T is for Time Zones

For the month of April I am participating for the ninth time in the annual A-to-Z blogging challenge, writing a post for every letter of the alphabet. My theme this year is the world, the world that is always with us, that we must not keep out and cannot do without.

Forgive me, but time constraints—and serendipity—have led me to re-use an old post that fits with my theme.

173. Multi-Timing

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candlelight.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.
from Bed in Summer, Robert Louis Stevenson

As my day is winding down, a new one is beginning for our family in India, as they carry out the morning rituals of teeth-cleaning, tea-drinking, poha, and private prayers at the kitchen shrine. As I get ready for bed, too late as usual, my California friends still have their evening ahead of them and are ready for long phone chats. Of a morning I wake in anticipation of news from England, since by the time I am sitting up in bed with my first cup of tea my English family and friends are well into their workdays and their fourth or fifth cuppas. With childhood friends in Australia and New Zealand and dear Alysha in South Africa this year, as I brace for a February nor’easter I am aware that the Antipodeans in my life are enjoying fresh garden vegetables and harvesting early summer fruit (all the more tormenting because they will keep posting photographs of them on Facebook). The diurnal and seasonal rhythms of yesteryear, each in its own time gradually and gracefully giving way to the next,  are now overlaid with the contrapuntal motions of multiple time zones, all competing simultaneously for space in my crowded consciousness.

      (from redlegsinsoho.blogspot)

This is my constant condition, now delightful, now dizzying. How much more so when my loved ones are on the move; waiting for the email or text message announcing their safe arrival, I am keenly aware, in every moment, of what time it is there. I read nineteenth, even twentieth-century novels in which travelers or family members working or studying abroad must of necessity remain incommunicado for months, sometimes unable to make a visit home for years on end. Those left behind at home, most of them women, sit down at their writing desks and immerse their whole selves in long, beautifully handwritten, artfully composed letters, pausing periodically to dip their pens into the inkwell and gaze into the middle distance.  In their position, I turn to my laptop, and Tell Me Another.

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587. S is for Spices

For the month of April I am participating for the ninth time in the annual A-to-Z blogging challenge, writing a post for every letter of the alphabet. My theme this year is the world, the world that is always with us, that we must not keep out and cannot do without.

 

Spices. The very word heightens the senses in a heady synesthesia of fragrance, aroma, richness of hue, deep well-being—even luxury. Ginger, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon. saffron, black pepper, star anise—just looking at them promotes well-being and makes you want to close your eyes, breathe deep, and let yourself be wafted away.

We endow even those spices in everyday use with near-magical powers, cherishing the home remedies passed down through the generations, tell and retell stories of miracle cures. We believe in them deeply. We covet them; we want more.

How spicy do you like your food, Madam?

Hold up! Not so fast with all the romance and exoticism. Those innocent-looking spices stacked neatly in your kitchen rack have driven global commerce, traveled global trade routes for millennia, made merchants and middlemen rich beyond the dreams of avarice, been the stuff of deeply unequal trade deals that have shifted the global balance of power, motivated slaughter and even genocide.

The spice trade traveled the silk road for centuries, with money changing hands several times along the way, but when Christians lost control of the overland routes across Asia, European powers engaged in a race to seek out sea routes to gain monopoly control over the wildly lucrative trade. The Portuguese got there first (as children we had to memorize 1498, the date when Vasco de Gama reached Calicut, India round the Cape of Good Hope), then the Dutch, French, and British. A convenient religiously sanctioned doctrine of moral superiority gave them permission to eliminate any “savages” who stood in the way of profit.

