One of the most valuable sources of information about ancient Indian food is medical texts. In India, food and medicine have always been virtually interchangeable. All foods have properties that exert an influence on the body and the mind – including foods that are otherwise prohibited. Not only did Indian doctors not advocate a vegetarian diet for their patients, but also they recommended the consumption of meat, garlic, mushrooms and even alcohol for many conditions. And no apologies were offered. As an eleventh-century physician wrote, ‘the recommendations of medicine are not intended to help someone achieve virtue (dharma). What are they for, then? They are aimed at achieving health.’1
The existence of competing and sometimes contradictory food ideologies is not unique to India. As the food historian Ken Albala points out in his Food in Early Modern Europe, an elegant meat pie may have been fashionable among the elite but was banned by the Catholic Church during Lent, while a physician might forbid it because its many ingredients made it impossible to digest.2 Physicians themselves were anything but united in their opinions about food – a situation that is just as true today as it was 2,000 years ago.
In Vedic times diseases were associated with supernatural forces. The physician of the Vedic gods was Dhanvantari, who in some parts of India is worshipped as a god. The Atharvaveda, written around 1000 BCE, is a collection of incantations and spells against disease, demons, wizards and noxious animals, but it also contains a few recommendations of medical treatment. Black pepper, for example, is recommended as a treatment for arrow wounds.
Greek observers commented on the excellent health and physiques of Indians. Alexander the Great was so impressed by Ayurvedic practitioners that he sent several Indian physicians to Greece, where they may have influenced Greek medicine (and perhaps introduced the theory of the humours, although this is a matter of debate). Sanskrit medical works were translated into Arabic and Persian. During the golden period of Arab civilization (749–1258 CE), Greek and Indian physicians competed for prominence at the caliph’s court in Baghdad.
In some parts of India, especially Bengal and Kerala, Ayurvedic physicians, known as vaidyas, formed a distinct caste and the profession became hereditary.3 One branch specialized in surgery. Centuries ago, Indian surgeons had special instruments to perform such procedures as rhinoplasty, cataract removal, amputation and Caesarean sections. In the eighteenth century Europeans went to India to study these procedures. The taboo on contact with human corpses was so strong, however, that Indians’ knowledge of internal anatomy was limited.
The main concern of Ayurvedic physicians was the prevention and treatment of illness. They made house calls and also saw patients in their own homes, which had storerooms filled with drugs and medical equipment. Physicians made their own drugs from herbs and other plants, which they either collected or grew in their gardens. The pharmacopoeia was very large: Susruta (see below) mentions more than 700 medicinal herbs, and the number increased over time with the introduction of drugs from Western and Central Asia. The Himalayas were especially famous for their medicinal herbs.
The goal of the more ambitious vaidyas was to enter the service of a king. Large courts had many physicians who reported to the king’s personal physician. His duties were not only to treat the king when he fell ill, but also to promote his health, longevity and virility. The vaidya supervised the royal kitchen, ensuring that the king’s diet was healthy, and was also responsible for detecting and preventing attempts at poisoning him, which – judging by the amount of attention paid to it in the medical literature – was an ever-present threat.
The main Ayurvedic texts comprise the writings of three men called the Great Triad: Susruta, who may have taught medicine between 700 and 600 BCE at the university in Benares; Caraka, a physician who lived in the second century CE or possibly was a composite of several physicians; and Vagbhata, a physician who may have lived in the Sindh in the sixth or seventh century CE. The principle texts are Caraka Samhita (Caraka’s Encyclopedia or Compendium), a monumental work three times as large as any extant texts from Greek medicine, and Susruta Samhita, both of which contain chapters on food and diet.4 Dating these two texts is difficult. There may have been an original text, which was redacted by physicians in the first centuries CE. Vagbhata’s Astangahrdaya, or Heart of Medicine, is considered to be the greatest synthesis of Indian medical thought, and was translated into Tibetan, Arabic, Chinese and other languages. Another important source of information is the so-called Bower Manuscript (named after the British officer who discovered it in 1890), a group of medical texts dating back to the fourth or fifth century CE, which contains among other things a famous treatise on garlic.
The tradition of writing medical texts continued well into the eighteenth century. In about 1300 CE the physician Sarngadhara wrote a popular treatise that included many recipes. Another work written in Sanskrit verse was the Vaidyajivanam (A Doctor’s Livelihood) by Lolimbaraja, a late sixteenth-century physician who lived near Pune. Ksemakutuhalam (Diet and Well-being) by Ksemasarma, which appeared in the mid-sixteenth century, is an interesting work: besides discussing the medicinal properties of various foods, the author is interested in the preparation and flavour of dishes, and even gives quantities and measurements.
