been little Greek influence in India, whereas they were deeply influenced by the Persian Empire, at the time the mightiest the world had known. The customs at Chandragupta’s court are believed to have been purely Persian; like the Great King, he lived in seclusion, appearing only for religious festivals.
Bindusara’s son Ashoka (304–232 BCE) inherited the throne following a succession struggle. In 260 BCE he defeated the armies of Kalinga (present-day Odisha), the last to be holding out in northern India, in a bloody battle that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. Ashoka expanded his empire by conquest and alliances until at its height, in 250 BCE, it covered the entire subcontinent except for the southernmost tip, and incorporated present-day Pakistan, Kashmir, southeastern Iran, much of Afghanistan and probably Nepal – an area of 13 million sq. km (5 million sq. miles). It was the largest empire in the world at the time and the largest in Indian history, surpassed by neither the Mughals nor the British. Agriculture, trade and other economic activity flourished, thanks to a well-organized administration and decades of peace and security. To this day Ashoka is considered by many to be the greatest of all Indian rulers, and is revered for his efficient administration and his tolerance.
The period from the eighth to the sixth century BCE was one of great intellectual ferment throughout the civilized world, with Pythagoras, Empedocles, Heraclitus and other philosophers in Greece; the major Hebrew prophets; Confucius and Lao Tze in China; and Zoroaster in Persia.1 In India, new beliefs, attitudes and practices emerged that would become central to Indian culture. The breakdown of the old tribal culture, rapid social change and the growth of urban centres engendered pessimism, a pervasive feeling of angst and scepticism about the value of worldly existence. One scholar wrote of a ‘passionate desire for escape, for unison with something that lay beyond the dreary cycle of birth and death and rebirth, for timeless being, in place of transitory and therefore unsatisfactory existence’.2 One explanation is that the surplus economy, based on agriculture, booming trade and the rise of a middle class, supported the emergence of a class of economically unproductive people, including philosophers, religious mendicants and hermits.
The new ideas were defined in a collection of philosophical texts called the Upanishads, sometimes known as Vedanta (the end of the Vedas), which were composed from about 500 BCE. Two central concepts posited in these texts are atman (the individual self) and brahman (the universal spirit). One of the goals of life is to obtain knowledge of the atman and to recognize its identity with brahman, an idea expressed in the Sanskrit phrase Tat tvam asi – that’s what you are.
Many definitions for this self were proposed, including prana (breath) and food. Food, eater and brahman are one and the same: one cannot exist without the others. An eater becomes the food of another eater, which in turn becomes the food of a third, until the whole of creation is linked in a vast food chain. Food is the central element of creation, a source of immortality and an object of worship. One of the Upanishads contains the ecstatic utterance:
Oh wonderful! Oh wonderful! Oh, wonderful!
I am food! I am food! I am food!
I am an eater of food! I am an eater of food! I am an eater of food!
Another concept is that the self is faced with an endless cycle (samsara) of birth and rebirth. From this emerged the law of karma, a word that means ‘action’ or ‘deeds’. Our actions determine what we become in the future, and the best way to escape this cycle, to attain liberation (moksha), is to neutralize karma altogether. The laws of karma are not divinely ordained, since God is absent from this world view, but inherent in the nature of reality.
Ode to Food (from the Taitiriya Upanishad)
From food, verily creatures are produced
Whatsoever creatures dwell on the earth.
Moreover, by food, in truth, they live
Moreover, into it also they finally pass
For truly, food is the chief of beings;
Therefore, it is called a panacea
Verily, they obtain all food
Who worship Brahma as food
From food created things are born.
By food, when born, do they grow up
It is both eaten and eats things
Because of that it is called food3
One way of release was renunciation (sannyasa) – leaving a worldly existence to live in forest retreats, called ashrams. Some renouncers, or sannyasi, practised austerity (tapas), such as fasting and breath control, to eliminate karma.4 Meditation and yoga appeared at this time. The word ahimsa, translated as non-injury, non-violence or harmlessness, is used for the first time in the Upanishads. It became one of the most important terms in Indian philosophy and culture and, in recent times, was central to the political philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and other advocates of non-violent political action.
The link between ahimsa and vegetarianism is complex. While the Upanishads do not overtly advocate vegetarianism, compassion for all living beings tops the list of the virtues to be cultivated by renouncers. For example, the texts state that when gathering his food, the ascetic should not take any part of a plant unless it has already fallen; he should avoid the destruction of seeds and eat only the meat of animals already killed by beasts of prey.5 Ascetics who were mendicants could not produce, store or even cook their own food, but had to obtain it by begging. Those who lived as hermits in the forest could eat only food that was wild and uncultivated – a practice that survives to this day in the Hindu fast called phalahar. Indeed, many contemporary practices have their roots in very ancient times. Such developments were accompanied by a downgrading of the importance of sacrifice and other ritual activities and with it the role of the brahmin caste as the administrators of the sacrifice.