In The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021), Amitav Ghosh discusses Francis Bacon’s 1623 treatise, An Advertisement Touching a Holy War, in which Bacon explained “why it was lawful, in his view, for Christian Europeans to end the existence of certain groups” (Ghosh 26). Bacon’s argument, that in the case of countries that “have utterly degenerated from the laws of nature” it was justified in both the eyes of the law and of God for other nations to “unit[e] together as a body with the object of punishing, even exterminating such savage peoples” (qtd. in Ghosh 26). Ghosh describes the Bandan massacre of 1619 in Maluku (the Moluccas or “Spice Islands”), when Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the governor of the Dutch East Indies, conducted such a massacre to “punish” the people for failing to give them complete control of the nutmeg trade.

And the fortunes these European trading companies made! Peppercorns, at one time, were worth their weight in gold. When the Roman Empire conquered Egypt in 30 BC, they gained access to the Malabar Coast of India. “To give you an idea of how precious black pepper was considered—3,000 pounds of black pepper was demanded along with gold, silver and silken tunics, as a ransom to free Rome besieged by the Huns” (Iyer). Cinnamon, Cloves, and Nutmeg were similarly prized. In 1667 the Dutch traded New Amsterdam (now Manhattan) to the British in exchange for the tiny island of Run, or Pulau Run, one of the smallest of the Banda Islands, part of the Moluccas, Indonesia, because of the tremendous value of the nutmeg that was found nowhere else. Before the 17th century, the Moluccas were also the only place in the world where clove trees grew.

Rival trading company agents from other European countries got up to all sorts of mischief to break the Portuguese, then the Dutch monopolies, and eventually they succeeded, grabbing shares of the outrageous profits. They gained access to the Moluccas and made off with seedlings that they planted in their own colonial holdings. 

    clove harvest day, East Manggarai, Indonesia

 In 2022, the United States imported:
—$887M in pepper, becoming the largest importer of pepper in the world. The U.S. imports pepper primarily from: Vietnam ($309M), India ($146M), China ($89.5M), Mexico ($84.9M), and Spain ($77M).
—$190M in cinnamon, becoming the largest importer of cinnamon in the world. It imports cinnamon primarily from: Indonesia ($83.5M), Vietnam ($52M), Sri Lanka ($41.1M), India ($4.29M), and Canada ($2.47M).
—$22.8M in nutmeg, becoming the 3rd largest importer of nutmeg in the world. It imports nutmeg primarily from: Indonesia ($11.1M), Vietnam ($6.05M), India ($2.43M), Canada ($2.14M), and Sri Lanka ($265k).
—$20.3M in cloves, becoming the 6th largest importer of cloves in the world. It imports mainly from Indonesia ($5.19M), Madagascar ($3.63M), India ($3.36M), Sri Lanka ($2.56M), and Canada ($795k).

Carl Lewis concludes an interesting piece on cloves as follows:
Because spices occupy a small space in the supermarket and in our kitchen cabinets, we often overlook their importance in shaping the modern world. It is hard to comprehend the centuries of exploration, conquest, slavery and war that brought these products to our shelves, and it is impossible to estimate the number of lives and fortunes that were risked and lost along the way. . . They stand as one of the best examples of a local crop that skyrocketed onto the world stage and forever transformed the global economy.

The colonial monopolies on spices have been broken up and now I can now afford to buy them when at one time only the fabulously wealthy could have done so. It is true that the spice trade made a once-rare plant from a remote island a global commodity. But at what cost?

The spices I use regularly in my cooking are readily available to me half a world away from where they were grown. But the violent histories that made them so accessible to me persists today in the tremendous inequities of power and wealth that underlie the global economy. As I close my eyes and take a deep breath, those histories rush in along with the heady scents.

 

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583. Opium wars, then and now

For the month of April I am participating for the ninth time in the annual A-to-Z blogging challenge, writing a post for every letter of the alphabet. My theme this year is the world, the world that is always with us, that we must not keep out and cannot do without.

