The new year, 2018, is here! Nothing seems to have changed, despite the firecrackers. Of course, in many parts of the world the firecrackers might have been confused with, or replaced by, bombs, and millions in those and other regions find firecrackers (let alone bombs) an unimaginable luxury as they struggle to obtain food or shelter.
New Year’s Eve came, as it does, close on the heels of Christmas, which commemorates the birth of a homeless child to poor refugees in a foreign place. That too was widely celebrated, as it should be, though in a world where the homeless, children, refugees and foreignness are often abused.
As I am writing this column largely for fellow Indians, many of whom, like me, are not Christian, I am aware that a group of increasingly loud fellow nationals might accuse me of celebrating ‘foreign festivals’. (Some of them consider me ‘foreign’ too, as I am an Indian born in a Muslim family.) I have no desire to upset these people.
A New Year’s list
So, I told myself: I do not want to start my new year being abused by these people whose voices are getting louder every year; I should only write of ‘truly’ Indian matters, whatever they might be. I spent much of New Year’s Eve thinking of such topics. People make a list of things to do in the new year; I made a list of things to write about.
I was aware that I could not write about the new year itself. After all, most people, including most Europeans, observed new year on other days of other calendars until recently. Some of us, as in India and Iran, still have festivals that mark such new years, mostly, given agriculture, in spring.
Formalised calendars go back to the Bronze Age, which makes them about 5,000 years old, and they have been developed in different ways by different people, and changed by the same people in different periods. The Gregorian calendar that we use to mark the new year today was itself introduced as a refinement of the Julian calendar in 1582. So, yes, I was aware that I should not write about the Gregorian new year, but I could not write about other new years either, because not only are there various ‘new years’ in India, some are also shared by other nationals.
What about clothes? After all, India is justifiably renowned for some of its fabrics and dresses. But I discovered that everything we consider Indian today has some foreign admixture. It is not just in the dress type — obvious in the kurta, topi, shirt — but also in modes of stitching, tailoring, producing, and so on. One could, perhaps, talk of the dhoti and the lovely sari, which go back to ancient times, but alas such entire sheets of largely unstitched cloth were by no means restricted to India back then: most other civilisations, like the Greeks, Persians and Romans, used similarly woven but unstitched garments back in the far past.
What about food? Now, what is more Indian than our food? Sometimes I go all the way to London or Leeds just to eat good Indian food, which I do not get in Danish restaurants.
Potatoes and mangoes
Immediately, the potato came to mind. Growing up in Bihar, we had a saying which, roughly translated, meant: “The uncle is a bother in relations, the bear in forests, and the potato in food.” It was explained to me, as a child, that all three were summarily dismissed in the saying because one was far too likely to come across them. Now, my uncles were never a bother, and I have not yet been bothered by a bear, perhaps because there are hardly any forests left. But it is true that the potato is unescapable in Indian cuisines, ranging from samosas, pakoras and dosas to curries, pulaosand parathas.
But alas, the potato is not Indian. It comes from South America. It was introduced in Europe only in the 16th century, and from there it came to India. In the phase when Europeans were colonising the world and decimating indigenous populations in South America, the lowly potato performed a reverse colonisation by taking over world, including European, cuisine.
This is true of many other agricultural produce, such as the pineapple, which caused mobs to collect on London docks when it was shipped in from South America in the 19th century. Unfortunately, even the varieties of chilli that we use today are from elsewhere.
The mango? True, India has a long history of the mango. But, again, it is not confined to India, and, ‘unfortunately’, the cultivation of mangoes reached its pinnacle in India under the now-often-reviled Mughals.
The more I searched, the more I realised that just as India has penetrated the world — for instance, with its numerals — the world has penetrated India.
Perhaps what matters is not where things are from, but what they have become with us: the potato, after all, is cooked in distinctive ways in Brazil, England and India. Surely, what is true of the potato must be true of people and festivals too? Hence, I wrote of Christmas and New Year’s Eve after all.