The ascetic lifestyle attracted many young people: the historian Romila Thapar even compares the movement to the counterculture of the 1960s.6 Some ascetics attracted followers, who formed small groups that became sects and then orders or congregations called sanghas. Audiences gathered to hear these leaders preach and debate in the parks and forests on the outskirts of cities; some settlements even had assembly halls where such debates took place. The best known and most influential of these sanghas were Jainism and Buddhism.
Vardhamana Mahavira (possibly 540–468 BCE), possibly considered to be the founder of Jainism, was the son of the ruler of a small kingdom in Bihar. The word Jain means ‘a follower of jina (conqueror)’, jina being the name bestowed on Mahavira because of his self-control. Mahavira married and had children, but left home in search of enlightenment. (At the time he was not considered to be the founder of a new religion but the most recent of twenty-four jinas, called tirthankaras – omniscient teachers who attained enlightenment and showed others the way to liberation.) According to legend, Mahavira initially converted eleven brahmins, who became leaders in his organization.
Jains did not and do not accept the authority of the Vedas or the brahmins. They see the goal of human existence as being to free oneself from attachment and aversion in order to attain a state of perfect omniscience and ultimate release from the body; they believe that people are prevented from doing this by the bondage of karma. Jains came to view karma not as a spiritual or intangible element, but as a physical substance – a superfine matter that clings to people’s souls and conforms to mechanical laws of cause and effect. We attract karma particles when we do or say something wrong, such as telling a lie, stealing or killing another living being. These bad actions cause our souls to attract more karma, creating a vicious circle.
Mahavira rejected caste, although he appears to have recognized four classes of people, based on their activities rather than their birth. Jainism has temples but traditionally no priests. Some Jains became monks and nuns (called respectively sadhus and sadhvis), who did not own any possessions and wandered barefoot from place to place begging for their food. The sight of an itinerant monk, a mask over his mouth to prevent him from breathing in insects, sweeping the ground in front of him with a broom, is still a common one on Indian roads.
A central doctrine of Jainism is that all nature is alive. Everything, from rocks and plants to gods, has an eternal soul, or jiva, although some souls are more powerful and complex than others. Related to this is ahimsa. Mahavira’s ‘pure unchanging eternal law’ was that ‘all things breathing, all things existing, all things living, should not be slain or treated with violence’ – a clear repudiation of the Vedic sacrifice. The prohibition against taking life was so extreme that Jains were forbidden from being farmers, since agriculture meant destroying insects in the soil.
With regard to food, the rules of Jainism are the most stringent of any religion. ‘To say that Jains are strictly vegetarian hardly begins to convey either the rigour and severity of the rules which some Jains put themselves under or the centrality of such practices to Jain religious life’, writes one scholar.7 Five things are absolutely forbidden: meat and meat products, fish, eggs, alcohol and honey. Alcohol is reviled because the process of fermentation multiplies and destroys living organisms and because it clouds one’s thinking and may lead to violence. Jain monks are not allowed even to stay in a place where alcoholic drink is stored. Honey is banned because its removal from the comb kills bees.
Monks and nuns and other observant Jains avoid many other foods, including fruit and vegetables with many seeds, such as figs, aubergines, guava and tomatoes (because seeds contain the germ of life); vegetables that grow underground, such as potatoes, turnips, radishes, mushrooms, fresh ginger and turmeric (because pulling them up kills the plant as well as millions of jivas in the soil); onions and garlic (believed to inflame the passions); foods containing yeast and fermented foods; cauliflower and cabbage (insects live within their leaves); and buds and sprouts.
The abundance of fruit, vegetables and dairy products in India clearly facilitated a vegetarian diet – it is hard to imagine vegetarianism emerging in a cold climate. Jain food is largely regional and, despite the restrictions, can be delicious.8 As in much of India, the dietary staples are grains and legumes. Hing, or asafoetida, is a common replacement for garlic. Spices are essential in daily cooking, although they may be given up during fasts. Gujarat and Maharashtra, home to most of India’s Jains, are fertile regions where a wide array of fruit and vegetables is available all year round. There are no restrictions on dairy products, sugar or ghee, and affluent Jains are known for the amount of these substances they use in their cooking. Most Jains are not vegans. (In general, veganism is rare in India.) However, some Jains living in the West avoid dairy products because of the violence involved in producing milk by machines, and the fact that cows are killed when they stop producing.
