During the period discussed in this chapter, India was part of a world economy, exchanging goods with Africa, the Middle East and China. New ingredients entered the Indian culinary repertoire, including cloves and betel nuts, while Indian merchants may have introduced tamarind, garlic, ginger, turmeric and pepper to Southeast Asia. According to Rachel Laudan, in the period between the first and fifth centuries CE, ‘India was as pivotal to the wider Asian sphere as Greece and Rome were to the Mediterranean, North Africa and Europe.’1 Although the term ‘Hindu’ was not used until much later, some beliefs and practices that came to be associated with Hinduism were codified at this time, especially with regard to food.
The last Mauryan emperor was assassinated in 184 BCE, and until the establishment of the Gupta Empire in 324 CE, India was politically fragmented. The Mauryas’ immediate successor in the northeast was the Shunga dynasty, which lasted only 100 years. In the northwest, Greek Bactrians (descendants of Alexander the Great’s generals) took over Afghanistan, and by the end of the second century BCE had conquered the entire Punjab.
Northern India was invaded by various groups from Central Asia: the Scythians or Sakas, the Pahlavas and the Kushans (from the second to the third century BCE). Over time many of the invaders adopted Indian names and the caste rank of ksatriya and supported the brahmins’ rituals to sanction their kingship. In Rajasthan and central India, some became the ancestors of the Rajputs.
The Guptas (324–550 CE) started life as rulers of small kingdoms in Bihar. Through marriage, alliances and warfare they expanded their rule over much of northern India. The Gupta period is sometimes called the Golden Age of Indian civilization, since at that time India enjoyed relative peace, order and prosperity. It was one of the richest regions in the world, thanks to thriving agriculture and extensive overseas trade. Unlike Ashoka, the Gupta emperors performed Vedic sacrifices, but they also made endowments to both Buddhist and brahmin establishments. However, the two communities were physically separated, with the monasteries located outside the cities and the brahmin schools in the cities, close to the court.
The study of science, art, mathematics, literature, logic, philosophy and religion flourished. The positional number system, the notion that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and the game of chess were all conceived during this period. The plays of Kalidasa, who probably lived in the fourth century CE, are still performed today. The world’s first university, at Nalanda in Bihar, was founded in the fifth or sixth century CE. It had more than 10,000 students and 2,000 teachers, and attracted scholars from as far away as China, Persia and Greece.
The south of India was ruled by independent chieftains and dynasties: Cheras and Pandyas in the southeast, Cholas in the west, and the Satavahanas, also called the Andhra dynasty, who for more than 450 years controlled a large expanse of western, southern and central India.
India was the centre of a vast network of foreign trade routes. A Greek maritime geography of the mid-first century CE, The Periplus, lists more than fifty ports and routes on the Red Sea and twenty posts on the east and west coasts of India. Located at the mouths of rivers, these ports were major emporia for the exchange of goods with the Roman Empire, the Arabian Peninsula, Western and Southeast Asia. Each year a fleet of 120 Roman ships left Egypt (then part of the Roman Empire) for the west coast of India, a trip that could take just 40 days if the winds were favourable; later they were able to sail around the southern tip of India to reach the ports on the east coast. Three major ports were Muziris in Kerala, Arikamedu near Pondicherry, and Puhar in Tamil Nadu.2 The streets of these bustling cities were lined with merchants’ mansions and warehouses. Trade continued into ports further north, including Bharuch, and may have been a continuation of the trade routes of the Indus Valley civilization.
Many Indian merchants were Buddhists, in part because of the prohibitions against sea travel by upper-caste Indians because of the risk of contamination. Most of the merchants who bought goods for Rome were Arabs, Egyptian Jews and Greeks. They came to India for aromatic oils, ivory, agate, muslin and cotton cloth, silk trans-shipped from China, precious stones, apes, parrots and peacocks, salt from the Punjab, saffron and musk from the Himalayas, cloves and nutmeg from Southeast Asia, and cardamom, long pepper and black pepper from Kerala. The last was much in demand in the Roman Empire both for its flavour (pepper is an ingredient in two-thirds of the 468 recipes in Apicius, a Roman cookbook written in the late fourth or early fifth century CE) and as a status symbol, since it was very expensive.3 Recent archaeological evidence indicates that the Romans may also have imported medicinal plants from a region in Karnataka.4
The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea.