A central concept in Ayurveda is that everything that exists in the universe – the macrocosm – exists in the microcosm of the human body. All matter is made up of five elements, earth, water, fire, air and ether, which in turn are classified into ten pairs of contrasting qualities: heavy and light, cold and hot, oily/moist and dry, slow and intense, stable and mobile, soft and hard, clear and sticky, smooth and rough, subtle and gross, and solid and liquid.
Body parts such as bone and cartilage are mainly earthy. Fat and vital bodily fluids, such as lymph, blood, semen and mucus, are predominantly watery. Digestive fluids, endocrine secretions, body heat and substances that produce mental awareness are fiery. Everything mobile, including the nervous system, is air. All channels through which things pass – blood and lymph vessels, pores, nerves – are ethereal. In humans, elements manifest themselves in three doshas (a Sanskrit word variously translated as ‘humours’ and ‘faults’), which flow within the body. The three doshas are vata – a product of air and ether, sometimes translated as wind; pitta – fire and water, or bile; and kapha – made from water and earth, or phlegm.
Vata (located mainly in the large intestine) regulates all physical and mental motion, a concept consistent with recent findings concerning the role of gut flora in warding off diabetes, inflammation and other conditions; pitta (in the navel) is in charge of transformations, such as the process of digestion; while kapha (in the chest) stabilizes the other processes.5 Their attributes can be summed up as movement, metabolism and stability, respectively.
The three doshas keep the body healthy only as long as they can flow and accumulate in the right places. Under- or overproduction of the doshas, or their accumulation in the wrong part of the body, causes irritation or inflammation and therefore disease. Many things can affect the balance of the doshas: the season, a person’s age and level of physical activity, emotional stress, external heat and cold, and diet. People are especially prone to disease at the junctions of the seasons, and regular purification and fasting help to protect against this. Some of these practices have been institutionalized into holiday rituals and festivals.
There are many ways of controlling and adjusting the doshas, including massage, exercise, proper sleeping habits, herbal medicine and especially diet. As Caraka wrote, ‘Without proper diet, medicines are of no use; with a proper diet, medicines are unnecessary.’6 Thus the physician plays an active role in regulating and supervising his patient’s diet and food habits. Often the same dish is prescribed for both healthy people and patients, the difference being the addition of medicinal herbs to the latter.
Digestion is extremely important in Ayurveda, since if one cannot digest one’s food, it cannot produce the proper effects. The Sanskrit word for digestion (pacaka) also means cooking, and the digestive force itself is called fire (agni). Once food is cooked by this fire, it turns into a pulpy substance in the stomach, which is then transformed by heat into blood, flesh, fat, bone marrow and finally semen, considered the highest bodily essence. The sperm-producing quality of a food is considered extremely important. (No equivalent is given for women.) Stagnant pools of undigested food, called ama, inevitably breed disease. To eliminate ama, an Ayurvedic cure often begins with fasting, considered one of the most important medicines. The source of a body’s energy and strength is an essence called ojas, which is both the cause and the effect of good digestion. Foods are characterized as light (easy to digest) or heavy (difficult to digest).
There are six basic tastes (rasas): sweet, sour, salty, bitter, pungent and astringent. A person’s diet should contain all six tastes to maintain balance and promote health, and today most of India’s cuisines include at least some of them. However, the astringent taste has all but disappeared, except in Assamese dishes referred to as khar, or alkaline. Taste also stimulates the appetite, promotes digestion and affects the doshas in various ways. For example, bitter foods reduce pitta and kapha but increase vata; sweet foods increase kapha but reduce pitta and vata.
Ayurvedic texts use dozens of adjectives to describe the medical properties of food, based on the six tastes, the ten pairs of qualities, and so on. For example, food may be described as sweet or acid. Sweet food (which includes most meat and milk) is easy to digest, calms wind and encourages the production of phlegm, while acid food has the opposite qualities. But these descriptions are not to be taken literally. As the anthropologist Francis Zimmermann wrote, ‘The adjectives describing the meat – “cold” and “unctuous” – clearly have no descriptive value; they should be interpreted as strictly conventional, as indicating in technical language particular pharmaceutical processes and effects.’7
Another classification is the division of plants, animals and people into categories based on their natural habitats. The first category, jangala, denotes a dry area with little water, few trees, a lot of wind and abundant sunshine, such as the Indus–Ganges basin; the steppes; the semi-desert and desert of Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat; and dry tropical forests stretching from Uttar Pradesh to Tamil Nadu.8 The opposite category, anupa, covers places that are wet and tree-covered, such as marshes, rainforests, mangroves swamps and mountains. This region includes the monsoon forests of the east and west coasts of India and the rainforests of Bengal, Assam and Kerala.
