 "Indian history as a moveable Feast")
FEASTS AND FASTS
A history of food in india
Author: Colleen Taylor Sen
Publisher: Speaking Tiger Publishing
Price: Rs 699
Pages: 348
How does one approach a history of the food of India in these times? Does the moral politics of today have any historical backing?
There is fresh evidence every day that the centrality of food to politics has not diminished. Cow vigilantes, undeterred by the pleas and admonitions of the prime minister, continue in their quest for justice for the cow.
But did the cow enjoy as much protection in the past as it does now?
In that context, Colleen Taylor Sen's Feasts and Fasts: A History of Food in India is well-timed; it comes at this curious culinary-political juncture in contemporary Indian history.
Early on in the book the author demolishes the idealised notion of the place cows occupied in history, "Although the cows were the mainstay of the Vedic economy… there is textual evidence that they too were sacrificed," she writes. And, in those times, "the priests shared in the fruits of the sacrifice."
With the codification of the caste system it became a sin for people from different castes to inter-dine. However, the author does not explore what the notion of purity and pollution, which forms the basis of the system, meant in those days. Today, for example, vegetarian upper castes define their purity in opposition to the non-vegetarian lower castes.
This view of vegetarianism has been, as mentioned above, proven erroneous. As is well known, the rejection of the Vedic obsession with the ritual and the caste system formed the basis of the two movements, Jainism and Buddhism, which brought in the practice of ahimsa and introduced a new ethic of vegetarianism. These doctrines called for an end to the sacrifice of all beings, animals included.
In fact, the history of the diet of the Indus Valley civilisation is one of the most fascinating sections of the book. The author says that ginger, garlic, turmeric, wheat and sesame seeds were the staples, and they continue to be so 3,000 years later. If it is true, as some believe, that the Indus Valley civilisation was wiped out by hordes of "invading Aryans," how do we explain the similarity in the diet, which continues to this day, albeit with alterations? If anything, this book proves the theory of the French Annales School of historiography, that the only longue duree history is a history of diet.
The Aryan-language speaking people did, however, introduce the cow; the water buffalo was the mainstay of the Indus Valley till then. And with the introduction of the cow, beginning with the second wave of urbanisation - from around the middle of the second millennium BCE, the author says - they also introduced the obsession with dairy products. This obsession probably reached its height with the ode to ghee in the Rig Veda.
This book shows us that the rich mosaic that is Indian cuisine as it is understood now has global roots. To the introduction of the cow, we must add those of onion and garlic from the regions around Afghanistan, from where we also got the tandoor. The modern Indian curry would be incomplete without this migration of foodstuffs from other regions. For example, we wouldn't have had coriander, methi (fenugreek), hing (asafoetida) and mustard seeds had it not been for migrants from West Asia.
Sugarcane was first domesticated in Guinea and quickly spread to other parts of the world. But it was in the subcontinent that the processes of crushing cane and crystallising sugar were discovered.
The book highlights the immense ways in which our diets have changed through trade. For example, many foodstuffs were also sent from the subcontinent to other regions of the world, like garlic and ginger to southeast Asia, Indian varieties of sugarcane that went to the New World, and in a weird twist came back to India as new varieties of cane that are being cultivated to this day.
This exchange is also visible in the names we use for vegetables. With the "opening up" of the New World we got the potato, which Portuguese traders brought along. The term along the Konkan coast for potato is batata, which in Portuguese means sweet potato and potato in Latin.
Tobacco was a similar instant hit in the Indian subcontinent. With Akbar's court being the first to receive it, although earlier textual evidence does exist for the south. And, the author says, it was also during Akbar's reign that the hookah was first invented, to help consume this new intoxicant.
The book is a delightful read, but it cannot claim to be a history of Indian food. It is, at best, a history of the food of the Ganga Yamuna doab. Readers from other regions of the subcontinent will find little of the history of their diets, the way these changed over time, even as the author devotes a whole chapter to the food of the diaspora. However, this is probably a limitation any book that attempts to tell the history of the sub-continent must face.
There are other aspects of the book that are not very appealing. For example, the main narrative is interspersed with what can at best be described as fun facts and recipes. These sections end up distracting from the main text. In fact, the recipes lend an air of oriental fetishisation to the book. This is because the author states that there are no recipe books that survived, and yet this does not stop her from "recreating" recipes from the Vedic era.