Jain writings contain detailed rules about how and when food can be taken. Jains must not eat after sunset, lest they accidentally ingest an insect. All water must be boiled and reboiled every six hours, and all liquids strained before drinking. Milk must be filtered and boiled within 48 minutes of the cow being milked; yoghurt should not be more than one day old unless it is mixed with raisins or other sweetening agents; flour is to be kept for only three days in the rainy season and seven days in winter; and sweets must be consumed within 24 hours. Jain monks are not allowed to eat food sold at a roadside stand. Although these rules may no longer be relevant because of modern refrigeration, they reflect an awareness of hygiene and the risk of infection.
An important way of removing karma is by fasting, which Jains elevated to an art form. The ultimate fast, called smadhi maran or sallekhna, entails giving up all food and water and starving oneself to death. This practice is undertaken by someone who is in the final stages of a fatal illness or is very old and feels they have fulfilled their duties in this life. They must be given permission to do so by a senior monk.9
According to legend, the Maurya emperor Chandragupta was a practising Jain who fasted to death. Early on, the Jain community broke into branches descended from specific teachers who moved from the Ganges basin to other areas. Unlike Buddhists, Jains did not actively proselytize. In the south, the religion was patronized and, paradoxically, even espoused by militaristic kings who admired its emphasis on striving, discipline and self-control. In urban areas Jainism was patronized by merchants, artisans, jewellers and even courtesans, and today some of India’s wealthiest business families are Jains. Some Jain kings later returned to the traditional Vedic fold and even persecuted the Jain community. Today, there are only around 4 million Jains in India, mainly in the state of Gujarat and in the Indian diaspora, plus an estimated 300,000 Jains living abroad. But some of their beliefs and customs were absorbed into the mainstream religious practices of what later came to be called Hinduism.
Siddhartha Gautama (563–483 BCE), later known as the Buddha (‘enlightened one’), was, like Mahavira, the son of the ruler of a small kingdom, in northeastern India. He led a protected life in his palace until he reached his twenties, when he encountered for the first time the suffering of ordinary people. This led him to begin a spiritual quest, during which he joined the ascetics where he practised austerity and almost starved to death. But in a moment of enlightenment, he rejected this approach in favour of what he called the Middle Way, a path of moderation between the extremes of self-indulgence and self-mortification. Its purpose is to put an end to the suffering that is intrinsic in existence. Suffering is caused by greed, desire, ignorance and hatred, and can be eliminated by following the eightfold path: right understanding, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration. The concept of ahimsa is central to Buddhist doctrine, although it was not taken to the extremes of Jainism. Gautama Buddha also accepted the idea of karma, the idea that one’s actions in a previous life determine how one will be reborn. The ultimate goal is to attain nirvana, freedom from the cycle of birth and death.
Gautama preached the equality of all castes, which gave his religion a universal appeal. An excellent organizer, he founded monasteries for both men and women (although he was suspicious of the latter) and substituted congregational meetings for rituals. What distinguished Jainism and especially Buddhism from earlier practices was the institutionalization of ascetic practices. In keeping with the principle of ahimsa, the Buddha unequivocally rejected animal sacrifice. According to legend, the king of Kosala planned a great sacrifice of 500 oxen, 500 male calves, 500 female calves and 500 sheep, but abandoned it on the advice of the Buddha.
When it came to food, the Middle Way prevailed. Early Buddhism placed no restrictions on the diets of laypeople, but on many occasions the Buddha urged moderation, so as to avoid excessive attachment to the pleasures of the table. In one of his sermons, he told of a king whose love of eating meat was so great that he even ate human flesh. This so alienated his subjects and family that he had to abandon his throne and suffered great hardships. Alcohol and other intoxicants were also prohibited by the Buddha.
Monasteries had huge and complex kitchens and, like royal courts, their own food-processing equipment, such as oil presses and sugar mills. The food served at Buddhist monasteries was vegetarian. Monks were supposed to eat only what was necessary to sustain life, and to consume solid foods only between sunrise and noon. Their diet consisted of rice and milk in the morning, rice with cooked vegetables at lunch, and a little ghee, oil, honey or sugar in the afternoon. Outside the monasteries, where monks begged for food, they had to accept anything that was given to them, even meat or fish, provided the food was ‘blameless’; that is, not slain on purpose for the monk and killed out of the sight, hearing and even suspicion of the recipient (leaving the animal’s death to be the responsibility of the person who donated the food). Unless a monk were ill, he was not to ask specifically for meat, fish, ghee, oil, honey, sugar, milk or yoghurt. Only a few substances were absolutely forbidden to all Buddhists: alcohol, for example, and certain meats, including elephant, horse, dog, snake, lion and tiger. Venison and other game were allowed.
