I wrote last weekend about how Punjabi food — not the kind Punjabis eat at home but the restaurant version—remained the top choice for Indians who ate out. A tweet about the article featured a photo of kababs from Bukhara, the ultimate Punjabi restaurant. This evoked comments on social media about how kababs are actually not Punjabi at all and are part of a Turkish/Arab/Central Asian/ Persian (pick Muslim country of your choice) tradition.
I have written about all this so often that I am weary of making the same points again and again. But two trends in popular (rather than well-informed) commentary about Indian food refuse to fade. The first is to deny that anything that is popular in India could have Islamic origins. Coffee, samosas, jalebis, and other foods which came to us from the Middle East, are all claimed to be of entirely Indian origin, which they are clearly not. (Also read: The Taste by Vir Sanghvi: The guide to enjoying junk food )
The defining feature of this trend is to claim every vegetarian dish for pre-Muslim India. All that the centuries of contact (trade, military, imperial etc.) with Muslims and the Islamic world brought us, we are told, is lots of animal-slaughter which shocked Hindus who were all vegetarians. This is utter nonsense; India was a country full of non-vegetarians long before the Prophet was even born.
But there is also a second trend which is as wrong and misconceived. Too many people (often entirely secular persons) claim that every popular non-vegetarian dish is really from Western or Central Asia. So, kababs, biryani, all mutton curries etc. are said to be non-Indian.
I don’t suppose the people who spread this nonsense have any communal agenda. Nor is it their intention to perpetrate the caricature of vegetarian Hindus and non-vegetarian Muslims. Alas the people who advance this view, with their forceful claims on behalf of Arabia or Turkey, become unwitting propagandists for a bogus Hindutva view of India’s food history.
The truth is that in a country like India whose history is marked by global trade, by conquests and by migrations, it is impossible to expect that our food today will be exactly the same as the food our ancestors ate a thousand years ago. In reality our cuisine has evolved over the centuries as a consequence of various external influences.
The big divide, in fact, is not between any conception of pre-Muslim and post-Muslim food. It is between the food that our ancestors ate before the Europeans got here and after.
Many of the defining ingredients of today’s Indian food — chillies, tomatoes, potatoes, for instance — only got to India because of European traders and colonialists.
When it comes to the ingredients that we got as a consequence of what is called the Columbian Exchange (the discovery of the New World which gave us many new vegetables, fruit and other foods ), it is possible to trace when certain ingredients entered our country. But with most other foods, it is very difficult to be specific.
Let’s take the example of tandoori chicken. We can trace the dish with some certainty to Peshawar in the 1930s when a man called Moka Singh started putting chicken in the tandoors that were usually used for baking bread. After Partition the dish came to Delhi and it slowly spread all over India in the late 1950s and 1960s. It has no foreign origins (Peshawar was a part of undivided India) and no clear Islamic connection. The restaurants that opened in India in the post-Partition period to serve tandoori dishes were mostly run by Punjabi Hindus and Sikhs.
It does not surprise me that proponents of the Hindutva view of our food history black out this story. But I am shocked when secular people try and find a Middle Eastern/Islamic origin for tandoori chicken. As there is no record of the dish anywhere in West Asia they fall back on saying “but the tandoor is a Middle-Eastern invention.”
Well maybe. Or maybe not. In most of Central and West Asia, versions of the tandoor are still used mainly for baking bread. They are rarely used to cook chicken.
And is the tandoor either Hindu or Muslim? Archaeologists have found what look like early versions of the tandoor while excavating the Indus Valley sites. These date back centuries, long before Islam was born or Hinduism took the form we know it by today. So why introduce a Hindu-Muslim element to the subject?
Did the tandoor reach the Middle East from the Indus Valley? Once again: we don’t know. What about the chicken itself? It is believed (though this view has recently been contested) that chickens were first domesticated during the Indus Valley Civilisation.
We know that there were strong trade links between the Indus Valley and Middle Eastern civilizations. Both the tandoor and the chicken could have travelled from India. Or the reverse could have happened.
The point is: we can’t say for sure. And it is foolish to make politically-tinged, chauvinistic or communal claims based on so little evidence. And yet, people do it all the time.
Let’s consider the kabab. Frankly, the idea of cooking pieces of meat on a stick (or skewer) over a fire is a pretty obvious one which is why variations of the dish turn up all over the world.
As the food historians Colleen Taylor Sen writes in her Feasts and Fasts: a History of Food in India, the grilling of meat “directly on a fire, skewered on sticks was common in ancient Mesopotamia and in the Indus Valley Civilisation.” This tradition continued to exist in India through the centuries; the Manasollasa, a 12th century text, has recipes for what we would call kababs those days. It is wrong to believe, says Sen, “that elaborate meat dishes appeared only with the arrival of the Muslims. Early texts even have recipes that are very similar to today’s chapli or seekh kababs.”
So when did we start calling these dishes ‘kababs’? Hard to say. The kabab does not appear in medieval Arab cookbooks. Our own seekh can probably be traced to Persia (not Turkey or any Arab country), where a flatter version with totally different spicing is still popular. What our seekh has in common with its Persian ancestor is the skewer and the cooking on a sigri or an open-fire. But the seekh we eat at restaurants in India today has even less in common with its Iranian great grandfather because not only is it bigger and much rounder, it is made in the tandoor which no Persian version ever is.
Why do we make it in the tandoor? Well, because no matter what its origins were, the Punjabification of Indian food has resulted in the creation of a new kind of seekh that has only the skewer in common with its Persian ancestor. Its shape, spicing and size are all quite different as is the cooking method. So food is a complicated business. It is hard to be categorical. And it’s foolish to say things like “this is Indian ”, “this is Arab” and especially “this is Muslim”, or “this is Hindu”.
Nor is it useful or important to make these distinctions. Each time you eat a dish you enjoy, just think of the centuries of evolution that went into it, marvel at the cross-cultural influences it reflects. And say to yourself: this is what India’s diversity and pluralistic food tradition are about.
