For centuries Europeans had sought a sea route to the Indian subcontinent. Spices were a great luxury, valued not only for their taste and medicinal properties but also as a way of showing off one’s wealth. Until the fifteenth century the trade in spices had been controlled by Arab traders who shipped them across the Persian Gulf to Alexandria, from where Venetian merchants transported them across the Mediterranean.
Venice had taken over the maritime appendages of the Byzantine Empire and, despite a brief collapse of its spice business in the early sixteenth century caused by its wars with Turkey, it maintained its dominant role until the early seventeenth century, when the Dutch lowered the price to the point that spices brought via the Middle East were no longer competititive. According to Michael Krondl, the idea of going round Africa to reach the source of spices may have originated with Genoese merchants, although it was ultimately realized by the Portuguese.1 King João II (1455–1495) made reaching Asia by sea a national priority and in 1492 Christopher Columbus set out to find a passage to India and instead stumbled on a new continent. In 1498 the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope to reach Calicut on India’s Malabar Coast, a thriving port where Arabs, Hindus and Chinese merchants had exchanged spices, cloth and luxury goods for centuries. In 1501 the maharajah of Cochin allowed da Gama to buy spices, and he returned to Portugal with seven ships full. As the Portuguese extended their empire to the western hemisphere and Africa, their trading posts became the hubs of a global exchange of plants – the so-called Columbian Exchange, which changed world cuisine profoundly.
Spice-seller and customer, c. 1830.
The Portuguese conquests of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries constitute a remarkable chapter in the history of empire. Throughout the sixteenth century the Portuguese retained a dominant position in the maritime trade of the Indian Ocean and an important share of the trade east of the Strait of Malacca. At the heart of this mercantile empire was India. The Portuguese even used the expression ‘Estado da India’ (‘state of India’) to describe all their conquests between the Cape of Good Hope and the Persian Gulf on one side of Asia, and Japan and Timor on the other. At its height, the Portuguese Empire contained more than 40 forts and factories extending from Brazil to Japan.
In 1510 the Portuguese seized Goa from the sultan of Bijapur and made it the capital of Estado da India. This was Europe’s first base on the Indian subcontinent – and the last to be relinquished, in 1961. They also established trading posts along the Malabar Coast, on the island of Sri Lanka and in Bengal. By 1560, with a population of 225,000, Goa was larger than Madrid or Lisbon. Along the southwest coast of India, almost every acre of land capable of growing spices was planted.
European settlements in India, 1498–1739.
Unlike the British or the Dutch, who were mainly interested in making money and had little desire to change local culture, the Portuguese forcibly converted the inhabitants to Christianity. They brought the Inquisition to India and persecuted converts for following such ‘heretical’ customs as refusing to eat pork or beef, cooking rice without salt (a Hindu ritual custom) and wearing their traditional clothing. Growing a tulsi plant (a symbol of Lord Vishnu) was forbidden. Ironically, while such forced quasi-Westernization was going on, the Portuguese themselves lived much like Indians. They kept vast retinues of retainers and slaves, maintained harems, wore Indian clothes, chewed betel nut, drank arrack and hired Indian cooks.
In 1580 Emperor Akbar granted the Portuguese a charter to settle in a village on the banks of the Hooghly River, 40 km (25 miles) upstream from present-day Kolkata. It became a meeting place for vessels from other parts of India, China, Malacca and the Philippines. By 1670 at least 20,000 Portuguese and their descendants were living there. They dressed in the style of the local nawabs and ‘made merry with dancing slave girls, seamstresses, cooks and confectioners’.2 For servants and cooks, they took on Moghs from Sylhet and the Chittagong Hills, who for centuries had worked as deckhands and cooks on Arab ships trading with Southeast Asia. They quickly learned their masters’ culinary arts and became famous for their bread, cakes and pastries. The British later recruited them as seafarers and cooks, and today Sylhetis can be found running Indian restaurants in the United Kingdom and New York City.
One legacy of the Portuguese in India may be cheese, including India’s only indigenous Western-style cheese, Bandel, a soft, smoky cow’s-milk cheese still sold in Kolkata’s New Market. It has been argued (by me, among others) that the Portuguese were responsible for the creation of chhana, the curds made by curdling milk, used in sandesh, ras goolah and many other famous Bengali sweets.3 K. T. Achaya and others argue that this practice may have lifted an ancient Hindu taboo on the deliberate curdling of milk. However, Manasolassa and other works indicate that the technique was practised earlier (see chapters Seven and Eight). But this does not rule out the possibility that Portuguese cheese, which looks like chhana, was the specific inspiration behind Bengali sweets.
By far the most important Portuguese contribution to Indian and world cuisine was the so-called Columbian Exchange. The far-flung trading posts of the Portuguese and Spanish empires (Portugal was united with Spain between 1580 and 1640) became the hubs of a global exchange of fruit, vegetables, nuts and other plants between the western hemisphere, Africa, the Philippines, Oceania and the Indian subcontinent. To India, the Portuguese introduced potatoes, chillies, okra, papayas, pineapples, cashews, peanuts, maize, sapodilla, custard apples, guavas and tobacco.
Sculpture of a Portuguese nobleman with an Indian lady, 1540. |
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Custard apple (sitaphal in Hindi) was brought to India from the New World. Late 18th or early 19 th century. |
A few writers have argued that maize, pineapple, sunflowers, cashews and custard apples grew in India even before the arrival of the Europeans. They point to more than a hundred carvings on temples in Karnataka built between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries that appear to depict these plants, and claim that the plants were either indigenous to India or came from very early contact between Indian and Meso-American civilizations. Those who disagree maintain that what is depicted in these sculptures is actually other fruit. It is to be hoped that DNA evidence will shed light on this controversy.4
The new plants were not all integrated into Indian cuisine at the same time. By the mid-sixteenth century three varieties of chilli (Capsicum) from various parts of the New World were recognized in India and were rapidly adopted as a substitute for black pepper, since they grew virtually wild. The appearance of the tomato (called vilayati begun, or ‘foreign aubergine’ in Bengali) cannot be precisely dated. In Tomatoes in the Tropics, Ruben L. Villareal writes that while the Spanish began introducing several agricultural commodities into the Philippines in 1571, it is possible that tomatoes had been taken from Spain to Asia much earlier, perhaps just a few years after the discovery of the Philippines by Ferdinand Magellan in 1521. Trade between the Philippines and China, Japan and India may have been responsible for the spread of tomatoes into those countries. The British, Dutch and French may also have introduced tomatoes into their Asian colonies.5
In 1832 William Roxburgh wrote in Florica Indica: ‘Although [the tomato] is now very common in India, I suspect it is as little native as the common potato, which is now generally cultivated over India, even by the natives for their own use.’6 The new arrivals became substitutes for ingredients that were already part of the cuisine. Potatoes were a replacement for indigenous tubers, and became an indispensable component of Indian food. (Bengalis are said to be the world’s largest consumers of potatoes after the Irish.) The Sanskrit word for tubers, alu, is the word for ‘potato’ in many Indian languages, although Marathis use the Portuguese word batata.
