Another of India's soft power!

Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors
Author: Lizzie Collingham (2006)

When the first Europeans, mainly the British, landed on the Indian shores, they must have noticed that the natives' food was as bland as theirs back home. This must have been around the 16th century, when Europeans found an alternate route to access spices from the East, as the Islamic conquerers had absolute control over land routes and imposed exorbitant taxes on goods.

Most of India's staple diet was khichari, a simple dish with two grains boiled in water. The grains may be rice, millet, lentils, chickpeas, or whatever is harvested. The Brahmans had their food restrictions, and so did the Jains. They had a medico-spiritual relationship with food. The preparation of food was according to Ayurvedic principles. Food was divine. The average Hindu in that era ate only two meals a day, one if you were very poor. So, it was a culture shock for them to see Faranghis eating so many times and, what's more, so much meat. Holy Cow, indeed.

Opulence was the order of the day at the Moghul palaces. After all, the Quran promises much drinking, eating, and pleasures as rewards in the afterlife. Therefore, the Moghuls emphasised food, scents, sex, and ascetics. They were quite adventurous with their food. The nomadic invaders brought in the culture of pilau, in which rice or other grains were mixed with meat.

The Portuguese brought new foodstuffs to India. They must thank the Spanish, who discovered new fauna and flora in the New World and brought them into Europe. Soon, the Portuguese started knowing about corn, chillies, potatoes, tomatoes, turkey, and many more. When the Portuguese set up base in Goa, they were bored with the unimaginative Indian cooking. They brought their stuff from Portugal and taught their cooks, as well as their Indian mistresses and wives, various Portuguese cooking methods. Vindaloo was one of them.

For the Moghuls, lavish dinners were their trademark to show their supremacy to the occasional foreign visitor. The rulers were open to new recipes. Almonds and raisins became part of their cooking. A spicier version of pilau called biryani came about. The commoners also tried experimenting with what the palace cooks did with their own cooking.

To accommodate one morbidly obese Moghul king who was a foodie but had such rotten teeth that he could chew his meat, somebody came up with the idea of mincing the meat. Thus, Kimma was born.

The Portuguese, even being a small country, had a profound influence on European culinary habits. The introduction of their cooking styles to subsequent generations in India, also via Anglo-Indians, made it quite famous. The English who came in droves also picked up the habit.

The East Indian Company and the British Raj personnel who returned home after their tours of duty could not just live without their Indian-flavoured foods. Some entrepreneurial mavericks tried to sell packed curry powders to the British. Of they were far from the real McCoy. Some sailors from India also set up eating shops to fulfil palatal cravings.

Curry is a British invention. The Indians do not call any of their dishes curry. Instead, they call their dishes by their names, rogan gosh or korma. The British lumped all of them together as curry.

Indian cooking could not be reined in. As the Indian diaspora migrated or were sent as labourers to various places worldwide, cravings kept spreading. Indian cooking style spread to the Caribbean, the Malayan archipelago, the Southeast Asian countries, the Pacific islands of Fiji and Tonga, and even Japan. Surprisingly, one country where curry occupies a position of national importance almost equal to the place of Indian food in Britain is Japan, which has no colonial connection with India and indeed boasts its own sophisticated food culture. The Japanese found it easier to feed their large army during WW2.

During the British Empire, when indulging in the exotic of Eastern mysticism was hip, it later became low-brow to consume curry. It then turned upon itself to come a full circle. In 2001, Chicken Tikka Masala became the British National Dish. One can probably find Indian food or something claiming to be Indian anywhere globally. This must be another of India's soft power.

Over the centuries, new foodstuffs and recipes have transformed Indian food. In modern India, the kitchens of the growing Indian bourgeoisie have joined the imperial kitchens of the Mughal emperors, the bakehouses of the Portuguese settlers at Goa, the Vaisnavite temple kitchens in the south, and the cookhouses of the British in India as the engines of culinary change.

Tea gets a special mention here as it was the British went all out to promote tea in India. There was no divine calling to make Indians drink this beverage. It was all economics. The British tried to introduce it in public places, including railway stations. The Indians were quite happy with water and buttermilk. In the South, coffee was a favourite indulgence. The British could not understand why Indians mixed so many things into their teas- spice, copious amounts of milk, ginger, and how they boil the tea leaves. Well, eat your words. Chai tea is a real thing now.