Diseases are said to be rarer in jangala areas: people who live there have tough, dry bodies. Anupa areas are full of doshas, and their inhabitants tend to be soft and delicate. Certain diseases are endemic in both terrains, and a person who wants to avoid falling victim to them must eat food that has opposite qualities to the region in which he or she lives. Jangala animals include the many varieties of deer and antelope that once thrived on the subcontinent, and game birds such as quail and partridge.9 They eat light food and their meat is accordingly light and easy to digest. The meat of creatures that live in anupa regions or wallow in mud (pigs, water buffaloes and rhinoceroses, for example) is heavy and hard to digest.
The Ayurvedic texts contain many descriptions of dishes and ingredients and their effects on health. Some items are difficult to identify, because the words have disappeared from modern Indian languages or the same animal is called by a dozen or more names. In the Susruta Samhita, the author writes that the intelligent physician determines what food his patient should eat after taking into account several things: the cause and nature of the disease; the season of the year; the attributes of the ingredients; the properties they acquire through flavouring and combination; and the patient’s natural longings for a certain food when his doshas are deranged. A food’s properties depend on the method of preparation and cooking more than on the ingredients, and on the amount more than how it is cooked. For example, boiled rice is heavy to digest, while fried rice is light. A heavy food should be eaten until one’s appetite is only half satisfied, while a substance that is light to digest may be eaten to satiety.
Meat is very important in Ayurvedic cures. Caraka lists four jangala animals that should always be kept on the premises of an Ayurvedic hospital: quail, partridge, hare and antelope. Meat cooked with ghee, yoghurt, sour rice gruel, sour fruit (pomegranate, Indian gooseberry) and pungent spices, such as black pepper and asafoetida, is considered very wholesome. Another method is to cut meat into pieces, fry it in clarified butter, boil it until the water dries up, then sprinkle it with cumin seeds and other spices. Minced meat is shaped into patties that are cooked over charcoal or coated with ghee, threaded on skewers and roasted (similar to modern chapli and seekh kebab). Meat is marinated in mustard oil and aromatic spices, then roasted over charcoal until it is the colour of honey. Although these meat dishes are described as heavy to digest, they also improve the appetite and intellect, build up fresh tissue and increase the production of semen.
A thin meat broth is prescribed for shortness of breath, coughs and consumption; weak memory; and loss of appetite and emaciation arising from fever, endocarditis and other diseases affecting a person’s vital energy. Boiled minced meat cooked with treacle, clarified butter, black pepper, long pepper and ginger imparts strength. A broth prepared with pomegranate juice and spices is considered particularly beneficial since it subdues the action of all three deranged humours. But meat whose essence has already been removed, perhaps by overcooking, is useless, and dried meat is especially hard to digest.
Rice is a particularly versatile remedy. A dish of rice prepared with clarified butter, meat, sour fruit or any lentil helps to build new tissue and imparts strength and rotundity. Fried rice alleviates vomiting and dysentery; pulverized, it alleviates vomiting, thirst and a burning sensation of the skin. Immature or newly harvested rice builds tissue. Old or well-matured rice promotes the healing of fractured bones. Old rice is easier to digest than new rice, and raw rice is the least easy to digest.
By far one of the most common methods of preparing rice under Ayurvedic guidance is to boil it into gruel or porridge. (Monier Monier-Williams’s Dictionary of Sanskrit lists 80 words related to gruel.) Rice gruel is prescribed for invalids or people who have gone through a regimen of purging and emetics. Kanjika is a sour rice gruel made by leaving boiled rice overnight until it ferments slightly, and is drunk hot or cold. (In modern Hindi, kanji or ganji means the water in which rice is boiled, and is often fed to invalids.)
Manda (today the name of a steamed sweet rice dumpling) was a porridge made by frying rice with long pepper and ground ginger and then boiling it in water. Yavagu, a word that can signify either rice or a thin gruel made from another grain, refers to another porridge-like dish made by cooking grain with meat, fruit and vegetables. It has an extremely coarse texture and is hard to digest, but strengthens the body. Another rice preparation is payasa (modern payesh or payasam), a pudding made from boiled rice, milk and sugar.
