Curry

by Lizzie Collingham

  Those who remained were forced to convert to Christianity. In 1550 only one-fifth of Goa’s population had converted, but by 1650 two-thirds were Catholic.53 But one priest at least was under no illusions as to the sincerity of these conversions. He wrote a despairing letter to his leader, Ignatio Loyola [sic], in Rome in which he acknowledged that ‘The people of this country who become Christians do so purely for temporal advantage . . . Slaves of the moors and Hindus seek baptism in order to secure their manumission at the hands of the Portuguese. Others do so to get protection from tyrants, or for the sake of a turban, a shirt, or some other trifle they covet, or to escape being hanged, or to be able to associate with Christian women. The man who embraces the faith from honest conviction is regarded as a fool. They are baptised whenever or wherever they express a wish for the Sacrament, without any instruction, and many revert to paganism.’54

  For those at the bottom of the Hindu social hierarchy, conversion was a means of escaping the oppressions of the caste system. The majority of converts were drawn from the downtrodden tribal communities, the lower castes and untouchables. The Christian principle of equality before God appeared to offer them a means of improving their social and economic status. There were also a variety of incentives: widows and orphans who converted were entitled to inherit their husband’s or father’s property; the Church provided converts with food (including a Christmas lunch), clothes, dowries, medicines and money to finance funerals.55 The higher castes converted to protect their privileges and social status. They also found that, by bringing them closer to their new European rulers, conversion opened up new job opportunities.

  After the initial success in terms of the number of conversions, the Inquisition found it hard to enforce its rule. Each time the edicts of the Church were enforced, the mass desertion of the Indian inhabitants from the Portuguese territories left the Europeans short of agricultural labourers, artisans, craftsmen and sailors. The contradictions of Portuguese rule were evident in the letter of one official who reported thankfully that, despite the activity of the missions around the port of Bassein, they had still been able to recruit sailors for the Portuguese ships. In the vital areas of trade and finance, the Portuguese relied heavily on Hindu merchants, moneylenders and tax collectors. Even the important pepper procurement contracts were often handled by members of the elite Saraswat Brahman community.56 The Church complained frequently (in 1559, 1582 and 1591 at least) that ‘many important government posts were held by Hindus even though this was not royally sanctioned’. But for the sake of the economy the Portuguese were forced to make numerous exceptions to the law or to turn a blind eye to the religious convictions of their partners in trade and finance.

  Among the converts, the battle to inculcate Christian habits and establish a Christian way of life was slow and difficult. The fact that for almost two hundred years the Church regularly issued edicts banning the same Hindu practices demonstrates only partial effectiveness. In the 1580s a despairing order noted that ‘many Hindus keep reverting to their old rituals’, and again in 1633 the Church complained that converts were still to be found worshipping idols. As late as 1736 the Inquisition issued a very lengthy edict outlawing hundreds of Hindu practices that had already been banned in the Portuguese territories in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The list revealed that many of the Indian converts continued to revere the cow and to spread cow dung on their floors to purify them, and to observe Hindu strictures governing the preparation and consumption of food. The Church ineffectually reminded its subjects that they were not supposed to avoid pork and beef, neither were they to ‘bathe in their clothes before entering [the] kitchen for cooking food, in the manner which is customary among the Hindus’. Nor were they supposed to cook their rice ‘without salt, adding salt subsequently according to taste, as the Hindus are accustomed to do’.57

  Goan villagers conducted a clandestine resistance to the Catholic Church. Although the majority of village temples were destroyed and replaced by churches, the villagers rescued the statues of the gods once resident in them. The deities were smuggled over the border to villages in the neighbouring provinces where they were re-established in new temples. The links between the gods and their old villages still survive today. Some of the deities have since returned to their original villages, others are taken on an annual visit to their old homes. Both Catholics and Hindus frequently visit the temples of the escaped gods when looking for advice or solace.58