In exchange for their goods, the Indians received mainly gold and silver coins, hoards of which have been discovered along the coasts. Luxury goods included wine (those from southern Italy and the Greek islands were much valued), women for the rulers’ harems, and horses from the Middle East and Central Asia. Mediterranean amphorae recently discovered near Pondicherry contain the remains of olive oil, garum (fermented fish sauce) and apples.5
Such contact had other consequences. According to an apocryphal version of the New Testament Acts of the Apostles, in 52 CE the Apostle Thomas sailed to India to spread Christianity, and was martyred near Chennai. Some members of Kerala’s Syrian Christian community claim descent from his converts. Jews came to southwest India in 68 CE to escape religious persecution, and centuries later were joined by Jews from the Middle East. Most have since emigrated to Israel, but a small number remain in Cochin today.
As the Roman Empire began to crumble in the third century, its trading declined, but Indian trade with Southeast Asia and Indonesia expanded. Black pepper was exchanged for cloves, nutmeg and mace, which at the time grew only in the Malaccan Islands. An intriguing question is when these spices entered Indian cuisine. The Sanskrit word for clove, lavanga, comes from the Malay word bungalavanga. References to nutmeg are found in Buddhist and Jain texts composed a few centuries BCE. The earliest reference to cloves (as a flavouring for meat and paan) appears in Tamil works written between the third and sixth centuries CE. The betel palm (Areca catechu) and the leaf of the betel vine (Piper betle), components of paan (betel quid), reached South India from Southeast Asia by the late fifth century. Indian merchants may also have introduced tamarind, garlic, ginger, turmeric and pepper to Southeast Asia and Indonesia, and disseminated such spices as lemongrass and galangal.
Indian merchants, accompanied by priests, also brought Indian religious beliefs and practices, dance, sculpture, music and their concepts of statecraft to Southeast Asia. Local rulers enlisted the service of brahmins to support their political authority, married Indian women and adopted Hindu ceremonies and rituals. The two great epics of the Ramayana and Mahabharata are central to the cultures of the region, especially Thailand and Cambodia, where the stories are immortalized in the temples of Angkor Wat. So-called Hinduized kingdoms flourished in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia until the eighteenth century, and Hinduism is still practised in Bali. Almost uniquely in the history of the world, this cultural expansion was brought about by peaceful means and did not involve political hegemony or an attempt by Indian rulers to build an overseas empire.
These fishing nets in Cochin may have been introduced by the Chinese in the 14th century.
Trade with China was conducted by sea and land via the Silk Road, where Buddhist monasteries provided a link between South and East Asia. Chinese merchants established posts along India’s coasts and brought silk, porcelain and musk, the last of which became highly valued as a flavouring. En route they stopped in Malacca for nutmegs, mace, cloves and aloes, and Sri Lanka, where they bought cinnamon, all for resale in India, Persia and Arabia. Remnants of the Chinese presence are the Chinese-style fishing nets and wok-like cooking pots used in Kerala to this day. (Other theories are that they were introduced later by the Chinese explorer Zheng He (1371–1433) from the court of Kublai Khan or by Portuguese settlers from Macau.)
The Sanskrit names of several Indian foods contain the element chini, indicating their Chinese origin, including peaches (chinani), pears (chinarajaputra), lettuce (chinisalit), camphor (chinakarpura) and cinnamon (dalchini, or Chinese bark). Indian Buddhist travellers may have introduced sugar-refining to China, where the earliest reference to processing dates from 286 BCE.
In the middle of the first millennium BCE brahmin priests wrote a series of prose texts called Dharmasutras, which can be viewed as extensions of the ritual prescriptions of the Vedas. Their central purpose was to define dharma, a term that has been called ‘the most central and ubiquitous concept in the whole of Indian civilization’.6 Originally, dharma referred to rules of correct ritual procedure for such occasions as funeral ceremonies and purification rites, but the concept was later extended to include definitions of correct behaviour in the public sphere, such as in marriage and inheritance, and even in private activities, such as bathing, brushing one’s teeth, sexual conduct, general etiquette and diet.