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Wealth bequeath power for generations to come!

Fool Me Once (Miniseries, S01 E01-08; 2023)

The thing that piqued my interest is the apparent class difference that happens in the UK. It is common knowledge that European societies were separated based on their professions. Pretty soon, the professions were imprinted on their surnames. Weavers became Webbers and Webster, clerks to Clarke, shoemakers to Schumachers, scholars to Scully, tillers to Tyler, and the various Smiths and Taylors.

Specific surnames denoted aristocracy and privileged them to move around the royal family and stand a chance to pick a bone strewn by the monarch. Hanging around with the right crowd ensured prosperity and opportunities to venture out to exotic lands and further fatten the family coffers.

Talking about making an overseas trip and coming back rich, besides the Pirates of the Caribbean, we have, from the East, Robert Clive. Robert Clive owes much of his existence to India, and he had appropriated the word India into his name. Clive of India had amassed so much from political wrangling and military conniving. He started employment in the East India Company as an office clerk and, through his expert manoeuvring, overthrew one of the wealthiest rulers in India to bring home £25miilion in today's money. His status was raised to a Baron for his efforts in bringing in foreign exchange. His family was set for generations to come.

When the imperialist powers moved their mercantile prowess to the East, they tried to pigeonhole their subjects into similar divisions. They found this kind of 'divide and rule' helpful as it also created animosity amongst its subjects. The imperialists laughed all the way to their ship and their motherlands. Years later, from their lootings, they emerged as first-world nations, smelling of roses. Their subjects, even generations later, stay stinking as basket cases. They not only still had to look up to their former colonial masters but also be dependent on them for items of precise engineering.

That was what went through my mind when I viewed this miniseries. It is set in an obscenely colossal manor in the UK as the family comes to terms with the brutal murder of one of its sons. Things take a turn when a nannycam picks up the deceased on camera playing with his daughter.

Pandora's box opens many family secrets, under-table dealings, family dirty linen and shady family businesses involving Big Pharma and poor third-world nations.

Expect a Sivaji's 1964' Puthiya Paravai' kind of ending in this one!

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Guess who's for dinner?

I used to think that only isolated primitive tribal people practised cannibalism. Long before there was such a thing as headhunters, the employment agency, the indigenous people of Sarawak, were the original headhunters. They were fabled to kill their enemies, shrunk their skulls and wore them as ornaments. Even in modern times, consuming the human brain was a delicacy amongst the tribes in Papua New Guinea. We learnt about Kuru, the first human prion-linked disease, way before the world heard of Cruetzfelt-Jakob disease (CJD) or Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE, Mad Cow Disease). Kuru was transmitted when attendees of tribal funerals would consume the brain of the recently departed in their honour.

I was made to believe that only primitive ‘uncivilised’ natives only had such practices. The colonial masters were quick to label anyone who had built the courage to oppose their rule as cannibal as they did to Thugees in India and Mao Mao people in Kenya.

The Thuggees were the local dwellers who were doing nothing more than defending their jungles against the colonisers who were keen to appropriate the forests to mine the minerals allegedly found there. To justify their usurping these lands, the colonists labelled them professional robbers and murderers. Just because the locals prayed to a ferocious-looking Kaali, Thurga, with weapons, protruding tongue while stepping on asuras, they were labelled as cannibals. The British ended up stealing the land and appropriating the words ‘jungle’, which the locals called a forest. ‘Thugs’ made it into English to refer to a violent, lawless person.

In mid-century Kenya, the British colonists, in their expertise to bring nations to their knees via their divide-and-rule tactics, started spreading lies about a group of aggrieved British Kenyan soldiers who became freedom fighters. They were Mau Mau warriors. Their reputation became so bad that mothers used to scare their crying kids that the Mau Mau people would snatch them and eat them if they did not quieten down and sleep.

The implication of all these is that cannibalism is the limit of human cruelty. Once one eats up a fellow human, he has crossed the point of no return.

Surprise, surprise.

The practice of consumption of human flesh is not alien to Europe. It peaked in the 17th century when it was a rage to consume human meat. There was even a lucrative black market to source Egyptian mummies. It was believed that the medicinal composition of the mummies and the mystic aura surrounding the carcasses gave them special powers. It was fashionable as late as the late 18th century among the elite society to hold private 'mummy-feasting' parties. Then there was a symbolism of the Eucharist representing Jesus' human body, consumed during Holy Communion as if justifying man ingesting another.