Maize is prepared in various ways. Roasted on the cob, it is a ubiquitous street food. Corn kernels are an ingredient in curries in western India, while cornflour is used to make the national dish of Punjab, makki ki roti (corn bread). However, as the food historian Rachel Laudan points out, rarely were cooking techniques exchanged or borrowed; for example, the Meso-American technique of treating maize with an alkali in order to free the niacin was never adopted in India.7 However they were introduced, all these products, especially tomatoes, chillies and potatoes, were assimilated to such a degree that it is now impossible to imagine Indian cuisine without them.
The Portuguese capital, Goa, became famous for its meat dishes, especially those using beef and pork. Classic Portuguese dishes were enlivened by the addition of spices: caldo verde, a potato and cabbage soup, was flavoured with ginger and black pepper; chicken xacuti contained a paste of roasted coconut, peanuts and spices, flavoured with vinegar; and the most famous Goan dish, vindaloo (from the Portuguese carne de vinha d’alhos, meat in wine and garlic), was turned into a sweet, sour and fiery hot pork curry. The authentic Goan version can be very dry, like a pickle, so that it can be taken on long journeys. The Portuguese tradition of baking flourishes in pau, light oven-baked bread rolls; bibinca, a cake made by stacking layers of pancakes; and boliho de coco, little coconut cakes.
A valuable source of information about plants and ingredients in sixteenth-century India is Garcia de Orta’s Colóquios dos simples e drogas . . . da India (Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India, 1563).8 De Orta (c. 1501–1568) was a Portuguese Sephardic Jewish physician and naturalist who served as physician to the Portuguese viceroy of India for thirty years, and died in Goa. Written in the form of conversations between de Orta and a friend, each of the work’s 59 chapters describes the origins, history and medicinal properties of a spice, drug or plant, including pepper, turmeric, banana, betel, bhang (cannabis), galangal and camphor.
De Orta noted the importance of turmeric as a medicine, especially for diseases of the eye and the skin. It was also used for colouring and seasoning food, and exported to Arabia and Persia. Bananas, which he called ‘the figs of India’, were roasted and served in wine with cinnamon, or cut in half, fried in sugar and sprinkled with cinnamon. They were also taken to Portugal as ships’ provisions. De Orta mentions pineapples only in passing as a fruit native to the West Indies, but they were clearly known in India by this time. Of asafoetida he writes:
The thing most used throughout India, all parts of it, is that Ass-Fetida, as well as for medicine as in cookery. A great quantity is used, for every Gentio [Hindu] who is able to get the means of buying it will buy it to flavour his food. The rich eat much of it . . . and he who imitates Pythagoras [a vegetarian]. They flavour the vegetables they eat with it; first rubbing the pan with it, and then using it as seasoning with everything they eat . . . The Moors [Muslims] eat it, but in smaller quantity and only as a medicine.9
De Orta goes on to say that while to him asafoetida has the nastiest smell in the world, the vegetables seasoned with it do not taste bad. He was fascinated by the widespread use of bhang, noting that his servants who took it said that ‘it made them so as not to feel work, to be very happy and to have a craving for food’ (adding that he never tried it himself).10
The glory days of the Portuguese Empire lasted little more than a century. The burden of maintaining such an extensive empire was too great for a nation of just over a million people. The Portuguese system of administering the spice trade was inefficient, and the viceroy in Goa disdained merchants, many of them converted Jews who fell victim to the Inquisition. Many Portuguese left Goa to seek their fortunes as mercenaries at various Indian courts. But the Portuguese association with India left its mark not only on the cuisine of India but also on that of Portugal. Ginger, pepper, turmeric, coriander, cinnamon, fennel, cloves, allspice and chillies are used to flavour Portuguese dishes, including caldeirada, a stew of fish and vegetables. Dashes of curry powder are often added to casseroles and soups in the remotest country kitchen.
In the late sixteenth century Jan Huyghen van Linschoten (1563–1611), a Dutch merchant, traveller and historian who lived in Goa, published a book on the Portuguese Asian trade and navigational routes that helped the British and the Dutch break the Portuguese monopoly on trade with the East Indies. The Dutch East India Company was founded in 1602 with a 21-year charter to carry out colonial activities in Asia. The merchants established themselves on the west coast of India and in Bengal. Kochi (formerly Cochin) was a major trading centre, and the Dutch influence is still visible in the architecture. In the early nineteenth century the Dutch exchanged their Indian possessions for British holdings in the East Indies (Indonesia), which henceforth became the focus of their mercantile and imperial ambition.
The Dutch brought slaves from India as well as Indonesia to work in their kitchens in South Africa, originally a provisioning port en route to India. They were the ancestors of the Cape Malays, famous for their delicious spicy cuisine. The Dutch presence was much more lasting in Sri Lanka, which they controlled from 1633 to 1792. There, their culinary legacy includes various dishes of Dutch origin, among them frikkadels (meatballs) and various sweets. The Burghers – people of mixed European (especially Dutch) and Sinhalese or Tamil descent – developed their own distinctive hybrid cuisine. However, the Dutch had little, if any, influence on the cuisine of India itself.