The Dharmasutras told people what to do, but probably did not reflect what people actually did, especially since they contain contradictory statements and opinions. The very diversity of the instructions ‘belies the common assumption that ancient Indian society was uniform and stifling under an orthodoxy imposed by the Brahmins’, writes Patrick Olivelle. If even the experts disagreed so vehemently, ‘the reality on the ground must have been even more chaotic and exhilarating’.7 The content of the Dharmasutras is elaborated on in the Dharmashastras, composed somewhat later. The earliest and most famous of these is the Manu Smriti, translated as the Code or Lawbook of Manu. Composed in verse between 200 BCE and 200 CE, it was written by a conservative brahmin (‘Manu’) in northern India, or perhaps more probably by several authors living at different times. It is still considered by some to be the most authoritative code of Hindu customs.8
The writing of these works may have been motivated by a desire (especially by those in power) for stability and the establishment of social norms, caused by the period of political and social uncertainty that followed the disintegration of the Maurya and Shunga empires. The brahmins’ status and power had been weakened by the spread of Buddhism and Jainism, by the royal support for these movements and by Ashoka’s restrictions on animal sacrifice. To retain their position of superiority and their royal patrons, the brahmins had to steal a march on non-brahmin ascetics by presenting themselves as the ‘ultimate exemplars of the canons of proper asceticism’.9 The sutras represented an attempt to restore and consolidate their position and also to rationalize the myriad social groups that had emerged. The following is a summary of the main ideas in this literature, with a focus on dietary prescriptions and proscriptions.
Manu reiterates the concept of four castes (varnas), with brahmins at the pinnacle. Brahmins studied and taught the Vedas, offered and officiated at sacrifices, and gave and received gifts. Ksatriyas studied the Vedas, offered sacrifices, gave gifts to the brahmins and protected their subjects by arms. The vaisyas also studied the Vedas, offered sacrifices and practised agriculture, trade, animal husbandry and lending money on interest. These three castes were called ‘twice born’ because they underwent an initiation ceremony that represented a second birth. The job of the fourth caste, the sudras, was to serve the first three.
Twice-born men were supposed to live in a certain region, called Aryavarta or the region of the aryas (although by then this was not very feasible because of population growth). It was located between the Himalaya and Vindhya mountains and the eastern and western oceans, a region that coincides with the natural range of the black antelope. If a sudra did not have a means of livelihood, he could live anywhere at all. Beyond the Aryavarta was the land of the mlecchas, a word sometimes translated as ‘foreigners’ or ‘barbarians’ and applied to individuals and groups outside mainstream society.
Brahmins and ksatriyas were supposed to avoid farming, since farmers harm living beings in the soil – an idea perhaps adopted from the Jains. If hard-pressed a brahmin could engage in trade, but he could not sell meat, cooked food, salt, alcohol, milk or certain other items under pain of losing his caste status. A man who practised the profession of a higher caste was theoretically banned from society.
However, this fourfold taxonomy did not account for the thousands of clans, professions and tribes, called jatis, so the writers of the dharma literature came up with the ingenious solution of attributing the origins of the jatis to intercaste unions (an explanation that has little historical justification). Outcastes were said to be the children of sudra men and brahmin women. This abhorrence of the mixing of castes became the driving force of other prescriptions, including those relating to food.
The dharma literature has a lot to say about what, when and how a man could eat at different stages of his life, how his food should be prepared, from whom he could accept food and with whom he could eat. The term ‘man’ is used deliberately, since the readers were assumed to be men. Women were not supposed to study or even read the Vedas and dharma literature. However, while men were the arbiters of social norms, it was the women who inculcated and enforced these norms in the domestic sphere. Even today, in traditional Hindu households it is women who look after the ritual purity of the food and the kitchen and undertake fasts, often for the benefit of their husbands and children.
A twice-born man ideally passes through four stages, called asramas: student, householder, hermit or forest-dweller (vanaprastha) and ascetic or renunciant (sannyasi). In an interesting transformation, the practices and even the names (asrama, sannyasi and so on) from an earlier era were incorporated into the mainstream of life. Each stage had its own dietary rules. Students, who lived in their teachers’ homes, led an ascetic existence in which they abstained from sex, honey, meat, spices, onion, garlic, acid dishes and other foods believed to stimulate the passions (practices still followed in Hindu ashrams). They also had to beg for food on certain days.