According to the old Ayurvedic texts, mung dal has many benefits. Cooked with grapes and pomegranate juice it subdues deranged doshas; prepared with snake gourd or neem it cures skin diseases; and boiled with horseradish it relieves coughs, catarrh, fever and diseases of the throat. Dal made from horse gram is a remedy for asthma, catarrh and diseases of the bladder and abdominal glands. Prepared with pomegranate or amla juice, dal pacifies deranged humours and helps to cure epilepsy and obesity. Other ingredients that can be added to boiled lentils are dairy products, rice gruel (kanjika), cumin seeds, black pepper and certain fruit. A soup made from any unhusked lentil is light and wholesome.
Vegetables should sometimes be avoided during therapy, since they are considered astringent and may close the channels. Susruta has little to say about vegetables, other than that green leafy vegetables (shaka) boiled well, thoroughly drained and then cooked in oil, are wholesome, while those cooked in a different manner are not.
3 litres (5¼ pints) milk
1 tbsp yoghurt (as starter)
1 tbsp sugar, or to taste
a few strands of saffron, lightly toasted or soaked in
a little warm milk
5 green cardamom pods, ground
chopped almonds and pistachios
Boil the milk and let it cool a little. While still warm, add the yoghurt and mix well. Cover and leave in a warm place overnight.
Next morning, pour the yoghurt into a white muslin cloth, tie the four corners in a knot and hang it over a bowl until all the liquid has drained out. (This will take several hours.)
Remove the remaining yoghurt from the cloth and mix with the sugar. Strain the mixture again in the same way.
Add the saffron and ground cardamom and mix well. Garnish with the nuts and serve chilled.
In Ayurveda, ghee is considered a virtual panacea. As an eighteenth-century physician wrote, ‘ghee rejuvenates, is tasty, alleviates pitta and vata, removes poisons, prolongs life, promotes growth, and destroys sins and poverty.’10 It features in many Ayurvedic recipes both as a cooking medium and as a flavouring, and may be prepared with various spices and herbs.
Sweets fried in ghee, roasted in earthenware pots or cooked over a charcoal fire are light and tonic, and improve the complexion and eyesight, while those that are deep-fried are heavy and pungent and irritate the skin. Susruta Samhita lists a large number of sweet and savoury dishes – what today would be termed snack foods – although details of how they are made are scanty. Gaudikas are wheat-flour balls filled with treacle, perhaps similar to Rajasthani choorma. Sattakas are made by mixing yoghurt with jaggery and powdered trikatu (a mixture of ginger, black pepper and long pepper that is sold at Ayurvedic pharmacies), straining it through a piece of cloth and flavouring it with camphor and pomegranate seeds. A phenaka is a deep-fried pastry made from flour, ghee and jaggery and stuffed with spiced mung dal or minced meat (a dish that sounds very like the modern street foods dal puri and kachauri).
In Susruta’s view, the best restorative is water mixed with molasses, unrefined sugar and sour fruit, and scented with camphor. Drinks made with pomegranate juice are very soothing and strengthening. An important aid to digestion, especially after a very heavy meal or one that deranges the doshas, is an after-dinner drink – an Ayurvedic version of the French digestif. Common digestifs are cold or warm water, a drink made from mung dal, the juice of sour fruit, sour rice gruel, milk, concentrated meat broth, asava (wine) and madya (spirits.)
Susruta is as assiduous in matching alcoholic beverages with food as any French sommelier. The main categories are sura and asava, but the precise meaning of these terms is not clear, and translators usually use the generic word ‘wine’. He recommends a particular drink for every category of bird and animal, and the long list of alcohol beverages demonstrates the imagination and ingenuity of Indian wine-makers and distillers. This table shows some of Susruta’s recommended pairings.
