After the First World War the Britishness the Anglo-Indians so self-consciously preserved became increasingly out of date. Newcomers to India in the 1920s and 30s felt as though they had been transported back in time. One memsahib described how she ‘stepped into an almost Edwardian life . . . The bungalow was large and old-fashioned, tended by an army of servants . . . we rode every morning before breakfast . . . Life was very formal. Winifred and I would be driven out to the shops or to pay calls in the morning, for which . . . one wore hat and gloves . . . In the afternoon . . . one rested or wrote letters.’ Socialising consisted of race meetings, garden parties, polo meets and formal dinner parties.77
Anglo-India had failed to keep pace with social change in the home country. The dinner parties seemed convention-bound and old-fashioned. In Britain it was becoming less common to dress for dinner, but Anglo-Indians continued to insist on it, and everyone still sat at the table, no matter how small the party, in order of precedence. This insistence on stiff formality struck many as pompous and slightly absurd. In the nineteenth century, Anglo-Indian pseudo-British dishes had been recognisable approximations of those eaten at home. Post-1919, the food seemed odd. Savouries had been relegated to formal dinners in Britain, but even on the most ordinary occasions Anglo-Indians still served what they referred to as ‘toast’ after the dessert. Usually this was something like sardines, or mashed brain spiced with green chillies on toast.78 The Victorians had delighted in trompe l’oeil jokery. The famous chef Alexis Soyer loved to surprise his guests by making a boar’s head out of cake, or saddles of mutton out of different coloured ice creams.79 Like the Nawab of Oudh’s inventive cooks who were able to manufacture realistic biryanis and kebabs out of caramelised sugar, the Anglo-Indians’ cooks had a penchant for food trickery. It was not unknown for them to cheer up the dull food by dyeing mashed potatoes bright red and boiled carrots purple. But this sort of thing was now hopelessly out of date. Curry was rarely served for dinner and it was possible for a British person to live in India without ever trying one.
Curry survived in a few niches of Anglo-Indian life. In Calcutta in the 1930s, the clubs would serve curries for lunch at the weekends. After a round of golf in the mornings, the men would meet up with their wives at the club, where prawn curry was usually on offer. Club curries reduced the subtleties of Indian food to three different bowls, labelled hot, medium and mild. The Sunday ritual was completed by a siesta and the cinema. Some households included mulligatawny soup for breakfast in the ritual.80 On the P&O boats which linked India to Britain, curry was served alongside the roast joints at dinner, and on the trains it survived in the guise of ‘railway curry’, as it was referred to by the Maharani of Jaipur’s family. ‘Designed to offend no palate [it contained] no beef, forbidden to Hindus; no pork, forbidden to Muslims; so, [it was] inevitably lamb or chicken curries and vegetables. Railway curry therefore pleased nobody.’81 Both the British and the Indian army messes kept up the tradition of curry lunches. In 1936 Edward Palmer, caterer to the Wembley exhibition of 1924–5 and founder of Veeraswamy’s Indian restaurant, was invited to lecture to the army cooks at Aldershot on curry-making. During the Second World War trainee cooks in the army catering corps were taught how to make curries by adding curry powder to a roux of flour, and army stock books show that cooks were allotted supplies of curry powder each month. Major Eric Warren, who served with the Royal Marines from 1945 to 1978 ate curry throughout his career in officers’ messes from Hong Kong to Cyprus and the West Indies. A standard item on the Sunday-lunch menu, they were always accompanied by an array of side dishes, including sliced bananas, pieces of pineapple and poppadoms. Slightly sweet yellow curries, dotted with raisins and made with fantastical fruits, were still served in British army messes in the 1970s and 80s.82 Indeed, the army and the merchant navy were two important routes by which Anglo-Indian curries found their way to Britain. It was on board ship and in messes, during the Second World War, that many British men who had never travelled before were introduced to curry.83