In 1664 Louis XIV founded the French East India Company to give France a seat at the spice table. French outposts were established on both coasts of India, and at one point France controlled the area between Hyderabad and Cape Comorin, at the very southern tip of the subcontinent. Its headquarters were in Pondicherry (today called Pudicherry), 160 km (100 miles) south of Chennai (Madras).
France and England went to war over control of South India, and while the French were temporarily victorious, in the long run the British prevailed. Napoleon wanted to use Egypt as a base to attack India, but the destruction of the French fleet in 1805 by Lord Nelson put an end to that scheme. By 1761 the French presence had been reduced to a few small settlements, which became part of independent India in 1954.
Still, even today Pudicherry has a French flavour. Older residents speak French, the policemen’s uniforms resemble those of French gendarmes, and streets are named after French admirals and governors. The French government encourages cultural ties, and many French tourists visit the city. The local cuisine has a few dishes that may reflect the French legacy, including a stew called ragout, heavily flavoured with garlic and aromatic spices; dishes called rolls (lamb stuffed with minced lamb), which are served on New Year’s Eve; meen puyabaisse (fish bouillabaisse) and Pondicherry cake, a rum-soaked fruitcake served at Christmas.11 But, unlike in Britain, India left little mark on the way the French eat, perhaps because their own culinary tradition is so strong. Today there are a few Indian restaurants in Paris, but they are far outnumbered by those that serve North African cuisine. Some menus are like those of their British counterparts, heavy on North Indian dishes, while others (particularly those in the 10th arrondissement) serve mainly South Indian food.
On 31 December 1600 Elizabeth I of England granted a royal charter to the East India Company (popularly known as the Company), giving it a fifteen-year monopoly on trade with the ‘Indies’, defined as all the lands between the Cape of Good Hope and the Strait of Magellan. In 1618 a British ship landed at Surat, the principal port of the Mughal Empire. The following year this became the site of England’s first ‘factory’ – a trading establishment at a foreign port. By 1647 the British had established 28 factories in India and gained access to the Mughal emperor. In 1665 the Portuguese viceroy handed over Bombay, with its excellent harbour, to the English as part of the marriage settlement of Charles II and the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza. In 1696 the emperor let the Company establish a new settlement in Bengal, called Fort William, which later became Calcutta.
As long as the Mughal emperors were able to enforce their authority, the activities of the foreigners were limited to trade. They exported cotton goods from Madras and Gujarat; silk, sugar and saltpetre from Bengal; spices from the Malabar Coast; and opium, which the Company forced upon the Chinese in exchange for tea. Profit margins of 25 per cent were regarded as moderate, and some merchants, known as nabobs, became fabulously wealthy. Moreover, officers of the Company’s ships were allowed to trade on their own account, ensuring that English goods, including ham, cheese, wine and beer, were supplied to the British community in India.
Political instability from the mid-eighteenth century onwards led the Company to seek political power. It formed its own armies and began to meddle in local disputes. In 1757 the Company’s British troops and their Indian allies defeated the forces of the Mughal viceroy at the Battle of Plassey, and secured permission to collect the Mughals’ taxes in return for an annual tribute and for maintaining order. They subsequently installed puppet rulers in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, and extended their control over Malabar and much of the west coast.
In the late eighteenth century the British government established a separate Administration and Civil Service to run India. They appointed governors in Madras (now Chennai) and Bombay (Mumbai) and a governor-general in Calcutta (Kolkata), which remained the capital of British India until 1905. In the second half of the nineteenth century the British annexed the Punjab, Nepal and Burma.
In 1857 North India went up in flames. After a mutiny of Indian regiments in Meerut, other Indian troops rebelled and slaughtered their British commanders and local British residents. The rebels set out for Delhi with the goal of restoring the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah II to power. Dietary complaints played a role: the rumour was that the cartridges used by the army were greased with pork and/or beef fat, while news of the impending revolt was purportedly spread by the distribution of chapattis.
Ultimately the revolt failed and the reprisals were savage. This event – called the First War of Independence by Indians, and the Indian Mutiny by the British – had significant consequences. Emperor Bahadur Shah was exiled to Burma, and the reign of the Mughals came officially to an end. The Company was disbanded, and in 1858 the British Parliament transferred all its rights to the British Crown. In 1877 Queen Victoria was named empress of India.
From then until 1947, when India gained its independence, around 60 per cent of India’s land area was under direct British rule, sometimes called the Raj. The rest of the subcontinent, the so-called Princely States, retained their rulers, who pledged obedience to Victoria and were more or less under the control of the British authorities.
As the Portuguese had done before them, until the early eighteenth century British traders lived much like the local population: they spoke Indian languages, took Indian mistresses and wives, wore Indian clothes, smoked hookahs and ate Indian food. The prodigious meals at the British settlements, prepared by Indian, Portuguese and British cooks, were similar to those eaten by the Mughals and their local representatives, and featured rice pulaos and biryanis, dumpukht, chicken, khichri, chutneys and relishes, accompanied by shiraz wine from Persia, English beer or arrack.
According to David Burton in his chronicle of the food of the Raj, the first British settlers may not have considered the highly spiced cuisine of India very strange: ‘In 1612, English cooking had itself barely emerged from the Middle Ages and was still heavy with cumin, caraway, ginger, pepper, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg.’12 The Indian dumpokhed chicken, stewed in butter and stuffed with spices, almonds and raisins, was very similar to an English chicken pie of the same period. Forks were still relatively uncommon in England, and the English scooped food into their mouths with pieces of bread – just as the Indians did. Even the custom of eating spices (paan) after a meal as an aid to digestion had its counterpart in voidee, the English custom of offering departing guests assorted spices and wine at the end of a banquet.