 

I have just started reading Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories (2023), by  Amitav Ghosh. Having read his Ibis trilogy, ordering every new book as soon as it became available, I was familiar with the story through Ghosh’s riveting fiction, but it was still shocking to read his historical account of the opium trade in the British colonial era. The rapaciousness, the aggression, the cynical disregard for human life is almost beyond belief; but we see in it the features of the opiate and opioid crisis of today, as a succession of wars on drugs have only served to exacerbate the problem. Ghosh reminds us that the poppy has been used for millennia, but it was under British colonialism that the scale of its exploitation was first ramped up to “narco-state” proportions. He further proposes throughout Smoke and Ashes that we shift our human-centered focus and consider the poppy as  itself a powerful actor in this story.

Poppies are widely associated with sleep, war, and death. Here’s an article on the history of the poppy, which was first used for medicinal purposes by the Sumerians back in 3,400 B.C.E. And here, just for fun, is the scene from The Wizard of Oz in which Dorothy and the Lion are overcome in a field of poppies. 

Ghosh gives a brief introduction to his new book below:
Smoke and Ashes is the story of how, under the aegis of the British Empire, India became the world’s largest producer of opium between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the different conditions under which opium was produced in various regions, with lasting effects for those areas. It also traces the transformative impact that the opium trade had on India, China, Britain and the United States, with profound long-term consequences for the birth of the modern world, and of contemporary globalism. Many of the world’s biggest corporations got their start in the colonial opium trade. But the opium economy also had significant effects at the microlevel, influencing migration and settlement patterns, and touching upon millions of lives. . .
This story is remarkable, and revelatory, because at the heart of it lies a plant—the opium poppy. While many other plants, like sugarcane, tobacco and cotton, have played major roles in history, their importance has faded over time. The opium poppy, on the other hand, has gone from strength to strength; it is now more powerful than ever, manifesting itself in the devastating opioid crises that currently grip the globe.
                                                                                        Harper Collins India, 2023

The Opium Wars (1839-1842 and 1856-1860)
The British first created a captive market (and a famine) by forcing Indian farmers to grow opium poppies instead of food crops, then illegally smuggling the opium into China, giving rise to a massive addiction problem, and then going to war with China—not once, but twice—to force it to allow the opium into the country in the name of free trade. (See this useful learning module on the opium wars from the Asia Pacific curriculum in California.) We see comparable strategies being played out in the opioid crisis of the past three decades, in the highly lucrative trafficking of illicit and prescription opioid drugs, the creation of a nation of addicts, and soaring numbers of opioid overdose deaths (OODs).

“Opiates” vs. “opioids”
.
Although these terms are often used interchangeably they are different: Opiates refer to natural opioids such as heroin, morphine and codeine. Opioids refer to all natural, semisynthetic, and synthetic opioids—fentanyl, for example.

Starting in the mid-1990s Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler family, deliberately created a demand—and millions of addictions—by flooding the market with a prescription opioid drug Oxycontin, dispensed to unsuspecting patients by their doctors. In 2017 alone, as a direct result of these practices, there were more than 17, 000 deaths in the United States from prescription opioids. See Pain Pill Pushers, by fellow A-to-Z Challenge participant, English Explorer, for an account of Purdue Pharma’s criminally deceptive and wildly profitable marketing of Oxycontin.

Although a high-profile lawsuit eventually brought attention to the dangers of Oxycontin, opioid overdose deaths have continued to rise, in large part due to the introduction of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, into the global market. In 2023, for the first time in U.S. history, fatal opioid overdoses peaked above 112,000, with young people and people of color among the hardest hit. Drug policy experts and people living with addiction say that this scourge now eclipses every previous drug epidemic, from crack cocaine in the 1980s to the prescription opioid crisis of the 2000s (NPR).