  In the face of often brutal coercion, the Goans were able to retain aspects of their Hindu culture and identity within the Christian framework.59 To the frustration of the priests, the Indian converts tended to embrace Catholicism as a form of Hinduism. The Church was often able to eradicate some of the pagan trappings, such as the ceremonial use of betel and areca nuts, but it was unable to suppress many of the actual rituals. A Jesuit letter described how recent converts in the parish of Divar insisted that the priest should take on the role of the Hindu astrologer who blessed the rice harvest each year. The villagers arrived at the church carrying a banner with the names of Jesus and St Paul on it and laid the sheaves of rice on the steps of the altar.60 Similarly, the Hindu mixture of milk, turmeric, coconut oil and rice powder which was used to bathe the bride and groom at weddings was replaced with more acceptable coconut milk; crosses of palm leaves substituted for the betel leaves and areca nuts which were usually placed underneath the new choolas (stoves) at a wedding.61 High-caste converts continued to socialise and marry within their castes, and they maintained their caste names, adding them after their new Christian names and surnames.

  Nevertheless, by the nineteenth century the majority of the Goan population attended Mass on Sundays, wore European clothes, shaved their beards and lived in Portuguese-style bungalows. Most strikingly, they drank alcohol and happily ate pork and beef. Indeed, the stranger approaching the town of Panjim (new Goa) in the 1850s could instantly tell that it was a Christian town ‘from the multitude and variety of the filthy feeding hogs, that infest the streets’.62 The adoption of the Portuguese attitude towards meat is not particularly surprising among the lower-caste converts who would have been lax about food restrictions and, even before conversion, would not necessarily have found the consumption of meat abhorrent. But what is extraordinary is that it was the wealthier Catholics with an upper-caste background who placed the greatest emphasis on the consumption of pork and beef. This was due to the fact that within their own society they were now regarded as outcastes. The only way in which they could hold on to their high status was to associate themselves as closely as possible with the Portuguese rulers. Hence, they not only embraced the faith of their colonisers, but also wholeheartedly embraced the Portuguese language, education, clothes and diet. Thus, in Goa a meal of pork or beef was surrounded by an aura of prestige.63 Although the Inquisition had been dismantled in India in 1812, it had finally won the battle.

  Not only did the Portuguese persuade their Christian converts to eat pork, they taught them how to cook it. The most famous of all Goan dishes is undoubtedly vindaloo, now a standard dish in almost every Indian restaurant. British men (until the advent of the even hotter phal) would choose to eat a vindaloo after a few lagers in the pub to prove their machismo; and British 1998 World Cup football fans included vindaloo in their chant (alongside cups of tea, knitting and Cheddar) as a symbol of Englishness.

  The British were first introduced to vindaloo in 1797 when they invaded Goa. By then the British, Dutch and French had joined the Portuguese in India and were jostling for control of the lucrative spice trade. During their seventeen-year-long occupation of Portuguese India, the British discovered the delights of Goan cookery. They were relieved to find that the Catholic cooks were free from the irritating caste or religious restrictions which prevented Hindus and Muslims from cooking beef and pork and, when the British left in 1813, they took their Goan cooks with them.64 In this way vindaloo made its way to British India, and from there back to Britain.

&n
bsp; Vindaloo is normally regarded as an Indian curry, but in fact it is a Goan adaptation of the Portuguese dish carne de vinho e alhos, or meat cooked in wine vinegar and garlic.65 The name vindaloo is simply a garbled pronunciation of vinho e alhos. The Portuguese particularly savoured the sour, but fruity, taste of meat marinated and cooked in wine vinegar.66 When they arrived in India, however, they found that Indians did not make vinegar, though a similar sour-hot taste was produced by south Indian cooks using a combination of tamarind and black pepper. Some ingenious Franciscan priests are said to have solved the problem by manufacturing vinegar from coconut toddy, the alcoholic drink fermented from the sap of the palm tree. This, combined with tamarind pulp and plenty of garlic, satisfied the Portuguese cooks. To this basic sauce they added a garam masala of black pepper, cinnamon and cloves, some of the spices in search of which Vasco da Gama had made his way to the Malabar coast in 1498. But the key ingredient, which gave bite to the granular sauce of vindaloo, was the chilli. Like their Spanish counterparts in South America, the Portuguese in India had developed a liking for the fiery taste of the chilli pepper and they used it in excessive quantities in a vindaloo. Some recipes call for as many as twenty red chillies.