Another beverage recommended by the Ayurvedic physicians is the urine of cows, buffaloes, goats, sheep and other animals that is pungent, hot, light and saline. This stimulates the heart, purifies the blood and stimulates the appetite.11
Caraka Samhita is a composite work that may have been written by many authors over centuries. It consists of 120 chapters divided into eight parts covering diet, the causes of disease, anatomy, embryology, diagnosis, therapy and pharmacy. He summarizes the properties of various foods:
In keeping with its nature, water wets, salt melts, acid digests, honey joins broken parts, clarified butter anoints, milk enlivens, meat causes growth, meat soup nourishes the weak, liquor builds up weakened flesh, wine called sidhu [prepared from the juice of ripe sugar cane] causes scraping of tissue, wine prepared from grape juice stimulates the digestive fire, phanita [thickened sugarcane juice] causes the accumulation of doshas, yoghurt causes oedema, sesame-oil sediment causes fatigue and depression, soup prepared from urad dal produces excess faeces.12
Caraka lists 60 oilseeds, including sesame, mustard, safflower, linseed, castor, chironji, bael and kola, plus many kinds of animal fat together with their effects on the health. More than 60 fruits and nuts are cited, including apples, almonds, bananas, pistachios, walnuts, four varieties of jujube, two varieties each of grape and pomegranate, the nagaranga (a kind of orange) and the starfruit or carambola, which is native to eastern India and Southeast Asia. A dozen varieties of sugar cane are mentioned, with a description of their medical benefits. In Caraka’s view, the whiter and purer the sugar, the ‘cooler’ it was. Barley was a very common ingredient. It was ground into flour and made into cakes (kulmasa and yavapupa), prepared as a porridge, fried (dhana), or sprouted and fried (viruda-dhana). Other dishes include thin and thick rice gruels (pepa and velepika), rice water flavoured with long pepper and ginger (laja manda), a gruel made of fried rice (laja-saktu) and deep-fried spirals of rice-flour dough (saskuli). Some dishes sound delicious by modern standards: pupalika, a rice- or wheat-flour cake filled with honey or mung dal paste and fried in ghee; rasala, churned yoghurt flavoured with cinnamon leaf, cardamom, ground cinnamon, cumin and ginger; and vesavara, minced meat cooked with long pepper, black pepper and ginger (a dish that appears in later collections of recipes).
DISH |
RECOMMENDED BEVERAGE |
Oily food |
Hot water |
Honey, yoghurt, payasa |
Cold water |
Rice or mung dal |
Milk, meat essence |
Diet heavy with meat |
Wine |
Meal with a lot of cereals |
Sour soup made from jujubes? |
Venison |
Wine with long pepper |
Seed-eating fowl |
Jujube or fig wine |
Meat of scavengers |
Fig-tree wine |
Meat from cave-dwelling animals |
Coconut, date-palm wine |
Birds of prey |
Wine from withania plant (Indian ginseng) |
Animal with unbifurcated hoofs |
Wine made with triphala (a mixture of three varieties of myrobalan) |
Animal that lives in marshy or damp land, molluscs or lizards |
Liqueur made from water chestnuts |
Sour fruit |
Lotus-root wine |
Astringent fruit |
Pomegranate or rattan(?)-fruit wine |
Sweet fruit |
Kanda(?) wine with trikatus |
Fruit of the palmyra palm |
Sour, fermented rice gruel |
Pungent fruit |
Rattan fruit, kind of millet |
Long pepper |
Wine from a herb called goat’s head |
Pumpkin |
Tree turmeric or caper wine |
Sun creeper, green vegetables, cucumber |
Triphala wine |
Date-palm tree pith or marrow |
Wine from sour fruit |
Source: The Sushruta Samhita: An English Translation Based on Original Sanskrit Texts, trans. Kaviraj Kunja Lal Bhishagratna (New Delhi, 2006), vol. I, pp. 457–66. While the literature refers to various kinds of alcohol there are no descriptions of the method of production. One scholar argues that, based on linguistic and archaeological evidence, Indians may have distilled alcohol as early as the fourth century and possibly as far back as the Indus Valley civilization. See F. R. Allchin, ‘India: The Ancient Home of Distillation?’, Man, n.s., XIV/I (March 1979), pp. 55–63.
In prescribing meat, the physician must take into account the animal’s habitat and inherent nature, the part of the animal, the method of cooking and the amount, which depends on the strength of the patient’s digestive fire. Caraka warns against eating too much parched rice, dry meat, dry vegetables, lotus roots or nutmeg, because they are heavy. But sali rice, salt, myrobalan, barley, rainwater, milk, ghee, the meat of animals that live in the forest, honey and green gram can be eaten regularly.
For patients with consumption, Caraka recommends chicken soup mixed with sour and pungent ingredients and flavoured with ghee. It is also recommended for piles, fever and wind disorders. Other health-giving preparations are chicken soup boiled with sweet wheat dumplings, and a broth of four birds: sparrow, partridge, chicken and peacock.13
An interesting passage in Caraka’s Samhita indicates an awareness of the dietary habits of other groups in India and beyond:
Bahlikas, Pahlavas, Cinas, Sulikas, Sakas and Yavanas [northern tribes, some of Central Asian origin] are habituated to consuming meat, wheat, mead, [to] fighting and [to] fire. Easterners have an affinity for fish, while the people of Sindh have an affinity for milk. Tradition has it that Asmakas and Avantikas [of central India] have an affinity for oil and sour tastes. The inhabitants of Malaya are known for their affinity for tubers, roots and fruit, while southerners have an affinity for milk and northeasterners for churned drinks. In the central region there is an affinity for barley, wheat and cow’s milk. One should prescribe medicines that are in harmony with the affinities of these people, since such affinities give rapid strength and do little harm even in excess.14
How to Give up Bad Eating Habits and Lose Weight
Suppose someone wants to give up unwholesome barley in favour of wholesome red rice. On the first day he eats three parts barley to one part rice. On the second day two parts of each; on the third day the same again. On the fourth day one part barley to three parts rice, and the same on the fifth and sixth days. From the seventh day onwards he eats only the wholesome rice.