Householders had to follow the dietary rules appropriate to their caste. After their hair turned grey, they had the option of retiring to the forest and living as a hermit. They were to wear clothing made of bark and animal skin, could not enter a village or step on ploughed land, and had to avoid eating cultivated grains (anna), a practice still observed in Hindu fasts called phalahar. During these fasts, breads and snacks were made of water-chestnut or lotus-seed flour instead of wheat, while onions, turmeric, garlic, ginger and urad dal were also banned.
One category of hermit did not cook their food, and ate only raw fruit, vegetables, leaves and roots. ‘To move around with animals, to dwell with them alone, and to sustain oneself just like them – that is the visible token of Heaven’, proclaims one of the Dharmasutras. ‘Having embarked on this splendid path far away from wicked men and undertaken the forest life, a Brahmin never comes to ruin.’10
In the final stage of life, as a man prepares for death, he abandons attachment to all worldly things. He wanders around without a fixed dwelling, practises yoga and meditation, lives by begging and avoids injuring any living creature. This lifestyle guarantees freedom from rebirth after death. Today most Hindus are familiar with the idea of this life cycle, although very few put it into practice.
For householders, the literature enjoins moderation in food: ‘A sage’s meal is eight mouthfuls, a forest-dweller’s sixteen, a householder’s twenty-two, and a student’s an unlimited quantity.’11 It was considered improper to eat early in the morning, late in the evening or between meals, or to eat too much. A person should wash before and after eating, wear at least two garments, remove his hat and shoes, sit on the floor facing east and dine in privacy without talking. Before eating, a householder should offer some food to the gods and then give it to children, old men, newly wed girls, sick people and pregnant women. He should also set aside food for dogs, outcastes, people who are ill, birds and insects. Rules of etiquette forbid one from cracking one’s joints or striking one’s nails, tapping one’s eating bowl, drinking water from cupped hands, splashing water or throwing pieces of food at other diners. Indian meals must have been lively events if such proscriptions were necessary!
The dharmic literature contains lists of foods that must not be eaten by twice-born men. They fall into two categories: those that are always forbidden because of their intrinsic nature (abhaksya), and those that could normally be eaten but have been made inedible because of contact with someone or something that is impure (abhojya).12
Foods that are always forbidden for twice-born men include the following:
Garlic, leeks and onions
Mushrooms and all other plants springing from impure substances
Red juices flowing from incisions on trees
The thickened milk of a cow after calving or the milk of an animal within ten days after calving
Rice boiled with sesame, wheat mixed with butter, milk rice and flour cakes unless they were prepared for a sacrifice
Meat that has not been sprinkled with water while sacred texts were recited
The milk of camels, one-hoofed animals, sheep, a cow in heat or one that has no calf with her, all wild animals except buffaloes
All substances that have turned sour, except sour milk and food prepared from it
Meat from a slaughterhouse (as opposed to meat obtained by hunting)
Dried meat
Village pigs
Most fish
Alcohol, especially distilled spirits
Certain categories of animal and bird (see below)
Although onions are native to Central Asia and Afghanistan and grew in India at a very early date, they are not mentioned in the Vedas, perhaps because they were associated with the despised indigenous people or because of their odour. Onions and garlic were reputed to have aphrodisiac properties, which is why they were forbidden to students and widows. (Later, the ban may have been reinforced by their association with Islamic cuisine.) Even today, Jains, orthodox brahmins, widows, ascetics and some Hindus avoid onions and garlic, and they are never used in religious ceremonies.
Singhare ki Puri (Puris made with Water-chestnut Flour)
2 medium-sized potatoes, boiled
150 g (1 cup) water-chestnut flour (kuttu)
¼ tsp black pepper
oil for deep frying
salt, to taste
Peel and mash the potato, and mix it with the flour, salt and pepper. Slowly add a little water (about 60 ml/¼ cup) until the dough is smooth and fairly hard. Form it into 12–15 small balls and very gently roll each one into a disc about 8 cm (3 in.) in diameter. Deep-fry in the oil until puffy.
Mushrooms are banned because they grow in dirty soil. The ban on red sap may be because of its association with blood. (According to legend, the god Indra once killed a brahmin; his guilt was assumed by trees and became their sap.) Avoiding the milk of newly calved cows can be seen as protecting the young.