Not long after their arrival, the British opened taverns, often named after famous British pubs, where they sold wine, beer, rum, punch and local arrack, and also served suppers and cold collations. Punch, a popular drink from the mid-seventeenth century, was named after the Hindi word for ‘five’ because it contained five ingredients: arrack, rosewater, citron juice, sugar and spices. By all accounts, both men and women drank alcohol to excess. At a dinner in Calcutta in 1831, the 23 guests drank eleven bottles of wine, 28 quarts of beer, 1½ quarts of spirits and twelve bowls of punch, and ‘would have drunk twice as much if not restrained’, as Bishop Wilberforce complained.13 A French count visiting India observed:
If you are a Frenchman, you will be thunderstruck by the enormous quantity of beer and wine absorbed by these young English ladies, in appearance so pale and delicate. I could scarcely recover from my astonishment at seeing my fair neighbour quietly dispose of a bottle and a half of very strong beer, eked out with a fair allowance of claret, and wind up with five or six glasses of light but spirited champagne taken with her dessert.14
Stomach disorders were common, but were blamed on the climate, not on people’s drinking habits or their heavily meat-based diet. A few European physicians pointed to the over-consumption of meat as inappropriate, and one regretted that the majority avoided eating local food ‘from a kind of false bravado and the exhibition of a generous contempt for what they reckon the luxurious and effeminate practice of the country’.15
An East India Company civil servant and his wife breakfasting on fried fish, rice and Sylhet oranges, with servants in attendance, 1842. |
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By the early nineteenth century Indianized habits among the British had become rarer. Company employees were forbidden to wear Indian dress or to take part in local ceremonies and festivals, while their children by Indian women were excluded from employment by the Company. Part of the blame falls on General Charles Cornwallis who, having recently been defeated at Yorktown, Virginia, wanted to make sure that a settled colonial class did not emerge in India to undermine British rule, as it had in America. Clothes began to follow London fashions, and Indian food, although still offered in punch houses and taverns, was no longer the norm. British wives replaced Indian mistresses, and these women, many of them neither well-educated nor adventurous, had no interest in exploring local culture or cuisine. As one writer put it:
The Englishwoman fought against eating Indian food for more than one reason. Highly spiced food often upset her poor digestion and through ignorance she regarded Indian food as hot and unpalatable. It also gave her a sense of superiority to despise the food of the natives. French cuisine was considered fashionable and food cooked in wine was the last word in good taste.16
Curries were no longer acceptable dishes at dinner parties, although they were still served at lunch. Canned fish, cheese, jam and dried fruit from Europe became de rigueur, and were valued in part because they were hard to obtain. Dinner parties, an important part of social and official life, consisted of multiple courses of bland English food with joints, legs of lamb, great saddles of mutton and boiled chicken. In the novel A Passage to India (1924), E. M. Forster makes this clear:
And sure enough they did drive away from the Club in a few minutes, and they did dress, and to dinner came Miss Derek and the McBrydes, and the menu was: Julienne soup full of bullety bottled peas, pseudo-cottage bread, fish full of branching bones, pretending to be plaice, more bottled peas with the cutlets, trifle, sardines on toast: the menu of Anglo-India. A dish might be added or subtracted as one rose or fell in the official scale . . . but the tradition remained: the food of exiles, cooked by servants who did not understand it.
Queen Victoria with Indian servants, 1897–1901, chromolithograph. |
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However, curries, kedgeree and mulligatawny soup continued to be served at breakfast and lunch until the twentieth century. Common soldiers, meanwhile, lived in appalling conditions on a diet of tough beef and raw rum all year round.
Although she never visited India, Queen Victoria took her responsibilities as empress seriously. She learned Hindustani, and during the last decade of her reign insisted that curry be cooked every day for lunch. At Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, one of Victoria’s favourite homes, banquets were served by Indian waiters wearing showy gold and blue uniforms in the ornate Durbar Room, decorated with Indian motifs. Her grandson George v was especially fond of beef curry served with Bombay duck (a small dried fish). Indian chefs were employed in the palace kitchens to prepare such dishes as biryani, pulao, dal and dumpukht. The Swiss chef Gabriel Tschumi left behind an account of their activities. For religious reasons, they could not use the meat that came to the kitchens in the ordinary way, and so killed their own sheep and poultry. A special area was set aside for grinding spices between two large stones.17
To a gallon of vinegar one pound of garlick, and three quarters of a pound of long pepper, a pint of mustard seed, one pound of ginger, and two ounces of turmerick; the garlick must be laid in salt three days, then wip’d clean and dry’d in the sun; the long pepper broke, and the mustard seed bruised; mix all together in the vinegar, then take two large hard cabbages, and two cauliflowers, cut them in quarters, and salt them well; let them lie three days, and then dry them well in the sun.
N.B. The ginger must lie twenty-four hours in salt and water, then cut small and laid in salt three days.
Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, 1747
Back in India, to help the memsahibs (British wives) cope with their new environment, including managing enormous contingents of servants, old hands at the expatriate life in India wrote domestic handbooks with menus and recipes, most of them for British and European dishes. Recipes for Indian dishes were relegated to separate chapters and were often referred to in derogatory terms. Flora Annie Steel (1847–1929), the co-author of one of the most famous handbooks, wrote in The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook (first published in 1888) that ‘most native recipes are inordinately greasy and sweet.’ Another writer called ‘pellows’ (pulaos) ‘purely Hindoostanee dishes’, some of which were ‘so entirely of an Asiatic character and taste that no European will ever be persuaded to partake of them’. More sympathetic was Colonel Arthur Robert Kenney-Herbert (1840–1916), who wrote under the name Wyvern. In his Culinary Jottings for Madras (1878) he sought to give Indian curries the same care and attention as he did a classic French fricassee or blanquette.
Social contact between Indians and the British was limited to the princes and wealthy families, such as the Tagores in Calcutta and the Tatas in Bombay, who made their fortunes acting as go-betweens. Despite this separation, the two cultures left lasting marks on each other’s cuisine. The most obvious Indian legacy to Britain is curry. The word was not historically used by Indians, who called dishes by their specific names: korma, kalia, salan, rogan josh, and so on (in 1973 in her book An Invitation to Indian Cooking the celebrated Indian cookery writer Madhur Jaffrey wrote that the word ‘curry’ was ‘as degrading to India’s great cuisine as the term “chop suey” was to China’s’). The word appears to have been first used in 1502 in a Portuguese travel account, and may come from the Tamil karil, signifying a watery sauce poured on rice. The British came to use this word for any dish of vegetables, meat or fish cooked in a spicy sauce. It has since gained respectability among Indians, and twenty years later Jaffrey herself called a book The Ultimate Curry Bible.