In a video interview with The Wire, From Opium Wars to Opioid Crisis, . . . How the Poppy Made and Unmade West and East, Ghosh talks about the lucrative U.S. opium trade with China. His January 2024 article in The Nation, Merchants of Addiction: The Blue-Blood Families That Made Fortunes in the Opium Trade, is a lengthy excerpt from Smoke and Ashes, focusing on the merchants, mostly from New England, who made their fortunes and their family name in the opium trade. An earlier article by Martha Bebinger, How Profits From Opium Shaped 19th-Century Boston,
reminds us that the opium trade was a global affair that affected and continues to affect us all, not just India, China, and Britain. Ghosh ends his piece in The Nation by noting that: “[i]f the role that privileged, upper-class white Americans played in the history of the opium trade were better known, it would surely be more difficult, if not impossible, to impose xenophobic, anti-immigrant framings on issues concerning narcotics, as is still so often done in the United States.” It was not “Oriental depravity” that was to blame for Chinese opium addiction, but a deliberate policy that destroyed the lives of millions of people.

Two opium smokers in a Shanghai, China, den in the early 20th century

The only ray of hope Ghosh offers in his story is that if we are to address problems of global proportions like the opioid crisis or the climate crisis, we will need to work together to do so, cultivating a transnational network. He discusses successful anti-opium campaigns in China and in India during the British colonial era. (Then again, he reminds us that “[i]n those days the trade was operated by colonial regimes, whereas today much of it is run by criminal networks that cannot be controlled by governments, especially in a world that is increasingly destabilized by war, internecine conflict and climate change” (Smoke and Ashes, 306).) He cites Indian social reformer Gopal Krishna Gokhale, who said in 1907, “I have always felt a sense of deep humiliation at the thought of this [opium] revenue, derived as it is practically from the degradation and moral ruin of the people of China” (Smoke and Ashes 137). Indians, he writes, should remember  these words in the current climate in which they feel aggrieved and threatened by China.

In the United States, if we are to curb the soaring opioid death rates due to fentanyl trafficking, China and the U.S. will need to cooperate. Perhaps that prospect is the best news of all.

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582. Nationalisms

For the month of April I am participating for the ninth time in the annual A-to-Z blogging challenge, writing a post for every letter of the alphabet. My theme this year is the world, the world that is always with us, that we must not keep out and cannot do without.

My relationship to nations and nationalisms will always be complicated because each of my parents was from a different country, and I was born in one, raised in another, and settled (as much as I ever will be) in a third. I have a strong sense of belonging to all three countries, where the people I love most in the world are, where my dear parents were born, where my extended family lives, and where I too have a personal history.

When you love and have a sense of belonging to a country, it is natural to feel a sense of responsibility for it. Even when you camp overnight in a beautiful place you will feel responsible for leaving it as clean as it was when you arrived. When you have lived in a country for years you feel a need to contribute to it, and when it falls short of your hopes for it, you personally feel to blame, or betrayed, or both. This is what I find myself doing with respect to all three of “my” countries—feeling delight in their natural landscapes, their cultures, and their people, and dismay when they fail to measure up to what I consider to be their best selves. And in recent decades, all three countries and many more besides, have seen democracies in decline and exclusive nationalisms on the rise.

Growing up in a country where a long nationalist movement had won political independence from colonial rule not long before my own birth, I was predisposed to think well of nationalism. After all, how would we have won without the nationalist movement to unite the people in the struggle? On the other hand, the more I studied nationalisms—and I use the plural advisedly—the more flaws I saw in nationalist ideologies. Nevertheless, throughout the research and writing of my doctoral dissertation, I retained a hope that nationalism could be a positive force, despite all the evidence to the contrary. But with time that hope has faded, as the past three decades have seen the rise of ethnonationalisms and religious nationalisms that, in my view, have done more to divide people than to unite them.

                                 (source: Julia Kolodko’s blog)

In very broad terms, some nationalisms are inclusive and pluralistic, acknowledging and celebrating the full diversity of their people, while others are exclusive, elevating some groups over others and effectively denying those others full citizenship. Nevertheless, all nationalisms exclude by definition, simply by virtue of constituting themselves as a nation: people are either one of Us or they are one of Them. “They” are sometimes located outside the nation, and sometimes located inside it, as perhaps a minority or dissident community.

