An Arabic Word Halwa Makes all Indian Sweet Dishes "Imported" Dishes

 

An Arabic Word Halwa Makes all Indian Sweet Dishes "Imported" Dishes

Shrikant G. Talageri

 

Just yesterday I wrote about the attempt to make chutneys an invention of the Mughal Court. It could not be made a direct "import" from some West Asian country, because the writer in the Times of India article who claimed chutneys were an invention of the Mughal court himself admitted that the name chutney was a purely Indian (he even called it Sanskrit) word.

However the use of a ubiquitous Arabic word for "sweet", halwa,  in the name of countless sweet dishes (son halwa, mahim halwa, gajar/dudhi halwa, etc. etc.), a practice which undoubtedly started in the era of Mughal domination and continued thereafter, for many different kinds of sweets from different parts of India (most or almost all of which do not even have similar counterparts in the sweets of West Asia) is a golden opportunity for all the masterminds of all these divest-India-of-credit-for-its-cultural-contributions projects ─ who occupy prominent positions in all major Indian newspapers and journals ─ to glibly declare all or most of these sweets as inventions of the Mughals in India or direct imports from West Asia (Iran, Arabia, Turkey). Likewise the Arabic word barfi, which is used as a generic term for a wide variety of Indian sweets, also provides similar maneuvers.

So I went into google to find examples of this game being played, and came upon the following article, this time in the Indian Express, titled "Explained: a sweet Tale of how India imported halwa and made it its own":

https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-a-sweet-tale-of-how-india-imported-halwa-and-made-it-its-own-6230068/

As the article brightly tells us: "A dish that came in from Turkey is now served as kada prasad in Gurdwaras, is associated with the Hindu festival of Navratri, and even plays an important role in the Union budget".

 

It goes on: "Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Monday (January 20) presided over the Halwa ceremony at North Block, marking the commencement of the Union Budget’s printing process. The ceremony, a longstanding tradition, is a marker of how cuisines and cultures from various countries poured into India, and were adopted and adapted to make them uniquely our own.

Halwa is a ubiquitous dessert in India, found across the country with local variations — the Sindhi halwa, Mohanbhog, the Tirunelveli Halwa, even gosht (meat) halwa. It is important in various religious traditions — Gurdwaras serve halwa as ‘kada prasad’, and an important ritual during Navratri for Hindus is feeding young girls ‘halwa poori’.

Yet, this super-common Indian dish is actually an import — brought in from Turkey….".

 

Apart from the fact that sugar itself was India's contribution to the world, making it highly dubious that India should be considered to have been a sweetless country before West Asians started teaching us to make sweet dishes, or Indians started "importing" sweet dishes from West Asia, the very fact that the word "halwa" by itself (without any other qualifying word before it) refers to a sweet dish for which the original Indian word ─ derived from a purely Sanskrit, and even new Rigvedic, word ─ is still extant and has not been pushed out of usage by Islamic rule, proves that there is nothing imported about the dishes which have come to be generically referred to by the word halwa. The word is śīra/śīrā.

 

The original New Rigvedic word kṣīra, meaning "milk", but clearly a kind of sweetened milk, evolved into two distinct names for an original combination of milk, semolina, sugar and ghee: called śīra when cooked thick and to be eaten, and khīra when cooked liquid and meant to be drunk. This is a regular phonetic development of Sanskrit kṣ- as in Sanskrit kṣetra "field" becoming khet in Hindi and śet in Marathi.

 

So the halwa puri eaten by young Hindu girls as "an important ritual during Navratri", as per this Machiavellian scribe ─ and for that matter the halwa puri eaten by Muslims during dargah festivals or urs melas ─ is not, as he brazenly claims, "actually an import — brought in from Turkey", but a form of an ancient sweet dish existing in India from New Rigvedic times at least.

 

Of course, it would have been interesting if the writer had produced documentary dated evidence of Turks eating halwa puri in the centuries before Islam entered India ─ though in the circumstances even that could well have been a dish imported by the Turks from early medieval India along with sugar itself ─ but he does not do so and only expects the media power of the divest-India-of-credit-for-its-cultural-contributions gang to push his claims through. An examination of the descriptions of Turkish halwa on Google make it very clear that it is a totally different sweet with sesame paste as one of its chief ingredients, not a very likely candidate for the ancestry of the śīrā  eaten in India under the title of halwa puri.

 

When the sweet dish called in India as simply halwa, but thankfully having retained also the original pre-Islamic name śīrā, is so very clearly not an imported dish from Turkey, little needs to be said about the countless other sweet dishes from different parts of India which have been carelessly bundled together under the generic word halwa (with different qualifying words before it) by an Indian populace not aware of the politically loaded tricks that a powerful anti-Indian media can play with words.

 

As I said, the whole subject of Indian cultural contributions in every field of cultural life, glibly attributed to Mughal or West Asian "origins" (but not just to Mughals and West Asia: in my earlier article on idlis, we saw how even eastern countries like Indonesia can be drawn into this game) requires much deeper and systematic study.