Another Indian contribution is kedgeree, a favourite British breakfast dish that is a variation of khichri, the rice and lentil dish beloved of the Mughal emperors. A British kedgeree is made with rice (no lentils), smoked fish and hard-boiled eggs. During Victorian and Edwardian times, kedgeree was a staple of English country-house breakfasts. As P. G. Wodehouse’s character Bertie Wooster put it, ‘We really had breakfast . . . fried eggs, scrambled eggs, fishcakes and kedgeree, sometimes mushrooms, sometimes kidneys.’18 Other hybrids are mulligatawny – a spicy, rather thick meat soup that is a modification of a thin broth eaten in south India – and Worcester sauce, a popular condiment said to be based on an Indian recipe brought back to England by a governor of Bengal in the early nineteenth century. The popular condiment piccalilli was created by adding mustard to traditional chutney ingredients.
In the seventeenth century green tea imported from China to England by the Company was a popular drink among the wealthy, but its cost was becoming a drain on the British treasury. To break the Chinese monopoly, the British looked for another source, and discovered tea growing wild in northeastern India, where it had been used since time immemorial as a fermented pickle (as it is today in Burma and northern Thailand) and an infusion.19 Using Chinese seeds and techniques of planting and cultivation, the government launched a tea industry in India by offering land in Assam to any European who agreed to grow tea for export. Tea cultivation spread to the Darjeeling area in the Himalayas, the Nilgiri Hills in the south, and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). The price in the United Kingdom dropped dramatically, and by the end of the century black tea had become a mass drink in Britain.
In the late eighteenth century the owner of the Bow Brewery, near the East India Company’s docks in London, decided to brew a specific kind of beer for export to India, using a pale malt and plenty of hops, both known for their preservative qualities. This helped to stabilize the beer during the long, rough, hot journey to India. The combination produced a beer with a distinctively bitter taste and excellent thirst-quenching properties – a perfect drink for a hot climate and spicy food. The beer, called Hodgson’s, became very popular and was soon imitated by other brewers.20
It was the British who introduced tea-drinking to India, initially to the Anglicized elite. Afternoon tea – with cakes and sandwiches, and such Indian snacks as samosa and pakora – became an important meal, especially in Calcutta. However, tea did not become a mass drink in India until the 1950s, when the India Tea Board, faced with a surplus of low-grade tea, launched an advertising campaign to popularize tea, especially in the north, where the drink of choice was milk. In this form, tea is typically boiled with milk and spices. This chai is sold in little clay cups by millions of vendors on the streets and at railway stations.
In South India, coffee is the drink of choice, especially at breakfast. Although it had been grown earlier, the British built the first large-scale plantations in the hills of Karnataka in the 1830s. By the end of the nineteenth century more than 100,000 ha (250,000 acres) of South India were planted with coffee.
Another British contribution to India was beer. A popular beverage among the English in India from the early seventeenth century, especially porter and pale ale, it was originally imported, but in 1830 the first brewery was set up in the Solon District of Himachal Pradesh (it is still in operation). By 1882 there were twelve breweries in India.
Many vegetables originally grown by the British for their own use were quickly assimilated into Indian cuisine, including cauliflower, orange carrots, cabbage and spinach.
Another legacy of the British was the club: a members-only private institution for upper-class men. The first club in India was the Bengal Club in Calcutta, founded in 1827; it was followed by the Byculla Club in Bombay and the Madras Club (both 1833). These were gathering places for the British ruling elite, and at first tradesmen and Indians were barred. Delhi’s Gymkhana Club, which opened in 1913, was a relative latecomer. (It used to be said that India was ruled from the Gymkhana Club.) Today every town of any size in India has its own club, while large metropolises have many.21 Club dining rooms offer Indian, Western and often Chinese food.
The Bengal Club was famous for its omelettes, made with minced onions and chillies, which became a popular breakfast dish in India. The clubs were also known for their bars, offering whisky soda, beer and gin. When tonic water was invented in the 1860s and marketed as anti-malarial because of its quinine content, mixing it with gin led to the birth of the famous gin and tonic.22 Gin mixed with lime juice made a gimlet, which may also have been invented in India.
In the early to mid-nineteenth century the term Anglo-Indian referred to British residents of India, but it later came to mean the descendants of official or unofficial unions between British men and Indian women, sometimes referred to as Eurasians. Certain jobs were reserved for these people, especially in the railways, and there were large communities in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras and other railway centres. After India gained its independence, many Anglo-Indians emigrated to Britain, Australia and Canada.
Most Anglo-Indians were Christians of various denominations, spoke English, wore European clothes and married within their community. They also had a distinctive cuisine, which incorporated dishes from all over the subcontinent as well as British and Portuguese foods, leading some to call it the first pan-Indian cuisine.23 As Christians, they had no food taboos. Typical dishes were meat and potato curry, pepper water (a spicy beef soup), chicken jalfrezi (leftover meat in a dry sauce), dry fry (beef cooked with onions, tomatoes and spices), roast beef and many Goan dishes, including pork vindaloo, sorpotel, balchow (fried fish in a sweet-and-sour sauce), foogath (vegetables fried with onion, garlic and mustard seeds) and Western-style cakes. Christmas was celebrated with great gusto, with a roast turkey or duck; the plum pudding was prepared weeks in advance.
The Maharajah of Sailana’s Recipe for Jungli Mans
(Wild Game Prepared During a Hunt)
Heat some ghee or oil and add pieces of meat to it. Add salt and whole red chillies, and cook it for ten minutes. Add a little water now and then, making sure the meat neither fries nor boils. When tender, dry up the water and eat.
The author notes that he has deliberately avoided giving any weights or measures, as they are not available when one is stranded on a hunt.
Once the British had taken control of India from the Mughals, India’s local and regional rulers entered into alliances, first with the Company and later with the government of India. In return for protection, they accepted Britain as a ‘paramount power’. This meant that they retained their internal autonomy and the right to collect taxes, while handing over control of their external affairs to the British, who were represented at their courts by an advisor called a Resident. The British did not hesitate to depose rulers who resisted their control.