After Indian independence in 1947, the self-contained world of Anglo-India was maintained among the British businessmen who ‘stayed on’. Club life continued, cucumber sandwiches and sponge cake were served at tennis parties, and savouries still appeared at dinner parties.84 At Queen Mary’s School, Bombay, run by Scottish missionaries, Camellia Panjabi and her fellow pupils were treated to ‘baked fish, baked mince (cottage pie), dhol (English and Anglo-Indian for dhal) and yellow rice, mutton curry and rice, coconut pancakes, and Malabar sago pudding’. It was only when she went to university in Britain that it became clear to her that real British food ‘had none of the spices and seasonings that we had experienced as children in “English food” in India. It was then that I realised that “Indian English food” was a sort of hybrid cuisine in its own right.’85 On the railways and in dak bungalows stringy chicken and masala omelettes survived for a while. The Bengalis, fond of sweets, have adopted a few British desserts such as caramel custard and trifle.86 And in guest houses in Calcutta minced meat and mashed potato cutlets or chops are still on the menu. Soggy chips and vegetable cutlets served with a sachet of tomato ketchup, some toast and a cup of tea are standard breakfast fare on Indian trains.87 The dislocated Anglo-Indian community of mixed British and Indian heritage still eat stew and apple crumble. At the Fairlawn Hotel on Sudder Street in Calcutta, the white-gloved waiters politely hand round roast buffalo. The meal is finished with a savoury of sardines on toast.88 And at the Bengal Club in Calcutta the burra khana lives on: with one attentive bearer to every dinner guest and mulligatawny soup, ‘chicken dopiaz’ and orange soufflé on the menu.89
Despite the fact that remnants of Anglo-Indian cookery clung on in odd corners of the subcontinent, an English roast was surrounded by an aura of the exotic for the young author Manil Suri, growing up in Bombay in the 1970s. Inspired by the novels of Enid Blyton, which were filled with picnics, and by an English cookery book picked up at the local store, he longed to taste tongue sandwiches, scones and a roast lamb. But it was impossible to find the ingredients and his mother’s kitchen was not even equipped with an oven. After several attempts, which produced ‘grey and flabby’ boiled goat and an utterly inedible Neapolitan soufflé, to his family’s relief Suri gave up.90
Bengali potatoes
The British introduced the Bengalis to the potato but no self-respecting Indian cook would have produced plain boiled vegetables. The Bengalis quickly incorporated European vegetables into their own recipes, and this particular way of cooking potatoes results in an unusual sweet-sour flavour. Serves 4–6.
5–6 tablespoons vegetable oil
3cm stick of cinnamon
4 cardamom pods
4 whole cloves
2 bay leaves
2 onions, very finely chopped
10 cloves garlic, crushed
½–1 teaspoon chilli powder
1 teaspoon turmeric
500g small new potatoes
1 tablespoon tamarind pulp mixed with 250ml warm water
salt to taste
jaggery (or soft brown sugar) to taste
Heat the oil. When it is hot throw in the cinnamon stick, cardamom pods, cloves, and bay leaves, and fry for about 1 minute. Add the onions and fry until they brown. Add the garlic and fry for another 6 minutes. Then add the chilli powder, turmeric and the potatoes. Fry, stirring constantly, until the potatoes are coated in the spice mixture. Add the tamarind pulp mixture, the salt and jaggery, and bring to the boil. Then turn the heat low and simmer until the potatoes are done. You may need to add more water to prevent the sauce from burning.
Pathan labourers of the frontier area enjoying their afternoon tea between work
8
Chai: the great tea campaign
ONE MORNING IN 1936 a ‘special demonstration unit’ arrived at the door of a wealthy Nagarathar family in the provincial town of Karaikudi (Tamil Nadu). The special unit, consisting of ‘an experienced and senior Sub-Inspector a
nd an Attender’, was ushered into the house where they set up their equipment: a small stove, a kettle, milk jug, sugar basin, china cups and saucers, and a teapot. The kettle was set to boil and the ladies of the family were shown how to pour the boiling water over a carefully measured amount of tea. Once it had brewed for the required period, the golden liquid was poured into the china cups and the process of adding milk and sugar was demonstrated. The tea was then handed round to the members of the family who had gathered round to watch. The special unit were working for the Indian Tea Association and the Nagarathars were a small but influential sub-caste who had resisted earlier attempts by the Tea Association campaigners to persuade them to drink tea. They had been buying half-anna packets of tea, but had been giving them away to their servants. Apparently, the fact that previous tea demonstrations had used tea prepared in the homes of their lower-caste neighbours had proved offensive. Determined to change their ways, the special unit had abandoned the tea urns usually used to make demonstration tea and had set about wooing 240 Nagarathar families in Karaikudi with freshly boiled water and elegant china cups. The unit’s efforts were successful and the tea demonstrations became an event in the households they visited. By the end of four months, 220 of the Nagarathar families had been converted to tea drinking.1
The Nagarathars’ refusal to drink tea was by no means exceptional. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the majority of Indians did not know how to make a cup of tea and were reluctant to drink one.