  Recipe for Vindaloo or Bindaloo – a Portuguese Karhi from W. H. Dawe, The Wife’s Help to Indian Cookery, a British Indian cookbook

  The best Vindaloo is prepared in mustard-oil . . . Beef and pork, or duck, can be made into this excellent curry. The following ingredients are employed in its preparation: Ghee, six chittacks,fn2 lard or oil may be used; garlic ground, one tablespoonful; garlic, bruised, one tablespoonful; ginger, ground, one tablespoonful; chillies, ground, two teaspoonful; coriander-seed, one teaspoonful; coriander-seed, roasted and ground, half a teaspoonful; bay leaves, or Tej-path, two or three; peppercorns, quarter-chittack; cloves, half a dozen roasted and ground; cardamoms, half a dozen roasted and ground; cinnamon, half a dozen sticks; vinegar, quarter-pint. Take a seer* of beef or pork, and cut it into large square pieces, and steep them in vinegar with salt and the ground condiments given above, for a whole night. Warm the Ghee, lard, or mustard-oil, with the ingredients in which it has been soaking over-night and add the meat with peppercorns and bay leaves, and allow the whole to simmer slowly over a gentle fire for a couple of hours, or until the meat is quite tender. When preparing pork into vindaloo, omit the cloves, cardamoms, and cinnamon.’67

  In fact, the chilli became a central ingredient in Goan cuisine. Almost all fish and vegetable recipes, sausages and pork dishes, contain them. Many of these were adaptations of Portuguese recipes. Thus, a Portuguese sorpotel of pork meat, offal and blood was made more piquant with the addition of toddy vinegar and spices. Enthusiastic about their discovery of these new ingredients, south Indian cooks created ambot-tik (meaning sour and hot) made of mackerel, eel and shark cooked with red chilli, black pepper, tamarind, vinegar, and dried fruit peel.68 The result of this culinary interchange was a pleasing fusion of Portuguese ingredients (pork) – some of which were derived from Arab influences on Iberian cookery (dried fruit) – and Portuguese techniques (marinating and cooking in vinegar), with the south Indian spice mixtures, sour tamarind paste, shredded coconut and coconut milk. Added into this already cosmopolitan blend were the recently discovered foodstuffs from the New World such as the chilli. Thus Goan dishes unite in their fiery sauces the culinary histories of three continents: Europe, Asia and the Americas.

  Chillies were only one of many new foods that the Portuguese brought to India from the New World. The turkey, for instance, was viewed as a great curiosity. On the orders of the Emperor Jahangir, one was purchased in Goa and brought to the Mughal court, where an exquisite image of this peculiar bird was painted. Turkey meat did not, however, become popular until the British arrived.

  More successful were New World fruits. The Portuguese introduced papayas, custard apples and guavas from the Americas, all of which have since been incorporated into the Indian diet. But the most popular was the pineapple. Columbus came upon this fruit on his second voyage (1493) to the West Indies. The Spanish came to love pineapples. When Oviedo produced his Natural History of the Indies (1535), he enthused that ‘to taste it is so appetising a thing, so delicate, that words fail to give it its true praise for this . . . most beautiful [of] fruits I have seen wherever I have been in the whole world’. Travellers to America were so captivated by the taste that they took fruits and plants with them to other countries and the Portuguese are said to have introduced the pineapples to India in 1550.69 By the time Jahangir came to the throne in 1605, they were being grown at many of the European ports. As we have seen in the previous chapter, he was particularly fond of fruit and he had some pineapple bushes planted at Agra to supply his table.70 Pineapples are now a familiar sight in Indian markets, but they are regarded with suspicion by many Kanarese. New foodstuffs are generally categorised using the Ayurvedic categories of hot or cold foods and integrated into the diet accordingly. Fruits are usually classified as cool, due to their sweetness. But, despite its sweet taste, the pineapple tends to be regarded as hot and dangerous because it is grown in arid areas with the application of fertilisers, which are seen as heating. Kanarese villagers who have had the opportunity to taste a pineapple often claim to suffer from a sore mouth afterwards.71