Buddhism, unlike Jainism, was a proselytizing religion. The third Buddhist Council, in 250 BCE, reportedly convened by Ashoka himself, made a decision to send missions to other parts of the subcontinent and beyond. Starting then and continuing until the thirteenth century CE, Buddhist emissaries, as well as brahmin priests, went to South and Southeast Asia, including Sri Lanka, Burma, Cambodia, Thailand and southwestern China. In the seventh century CE another wave of missionaries went to Tibet. They took with them Buddhist dietary and monastic rules, including vegetarianism. Later, however, when Buddhism split into various sects, the propriety of eating meat because a subject of doctrinal dispute. In Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka today, monks eat meat if it is given to them, whereas in China, Korea and Vietnam they are strictly vegetarian. In Tibet, a cold country where vegetables are scarce, vegetarianism is rare and even the Dalai Lama eats meat.10
Buddhism has almost disappeared in the land of its birth since, like Jainism, many of its tenets and practices were absorbed into Hinduism. (The Buddha is often considered the tenth avatar of the deity Vishnu.) The Indian census in 2001 showed only 8 million Buddhists (0.8 per cent of the population), the majority of whom were dalits who converted en masse to Buddhism starting in the 1950s to escape the strictures of caste.
Many people found the moral and ethical teachings of the new movements an attractive alternative to the esoteric and expensive rituals of the brahmins. Some sacrifices required hundreds of animals, which placed a great burden on the farmers who had to donate their livestock, and the rulers’ growing administrative and military costs competed for the funds demanded by the brahmins for their increasingly elaborate rituals. In addition, both the new religions welcomed women and members of oppressed castes.
Like Mahavira, Gautama Buddha was successful in attracting political patronage. Buddhism became the official religion of a number of states, including Magadha, Kosala and Kaushambi. An important and enthusiastic supporter of Buddhism and Jainism was the Emperor Ashoka. According to Buddhist sources, Ashoka had once led a life of self-indulgence and cruelty. In 260 BCE he waged a violent war against the state of Kalinga. The terrible suffering and destruction that ensued caused him great remorse and led him to question the value of military action. Influenced by the teachings of Buddhism, Ashoka renounced violence. He built and supported Buddhist monasteries and sent missionaries all over the subcontinent and even further. He built thousands of stupas (semicircular mounds) to house the Buddha’s relics, constructed roads and rest houses, planted trees for shade and founded hospitals for both humans and animals.
The central tenet of Ashoka’s philosophy and practice was dharma (in Sanskrit; dhamma in Pali), a word that has been translated as duty, social order, righteousness or universal law. He expounded it in fourteen edicts posted on rock surfaces or sandstone pillars in more than 30 places in India, Nepal, Pakistan and Afghanistan. For Ashoka, dharma was essentially a moral concept, encompassing compassion, liberality, truthfulness, purity, gentleness and goodness.11
Ashoka also expressed concern for the well-being of animals. An inscription in his first edict reads: ‘Our Lord the king kills very few animals. Seeing this, the rest of the people have also ceased from killing animals. Even the activity of those who catch fish has been prohibited.’12 The most famous inscription shows that Ashoka practised what he preached:
Formerly, in the kitchens of the [emperor], several hundred thousand animals were killed daily for food, but now at the time of writing only three are killed– two peacocks and a deer, though the deer not regularly. Even these three animals will not be killed in future.
(Perhaps peacock and venison were exempt because they were very popular meats, especially at banquets and feasts, and also were considered healthy by Ayurvedic physicians.) The edict lists other animals that are not to be killed, including parakeets, swans, pigeons, bats, ants, tortoises, boneless fish, porcupines, squirrels, cows, rhinos, pigeons, nanny goats, ewes and sows with young, and animals less than six months old. Cockerels were not to be castrated, and one animal should not be fed to another.
Unfortunately, there is no record of the food served at the Mauryan court. The food historian Rachel Laudan speculates that since the Mauryan emperors emulated the Achaemenid rulers of Persia (550–330 BCE) in many areas, including their writing system, roads, art and architecture, their cuisine is also likely to have followed the Persian model, which in turn was based on the high cuisine of Mesopotamia developed over thousands of years.13 Lavish banquets featured hundreds of dishes, including breads made from wheat and barley flour of various grades; the meat of geese and other birds; fresh, fermented and sweetened milk; garlic, onions; fruit juice; and date and grape wine. An army of cooks toiling in vast kitchens at the Achaemenid court specialized in certain dishes: stews, roasts, boiled fish, a particular kind of bread, and so on.