Some nationalisms define themselves in terms of democratic ideals, such as equality and democracy, while others define themselves in terms of a particular cultural or religious identity. But all nationalisms work on the principle of “We are better than anyone else”—or as we used to chant during playground games as children, “I’m the king of the castle, and you’re the dirty rascal!”

Some nationalisms pride themselves on treating their women well and giving them equality. But most nationalist thinking is patriarchal thinking. The women of the nation are not “their” women; they were not “given” their equality but struggled for and won it. Many nation-states these days are led by “strongmen”, authoritarians who believe that might is right. Many nations still deny basic human rights, justice, and equality to large numbers of their people.

In my graduate work I studied the historiography of the Indian cultural and political nationalist movement; that is, the history of history, or the interpretations of the past undertaken by different schools of historians. All nationalisms rewrite history to craft a narrative that justifies their right to rule, with origin stories that purport to reach way back into the mists of time. In a recent lecture the eminent Indian historian Romila Thapar recalled an analogy made by Alan Hobsbawm, the late great historian of modern nations and nationalism. He once said that history is to nationalism what the poppy is to the heroin addict.

Pausing to let that one sink in: all nationalisms extract a national narrative from a history that they shape and then feed upon. Then they filter all their experience through that particular historical lens so as to create an ideology that is always self-affirming. That ideology then gains such a hold on them that it begins to drive and control their actions.

Then there is all the pageantry and ritual of nationalisms. I remember a collection that was much quoted in graduate school, co-authored by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, titled, The Invention of Tradition (1983). The blurb reads, “Many of the traditions which we think of as very ancient in their origins were not in fact sanctioned by long usage over the centuries, but were invented comparatively recently.” The essays in the book went on to examine particular instances of this process of invention. This taught me that whenever a nationalist reaches back into “tradition” to justify a national policy or action in the present, be prepared to examine it carefully. More often than not, you will find that it is a modern formulation.

A couple of examples of national pageantry and ritual: the flag and the national anthem—both modern phenomena. The flag is worshiped like a sacred relic and invested with great power, whereas it is merely a symbol of a nation-state. (Here’s Suzy Eddie Izzard’s skit, Do You Have a Flag?) Of among the anthems of my three countries, I don’t care for God Save the King, which doesn’t uphold anything I believe in, monarchy for a start. The Star-Spangled Banner is a paean to the national flag and its victory in battle—again, not something I believe in. Although I do believe that people may have to fight to achieve national self-determination, this anthem says little about the kind of nation that is being fought for. Jana Gana Mana is my favorite, because its words exemplify the kind of inclusive nationalism that I favor.

What about the original question, the one that dogged me throughout my graduate studies: is nationalism inherently good or bad? Well, I prefer to say that nationalism—all nationalisms—are flawed, perhaps fatally. All nationalist rhetoric trumpets its nation as the best. Most nationalist movements are led by elites who, once they prevail, continue to oppress the rest of their people in the same way that their erstwhile rulers did. I think of the story, “For Whom Things Did Not Change,” in the collection, No Sweetness Here by the late Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo. In it, an elderly couple reflect on their lives after Independence. The old man, who was a servant for a white colonial master, is still a servant, only now he serves a black man.

Come to think of it, nationalism may never be the ideology for me. Patriotism, simply defined as the love of one’s country, (rather than the elevation of one’s country over all others) is a more benign idea. Here’s Robert Reich on the difference between the two.

This is My Song is a hymn whose original words have been rewritten. (As a girl I sang it as “Be Still My Soul”, to the tune of Finlandia by the composer Sibelius.) Here it is, sung by the choir of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is beloved by many members of the monthly singing group that I attend, and has grown on me over the years. Its message is that although I love my country, I must remember that other people love theirs as much as I do mine. I want to take it a step further. Not loving one country above all others allows us to more readily imagine loving all countries, in a world without heavily armed and perpetually warring nation-states.