Cakrapanidatta, an eleventh-century Ayurveda scholar and physician, quoted in Dominik Wujastyk, The Roots of Ayurveda: Selections from Sanskrit Medical Writings (London, 2001), p. 43.
In Ayurveda, garlic is one of the greatest panaceas. According to the Bower Manuscript (a collection of Sanskrit medical texts discovered in eastern Turkistan in 1890 by Lieutenant Hamilton Bower), garlic was created when the king of demons drank the elixir of immortality and Lord Vishnu cut off his head as punishment. The drops that fell to earth became garlic, but because they flowed from a body, the bulbs are forbidden to brahmins.
The author of the Bower Manuscript, whose name and date remain unknown, describes garlic’s qualities and curative powers:
It was ordained by the creator to remove all three humours and to subdue all diseases. It vitiates wind because of its sour, hot and oily nature; pacifies choler because it is sweet and bitter; and mitigates phlegm because of its heat, bitterness and pungency. It strengthens the force of the digestive fire and promotes strength and complexion. It drives away pallid skin disease, appetite loss, abdominal lumps, cough, thinness, leprosy and weak digestion. It removes wind, irregular periods, gripes, phthisis [tuberculosis], bellyache, enlarged spleen and piles. It takes away paralysis of one side, lumbago, worm disease, colic and urinary disorders. It completely conquers lassitude, catarrh, rheumatism of the arms or back, and epilepsy.15
Turmeric, an ancient Indian spice, has many medicinal properties. |
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To obtain these benefits, a person must first purify his body, worship the gods and drink fresh garlic juice strained through cloth, or gargle the juice mixed with one-third an unspecified kind of alcohol. This should be followed by a meal of milk or soup made from lentils or the meat of jangala animals. The patient should then drink wine or equal parts of mead, spirits and mead, plum brandy, rum made from molasses, thick rice liquor, blended liquor, or any other liquor that is available – always with water and drunk one glass at a time to avoid inebriation. Teetotallers can drink warm water, sour fermented rice, barley or bean-husk water or fresh whey.
An alternative treatment is to soak peeled garlic overnight in wine, crush and filter it, and mix the garlic with wine, milk or meat broth. For additional benefit, tender garlic bulbs, crushed and mixed with an equal amount of ghee, should be eaten at dawn for at least ten days together with Bengal quince (bael).
Garlic can be threaded with meat on a spit and roasted; mixed with cold pickled and spiced meats; cooked in ghee and oil with barley meal, fermented rice water and vinegar; added to a meat soup thickened with wheat flour; or mixed with powdered mung beans, green herbs, aromatic spices and salt.
A powerful remedy is a mixture consisting of 32 parts garlic juice, 8 parts yeast, 1 part oil and 6 parts ground garlic, left to rest until it becomes liquid. To it is added 16 parts of the juice of the herb Gymnema sylvestre and two more parts ground garlic. After 25 days, the mixture acquires taste, colour and aroma, and can be used as an oil. The author of the Bower Manuscript explains: ‘The armies of disease beat a retreat from the man who makes diligent use of this as an oil, or as liquor, just as in a battle the opponents retreat from a person who carries bullets.’16
Brahmins are not allowed to eat garlic, but if a cow is given almost no grass for three days and then fed a mixture of two parts grass to one part garlic stalks, a brahmin can consume its milk or yoghurt, ghee or buttermilk made from it with impunity.