Ashoka did not impose an outright ban on the killing of male goats, sheep and cattle for food or sacrifices (although an inscription on one of the pillars rules that ‘no animal should be killed as a sacrifice here’). His position was one of compromise and won over many of his subjects. He insisted that all beliefs be respected, and invited Buddhists and non-Buddhists to conferences. Nearly 2,000 years later the Mughal emperor Akbar adopted a similar stance by becoming a virtual vegetarian and patronizing different religions. In India, food and politics are inseparable.
On Ashoka’s death, the Mauryan Empire began to disintegrate and broke into regional states. But the memory of Ashoka’s empire, which stretched from sea to sea and from the mountains to the peninsula, remained alive. Ashoka’s symbol, the wheel, representing the wheel of law, is at the centre of the modern Indian flag, while the symbol of India is four lions at the top of the pillar Ashoka erected at Sarnath, near Varanasi.
Feast at a hermitage: a scene from the Ramayana (1712).
Compared with earlier periods, we have much more information about Indian food customs from this time, thanks to the reports of Greek travellers, Buddhist and Jain texts, and the Arthashastra (Science of Wealth) by Chanakya (Kautilya).
Like later travellers, the Greeks were fascinated by what they saw in India, and painted a somewhat idealistic picture of Indian society. The Greek ambassador Megasthenes (c. 350–290 BCE) recorded his observations in a work called Indika. Although the original is lost, passages have survived in the works of the Greek geographer Strabo (64/63 BCE–c. 24 CE) and the Graeco-Roman historian Arrian (86–c. 160 CE). Megasthenes was impressed by the country’s prosperity:
India has many huge mountains which abound in fruit trees of every kind and many vast plains of great fertility . . . intersected by a multitude of rivers. The greater part of the soil, moreover, is under irrigation and consequently bears two crops in the course of the year. It teems at the same time with animals of all sorts.14
Thanks to this abundance, he continued, the inhabitants ‘exceed . . . the ordinary stature and are distinguished by their proud bearing. They are also found to be well skilled in the arts, as might be expected of men who inhale a pure air and drink the finest water.’
The conversion of sugar cane to products was first carried out in India, probably during the first millennium BCE. The cane was crushed in a machine called a yantra, a large mortar and pestle turned by oxen, still used in rural India. The juice was filtered and cooked slowly in a large metal pot over a low fire fuelled by the sugar-cane stalks. The thickened juice, called phanita, was similar to molasses. It was further concentrated and dried to make solid pieces of brown sugar, known as jaggery or gur (perhaps from Gaura, the ancient name for Bengal, which was famous for its superior varieties of sugar cane). Jaggery can also be made from the juice of palm trees; its distinctive flavour makes it the preferred flavouring for certain sweets. The removal of more liquid yielded sandy solids called sarkara (Sanskrit for sand or gravel, and the origin of the English word ‘sugar’).
In 326 BCE the Greeks described ‘stones the colour of frankincense, sweeter than figs or honey’. This may have been pieces of crystallized sugar called khand (the origin of the English word ‘candy’) . Exactly how this was made is not clear.
Further refinements came from Persia in the eighth century CE. In 1615 a Mughal governor presented the English diplomat Sir Thomas Roe with a loaf of sugar ‘as white as snow’.
The discovery that sugar cane could grow in the New World led to the rapid growth of plantations and the migration of millions of Indians to the Caribbean in the late nineteenth century. In the face of this competition the Indian sugar industry declined, and by the early nineteenth century it was almost forgotten. Sugar was imported into India from China (white sugar is called chini in Bengali and Hindi), Egypt (crystallized sugar is called misri in Hindi, from the name of Egypt) and Java at considerable expense. In 1912 the Sugar Cane Research Institute was created to develop hybrid sugar canes using New World plants that were thicker and more resistant to insects and had a higher sugar content than Indian varieties. Production increased dramatically, and today India is the world’s second-largest producer after Brazil.
Making sugar by boiling molasses in water, late 19th century. |
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Wheat was sowed in winter and summer, rice and millet in summer. Fruit grew spontaneously and vegetables thrived on riverbanks and in marshes. Because of this abundance, famine never visited India, nor had there ever been a scarcity of nourishing food. Megasthenes was particularly struck by ‘tall reeds which are sweet both by nature and by concoction’ – sugar cane, still unknown in Europe.
