K. T. Achaya and the History of Indian Food

K. T. Achaya (Kollengode Thiruvenkatachalam Achaya) was a food scientist and historian whose books gave Indian food a documented history, drawn from the Vedic hymns, the Sangam poems, the Manasollasa of Someshvara III (1130), the Nimmatnama of the Sultans of Mandu (c. 1500) and the Ain-i-Akbari of Abul Fazl (c. 1590). His method was to set text against text, and the textual record against the archaeology of grain and the practice of the kitchen. Later writing on Indian cooking, including the account of spice and migration in Raghavan Iyer's The Turmeric Trail, covers ground that he had surveyed.

Before Achaya, the history of Indian food was largely a matter of received assertion: that a dish was ancient, that a court had invented it, that a spice had always been there. Achaya's contribution was to ask of each claim which text carried it and from what century. His histories follow the subject through successive layers: the grains and pulses of the early settlements, the dairy and the sacrificial fire of the Vedic period, the rice, ghee and tamarind of the Sangam poems, the codified feasting of the Manasollasa, and the imperial kitchens recorded by Abul Fazl, where the Ain-i-Akbari sets out the provisioning of the emperor's table, the grades of rice and the preparation of dishes such as the early forms of pulao and sambusa. The lesson that runs through his work, and through Iyer's account of the spice trade, is that Indian cooking has never been a closed inheritance. The chilli, the potato, the tomato and the cashew came from the Americas by way of the Portuguese after Vasco da Gama's landfall of 1498, and were absorbed so thoroughly that they now seem native. Garcia de Orta, writing at Goa in the sixteenth century, recorded the spices and drugs of the coast as a physician and observer, and later historians have used him as a witness to what was grown, traded and eaten there. Black pepper, Piper nigrum, by contrast, was carried west from the Malabar coast in antiquity, and it is the older traffic that makes the later arrivals intelligible. Achaya also taught the reader to distinguish the kinds of source. The Manasollasa, a Sanskrit encyclopaedia attributed to Someshvara III, devotes a section to food and is a record of court practice in the Deccan. The Nimmatnama, compiled for the Sultans of Mandu, is a book of recipes and pleasures of the table, valuable because it shows a Persianate court cooking with Indian materials. Babur, in the Baburnama, writes as a newcomer remarking on the fruits, the want of good bread and melons, and the habits of Hindustan, and his testimony is that of an outsider. Each is a different witness, and Achaya's care was to say what each can and cannot support. Beneath the written texts lies a human lineage that his histories help the reader to see: the khansama and the bawarchi of the great households, the cooks of Lucknow under rulers such as Wajid Ali Shah, the Chettiar kitchens of the Chettinad country, and the kitchens of the Nizams of Hyderabad. These cooks left little in writing, and the texts he read record chiefly the tables of courts and the powerful.

The history Achaya wrote is ultimately a history of the table: of rice served with ghee and tamarind in the Sangam country, of the pulao and the layered meat dishes of the Mughal dastarkhwan, of the vegetarian feast of the temple and the Chettinad kitchen's pepper and dried spice. Read beside a meal, it explains why a dish carries a chilli the sixteenth century brought or a tamarind the Sangam poets knew. A cook who knows the lineage tastes the layers in the plate, the old pepper and sour beneath the later chilli.