Caraka makes some general recommendations for healthy eating. It is not advisable to eat a lot of foods with the same taste at the same time, nor to indulge constantly in dishes with various tastes. Eat only one main meal a day. Avoid bread, which is hard to digest; if you must eat it, drink twice as much water as usual. Take only half portions of heavy foods, but eat as many lighter items as you like. Avoid foods that are incompatible with one another, such as dairy products and fish. (This is one of the earliest mentions of a belief that may have originated in India and which gained wide currency in Africa, the Middle East, Europe and North America.17) Other rules are as valid today as they were centuries ago:
Eat properly combined food after digesting the previous meal to allow a free passage for all substances
Eat in a congenial, quiet place either alone or with affectionate people so that the mind is not depressed
Eat neither hurriedly nor leisurely, to appreciate the qualities of the food you are eating
Eat without laughing or talking, with concentration, considering your constitution and what is good and not good for you as you eat
Do not eat when you are not hungry and do not fail to eat when you are hungry
Do not eat when you are angry, depressed or emotionally distraught, or immediately after exercise
Keep as large a gap as possible between meals
Sit to eat whenever possible, facing east
Pray, thanking the Creator for the food you are offering your digestive fire
Never cook for yourself alone; the gift of food is the best gift at all
Feed all five senses: look at the food and savour its appearance and aroma; listen to the sounds it makes, especially when cooking; eat with your hands to enjoy its texture; chew each morsel many times to extract its flavour
Stroll about a hundred steps after a meal to assist the digestive process
Do not eat heavy or kapha-producing food like yoghurt and sesame seeds after sunset, and eat nothing within two hours before going to bed
Never waste food.18
Food should be ‘alive’ in order to give life to the eater. Raw food is more alive than cooked food. Overcooked, undercooked, burnt, badtasting, unripe or overripe, putrefied or stale food should never be eaten. Leftovers should be heated as soon as possible or, ideally, avoided all together.
A traditional Indian belief is that the materials in which food is prepared and served affect its properties. Silver and gold are considered the best materials, since they are non-reactive and ‘pure’. In the sixteenth century Akbar’s physician advised the head cook that rice cooked in copper destroyed gas and removed spleen disease, and that rice cooked in gold alleviated poisons and improved vigour and vitality. Even today, copper, considered a pure metal, is used to make thalis, plated with tin to negate the effects of the acid.19 In Susruta’s description of a palace meal, clarified butter is served in metal bowls, liquid foods in silver bowls, and fruit and confectionary on leaves. Meat dishes are served on golden plates, soups and meat essences in silver bowls, condiments and buttermilk in stone dishes, and cold milk or fruit juices in copper dishes. Other drinks, wines and cordials are served in earthen pots.
According to Susruta, dishes should also be served in a certain order. Sweet substances are eaten first to subdue wind, followed by sour and salty dishes to stimulate digestion, and finally pungent foods to subdue phlegm. During a meal the diner should frequently rinse his mouth or gargle, since a clean palate enhances the flavour. At the end, the diner cleans his mouth with water and removes food stuck to the teeth with a toothpick, and perhaps chews a betel leaf wrapped around areca nut, camphor, nutmeg and clove – one of the earliest references to paan. After resting for a while, he should walk 100 steps, then lie down in a bed on his left side, all the while enjoying ‘soft sounds, pleasant sights, sweet perfumes, soft and velvety touch’.
A popular belief is that foods have heating or cooling properties, depending on their effect on the body. This concept probably travelled from India to the Middle East in the sixth century BCE and later to Greece and Europe, where it became widespread in the Middle Ages. A similar idea exists in China.
Defining a food as hot or cold has little to do with its actual qualities. While most Indians can tell you whether a food is hot or cold, the classification varies by region. For example, wheat is considered a hot food in South India but only moderately hot in the north. Most varieties of lentil are considered cold in western India but hot in the north. Papayas are regarded as extremely heating in South India but not in the north. Most spices are considered hot everywhere, although a few, such as cumin and fennel seeds, are thought to be cold. Certain combinations of foods are also considered deleterious to health, including fish with dairy products, while others are considered beneficial; for example, mangoes and papayas followed by milk.
In summer cold foods are recommended, while in winter and monsoon seasons hot foods are desirable. Certain foods are recommended or prohibited for conditions such as pregnancy and a head cold, although again this varies by region. In some parts of the subcontinent, ‘cold’ foods are to be avoided during pregnancy on the grounds that they could cause death (which is cold) in the womb, while in other parts hot foods are banned as they could cause miscarriage.
A key concept in Indian philosophy is guna, a word that means ‘qualities’ or ‘tendencies’. As discussed in chapter Four, there are three gunas: sattvic, lucid, pure or dispassionate; rajasic, passionate, extroverted, interested in sensual pleasures; and tamasic, lethargic, dull, ignorant. Each quality is associated with certain foods, which are preferred by people with the same qualities and stimulate the gunas in those who eat them.20
Although attempts have been made to equate the three gunas with the three doshas, the concepts come from different traditions and cannot be absolutely correlated. However, an Ayurvedic physician is supposed to be familiar with the presence and functioning of the gunas in his patient, and to take it into account in his treatment.