As for the ban on alcohol, the justification is that a brahmin, stupefied by drunkenness, might fall on something impure, mispronounce Vedic texts or commit some other sin. The punishments are dire: if he deliberately drinks alcohol he must drink a liquid from a boiling-hot glass. If he drinks alcohol by accident, he must live on hot milk, hot ghee, hot water and hot air for three days each. If he even smells the breath of a man who has drunk alcohol, he must practise yoga, control his breath and eat ghee. A brahmin woman who drinks alcohol becomes a leech or pearl oyster that lives in water in her next life.
The classification of animals in the dharma literature challenges that of Leviticus in complexity. Eating animals with five-nailed paws and single hoofs is forbidden, but those with cloven hoofs are acceptable. Animals with incisor teeth on both jaws are not allowed; those with a single row of teeth are permitted. The only animals that meet both criteria of acceptability are goats, wild oxen, sheep, deer, antelopes and pigs. Dogs are not even mentioned because they are particularly abhorred as food, perhaps because of their association with chandalas, a tribal people who were sometimes called ‘dog-cookers’. Another forbidden category is birds that scratch with their feet, have webbed feet or are carnivorous.
Overriding all these taxonomical categories is habitat: animals and birds living in villages are forbidden, while those living in the wild or raised as farm animals are allowed. Thus the meat of a wild boar is acceptable, but not that of a village pig. A village chicken is banned but wildfowl can be eaten. Perhaps animals that live in villages were considered unclean, since they ate waste. Other blanket taboos are on carnivores and animals that lead solitary lives. The rules are silent about eggs, which could mean that they were rarely eaten at the time.
Regarding fish, the older literature assumes that all fish may be eaten except those that are grotesque or misshapen. Later writers, however, forbid all but a few fish, reflecting a belief that fish were carnivorous. ‘A man who eats the meat of some animal is called eater of that animal’s meat, whereas a fish-eater is an eater of every animal’s meat,’ says Manu.
The anthropologist Mary Douglas explains the origins of such classifications by defining forbidden and impure animals as those that are ‘out of place’ and deviate in some way from others in their category. For example, birds without feathers, fish without scales or cloven-footed animals that do not chew the cud are forbidden to the Jews because they are anomalies and therefore unclean. Pollution occurs when a category boundary is violated. Holiness requires that individuals conform to the class to which they belong, and that different classes of things not be confused. ‘To be holy is to be whole, to be one: holiness is unity, integrity, perfection of the individual and of the kind. The dietary rules merely develop the metaphor of holiness on the same lines’, Douglas wrote.13
As for eating meat in general, and the topic of vegetarianism, the Code of Manu devotes an entire section to the pros and cons. The antimeat verses (of which there are 25) far outnumber pro-meat verses (three), and could have been written at different times, perhaps in an attempt to reconcile renunciant ideals with traditional views on the value of the sacrifice. On the side of eating meat, Manu quotes Prajapati, the creator of the universe:
The immobile are food for the mobile, the fangless for the fanged, the handless for the handed, and the timid for the brave. The eater is not defiled by eating living beings suitable for eating even if he eats them day after day.
God himself created domestic animals for sacrifice for the prosperity of the entire world, and killing for sacrifice is, therefore, not killing. Plants, trees, cattle, birds and other animals that are killed for sacrifice are reborn into higher existences.
On the other hand, Manu dictates that while the consumption of meat for sacrifices is a rule made by the gods, to persist in using it on other occasions is demonic, and if a twice-born man eats meat in violation of this law, he will be eaten after death by his victims. A brahmin should not eat meat out of desire, but only for lawful reasons. If he has a craving for meat, he should make an animal out of clarified butter or flour and eat that; otherwise, he will suffer a violent death in future lives. Manu even gives a forced etymological explanation: ‘Me he (mam sa) will devour in the next world whose meat (mamsa) I eat in this world – this, the wise declare, is the real meaning of the word “meat” (mamsa).’
Manu further states that a man who abstains from meat and a man who offers the horse sacrifice every year for 100 years gain the same merit: ‘Even by living on pure fruits and roots and by eating the food of sages, a man fails to obtain as great a reward as he would by abstaining completely from meat.’ Manu remains firmly on the fence by finally declaring: ‘There is nothing wrong in eating meat nor in drinking wine nor in sexual union, for this is how living beings engage in life, but abstention bears great fruit.’