Megasthenes was intrigued by the division of society into seven classes. of which the most pre-eminent were the ‘philosophers’ (brahmin priests) who performed sacrifices and rites for the dead in return for gifts and privileges. Second were farmers, who were regarded as ‘sacred and inviolable’, since even during times of warfare their fields were left untouched. Other classes were shepherds who live in tents in the forests and rid the country of noxious birds and beasts; artisans; soldiers; overseers; and government administrators. He observed that no one was allowed to marry outside his caste or follow any profession except his own.15
Elsewhere Megasthenes is quoted as saying that the Indians lived frugally, never drank wine except as part of sacrifices, and ate mainly a mixture of rice and a thick stew, perhaps some form of dal or curry. A group of philosophers, the Brachmanes (brahmins), lived a simple life, abstained from sex and listened to serious discourse. They ate meat but not that of working animals, and abstained from highly seasoned food.16 Other ascetics, called Sarmanes (shramans), lived in the woods, where they wore clothes made of bark and ate only acorns and wild fruit. Megasthenes also writes of physicians whose diet consists of rice and barley meal, and who effect cures by regulating diet rather than administering medicine – one of the earliest foreign references to Ayurveda.
Another source of information about Indian agriculture and food is the Historia Plantarum (History of Plants) by the Greek philosopher Theophrastus (371–c. 287 BCE), who based his writings on the reports of Alexander’s soldiers. Of Indian rice, he wrote:
More than anything they grow the so-called oryzon, which is their boiled cereal. It is similar to emmer [a type of wheat] and, when bruised, similar to hulled emmer grains and is easy to digest. When growing it looks like darnel [a thin Eurasian grass], though standing for most of its life in water, but it fruits not into an ear but into a sort of plume, like millet.17
One result of Alexander’s sojourn in India was that rice entered the classical world, where, like spices, it was originally valued as a medicine. The chicken, first domesticated in India, reached Greece by the early sixth century BCE via the Persian Empire. Wine made from grapes came to Persia from Greece at about the same time, and from there went to Afghanistan and eastern India.18
According to Buddhist and Jain texts, summarized in Om Prakash’s Economy and Food in Ancient India, rice was the staple grain in northeastern and central India.19 The two main varieties were sali, which was grown from transplants and harvested in winter, and vrihi, a more ordinary variety grown by scattering seed harvested in autumn. Both were sown at the beginning of the rainy season. The most valuable variety was mahasali, which had large, fragrant, shiny grains and has been identified with basmati rice. Black and red varieties of rice were also cultivated and are still eaten today in parts of northeastern and southern India.
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Odana was a general term for a porridge-like dish made from rice and other grains. Rice cooked with yoghurt, honey or ghee was called payodana; made with sugar and milk it was known as kshiraudana (the modern kheer); and with meat, mamsaudana, an early version of pilau. Rice was heated in hot sand until it swelled up. Today muri (puffed rice) is a common breakfast dish and snack in Bengal. Puffed rice could be sweetened with honey or sugar. Soaked husked rice cooked in ghee was a popular offering to the gods. Puri-like breads were made from rice flour, ground lentils and wheat and sometimes coated with sugar.
Barley pearls were boiled in water or milk to make gruel that could be drunk or licked. Ground parched barley flour (sometime mixed with wheat flour) was used to make bread. Yavagu, a salty or sweet gruel of rice or barley flavoured with long or black pepper and ghee, was popular in western India and became a standard Ayurvedic remedy for digestive problems.20 Poor people ate kulmasha, a thick porridge of grains or lentils cooked with a little water and flavoured with jaggery or oil. They often carried a ball of dried kulmasha with them to eat in the fields while they worked – a practice still followed in rural India. The most widely eaten lentils were mung, masur and horse gram. They were boiled to make a thin dal called supa, which was eaten with rice or any other solid or dry food. Lentils were ground, formed into balls, fermented and fried in ghee.
200 g (1 cup) long-grain rice
1.5 litres (6 cups) water
½ tsp grated fresh ginger
pinch of freshly ground black pepper salt, to taste
Bring the water to the boil, add the rice and cook until soft. Add the other ingredients and stir well.
Sweet Yavagu
200 g (1 cup) long-grain rice
1.5 litres (6 cups) water
120 ml (½ cup) milk
120 g (½ cup) sugar
3 or 4 green cardamom pods
Prepare as above.
Cows and buffaloes were milked morning and evening. Rice was boiled in milk and mixed with fragrant spices and sugar to make a rice pudding called payasa (modern Bengali payesh, Tamil payasam). Sikharini, a mixture of yoghurt with crystallized sugar and pepper and other spices, is like the modern shrikhand. Sweetened rice flour or lentils were shaped into balls called modaka, one of present-day India’s most popular sweets at festivals.
Seasonings for modaka included five kinds of salt (sea, black, rock, kitchen and red), black pepper, long pepper, cumin, asafoetida, myrobalan, ginger, turmeric and mustard seeds. The most important oil seed was sesame, which was made into cakes, used as a seasoning or ground to make cooking oil. A Buddhist monk was said to be so fond of a sweet called saskuli (a large ear-shaped sweet made of rice flour, sugar and sesame, fried in ghee) that he asked a householder to make it for him – and had to apologize for this breach of the rules before an assembly of monks.