At the time of Independence in 1947, the 562 princely states covered around 40 per cent of the Indian subcontinent.24 Some, such as Kashmir, Mysore and Hyderabad, were as large as European countries, while others were tiny, even consisting of a single village. Their hereditary rulers held different titles – Maharajah, Rajah, Rana, Rao, Maharana, Maharao, Nawab, Nizam, Gaekwad – but were collectively referred to as princes (a term preferred by the British, since there could be only one king or queen in the empire). Under the Indian Independence Act of 1947, the British relinquished their suzerainty and left the states free to choose to join independent India or Pakistan. Most acceded to India, while eight joined Pakistan. A few states sought independence, notably Hyderabad, but it was forcibly annexed by India.
After Independence the princes were paid a pension by the government of India, called the privy purse. In 1971 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi abolished their titles and withdrew government support. Some, such as the maharani of Jaipur, became politicians; others turned their palaces into hotels, opened their collections as museums or supported programmes to conserve India’s wildlife and heritage.
The British sought to instil Western values into the rulers by arranging British tutors for their children and sending them to Eton and Harrow, or to Indian preparatory schools along the same lines. They also encouraged those who could afford it to travel to Britain for such events as coronations and jubilees. (Occasionally this backfired. The maharajah of Indore, who ruled from 1926 to 1961, spent so much time abroad that the British Resident proposed that the Indore national anthem be ‘Some Day my Prince will Come’.)
Some princes and princesses became glamorous society figures with residences in London and Paris. They patronized such establishments as the Savoy and the Ritz, and sent their cooks there for training. The maharani of Cooch Behar, Indira Devi (1892–1968), took her chef to Alfredo’s in Rome so that he could learn to make pasta the way she liked it. Others were more conservative in their dining habits. When the maharajah of Baroda (1879–1939) visited Europe, he took his own cooks, groceries and two cows, while Madhao Singh I of Jaipur attended Edward VII’s coronation in 1902 with four silver urns, each filled with 9,000 litres (19,000 pints) of water from the Ganges River, because of its reputed healthful properties. (The Mughal emperors are also said to have taken the water of the Ganges with them on their travels.)
The control exercised by the British left some princes with little to do, and so maintaining a luxurious lifestyle became a way of passing the time. It was also a sign of their authority and power: they had to live like kings to retain the respect and admiration of their subjects and their prestige among their peers. From the earliest contact with the Europeans, the wealthiest Indian rulers acquired rare and expensive goods from the West. This practice reached its apogee in the early twentieth century when some became patrons of the leading European manufacturers of luxury goods, ordering cars from Rolls-Royce, dinner services from Limoges and Spode, crystal from Baccarat and Lalique, and jewellery from Cartier. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, some of these companies survived solely on the orders of the maharajahs.25
Princely households had enormous staff and retinues, occasionally numbering in the thousands. Some servants were hired during famines as a way of providing employment; some were descendants of earlier generations of servants; while others came from other parts of India (notably Goa, which was famous for its cooks) or from Europe. Cooks specialized in vegetarian food, meat or fish, or even a single dish. Occasionally the preparation of a dish was divided among several cooks so that no one would know its secret. The royal kitchen at Mysore, one of the largest of the princely states, employed 150 chefs who cooked only vegetarian dishes and 25 who cooked non-vegetarian food. The latter were divided into Muslim and Hindu cooks. Another twenty brahmin cooks prepared food for religious ceremonies in a separate kitchen where no meat, fish, onions or garlic were allowed.
Life in the royal courts revolved around entertaining. Food played a role not just in celebrations, but also in diplomacy and politics, and princes competed to provide the most unusual and luxurious fare. A minimum of 51 dishes was de rigueur at parties at the Moti Bagh Palace in Patiala. At Hyderabad, at least twenty dishes had to be provided even if only two family members were dining, so that the cooks would not lose their skill. In some royal families, including those of Lucknow and Patiala, the men of the family supervised the cooking.
When British officials or other great princes were being entertained, the menus often consisted almost entirely of Western dishes. For example, when Sayajirao Gaekwad III of Baroda (ruled 1875–1939) held a dinner for Jivaji ‘George’ Rao Scindiya of Gwalior (ruled 1925–61) at his Laxmi Vilas Palace in Baroda in 1910, the menu was entirely in French, as it would have been in aristocratic British society of the time. The menu featured almond soup, fish in a mayonnaise sauce, crème de volaille with truffles, lamb cutlets à l’Italienne, roast partridge breast with green peas, artichoke hearts with a demi-glace sauce, curry with rice, baked apples with cream and pistachio ice cream.
Some princes had extensive wine cellars. In a few royal houses, such as those of the Rajput states of Jamnagar and Chhota Udaipur, Indian food was rarely eaten. In others, breakfast was English while other meals were Indian. Christmas was a major celebration, and such British dishes as boar’s head, game pie and plum pudding were served.
Menu of a dinner given by the Maharajash of Baroda at his Laxami Vilas Palace. |
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The royal tables also featured local dishes. In Kashmir, for example, vegetarian dishes such as guchchi pulao (mushroom rice), saak (Kashmiri spinach) and nadru (deep-fried lotus stems) are to this day served on silver thalis to the maharajah and his family. The royal family of the northeastern state of Tripura (the world’s second-oldest continuous line, after the Japanese) dines on such dishes as chunga bejong (grilled pork served with bamboo shoots), maimi (sticky rice wrapped in a banana leaf and roasted in a hollow bamboo stem over a wood fire) and gudak (mashed vegetables with fish).26
Because hunting, or shikar, was a way of life for many princes, meat dishes played an important role at many courts. Jodhpur, for example, was famous for its barbecued and roast meat dishes cooked out in the open, including khud khargosh (rabbit cooked in an underground pit) and roast quail. A famous Rajasthani dish is lal maas, venison cooked with red chillies. However, the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972, which banned the hunting of wild animals, put an end to this princely pastime; these dishes nowadays are prepared with pork.