Now that India is both the world’s major producer and consumer of tea, this seems incredible. It confounds the myth that the British acquired their love of tea from their Indian subjects. In fact, it was the British who introduced tea to the Indians. Although they barely changed the way Indians eat, the British radically altered what they eat and drink. While the introduction of a wide variety of European and American vegetables to India was an inadvertent by-product of British rule, the conversion of the population to tea drinking was the result of what must have been the first major marketing campaign in India. The British-owned Indian Tea Association set itself the task of first creating a new habit among the Indian population, and then spreading it across the entire subcontinent.
Tea drinking began in China during the fourth century. From China, it spread to Japan sometime between the sixth and eighth centuries, where it became an important social ritual. It also spread into Tibet and the Himalayan regions north of India, where tea was drunk as a kind of soup mixed with butter. On the eastern fringes of India, in Assam and further east in Burma and Thailand, the hill tribes chewed steamed and fermented tea leaves.2 Despite being bordered by tea-drinking (or -chewing) countries, India remained impervious to the charms of tea. When the interpreter for the Chinese Embassy of Cheng Ho visited Bengal in 1406, he was surprised to note that the Bengalis offered betel nuts to their guests rather than tea.3 Coffee had been introduced into India by the Arabs, Persians and central Asians who found employment under the Mughals. The young German traveller, Albert Mandelslo, who passed through Surat in 1638, noticed that the Persians ‘drink their Kahwa which cools and abates the natural heat’. Coffee houses could be found on Chandni Chowk, Delhi’s main thoroughfare. ‘An innovation from Persia, these were places where amirs [Mughal noblemen] gathered to listen to poetry, engage in conversation, and watch the passing scene.’4 Moplah Arab traders had introduced coffee to the west coast, and the south-western hills were dotted with tiny coffee gardens.5 For the most part, however, the coffee-drinking habit was confined to wealthy Muslims and did not spread to the rest of the population.6 As the chaplain Edward Terry noticed, Indians preferred water: ‘That most antient and innocent Drink of the World, Water, is the common drink of East-India; it is far more pleasant and sweet than our water; and must needs be so, because in all hot Countries it is more rarified, better digested, and freed from its rawness by the heat of the Sun, and therefore in those parts it is more desired of all that come thither.’ In northern India the villagers also drank buttermilk, a by-product of the Indian way of making ghee, by churning yogurt (as opposed to the European method of churning cream). If they wanted something stronger, they drank arrack or toddy.7
European East India merchants brought tea with them to India from China. Indian textiles could be exchanged there for Bohea (black) and green tea as well as for silks, hams, Chinese jars, quicksilver and vermilion.8 Mandelslo, who noticed the Persians drinking coffee, observed that ‘at our ordinary meetings’ the English at Surat ‘used only Thé, which is commonly used all over the Indies, not only among those of the Country, but also among the Dutch and English’.9 Indeed, the Dutch were said to be so fond of the brew that among them the teapot was ‘seldom off the fire, or unimploy’d’. Under the influence of the East India merchants, the Banians at Surat learned to drink ‘liberal Draughts of Tea and Coffee, to revive their wasted Spirits, any part of the Day’.10 But Mandelslo was mistaken in his assumption that tea was used as a refreshing drink by the entire Indian population. Even in the nineteenth century Indians stubbornly regarded tea as a medicine. An Englishwoman living in Lucknow in the 1830s observed that ‘china tea sets are very rarely found in the zeenahnah; . . . The ladies . . . must have a severe cold to induce them to partake of the beverage even as a remedy, but by no means as a luxury.’11 Prakash Tandon’s great-uncle, who was a pandit in the law courts of Punjab in the 1860s and 70s, would take a glass of milk, almond or fruit juice at four o’clock but ‘tea was unknown in those days except as a remedy for chest troubles’.12