Another distinction made by some Hindus is based on the method of preparation.21 Kaccha foods are those prepared in the family kitchen by boiling or roasting, such as rice, dal, khichri, dry-roasted breads (chapatti, naan) and vegetables – the basic everyday food in rich and poor families that can be supplemented with other dishes.
Kaccha foods are also exclusive. Traditionally a Hindu from a higher caste would eat this category of food at home and give it to or accept it from his relatives only. Pukka foods, on the other hand, could be shared with outsiders or purchased in the marketplace. Many fried street foods fall into this category. This distinction is largely disappearing with the weakening of caste boundaries, especially among city-dwellers and young people. However, only pukka foods are served at temples and at some community festivals and feasts.
Concerns for safety may have motivated this distinction, since cooking oil has a higher temperature than water and thus eliminates more bacteria.22 As the historian Arthur Llewellyn Basham wrote:
It is surprising how many of the instructions in the texts would tend to minimize the dangers of infection and food poisoning. Indian society seems unconsciously to have found a means of remaining healthy as far as possible in a subtropical climate, in its efforts to preserve its ritual purity.23
Chapattis, also called rotis, are a popular North Indian bread made from wholewheat flour and heated over a hot flame until they puff up.
This system was developed in South India in the seventh or eighth centuries CE, and today is practised in Tamil-speaking regions. The principles are similar to those of Ayurveda: the human body is considered a replica of the universe, as are food and drugs. The main difference is in the extensive use of metals and minerals in treatment, especially sulphur and mercury.
The Unani system of medicine (Unani Tibbia) is practised by Muslims. The theoretical framework is derived from the writings of the Greek physicians Hippocrates (460–377 BCE), who is considered to be the father of both allopathic (conventional Western) and Unani medicine, and Galen (c. 130–c. 210 CE). The Arabic word Unan refers to Greece.24 Unani practitioners are called Hakims.
When the Mongols invaded Persia and Central Asia in the fourteenth century CE, many physicians and scholars fled to India, where the Delhi sultans and later the Mughal emperors hired them as court physicians. Delhi became a centre of Unani medicine, which was at its peak between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. During the British rule Unani medicine suffered, but official interest returned after Indian Independence in 1947, and today India is the world leader in Unani medicine, which has its own licensed physicians, hospitals and institutions for education and research.
Unani medicine is based on the Greek theory that assumes the presence of four humours in the body: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. These humours are composed of the four basic elements: earth, water, air and fire. The seasons also have qualities, as does an individual’s temperament, which can be one of four kinds: sanguine, choleric, cold or phlegmatic, or melancholic.
Every person is born with a unique humoral constitution. When the balance of the humours is upset because of external or internal change, disease results. Restoring the quality and balance of the humours is the goal of treatment. Diet is one of the therapies, together with surgery, medicines and regimental treatments (such as massage or steam baths). One tenet is that many diseases can be prevented by regular digestion; conversely, poor digestion can cause illness. Foods that cause indigestion are those that putrefy quickly (milk and fresh fish), those that take time to digest (such as beef), stale foods, spices and chillies, alcohol, strong tea, coffee and oily food. However, any food is acceptable in moderation. Aids to digestion include decoctions and teas made from ajwain (carom) seeds, mint, fennel and coriander seeds; pomegranate juice; and other herbs and spices.
Diet therapy treats ailments by regulating the quality and quantity of a patient’s food. As in Ayurveda, treatment often starts with a total fast, which gives the patient’s system a chance to rest. People are also advised to eat foods that have the opposite quality to the distemper. For example, a person who has too much of the sanguine humour, which increases heat, should eat cold food, such as barley water and fish, and cooling herbs (although cold and hot are again to some extent determined by local and regional beliefs and customs). Some of the cures may be based on folk remedies: for example, a recommended treatment for influenza starts with ground long pepper mixed with honey and ginger juice, followed by milk and turmeric powder. Weaknesses of specific organs are corrected by eating the same organ of an animal. In both Ayurveda and Unani, bitter and astringent foods are prescribed for diabetes.
Bitter melon, often part of the first course in a Bengali meal, is also a treatment for diabetes in Ayurveda. Late 18th or early 19 th century. |
TODAY Ayurveda, Siddha and Unani together with allopathy are among the schools of medicine recognized by the Indian government and taught in state colleges. In India recently there has been a resurgence of interest in Ayurveda, especially with the rise of such diseases as diabetes. Ayurveda has also gained considerable popularity in the West because of its holistic approach to illness. Many clinical trials are being conducted at universities and medical centres to test the efficacy of Ayurvedic cures, such as the use of bitter melon against diabetes and turmeric for Alzheimer’s, cancer and other diseases.25