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578. J is for Jingoism

For the month of April I am participating for the ninth time in the annual A-to-Z blogging challenge, writing a post for every letter of the alphabet. My theme this year is the world, the world that is always with us, that we must not keep out and cannot do without.

What is jingoism? It is a disapproving term, even a slur, referring to extreme chauvinism and nationalism, marked especially by a belligerent foreign policy. Merriam-Webster tells us that it originated in Britain during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878 among people who thought that Britain should intervene against Russia. There was a popular song that expressed these sentiments, with this chorus:

We don’t want to fight, yet by jingo if we do,
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men,
We’ve got the money, too!

Such sentiments came to be known as jingoism.

It is important to make a distinction between patriotism, a healthy love for one’s country, nationalism, an often- passionate belief that one’s country is the best of all, and jingoism, which take nationalism to an aggressive extreme. As Danny Ballan writes in a handy piece, Jingoism: What It Means and When It’s Dangerous:

When a country consistently prioritizes military solutions, demonizes other nations, or expands its territory at the expense of others, jingoism may be at play. Political leaders or extremist groups who use nationalistic themes to stir up hatred and fuel violence against specific groups within or outside a nation are examples of jingoism . . . History shows that unchecked jingoism can fuel discrimination, conflict, and ultimately, war. Recognizing jingoistic rhetoric helps maintain a healthy balance between national pride and the need for cooperation and critical self-reflection on the global stage.

Under President Theodore Roosevelt, the US led with “big stick diplomacy”

There was plenty of jingoism going around in 1898, when the United States annexed Hawaii, fought and won the Spanish-American War in 1898, and from 1899-1902, fought to wrest control from President Emilio Aguinaldo and his forces in the War of Philippine Independence that killed 250,000 people, 200,000 0f whom were Filipino civilians. As a new immigrant to the U.S., I learned in high-school American history about Theodore Roosevelt’s imperialist doctrine and the big-stick diplomacy that defined the period.

I first encountered the word in relation to the Indian-born British writer Rudyard Kipling’s poetry. In a 1942 essay on A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (selected by T.S. Eliot),  George Orwell calls Kipling a “jingo imperialist” and “the prophet of British Imperialism in its expansionist phase” who “belongs very definitely to the period 1885-1902.”

“Kaa’s Hunting”, The Jungle Books, ill. by Stuart Tresilian.

When I was a child my dad had introduced me to a very different Kipling, one whom he loved, through The Jungle Book and All the Mowgli Stories, tales suffused with Kipling’s nostalgic love and longing for India. In the 1940s Dad had attended Bombay’s J.J. School of Art, where Kipling had been born and lived for the five happiest years of his life, and where, back in the 1860s, Kipling’s father had been the first principal.

But in 1899 Kipling wrote The White Man’s Burden, a poem in the jingoist spirit of that era exhorting the United States to step up and colonize the Philippines—purely for their uplift, of course, not for the colonizer’s gain. The poem is a prime exponent of the so-called civilizing mission used by colonial powers as a rationale to justify the violent invasion and takeover of other countries and their natural resources. This cartoon, published in the same year as Kipling’s poem, conveys the same sentiments in its sickeningly racist images. (See Civilization & Barbarism: Cartoon Commentary & The White Man’s Burden (1898-1902), by Ellen Sebring.)

Britain’s John Bull leads Uncle Sam uphill as the two imperialists take up the “White Man’s Burden” in this overtly racist cartoon referencing Kipling’s poem (Judge Magazine, 1899)

The United States relinquished direct colonial control of the Philippines in 1946, but it has held it close ever since, and particularly since Ferdinand (“Bongbong”) Marcos Jr. was elected in 2022. (Marcos is the son of the notorious dictator of the same name who ruled the country with an iron fist and who, on the advice of then-U.S. President Reagan, fled to Hawaii in 1986 after a popular uprising removed him from power.) Marcos Jr. has given the United States greater access to nine of his country’s military bases and in return the U.S. has given $100 million in military aid to the Philippines, despite the reported human rights violations committed by the Filipino military. The U.S. is actively cultivating the relationship in an effort to counter China’s influence in the South China Sea. Apparently in 2022, during a meeting at the UN, President Biden asked the new Philippine president, “What can I give you?” President Marcos is on a state visit to Washington again, where the “charm offensive” has continued apace, celebrating the strength of the U.S.-Philippines Alliance. 

US President Joe Biden shakes hands with Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr as they meet in the Oval Office of the White House, Washington, DC, May 1, 2023 [Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo]

How does this discussion of jingoism, Kipling, the White Man’s Burden, and the U.S. relationship with the Philippines relate to my theme about the inescapability of the world? There are many sides to everything, but one cannot look at one side in isolation without examining the whole. There is patriotism and then there is nationalism, taken to dangerous extremes with jingoist rhetoric. There is Kipling of The Jungle Book and Kipling of “The White Man’s Burden.” There is the United States going to war for control of the Philippines, later relinquishing colonial control, then supporting the brutal dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, and now, with the ascendancy of Marcos’ son, attempting to gain a greater military foothold in the country in order draw the Philippines closer as tensions mount with China.

Bringing these intertwined histories still closer to home, we find Rudyard Kipling in the 1890s living, not in England or his beloved India, but in Brattleboro, Vermont, less than 50 miles up the road from where I live. It was here that, in four short years, he wrote The Jungle Book and its sequel, Captains Courageous, portions of The Just-So Stories, and the first draft of Kim.

What a small world. Picking up one thread, you will be led to another, and another, until you find that they are all interconnected. It is impossible—in fact, irresponsible—to look at one part in isolation without following the threads where they lead. No matter how remote they seem, they will inevitably lead back home, especially if home is the United States, whose power and influence aim to penetrate the farthest reaches of the earth, and beyond.

As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. put it in his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Lest I leave you with the impression that the jingoism of the 1890s was uncontested, let me offer a contemporaneous cartoon, published in Life magazine in 1899, that challenged the perspective of the abhorrent White Man’s Burden cartoon above.In this cartoon, instead of the White men bearing the burden of their barbaric captives, it is the colonized peoples who are being forced to bear the burden of their colonial rulers.

J is for Jingoism, but it is also for Justice. Returning to the words of Dr. King, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

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564. The Magic Bus

The first thing we did on our recent visit to England was to top up our Oyster cards. I went into the newsagent’s across the street (run by British Indians), who swiped them and determined that they each already had about five pounds on them, as if they had been waiting for our next return. We added another five, and London was our oyster. The next day we bought Senior Railcards, which cut our train travel costs by a third, and after our first trip out of London we linked the railcards to the Oysters, giving us a third off the cost of all public transportation in London as well, as long as we traveled during off-peak times.

The Oyster card was our key to the city. We hopped on and off the Tube, the Overground, and the buses—but mostly the busses—tapping our cards as we greeted the driver, and topping them up from time to time at an Underground station or at the newsagent’s. Just half a block from where we were staying, in the flat of a generous friend that just happened to be empty at the time of our visit, we could hop onto the two buses we needed to get everywhere that mattered to us: the C-11 and the now all-electric 214.