  Although the Portuguese almost certainly introduced tomatoes and potatoes into India, these foods were not integrated into the Indian culinary world until the British showed their own cooks how to use them. Much more successful was the cashew nut. Cashew-nut trees still grow around Goa and further south along the Keralan coast. South Indians use the nuts whole with shrimps in their seafood pilaus, grind them to thicken sauces, powder them to make a succulent milky sweet called kaju katli, which is decorated with silver leaf, or crush the stems of the cashew plant to make a juice out of which they brew an extremely potent spirit called feni.72 The backstreets of Panjim are dotted with dingy feni bars, where old men sit sipping this heady brew, listening to the cricket on the radio.

  Of all the foods they introduced to India, chillies are undoubtedly the most important Portuguese culinary legacy. And yet, even at the end of the seventeenth century, chillies were still largely confined to the south of India. Two centuries after the Portuguese first landed at Calicut, the chilli had still not reached the northern plains of Hindustan. It arrived with the Marathas, a wild and unruly group of people from the Deccan in central India, who contributed to the decline of both the Mughals and the Portuguese. The Marathas had a reputation for being as restless and dangerous as the craggy mountainous country they inhabited. An English visitor to the area in the seventeenth century described them as ‘naked Starved Rascals; . . . accustomed to Fare Hard, Journey Fast, and take little Pleasure’.73 Akbar subdued the Marathas in the 1590s, but eighty years later they overthrew their Mughal masters and began to pillage the lands bordering their territory. The last great Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, wasted many years of his life fighting the Marathas. He referred to their leader Shivaji as ‘his Mountain Rat’. The Maratha cavalry would swoop down on the Mughals’ long baggage trains and heavy guns, inflict a great deal of damage and then disappear back into the mountains.74 By 1735, the Marathas had encroached as far as Malwa in central India and they continued to rule large swathes of central and southern India until the British defeated them in 1818.

  A north Indian scholar and poet argued that the Marathas’ nature was ‘dry and hot’ because they ‘put hot chillies in everything they eat’. This custom, he claimed, accounted for their warlike and determined character. In contrast, it was said that the Mughals, accustomed to a diet of rice pilaus, almond sweetmeats and central Asian fruit, had become soft and ineffectual. There was some truth in this observation. When they were posted to the Deccan, the Mughal officers were appalled by the life of tough military hardship they were forced to lead in the hill forts. They longed for their city lives, for lazing around on cushions, drinking wine, taking opium, feasting on pilau, listening to flowery poe
try and dallying with dancing girls. One Englishman commented with disgust that they would ‘miss of a Booty rather than a Dinner’. Their bodies, he stated decisively, were ‘unfit for such barren and uneasy Places’.75 They were no match for the Marathas with their bellies on fire with chilli juice.

  Chillies are still regarded as a potent food. The Jains classify them as a rajasic foodstuff. In contrast to sattvic foods such as cereals and pulses, fruits and vegetables, which are thought to encourage moderate behaviour and feelings of peace, rajasic foods are said to induce anger and hatred.76

  The Marathas were as much trouble to the Portuguese, who were responsible for introducing the spice which supposedly nurtured their angry natures. During the seventeenth century the Marathas wreaked havoc on the Portuguese settlements. By 1749 the Portuguese only had four territories left: Dui, Daman, Bassein and Goa.77 Cochin had been captured by the Dutch and the British had effectively wrested away control of the spice trade. Goa itself went into decline as its inhabitants were ravaged by epidemics of malaria and cholera, and by the mid-nineteenth century, the town was abandoned. The depleted population moved to the nearby settlement of Panjim, leaving a small community of monks to watch the grand houses, the cathedral and churches gradually disintegrate into ruins. But while the Marathas helped to bring the Portuguese to their knees, they were also taking the Portuguese legacy of the chilli pepper with them to the northern plains of India. The poet who attributed their dry, hot natures to their chilli-rich diet also noted that ‘during the last ten or twenty years, ever since these people spread over Northern India, the inhabitants of that region have learnt to use hot chillies, a practice which was very rare previously’.78