According to Prakash, ‘the general feeling of the time about meat eating seems to be that it should be used in extending hospitality to guests, as [an] offering to gods and ancestors, but animals should not be killed otherwise.’21 Buddhist texts contain many references to meat: venison, pork and chicken were popular but sheep, goats and even buffaloes were also eaten. Meat was roasted on spits, boiled in soup, mixed with spices, ghee and yoghurt to make curry, or fried in oil and seasoned with salt and pepper. By the middle of the first millennium BCE the notion of clean and unclean meat was well developed. The consumption of dogs, village cockerels, carnivorous animals, village pigs, cows and other animals was discouraged, although such meat could be eaten if it were a matter of life or death.
120–480 ml ½–1 cup) water
1 tsp vegetable oil
120 g (1 cup) rice flour
110 g (1 cup) grated coconut
2 tsp ghee (or melted butter)
½ tsp ground cardamom
90 g (½ cup) brown sugar
pinch of salt
Bring the water to the boil, add the salt and oil, then the rice flour, and stir until it forms a smooth dry paste. Set aside. Fry the grated coconut in the ghee. Add the ground cardamom and the sugar, mix well, and fry until the mixture thickens. When cool, roll the coconut mixture into small balls. Take a small piece of the rice flour mixture, flatten it on your palm into a circle about 8 cm (3 in.) in diameter, insert a coconut ball and wrap into a little package, squeezed at the top so that it looks like a head of garlic. Continue until all the ingredients are used up. Place in a steamer or colander over boiling water and steam for 7–10 minutes.
Four women selling food, Patna, c. 1850.
Items that had stood overnight, had turned sour or had been cooked twice were also considered unfit to eat, perhaps because of the risk of infection. Anything touched by a dog or a crow could be eaten if the defiled part was removed and the rest sprinkled with water. There were some restrictions on accepting food from people of different castes, but they were not as rigid as they would later become. These restrictions and prohibitions were codified in the texts called the Dharmashastras (see chapter Four).
In his Sanskrit grammar Asthadhyahi (Eight Chapters), the great linguist Panini (considered to be the father of modern descriptive linguistics) described the food-related habits in northwestern India where he lived around the fourth century BCE.22 He divides food into three categories: meat; supa, a word that means dal or perhaps a thin soup similar to the south Indian rasam; and vegetables. Vegetables were prepared with salt, yoghurt and churma (wheat flour fried with ghee and sugar), and could be flavoured during the meal with jaggery, sesame oil or ghee.
Both men and women worked as professional cooks. Some specialized in certain dishes; others were known for the amounts of food they could prepare, and were paid accordingly. Cookware was made of copper, iron, stone and clay. Bread was baked on pottery shards; meat was roasted on spits over live charcoal or fried in oil. Metal pots and utensils were cleaned with ashes, wooden ones by scraping. The main cooking techniques were roasting, boiling, sautéing and frying in sesame oil, ghee or mustard oil.
Domestic servants were given food as part of their wages. They also had the right to eat leftovers, although who ate which leftovers was carefully prescribed: leftovers from the serving dish were given to the family barber, food left in the cooking pot was given to the cook, while food on a plate from which rice had been served was given to dogs, crows or other scavengers.
Another valuable source of information is the Arthashastra, a manual of how a kingdom should be organized and run.23 Government superintendents were responsible for departments of agriculture, weights and measures, tolls, alcoholic drink, slaughterhouses, warehouses, even prostitutes and elephants. One superintendent had to inspect the preparation of foods sold in the market to make sure that customers were not cheated. For example, when barley was cooked as a gruel, it was supposed to swell to twice its original size, millet three times, ordinary rice (vrihi) four times and expensive rice (sali) five times. Rules were established for the preparation of flour, and any adulteration was punished with a fine. Cities had to have ample stores of dried meat, fish and other commodities in case of famine.
Food prepared in a large cauldron over a fire: a scene from the Ramayana (1712).
The dietary staple of the kingdom was rice, and the Arthashastra specifies how much should be consumed by the various categories of person, perhaps indicating some kind of rationing system. The meal of an arya (a man belonging to one of the three upper castes) was to consist of one prastha of rice (one prastha is equal to 48 handfuls, or approximately 2 kg, or 4½ lb), one-quarter of a prastha of dal (½ kg, or just over 1 lb), and one-sixteenth of a prastha (1/8 kg, or ¼ lb) of clarified butter or oil. Women were allotted three-quarters and children half of the men’s allowance. Members of the lower castes were to have one-sixth of a prastha of dal and half as much oil. There were even allocations for animals: dogs were supposed to be fed one prastha of cooked rice, and geese and peacocks half as much. Rice and dal were supplemented by other dishes, including meat and fish curries, but the amounts of those were not specified.