A history of food in india
Author: Colleen Taylor Sen
Publisher: Speaking Tiger Publishing
Price: Rs 699
Pages: 348
How does one approach a history of the food of India in these times? Does the moral politics of today have any historical backing?
There is fresh evidence every day that the centrality of food to politics has not diminished. Cow vigilantes, undeterred by the pleas and admonitions of the prime minister, continue in their quest for justice for the cow.
But did the cow enjoy as much protection in the past as it does now?
In that context, Colleen Taylor Sen's Feasts and Fasts: A History of Food in India is well-timed; it comes at this curious culinary-political juncture in contemporary Indian history.
Early on in the book the author demolishes the idealised notion of the place cows occupied in history, "Although the cows were the mainstay of the Vedic economy… there is textual evidence that they too were sacrificed," she writes. And, in those times, "the priests shared in the fruits of the sacrifice."
With the codification of the caste system it became a sin for people from different castes to inter-dine. However, the author does not explore what the notion of purity and pollution, which forms the basis of the system, meant in those days. Today, for example, vegetarian upper castes define their purity in opposition to the non-vegetarian lower castes.
This view of vegetarianism has been, as mentioned above, proven erroneous. As is well known, the rejection of the Vedic obsession with the ritual and the caste system formed the basis of the two movements, Jainism and Buddhism, which brought in the practice of ahimsa and introduced a new ethic of vegetarianism. These doctrines called for an end to the sacrifice of all beings, animals included.
In fact, the history of the diet of the Indus Valley civilisation is one of the most fascinating sections of the book. The author says that ginger, garlic, turmeric, wheat and sesame seeds were the staples, and they continue to be so 3,000 years later. If it is true, as some believe, that the Indus Valley civilisation was wiped out by hordes of "invading Aryans," how do we explain the similarity in the diet, which continues to this day, albeit with alterations? If anything, this book proves the theory of the French Annales School of historiography, that the only longue duree history is a history of diet.
The Aryan-language speaking people did, however, introduce the cow; the water buffalo was the mainstay of the Indus Valley till then. And with the introduction of the cow, beginning with the second wave of urbanisation - from around the middle of the second millennium BCE, the author says - they also introduced the obsession with dairy products. This obsession probably reached its height with the ode to ghee in the Rig Veda.
This book shows us that the rich mosaic that is Indian cuisine as it is understood now has global roots. To the introduction of the cow, we must add those of onion and garlic from the regions around Afghanistan, from where we also got the tandoor. The modern Indian curry would be incomplete without this migration of foodstuffs from other regions. For example, we wouldn't have had coriander, methi (fenugreek), hing (asafoetida) and mustard seeds had it not been for migrants from West Asia.
Sugarcane was first domesticated in Guinea and quickly spread to other parts of the world. But it was in the subcontinent that the processes of crushing cane and crystallising sugar were discovered.
The book highlights the immense ways in which our diets have changed through trade. For example, many foodstuffs were also sent from the subcontinent to other regions of the world, like garlic and ginger to southeast Asia, Indian varieties of sugarcane that went to the New World, and in a weird twist came back to India as new varieties of cane that are being cultivated to this day.
This exchange is also visible in the names we use for vegetables. With the "opening up" of the New World we got the potato, which Portuguese traders brought along. The term along the Konkan coast for potato is batata, which in Portuguese means sweet potato and potato in Latin.
Tobacco was a similar instant hit in the Indian subcontinent. With Akbar's court being the first to receive it, although earlier textual evidence does exist for the south. And, the author says, it was also during Akbar's reign that the hookah was first invented, to help consume this new intoxicant.
The book is a delightful read, but it cannot claim to be a history of Indian food. It is, at best, a history of the food of the Ganga Yamuna doab. Readers from other regions of the subcontinent will find little of the history of their diets, the way these changed over time, even as the author devotes a whole chapter to the food of the diaspora. However, this is probably a limitation any book that attempts to tell the history of the sub-continent must face.
There are other aspects of the book that are not very appealing. For example, the main narrative is interspersed with what can at best be described as fun facts and recipes. These sections end up distracting from the main text. In fact, the recipes lend an air of oriental fetishisation to the book. This is because the author states that there are no recipe books that survived, and yet this does not stop her from "recreating" recipes from the Vedic era.