Another Rajasthani royal tradition that has been restricted is the production of strong spirits, called ashavs, made from local herbs, spices and fruit. They include kesar kasturi, a distillation of saffron, dry fruit, herbs, nuts, seeds, 22 spices, milk and sugar that is a speciality of Jodhpur, and jagmohan, a spirit made from dried fruit and 32 spices and herbs, once brewed for the rulers of Mewar. The production of such spirits was banned in Rajasthan in 1952, but in 2006 a special law was passed authorizing the production of so-called Heritage Liqueurs, which are popular with tourists.27
There were exceptions to the princely carnivorous lifestyle. From the twelfth century until Independence, Kerala was divided into three kingdoms: Kochi, Malabar and Tiruvithamcore, ruled by three different royal families, all vegetarian. To this day meals served in the madapilli (royal kitchen) of the Cochin royal family are unassuming, featuring dishes prepared with local ingredients by brahmin cooks.28 The strictest regime is followed by the maharajahs of Benares (Varanasi), one of the sacred cities of Hinduism. Not only are they strict vegetarians who avoid onions and garlic, but also they are so orthodox that they cannot eat in the presence of other people, even their own family members. The current maharajah, Anant Narain Singh, eats only food prepared by a team of Bihari cooks, who accompany him on his travels to prepare his lonely meals.29
Because royals usually married other royals, dishes were often transmitted from one region to another. For example, the Jivaji Rao of Gwalior married a Nepali aristocrat, who introduced Nepali dishes into the Maratha kitchens; by the mid-1970s the kitchen at the Gwalior palace became as well known for its Nepali delicacies as for its Marathi ones.
Although the lavish royal lifestyle is to some degree a thing of the past, the royal families have played an important role in Indian cuisine by preserving traditional dishes in their homes and in restaurants, especially in the hotels into which their palaces were converted. Some have even become hoteliers or consultants. The Taj Group has restored several palaces and re-created princely dishes in its restaurants, most recently in Falaknuma Palace in Hyderabad, once home to the Nizams.
In recent years there has been a renewed interest in the lives and cuisine of India’s royals, evinced by the publication of a lavishly illustrated and informative book Dining with the Maharajahs: A Thousand Years of Culinary Tradition (2012), parts of which were televised. An earlier work by Raja Dilip Singh Ji of Sailana, a small state in Madhya Pradesh, is considered one of the best Indian cookbooks ever written. Singh’s grandfather began collecting, recording and even testing recipes from other royal houses, and his son published them to critical acclaim.
Partly as a reaction against this princely indulgence, India’s great political and spiritual leader, Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948), advocated an austere lifestyle and diet. His ideas represent a combination of ancient beliefs with modern dietary theories.
The Indian National Congress (INC) was formed in 1885. It was a moderate group of mainly Western-educated professionals who passed resolutions on uncontroversial topics, such as opportunities for Indians in the civil service. By 1900 it had emerged as an all-Indian political organization. In 1906 the All-India Muslim League was founded to represent that community’s interest. The partition of Bengal by the viceroy Lord Curzon in 1905 alienated both Hindus and Muslims, and intensified dissatisfaction with British rule.
The participation of Indian soldiers in the First World War – more than a million fought for the British Empire, and a great proportion died or were injured – economic depression and especially the massacre of unarmed civilians at Jallianwala Bagh in the Punjab in 1919 increased Indians’ desire for more control over their own affairs. The INC changed from an elite political club to a mass organization. The government introduced reforms to give Indians a greater role in the government and civil service, but these were too little, too late, and by 1930 some people were demanding total independence from Britain.
Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, Motilalal and Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and Subhas Chandra Bose (who advocated armed revolution) were significant members of the freedom movement, but Mohandas Gandhi, later known as Mahatma (‘great soul’), emerged as the most prominent figure. His vision brought millions of ordinary Indians into the movement. The basis of Gandhi’s movement was satyagraha, meaning ‘insistence on truth’ or ‘force of truth’. It is based on the principle of ahimsa, non-violence or non-injury, which dates back to the sixth century BCE (see chapter Two). While Gandhi’s religious beliefs were rooted in Hinduism, with a strong Jain influence, he maintained that all religions contain both truth and error, so that none was superior to another. He adopted the clothing style of the masses of rural India by wearing khadi (homespun cloth), urged Indians to rely on goods made in India by Indians, and favoured small-scale agriculture and industry over large-scale industrialization.
Baz Bahadur, the last sultan of Malwa (1555 to 1562), and his queen Rupmati hunting.
Gandhi’s beliefs about food are inseparable from his moral and political philosophy; indeed, it is impossible to think of another world political leader who is or was so concerned with food. His writings reflect traditional Indian religious and medical beliefs as well as the nutritional theories of the day.
Gandhi was born into a Vaishnav Hindu family on the coast of Gujarat, a region with a strong Jain presence. His family was vegetarian and his pious mother often fasted. When Gandhi was a teenager, a friend persuaded him to try meat. At the time there was a popular belief that the British owed their strength and dominance to their consumption of meat, and that if Indians followed suit, they could defeat the British and win independence. A popular Gujarati poem went:
Behold the mighty Englishman
He rules the Indian small,
Because being a meat-eater
He is five cubits tall.
Mahatma Gandhi’s Recommended Daily Diet
800 ml (2 lb/1½ pints) cow’s milk
175 g (6 OZ) cereal
75 g (3 OZ) leafy green vegetables
150 g (5 OZ) other vegetables
3 tbsp ghee
2 tbsp sugar
Fruit according to taste and budget
2 litres (5 lb/½ gall.) water or other liquid
Even the great spiritual leader Swami Vivkenanda urged the eating of meat on the grounds that it was the only way to achieve robust health and prevent the abject surrender of the weak to physically stronger people. ‘Which is a greater sin – to kill a few goats, or to fail to protect the honour of my wife and daughter?’ he asked. ‘Let those who belong to the elite, and do not have to win their bread by physical labour, shun meat.’30
In his autobiography, Gandhi described his first foray into meat eating:
So the day came. It is difficult fully to describe my condition. There were, on the one hand, the zeal for ‘reform’, and the novelty of making a momentous departure in life. There was, on the other, the shame of hiding like a thief to do this very thing. I cannot say which of the two swayed me more. We went in search of a lonely spot by the river, and there I saw, for the first time in my life, meat. There was baker’s [English-style] bread also. I relished neither. The goat’s meat was as tough as leather. I simply could not eat it. I was sick and had to leave off eating.