Another category in the texts is that of unfit food (abhojya) – food that can normally be eaten, but which has been rendered impure by coming into contact with someone or something that is considered unclean. Some prohibitions are probably based on hygiene and display an understanding of the principle of infection; for example, people should not eat food that has been touched by a dog or smelled by a cow; contains mouse droppings or an insect; looks disgusting; is stale (except vegetables or fried food); has been touched by someone’s foot or the hem of a garment; has been sneezed on; or is served by a sick person or someone who has had a death in the house.
Other foods are rendered unfit by caste distinctions, personal prejudice or perhaps just pure snobbery, including food given by a physician, a drunkard, a blacksmith, a goldsmith, a prostitute, a woman made impure by childbirth or menstruation, a hunter, a sudra, a law-enforcement agent, a thief, a eunuch, a miser, a liquor dealer, a carpenter, a woman without a husband, a washerman, the lover of a married woman, a man who keeps dogs, a man married to a sudra woman, or even a man who is bossed around by his wife. Some of these people (physicians and hunters, for example) were in contact with diseased or dead bodies, which in a hot climate could be a source of infection. But others – such as goldsmiths, eunuchs or hen-pecked men – were not, and the explanation must be sought elsewhere, notably in the correlation between perceived ‘purity’ and status.
As the anthropologist Louis Dumont stated in his classic Homo Hierarchicus, the Indian ‘classification of foods is essentially related to the classification of people and to relationships between human groups. It is not a primary datum resulting from a universal classification of pure and impure.’14 Mary Douglas argues that the restriction on eating outsiders’ food was a way of protecting one’s group from threats from below, especially since the higher a caste’s status, the more of a minority it must be. Then there is the ‘Primrose Path’ theory: eating with someone from outside one’s group could be the first step towards sleeping with them, a concept summed up in the Hindi phrase ‘roti-beti’: bread = daughter-in-law.
One of the main sources of food contamination is bodily fluids, including saliva, and this concern dictates, if only subconsciously, many modern practices in India.15 Some people do not sip water from a glass but pour it into their mouths, since even one’s own saliva can be polluting. To this day, many Indian women do not taste food while they are cooking it. An orthodox Hindu takes a bath before entering the kitchen, and wears freshly washed clothes.16 Food is eaten only with the right hand, the left being reserved for bathroom practices. Sampling food from another diner’s plate, except that of a close relative, is unacceptable.
Leftover food was the subject of complex rules. A person could eat the leftovers of his superiors only, which for a brahmin meant only God (that is, the food offered as a sacrifice or offering); for a ksatriya, the leftovers of a brahmin; for a vaisya, those of a ksatriya or brahmin; and for a sudra, those of the three castes above him. A student could eat his teacher’s leftovers. A twice-born man could not eat food left by a woman.17
But these barriers may not have been as rigid as they sound. According to the Dharmashastras, a brahmin could eat the food of a sudra as long as the sudra in question was a tenant farmer, a friend of the family or his own cowherd or slave (perhaps because he would be familiar with his hygiene and habits). The attitude of the person giving the food was equally important: the gods once compared the food of a miserly brahmin and a generous usurer and proclaimed them equal. However, no leniency was given to chandalas, who had to live outside villages, and were not even allowed to cook their own food but had to receive it from other people, who gave it to them in broken dishes.
