Sen - Feasts and fasts: a history of food in India

FOODS AND NATIONS is a new series from Reaktion that explores the history and geography of food. Books in the series reveal the hidden history behind the food eaten today in different countries and regions of the world, telling the story of how food production and consumption developed, and how they were influenced by the culinary practices of other places and peoples. Each book in the Foods and Nations series offers fascinating insights into the distinct flavours of a country and its culture.

Already published

Al Dente: A History of Food in Italy

Fabio Parasecoli

Beyond Bratwurst: A History of Food in Germany

Ursula Heinzelmann

Feasts and Fasts: A History of Food in India

Colleen Taylor Sen

A History of Food
in India

C OLLEEN T AYLOR S EN

REAKTION BOOKS

In memory of my mother,
Kathleen Gilbert Taylor

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33 Great Sutton Street
London EC1V 0DX, UK

www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2015

Copyright Colleen Taylor Sen 2015

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and
Index match the printed edition of this book.

Printed and bound in China
by C&C Offset Printing Co., Ltd

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

eISBN: 9781780233918

[India] was like some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously... Though outwardly there was diversity and infinite variety among our people, everywhere there was that tremendous impress of oneness, which had held all of us together for ages past, whatever political fate or misfortune had befallen us.

Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (1946)

I ndia has been called a universe, not a country. It is the second most populous country in the world after China and the seventh largest in area; no other country has such a diversity of climate and soil, race and language, religion and sect, tribe, caste and class, custom and cuisine.

From ancient times, foreign travellers have marvelled at the countrys agricultural bounty. Plants indigenous to India include lentils (such as urad, mung and masur dal), millet, aubergines, many tubers, pumpkins, melons and gourds, mangoes, jackfruit, citrus fruit, ginger, turmeric, tamarind, and black and long pepper. India is also the home of domesticated chickens. Today these foodstuffs are still central to the diet of a great many Indians.

But India was also one of the worlds first global economies. From the time of the Indus Valley civilization in the third millennium BCE, it was the centre of a vast network of land and sea trade routes that were a conduit for plants, ingredients, dishes and cooking techniques from and to Afghanistan, Persia, Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa, China, Southeast Asia and the Indonesian archipelago. The spread of Buddhism from India to China, Southeast Asia, Korea and Japan changed the dietary habits of those countries. Later, Europeans brought plants from the western hemisphere and elsewhere, including tomatoes, pineapples, cashews, potatoes and chillies. All these added layer upon layer to what, paraphrasing Nehru, we might call the palimpsest of Indian cuisine, in which no layer ever hides or erases what has gone before.

In light of this diversity, it is intriguing to unearth what makes Indian food recognizably Indian and how it came to be that way, and to investigate whether there is a gastronomic culture common to all Indians. This book addresses these questions by tracing the history of Indian food from prehistoric times to the present in the context of historical, social, religious and philosophical developments. It is organized more or less chronologically, although with certain liberties, since many old Indian works can be dated only over a span of centuries or even millennia. As one leading scholar wrote, One of the rarest gifts to those who study the vast corpus of epic and mythological literature in India is a date.

The religious, moral and philosophical significance of food is an important theme of the book, since in India, more than in any other part of the world, food has been invested with meaning as a marker of identity. The corollary of You are what you eat is You eat what you are. Buddhists, Jains, Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims and those adhering to other religions have their own food prescriptions and proscriptions. Feasts to celebrate festivals and life transitions and fasts for spiritual and medical reasons are universal on the subcontinent.

Another important theme is the unbreakable connection between diet and health. Diet was the prime treatment in Ayurveda (Indian medicine) and Unani (Islamic medicine). Modern scientific research is now confirming the efficacy of many Ayurvedic treatments and ingredients.

My sources for this book include reports on archaeological discoveries for the earliest period; scripture, philosophical writing and treatises or books of rules (shastras); Ayurvedic texts; Kautilyas (Chanakyas) Arthashastra; the Hindu epics; the Tamil Sangam literature and other poems; the accounts of foreign travellers from the time of Alexander the Great onwards; and memoirs. The first rudimentary cookbooks the Manasollassa, the Lokopakara, the Supa Shastra and the brilliantly illustrated Nimatnama of the sultans of Mandu began to appear only in the twelfth century. While all these works give a general idea of what and how people ate, what is missing is detailed information about exactly how dishes were prepared. The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai wrote:

Recipes, the elementary forms of the culinary life, are missing in the great tradition of Hinduism... While there is an immense amount written about eating and feeding, precious little is said about cooking in Hindu legal medical or philosophical texts... Food is principally either a moral or medical matter in traditional Hindu thought.

Because of this physical and cultural diversity, there are not one but many distinctive Indian cuisines based on regional, religious and social differences too many to enumerate in this or perhaps any work. Indian regional variations and the domestic consumption of food were largely ignored by British administrators and writers and have received relatively little attention from historians. The study of food has been left largely to anthropologists, who, as one member of the profession put it, have developed a large and impressive conceptual apparatus for talking about food abstracted from its historical context.

The most comprehensive study of Indian foodways to date is Professor K. T. Achayas brilliant A Historical Companion to Indian Food (and its companion volume, A Historical Dictionary of Indian Food