Then there is the legacy of Dracula and the pseudo-medical elixir of vitality, including human blood. Even to date, like a cat, humans eat the placentas of their offspring directly or in concoctions.

Guess what (or who) is for dinner? And I wonder who is coming for dinner tonight or who is for dinner tonight?

Are these thugs?

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Out of India it is, not Aryan Migration theory!

The Saraswati Civilisation. (2019)

(A Paradigm Shift in Ancient Indian History)
Author: Maj General Dr GD Bakshi

In secondary school history class, we were taught to believe that civilisation developed circa 1500 BCE around the Indus River. Then came mighty learned men from the Steppe Land on horsebacks to bring knowledge and wisdom to this region. The original inhabitants of this region ran helter-skelter, crossing the Vindhya Hills to root themselves in the Southern part of the subcontinent. We vaguely remember being told about the Aryan Invasion Theory and the clear demarcation between the Northern part of India and the South.

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Later in life, we were exposed to Mahabharata, Ramayana and Bhagavad Gita. What was taught as mythological tales, we later found out, was actually backed with scientific facts. For starters, the birth dates of specific icons could be fact-checked as their birthdates were described in relation to astronomical positions. These scriptures also illustrate a lush culture along the banks of a massive river with a width of up to 6-8km with torrents of glacier water, traversing 4,600km from the Himalayas. The scientific calculations of this event place it somewhere 5,000 to 6,000 years before the present, i.e. ~3000 BCE. It is also said to bear water from Yamuna and Sutlej.

Bunkum, say the Western historians and leftist-minded members of the academia. Even modern-day Indian historians, among which Romila Thapar is infamous, concur with the theory that Aryan Invasion is true and the Sarasvati River did not exist.

Since the 1970s, with the aid of satellite images, traces the presence of a large basin reminiscent of a dried-up river. We know Carbon C14 dating on archaeological finds is not easy. However, local archaeologists are confident that Indus-Saraswati could be as old as 9,500 years before the present. If that is true, the Indus-Saraswati must be the cradle of civilisation, preceding the Tigris-Euphrates one.

The Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-Daro
Indus Valley Civilisation
?2300-1750 BCE.

Archaeological excavation reveals they find spoils away from Indus, nearer to Saraswati River's 'mythical' placement. Perhaps, the descriptions of Rig Veda, about the glory of Saraswati and the glorious kingdom surrounding Saraswati, actually denote Harappa civilisation. Is it not amazing that cultural traditions, as seen in statues from Mohinjo-Daro and Harappa, are still practised in the sub-continent even today? 

Geologists suggest massive technotic plate movements that made the Yamuna and Salrej rivers change course between 4,600 and 2,700 years ago. Only during monsoons the Sarswati used to drain. Later, Saraswati water went underground, leaving pockets of pools. The Ganges became more prominent as Yamuna and Sutlej brought in a glacial stream of water. So, the Saraswathi described in Rig Veda corresponds to the lifeline of the scriptures.

If the Aryans did indeed move into Indus/Sarasvathi Valley, we would have been moving into a desiccated plain where the rivers had run dry by 1500 BCE. If the Aryans brought in culture, archaeological dating of Mohinjo-Daro and Harappa buildings would pre-date this timeline.

Now, who are these Aryans? Are they alien immigrants or indigenous to the area? Genetic tracking via maternal and paternal DNA to differentiate Aryans and Dravidians and to prove migration into India does not seem convincing. Its methodology is also allegedly flawed. Its sample failed to include subjects from essential groups. There is proof Aryans were local people who had evolved all through the Paleolithic (Stone Age) through to the Neolithic and Chalcolithic (Bronze) stages of civilisation. They had become farmers and domesticated plants and animals.

In fact, many now believe that, just like there was an 'Out of Africa' theory to explain the migration of primitive homosapiens, there is a convincing case for an 'Out of India' deduction to expanding human civilisation. There is ample proof that eco-catastrophe made them out of Indus/Saraswati.

It looks like the age-old Aryan Invasion Theory propagated by Max Müller, and Mortimer Wheeler will get the boot. There is evidence of genocide to convince us that Aryans butchered cultured Dravidians and drove them southwardly. The theory that came out later, Indo-Aryan Migration, says that Aryans supposedly came in droves to a desert land.

