After Idlis It is Now Chutneys
Shrikant G. Talageri
Again, like another earlier article on the origin of idlis that I had written about, a chance glance at google brought to my notice one more of the divest-India-of-credit-for-its-cultural-contributions projects by anti-Indian "scholars". The article purports to delve into the history of chutneys:
The article begins by making chutneys the be-all-and-end-all of Indian cuisine, "because without chutney there is no taste in [Indian] food."
After descriptions of different kinds of chutneys from different parts of India, the writer muses intellectually: "But have you ever thought that when and who would have made the chutney for the first time? Who would have thought of this spicy dish and why only chutney was kept in it? Read more to find out about the history of chutney."
No surprise at all in the writer's discovery that it was the Mughals who first introduced chutneys into Indian cuisine! To make his point, he cites the following fairy tale: "Chutney is a Sanskrit word, and it is believed that chutney was first made in India during Shah Jahan's rule, when he fell ill. Shah Jahan's Hakim had advised his Bawari to feed him something which was tasty as well as spicy. Not only this, the food should be such that it can be easily digested. It is said that mint and tamarind chutney was first prepared. After this, sweet date chutney was made for Shahjahan. Since then, the number of people fond of chutney has increased in India and today chutney from fruit to flower is made".
This discovery is based perhaps on some akashwani from heaven, since the article does not cite the specific document from Shah Jahan's time which gives testimony to the idea that no chutney existed in India before some cook of Shah Jahan's invented it to fulfil some prescription of some hakim. Nor does it explain why exactly Shah Jahan or his Muslim hakim or his cook should invent something new and give it a Sanskrit name, when the practice in Mughal times was to take Indian cultural items and give them Persian-Arabic names while inventing fairy tales to show that they originated in the courts of the Mughals!
As Alain Danielou points out in the field of music: “Amir Khusrau (AD 1253-1319)…wrote that Indian music was so difficult and so refined that no foreigner could totally master it even after twenty years of practice”; and the Muslim attachment to Indian music grew to such an extent that it led to the invention of stories about “how the various styles of Northern Indian music were developed by musicians of the Mohammedan period…Under Moslem rule, age-old stories were retold as if they had happened at the court of Akbar…Such transfer of legends is frequent everywhere. We…find ancient musical forms and musical instruments being given Persian-sounding names and starting a new career as the innovations of the Moghul court” (DANIELOU:1949:34)".
The glib way in which everything Indian is sought to be credited to the Mughals, or to some other country (whether China, Indonesia, Persia or some part of Africa), is a field of study in itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment