The Spice Trade as India's Own Story

The story begins on the south-western coast, where the Western Ghats hold back the monsoon and the wet forests of Kerala and coastal Karnataka grew black pepper, Piper nigrum, wild long before any ship came for it. Malabar pepper, a protected name, still carries that coast's claim, and the cardamom of the Western Ghats hills, sold under the protected names Alleppey Green Cardamom and Coorg Green Cardamom, came down from the high ground to the same ports. The trade that grew from these hills is usually told as a European tale of ships and empires, but it was first an Indian one, carried by Indian growers, brokers and sailors across the Arabian Sea.

Spices were India's own long before they were anyone's prize. Turmeric, Curcuma longa, ginger, black pepper, mustard, Brassica juncea, and the seeds of fenugreek, Trigonella foenum-graecum, belong to the subcontinent's kitchens and to its ritual life, and Raghavan Iyer, writing in The Turmeric Trail, treats the spice box as the working centre of the Indian house rather than as an export commodity. The Sangam poems of the Tamil country speak of pepper traded for gold, and the coast's harbours sent cargoes westward to Arabia, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean through merchants who understood the goods far better than the buyers at the far end. Much of what Europe later fought over was a market that Indian and Arab traders had held for centuries. The arrival of Vasco da Gama on the Malabar Coast in 1498 changed who held the sea lanes, not what the land grew. The Portuguese sought pepper and cinnamon and took Goa as their base, and from their ships came plants of the Americas, above all the chilli, which Indian cooks took up with such completeness that it is now difficult to picture the cooking without it. Before the chilli, heat in the pot came from black pepper, long pepper and ginger, and the Manasollasa of 1130, attributed to Someshvara III, describes a kitchen already skilled in seasoning without the New World capsicum. Garcia de Orta, writing in Goa in the sixteenth century, recorded the drugs and spices of the region at first hand, a reminder that the Portuguese learned much from the people they traded with. Inside India the spices shaped regional cooking more than any court did. The Kerala kitchen uses pepper, curry leaf, Murraya koenigii, and the sour fruit of kudampuli, Garcinia gummi-gutta, while the Konkan coast leans on kokum, Garcinia indica. The Mughal table, described in the Ain-i-Akbari of Abul Fazl around 1590, set green cardamom, Elettaria cardamomum, saffron and cinnamon against ghee and meat in the fragrant style of the north. Bengal keeps mustard and the five-seed mix of panch phoron, Gujarat balances sweet and sour with jaggery and kokum, and the Deccan brings tamarind, Tamarindus indica, and dried chilli into the same pot. Each region took the same small family of ingredients and built a distinct grammar from it. The British came as buyers and stayed as rulers, and the Company's interest in pepper, cardamom and turmeric turned the coast into a plantation economy in places. Out of that period came the word curry, a name given by outsiders to a great range of sauced dishes that the cooks of India call by their own names. The same movement of people carried spices abroad: indentured labourers and traders took the spice box to East Africa, the Caribbean, Malaysia and Britain, where it became the basis of new tables. The story that Iyer follows is therefore a circle, with the spices leaving India as cargo and returning in the pots of its descendants, each time under Indian hands.

At the table the trade reads as a sequence of tastes: pepper's sharpness in a Kerala fish dish soured with kudampuli, cardamom's sweetness in a Mughal pilau, mustard's bite in a Bengali jhol. The cook of India tempers whole spices in hot oil or ghee, a step called tadka or chaunk, to release their aroma before the main ingredients go in, and this single habit ties the spice box to almost every regional cooking. Ayurvedic tradition counts many of these spices heating or cooling and serves them on that understanding, a matter of custom and history in the kitchen.