The colonial masters probably introduced the Aryan Invasion Theory to convince their subjects that they had indeed been colonised for aeons. In a way, it was their justification to rule over India and 'civilise' them. The British left long ago, but the push to maintain the status quo is ever so strong. Detractors have, in their sleeves, many deceptive ways to prove their point of Europe and Central Asia being the cradle of civilisation, which forms the basis of Judeo-Christian ideology, not Hinduism, not India. It is peculiar that features seen in the dancing girl of Mahinjo-Daro, like the multiple bangle adornment and the vermillion marking at the parting of the hair characteristic of married women in the subcontinent, are still present today.

It drives home the point that Indian or Hindu culture, as that was how the way of life practised in this part of the world was referred to, still stand tall despite all the external forces and invaders that permeated and tried to dominate over theirs.

[P.S. The analysis of DNA samples extracted from the skeleton of a woman buried in Rakhigarhi, Haryana, four to five millennia ago rejected the theory of Steppe pastoral or ancient Iranian farmers as a source of ancestry to the Harappan population. It demolished the hypothesis about mass human migration during Harappan time from outside south Asian genes. The sample had traces of genes of Iranian lineage. Since the pieces were as old as 11,000 to 12,000 years ago, it is way before Harappan.]

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An early freedom fighter!

Marakkar: Arabikadalinte Simham (Marakkar: Lion of Arabian Sea, Malayalam, 2021)

Screenplay / Director: Priyadarshan

Of late, many movies seem to highlight and bring to the fore the many freedom fighters in India who had been lost in the annals of history. They failed to make it into the mainstream history books as the syllabi were written either by colonists or the sympathisers of their colonial masters. It seems many of the non-Muslim empires that ruled valiantly with impressive CVs like the Cholas, Pandyas and Vijayanagar just remain in the folklores and children bedtime stories. Luckily, the current generation of scholars appears to be digging deep into the dusted palm leaves and forgotten scripts to remind everyone of the nation's fallen heroes.

Long before Jhansi Rani rode to fight the tyranny of the East India Company in 1857, there was Queen Velu Natchiyar from Sivagangai District, who holds the reputation of being the first Queen who fought the British. In 1780, with the allegiance she built with Sultan Hyder Ali of Mysore, she reclaimed her land from the British invaders. She formed the first all-women regiment named Udaiyal Army. Her aide/adopted daughter, Kuyili, is said to be the first suicide bomber. She had doused in ghee and oil, immolated herself and walked into the English ammunition depot.

Then there are Bhagat Singh, Veerapandia Kattabomman, V O Sithambaram, Chandra Bose, the INA and many more who hardly gets mentioned in the mainstream narratives. Thanks to the new generation of moviemakers, the general public is able to view these oft-forgotten icons of yesteryears on the silver screen. 

The current tone in India portrays Muslim marauders as looters and destroyers of India's past wealth and glory. They bear the single burden of destroying the whole web of scientific wisdom that existed there before their invasion.

 

Not wanting to be left out in the sea of the revival of the long-lost Hindu warriors, Muslims of India probably dug deep into their armamentarium to unveil this 16th-century defender of the motherland. This film is perhaps the result of that.

Kunjali Marakkar
Memorial
©Nmkuttiady

In the 16th century, when pirates were hailed as national heroes, naval power was king. We remember a time in British history when the British Crown rewarded pirates for stealing off the Spanish ships that carried gold and silver from South America.

By the early 16th century, the Portuguese had reached the Malabar coast. Many European nations were eager to find an alternative route to the spice trade controlled by Arab traders. Slowly and indeed, the Portuguese befriended local warring chieftains. Trouble brewed when a new law dictated that spice could only be traded through the Portuguese, upsetting their age-old traditions. 

The Marakkars are said to be seafaring people who have their origin in the Arab peninsula. They had settled in Kochi and were involved in the King navy and shipbuilding. The Marakkars had been helping to fight the Portuguese in many wars. 

This movie is a biopic of the fourth Kanjali Marakkar, Kozhikode's ruler's fleet Admiral. After his family was doublecrossed, the Marakkars go underground, performing minor thefts. Their help is summoned when the local chieftains feel that a combined effort is necessary. One of the slaves aboard a Portuguese ship, Chinnali, joined the Marakkars to give the Portuguese a run for their money. 

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