Spices and herbs mentioned in the Arthashastra include long pepper, black pepper, ginger, cumin seeds, white mustard, coriander, kiratatikta (Agathotes chirayta, a bitter herb grown in the Himalayas), choraka (angelica), damanaka (Artemisia indica), maruvaka (Vangueria spinosa, a kind of basil) and sigru (Hyperanthera moringa, drumstick tree). Today the last five items are used only in Ayurveda.
All animals, including domesticated animals, birds, game and fish, were under state protection. Butchers were supposed to sell the boneless meat of animals that had just been killed. If they included bones or used false weights, they had to compensate the customer by giving him or her eight times as much meat as the original order. Calves, bulls and milk cows could not be killed, and a large fine was imposed on those who did so. It was forbidden to sell meat from animals killed outside a slaughterhouse or which had died a natural death.
Poaching was subject to heavy fines. One-sixth of all wild animals were supposed to live unharmed in state-run forest preserves, although this may in reality have been a way of protecting the rulers’ hunting preserves. Other animals protected from ‘all kinds of molestation’ included elephants, horses, animals ‘having the form of a man’ (perhaps monkeys), geese, brahmany ducks, partridges, peacocks and parrots.
The production and sale of alcoholic beverages were a state monopoly under the superintendent of liquor. The description of his duties indicates the existence of a lively pub scene. Every village had at least one state-supervised shop that was a combination of shop and tavern. The shops had rooms with beds and chairs and were decorated with flowers. To prevent unruly behaviour, alcoholic drink was sold only in small amounts and had to be drunk on the spot, although people known to be of good character could take it out of the shop. Government spies were stationed in taverns to make sure that customers were not spending more than they could afford or concealing stolen goods. Special attention was paid to foreign customers who ‘acted like aryas’ but lay in a drunken stupor with their beautiful mistresses. If customers lost anything while drunk, the shopkeeper had to make good the loss and pay a fine as well.
A container for storing home-made rice beer in Meghalaya.
On special occasions, families could make certain kinds of alcohol for their own use. For festivals, fairs and pilgrimages, they could make it for four days, giving the state a share of the proceeds. Alcoholic drinks were made from rice, barley, grape, palm, mango, wood apple, sugar cane, the flowers of the mahua tree (Madhuca longifolia), jasmine or the bark of certain trees.24 The fermenting agent was originally honey, but later treacle, yeast and other ingredients were used. Digestion techniques included putting the ingredients in a jar and burying it in the earth, covering it with manure or grain, or exposing it to the sun. A popular fermenting and flavouring agent was sambhara, a mixture of cinnamon, long and black pepper and other spices. Sukta was a mixture of treacle, honey, fermented rice water and whey placed in an earthen pot and left on a pile of rice for three days in summer.25
In the Arthashastra, Kautilya lists the ingredients of five kinds of alcoholic drink:
Medaka. Water, fermented rice and a mixture of ground spices and herbs, honey, grape juice, panic seeds, turmeric, black pepper and long pepper.
Prasanna. Flour, various spices and the bark and fruit of a tree called putraka.
Asava. Wood apple (Feronia limonia), sugar and honey. (It can also be made from sesame and sugar-cane juice.) It is flavoured with ground cinnamon, Ceylon wort (Plumbago zelanica), coco grass, lodh tree, betel nut and mahua flower.
Aristha. Water, treacle and medicines are placed in an earthen pot coated with a mixture of honey, butter and ground long pepper. The pot is put in a mass of barley and the mixture allowed to ferment for at least seven nights.
Maireya. A wine made from various ingredients, including grapes.
Maireya was so popular that Buddha explicitly banned his followers from drinking it. It was sold in taverns and sweetened with sugar, jaggery or thickened sugar juice. One of the most prestigious drinks was a wine made from grapes from Kapisi in northern Afghanistan, an ancient centre of wine-making, where excavations have found glass flasks, fish-shaped wine jars and drinking cups.
Other texts of the time contain many references to alcohol, which appears to have been very popular despite brahmin, Buddhist and Jain disapproval. Characters in later Sanskrit plays drank spirits and coconut wine (perhaps toddy) to the point of intoxication. Alcohol was seen as enhancing the charm of a woman by making her complexion rosier and her behaviour more amorous.
From ancient times, Indian attitudes towards alcohol have been ambivalent. Despite disapproval by respectable people (even today, several states have prohibition or ‘dry’ days), there has always been a rich tradition of making alcoholic beverages from available materials.