Changing one’s eating habits could be a way of upward mobility. By emulating the ritual and customs of higher castes (or sometimes by an outright bribe), individuals or groups were able to rise in the caste hierarchy, a process the anthropologist M. N. Srinivas called Sanskritization:
The caste system is far from a rigid system in which the position of each component caste is fixed for all time. Movement has always been possible, and especially in the middle regions of the hierarchy. A caste was able, in a generation or two, to rise to a higher position in the hierarchy by adopting vegetarianism and teetotalism, and by Sanskritizing its ritual and pantheon. In short, it took over, as far as possible, the customs, rites and beliefs of the Brahmins, and adoption of the Brahminic way of life by a low caste seems to have been frequent, though theoretically forbidden.18
Although some prohibitions and restrictions remained in force well into the twentieth century and beyond, they are now breaking down, especially in cities where a neighbour’s or colleague’s caste may be unknown or a matter of indifference. More than twenty years ago, Srinivas wrote:
In the big cities of India there are small numbers of rich people who are educated and have a highly Westernized style of life. These may be described as living minimally in the universe of caste and maximally in class. The occupations practised by them bear no relation to the traditional occupations of the caste into which they were born. They ignore pollution rules, their diet includes forbidden foods, and their friends and associates are drawn from all over India and may even include foreigners. Their sons and daughters marry not only outside caste but occasionally also outside region, language and religion.19
These prescriptions and proscriptions fascinated the Chinese Buddhist scholars who travelled to India to visit monasteries and collect and translate texts. The monk Faxian (337–c. 422 CE) wrote:
Throughout the whole country the people do not kill any living creature, nor drink intoxicating liquor, nor eat onions or garlic. The only exception is that of the chandalas [outcastes]. That is the name for those who are (held to be) wicked men, and live apart from others. When they enter the gate of a city or a marketplace, they strike a piece of wood to make themselves known, so that men know and avoid them, and do not come into contact with them. In that country they do not keep pigs and fowls, and do not sell live cattle; in the markets there are no butchers’ shops and no dealers in intoxicating drink . . . Only the chandalas are fishermen and hunters, and sell flesh meat.20
Such observations were probably the result of the commentators seeing the world through Buddhist-coloured glasses, since other texts indicate that meat and even alcohol were consumed. A similar picture of a segregated society was painted by Xuanzang (Hsuan-tsang, 602–664 CE), a scholar and translator who travelled throughout Central Asia and large swathes of India for seventeen years and recorded his impressions in his book Great Tang Records on the Western Regions. According to Xuanzang, ‘butchers, fishermen, actors, executioners, scavengers and so on have their dwellings outside the city. In coming and going these persons are bound to keep on the left side of the road until they arrive at their homes.’21 He reported that people were divided into four castes with different degrees of ceremonial purity, and could marry only within their own caste. He admired the prestige assigned to austerity and simple living, while those who ‘lead idle lives, abounding in food and luxurious in their dress’, are met with shame and disgrace.22 He was impressed with the cleanliness of the people who wash before every meal and never use leftover food or dishes a second time.
Xuanzang observed a certain culinary democracy, inasmuch as the sudras and people born of mixed castes ate the same food as everyone else, the only difference being the material of the cooking vessels. But beverages differed: the ksatriyas drank alcoholic drinks made from grapes and sugar cane, the vaisyas drank strong, fermented drinks, while brahmins drank a kind of alcoholic syrup made from grapes or sugar cane.
Noting that it was impossible to list all the fruit grown in India, Xuanzang wrote that the most common were mango, tamarind, mahua (Madhuca longifolia), melon, jujube, wood apple, myrobalan, fig, coconut, jackfruit, pomegranate, pumpkin and sweet orange. Dates, loquat and persimmon were unknown. Peaches, pears, apricots and grapes grew only in Kashmir. Among the edible items were ginger, mustard and kunda (olibanum, an aromatic resin sometimes confused with frankincense). Onions and garlic were rarely eaten, and those who did eat them were ostracized.23 The most widely consumed foods were milk, butter, cream, soft and crystallized sugar, mustard oil and various breads. Fish, mutton and venison, served in joints or slices, were sometimes eaten, but the meat of the ox, ass, elephant, horse, pig, dog, fox, wolf, lion, monkey and ape was forbidden.
Xuanzang was surprised that although Indians used varied cooking equipment, steaming was unknown. Dishes were made from earthenware and everyone ate from a separate plate, mixing all the ingredients together and eating with their fingers, not chopsticks or spoons (except when they fell ill, when they used copper spoons).
The most detailed description of Indian food customs at this time is given in the writings of Yijing (635–713 CE), a Tang Dynasty Chinese Buddhist monk who left a record of his 25-year travels throughout Southeast Asia and India, including a stay at Nalanda University.24 In a Buddhist monastery, he wrote, the basic meal consisted of wet and soft food such as rice, boiled barley and peas, baked flour (perhaps meaning bread), meat and cakes. If a monk were still hungry, he could partake of another course, comprising hard and solid food that is chewed or crunched: roots, stalks, leaves, flowers and fruit. Milk, cream and other dairy products were served at every meal.
In the north, Yijing reported, wheat was the dietary staple, in the west rice or barley, and in Magadha (Bihar) and the south, rice. Dairy products and oil were eaten everywhere, and there were so many kinds of bread and fruit that it was difficult to name them all. Because of this bounty, he wrote, even lay people rarely needed to eat meat.