I had a very bad night afterwards. A horrible nightmare haunted me. Every time I dropped off to sleep it would seem as though a live goat were bleating inside me, and I would jump up full of remorse. But then I would remind myself that meat-eating was a duty, and so become more cheerful.31
Gandhi’s friend began to cook special meat dishes for him and even arranged meals at a restaurant. Gandhi eventually overcame his reluctance (and his compassion for goats) and began to enjoy meat dishes. This went on for a year. Eventually, however, he was overcome with guilt and concluded that lying to his parents was worse than not eating meat. He decided that as long as they were alive, eating meat was out of the question.
In 1888 Gandhi left for England to study law. Before he went, his mother made him swear a vow before a Jain monk that he would never touch meat, alcohol or women. At first he subsisted on a diet of boiled vegetables and bread, until he discovered a vegetarian restaurant in London. There he bought a copy of the book A Plea for Vegetarianism (1886) by the British reformer Henry S. Salt, one of the first modern advocates of animal rights. The book outlines the moral reasons for being a vegetarian, including the inherent violence in eating meat and the non-violence that could be achieved from abstaining from it – ideas that Gandhi identified with the ancient concept of ahimsa. Now, rather than abstaining from meat because of his vow to his mother, he did so from moral conviction: ‘The choice was now made in favour of vegetarianism, the spread of which henceforward became my mission.’32 Gandhi joined the London Vegetarian Society and became a member of its Executive Committee.
In a speech entitled ‘The Moral Basis of Vegetarianism’, delivered to the society in 1931, Gandhi said that people who became vegetarians purely for health reasons usually failed because vegetarianism requires a moral basis as well as a practical one. Some vegetarians made food a fetish and thought that by becoming vegetarians they could eat as much cheese, lentils and beans as they liked – an approach that did not improve their health. The secret to remaining healthy, he said, is to cut down the quantity of one’s food and reduce the number of meals.
In later life, when drinking goat’s milk helped him to recover from a severe case of dysentery, Gandhi was forced to admit the necessity of adding milk to a vegetarian diet, since it provides a much-needed source of protein. Nonetheless, he called his inability to give up milk ‘the tragedy of my life’. Gandhi accepted the consumption of eggs as long as they were unfertilized. Cereals should be ground and processed locally to avoid removing the nutritious pericarp. He recommended that green leafy vegetables and seasonal fruit be eaten every day, preferably raw. Milk and bananas, which are rich in starch, make a perfect meal.
Gandhi maintained that a certain amount of fat is necessary; the best is pure ghee, followed by freshly ground peanut oil. About 40 g (1½ OZ) a day is necessary to meet one’s bodily needs. Using more, especially to deep-fry puris and laddus, is a ‘thoughtless extravagance’. Some sugar is needed – he recommended 25–40 g (1–1 ½ OZ) a day – and more if sweet fruit is not available. But the undue preference given to sweet things in India is wrong, he said; in fact, to enjoy sweetmeats in a country where many people do not even get a full meal is equivalent to robbery.
‘Food should be taken as a matter of duty – even as a medicine – to sustain the body, never for the satisfaction of the palate’, Gandhi wrote, since pleasure comes from satisfying hunger.33 He opposed the use of spices on the grounds that their only function is to please the palate. He also believed that they have no role in maintaining health, and that all condiments, even salt, destroy the natural flavour of vegetables and cereals. Likewise, tea, coffee and cocoa are not beneficial and can even be harmful.
For Gandhi, alcohol was beyond the pale because of the economic, moral, intellectual and physical harm it does to poor people (as well as, he noted, to some princes whose lives had been ruined by spirits). Gandhi advocated a total ban on the manufacture, sale and consumption of alcohol, a policy that is still in force in his native Gujarat and some other Indian states. (Gujarat even imposes the death penalty on those found guilty of making and selling bootlegged alcohol that leads to death.) Regarding tobacco, he quoted the Russian writer Tolstoy, who called it the worst of all intoxicants and noted that it was very expensive, smelly and dirty, especially when people spit. Gandhi’s writing makes no mention at all of drinking urine, although some people believe that was part of his food philosophy.34
While Gandhi rigorously followed his own prescriptions, he was not dogmatic about imposing them on others. Prolonged experimentation and observation convinced him that there is no fixed rule for all constitutions, and that while vegetarianism, ‘one of the priceless gifts of Hinduism’, is highly desirable, it is not an end in itself. ‘Many a man eating meat and [dining] with everybody, but living in the fear of God, is nearer his freedom than a man religiously abstaining from meat and other things, but blaspheming God in every one of his acts’, he wrote in Young India.35 Despite his affinity with the Jains, he did not hesitate to have insects or snakes killed if they invaded his ashram, nor did he find it necessary to avoid aubergines or potatoes, as Jains did.
One of Gandhi’s main weapons in the fight for independence was fasting. He undertook seventeen fasts during his lifetime; the longest, to stop communal rioting in 1943, lasted 21 days. This tactic has been adopted by others in India and abroad, most recently by the Indian anti-corruption fighter Anna Hazare.
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Gandhi during his final fast at Birla House, New Delhi, in January 1948 to restore communal harmony. |
Gandhi was also an assiduous defender of the protection of cows. He wrote:
The central fact of Hinduism . . . is cow-protection. Cow-protection to me is one of the most wonderful phenomena in human evolution . . . Man through the cow is enjoined to realize his identity with all that lives. Why the cow was selected for apotheosis is obvious to me. The cow was in India the best companion. She was the giver of plenty. Not only did she give milk, but she also made agriculture possible . . . She is the mother to millions of Indian mankind. Protection of the cow means protection of the whole subcreation of God. The ancient seer, whoever he was, began with the cow. The appeal of the lower order of creation is the gift of Hinduism to the world. And Hinduism will live so long as there are Hindus to protect the cow.36
Today many of the Indian states have cow protection laws, which forbid the transport and slaughter of cattle and in some cases the consumption of beef.
Whether Gandhi’s views on food had a lasting effect in India is doubtful. The dietary changes accompanying economic growth have led to a rise in diabetes, high blood pressure and other ‘diseases of affluence’ – a topic reprised in chapter Twelve.