Tea was initially used by monks in China (and later in Japan) as a herbal remedy for headaches and pains in the joints, as well as an aid to meditation. But it fairly rapidly became a favourite everyday drink with the majority of the population. Similarly, among the other nationalities who took up tea, it was first adopted as a medicine. The Dutch in India, who constantly had the teapot boiling, would mix it with spices and add sugar or conserved lemons, and even sometimes a slosh of arrack, to mix up a pleasant cure for headaches, gravel, ‘Griping in the Guts’ and ‘Twistings of the Bowel’.13 Mandelslo attributed his recovery from burning fever and bloody flux to the tea which he drank on an English ship sailing across the Persian Gulf to Surat.14 In Britain, Mrs Pepys famously tried drinking tea in 1667 as a cure for ‘cold and defluxions’.15 Among all these nationalities tea quickly escaped from the medicine cabinet and found itself a secure home in the kitchen cupboard. In India, however, it remained firmly in the category of herbal remedy (even today Bengalis regard tea mixed with ginger juice as a cure for colds),16 and the tea-loving British were forced to carry their own supplies of tea leaves when they travelled into the Indian countryside, as it was impossible to buy tea there.17 But the British-run Indian Tea Association was to change all this.
In 1823 Robert Bruce, stationed as a British agent in Assam, noticed the Singpho people drinking an infusion of the dried leaves of a plant that looked suspiciously like Camellia sinensis, in other words tea. He wrote to his brother Charles, who later reminded the government that ‘I was the first European who ever penetrated the forests and visited the tea tracts in British Sadiya, and brought away specimens of earth, fruit and flowers, and the first to discover numerous other tracts’.18 Charles Bruce’s injured tone arose from the fact that the British government paid absolutely no attention to his discovery. Then, in 1834, Lt. Andrew Charlton of the Assam Light Infantry, also stationed in Sadiya, persuaded the authorities in Calcutta to investigate the possibility of growing tea in India. Charlton later received a medal for discovering tea in India, much to Bruce’s chagrin. But Charlton’s timing was better. At the end of the 1820s the British East India Company became concerned that they might lose their monopoly of the China trade, which they did in 1833. Given that tea was their main import from China, accounting for £70,426,244 of the £72,168,541 made from the China trade between 1811 and 1819, they had an interest in finding an alternative source of tea.19 In addition, the Chinese reliance on small householders, who grew t
ea on their tiny plots of land, was a haphazard, labour-intensive and unreliable way of producing a commodity which had become vital to the British. The company was required to keep a year’s supply in stock at all times, to protect the British public from supply shortages.20
By the end of the eighteenth century, tea had become the British drink. At first a herbal remedy for the wealthy elite, it soon became a fashionable beverage. It provided a good replacement for the glass of sweet wine which aristocratic ladies used to take with a biscuit in the afternoons, and it allowed them to show off their collections of delicate porcelain tea bowls. In the 1730s, a direct clipper link with China and a reduction in taxes on tea meant that it became affordable for nearly everyone. In 1717, Tom Twining had two adjoining houses in London, one selling coffee and the other tea. By 1734, the consumption of tea had taken off to such an extent that he sublet the coffee house and concentrated on selling tea.21 Tea suited the new middle-class lifestyle perfectly. Served with bread and butter and cake, it tided middle-class ladies over until dinner, which was now eaten much later, as the gentleman of the house did not come home from his office until after five o’clock. It was also popular among the labouring classes. With the addition of sugar it made an energising drink and in 1767 road menders were observed pooling their money to buy tea-making equipment. Haymakers developed a preference for cups of tea rather than glasses of beer.22 Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor noted that tea and coffee had replaced saloop (the powder of an orchid imported from India) and sugary rice milk.23 By the early 1830s, the East India Company was importing approximately 30 million pounds per annum which translated into each person in the country drinking about a pound of tea a year. This provided the Exchequer with £3,300,000 in duty, or one-tenth of its total revenue.24 It therefore made perfect sense when Governor-General William Bentinck appointed a tea committee in February 1834 to look into the idea that India might be a good place to set up the company’s own tea production under the latest efficient means of agricultural production.25
Curry Page 20