Yijing was surprised by the absence of foods popular in China, including glutinous rice, glutinous millet, millet and edible mallow (the soft shoots and leaves of Malva verticillata). Indian mustard seed was different from the Chinese variety. No one in India ate onions or raw vegetables; onions were forbidden because they caused pain, spoiled the eyesight and weakened the body.
The drinking of alcohol was apparently common. The plays of the fifth-century dramatist Kalidasa, which depicted all levels of society, contain innumerable allusions to alcohol and to intoxication, even among women, to whom it was supposed to lend a special charm. In Kalidasa’s epic Raghuvamsa, the queen of Aja receives wine directly from the mouth of her husband, while Raghu’s entire army drinks wine made from coconuts. The upper classes scented their wine with mango flowers or orange peel to remove the smell of drink and sweeten their breath.
Moreover, as Hashi and Tapan Raychaudhuri write, ‘Contrary . . . to another stereotype. Hindu spirituality and the supposed normative objections to worldly pursuits have never precluded culinary delights.’25 A seventh-century Sanskrit poem, Dandin’s Dasakumaracharita (What Ten Young Princes Did), contains vivid pictures of how both men and women lived, not how they should live, including a two-page detailed description of how a woman cooks and the pleasure it gives to her guest:
She stirred the gruel in the two dishes which she set before him on a piece of pale green plantain leaf. He drank it and felt rested and happy, relaxed in every limb. Next she gave him two ladlefuls of the boiled rice, served with a little ghee and condiments. She served the rest of the rice with curds, three spices, and fragrant and refreshing buttermilk and gruel. He enjoyed the meal to the last mouthful . . . [The water] was fragrant with incense, the smell of fresh trumpet flower, and the perfume of full blown lotuses. He put the bowl to his lips, and his eyelashes sparkled with dewdrops as cool as snow; his ears delighted in the sound of the trickling water . . . his nostrils opened at its sweet fragrance; and his tongue delighted in this lovely flavour.26
A seller of dried fruit, nuts and spices in Delhi’s Chandni Chowk market.
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Scenes from daily life are depicted in the Sangam literature – anthologies of Tamil poetry compiled and written down between 600 BCE and 300 CE. The poems are set in six distinct areas: the dry hill or forest region, pastureland, forests, coastal areas, barren areas, and fertile land in the river valleys. Originally the inhabitants of these areas practised shifting cultivation and raised cattle, but later agriculture became more settled and more productive, especially after the introduction of iron ploughs and irrigation. The staple crops were pulses and millet; later rice cultivation began in the river valleys, where the land was so fertile that, it was said, the space in which an elephant could lie down could support enough crops to feed seven people. Forest products that were brought under cultivation included bamboo, jackfruit, honey, black pepper and turmeric. Kerala was famous for its black-pepper farms.27
Boiled rice was flavoured with tamarind or sesame seeds and sugar or cooked with lentils, meat or ghee. Rice was also soaked, heated in hot sand and pounded until it was flat, or heated until it puffed up, then was eaten with milk – like the modern poha (Hindi) and aval (Tamil). Cooked rice or rice gruel left overnight to ferment produced a beverage that even brahmins consumed (although this violated proscriptions against stale food and alcohol, indicating that perhaps such rules were not yet widespread in the south).28 Other items mentioned in the literature were idi-appam, noodles made from rice flour; aval, flattened or beaten rice soaked in milk; and bamboo rice, made from the seeds of bamboo plants, a dish today found in Kerala and parts of Karnataka. There are many references to coconut and cloves. The latter were used to flavour meat and pickles, mixed with bhang (cannabis) or chewed.
A passage from a third-century Sangam poem describes the meals served to a wandering minstrel. The hunters gave him red rice and lizard meat on the leaf of a teak tree; the shepherds fed him sorghum and beans and millet boiled in milk; agricultural labourers offered him a meal of white rice and roast fowl; the fishermen on the coast gave him rice and fish in dishes made of palmyra leaves; the brahmins served him fine rice with mango pickle and pomegranate cooked with butter and curry leaves; while the farmers feted him with sweetmeats, jackfruit, banana and coconut water.29
Flattened rice is dehusked rice that is beaten to form dry, light flakes that can be lightly fried with nuts and spices to make a snack.