Let me backtrack for a moment. We were staying in the North London borough of Camden, just north of Kentish Town and just east of Hampstead Heath. It was almost across the street from Parliament Hill School, where my mother and my cousin Sue had gone to secondary school and which I too attended for five short months in 1969-70, while my mother, my sister, and I were awaiting our immigration visas to permit us to join my father in the U.S.. It was five minutes’ walk from Gospel Oak, the primary school I had attended with my cousin Lesley in the autumn of 1963, when we spent three months visiting family in England before returning to India. Furthermore, it was walking distance from where my mother was born and grew up, where my father stayed when he came to study in London, where my parents met, where they lived after their marriage and before they left for India, and from where I was born. So perhaps you may understand why every little thing I did in that neighborhood, from waiting at the bus stop to crossing the street to buy a pint of milk, felt freighted with significance. As I walked down the streets in the area, their names like litanies, like touchstones—Gordon House Road, Mansfield Road, Prince of Wales Road, Belsize Lane, South Hill Park—my footfalls seemed to echo through the years, raising with them the spirits and stories of my parents, our friends and family, and my younger self.

Our buses came on time and regularly; rarely did we have to wait more than a few minutes. If a given bus was delayed, there were invariably alternative buses that one could take in the same direction. And every time the 214 rolled up to our stop, we boarded The Who’s Magic Bus (1968).

Thruppence and sixpence every day

Just to ride to my ba-by

No doubt transportation costs in the U.K. have risen dramatically over the years, especially travel by train and the London Underground. But for me, from the public transportation desert of the U.S., it brought freedom and joy.

But magic, you say? How so? 


On one of our first rides on the all-electric 214, tapping our Oyster cards as we traveled from Kings Cross station back to the flat, someone boarding the bus on Camden High Street caught my eye. It was Tamara, a dear family friend whom I’ve known since I was two years old. I sang out her name, and, after looking around bewildered for a few seconds, she registered who it was. Half an hour later, after stopping off at home, she had hopped on the 214 again from her place to ours, and together we went for a long ramble over Parliament Hill and Hampstead Heath at dusk. It was a dream, something I had longed to do and here I was, actually doing it.

The very next day, the next tap of the Oyster card: back on the 214 on the way back to Kings Cross—this time to link our rail passes to our Oyster cards—someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was my cousin Jan, on her way to work! A few days later she invited us to dinner at her house, minutes away from ours, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world to run into your cousin and drop over to her house, in the middle of the workweek, too.

And on our last day in London I took the C-11 bus to Belsize Park and back to meet my cousin Lesley for breakfast and she hopped on with me for the return journey stepping off for a few minutes to say hi to cousin Jan, whom I was meeting for a last walk on the Heath. A rare meeting of three cousins, who hadn’t been together for I can’t say how long, but even longer than the last time our parents had been together, which must have been at least 25 years.

I don’t want to cause no fuss (Too much, Magic Bus)
But can I buy your Magic Bus? (Too much, Magic Bus)
Nooooooooo!

Back in the U.S.A., I hardly dare voice my desire to prolong those magic moments. A voice in my head tells me it’s too much.

I don’t care how much I pay (Too much, Magic Bus)
I wanna drive my bus to my baby each day (Too much, Magic Bus)
I want it, I want it, I want it, I want it … (You can’t have it!)

What if those bus rides were to become a normal, daily thing? Would the magic still hold? In the song, the singer gets his wish; but the chorus still echoes, “Too much, Magic Bus.”

The Pioneer Valley Transit Authority (PVTA), the subsidized bus system in the Five-College Area where I live, is a rare thing in rural New England, with more than ten routes in our town alone. There’s a stop a block from our house where one can hop on several different buses, absolutely free (now there’s magic for you). A couple of weeks after we got back I realized that although one of the points in favor of this house when we moved here five years ago was its proximity to a busy bus stop, I had used it only once in all that time. Yet here I was waxing poetic about bus rides in England.

On the way back from a neighborhood vigil calling for a ceasefire in Israel-Palestine, Andrew and I flagged down a 31 bus and rode it home. With a little effort, I was able to summon up the delight that I had felt taking public transportation in London, and vowed that now I had retired, whenever possible I would take the bus into the center of town instead of driving. I’ll keep you posted about that.

I’ve been back for six weeks now, but can’t get the Magic Bus out of my head.

I don’t care how much I pay (Too much, Magic Bus)
I wanna drive my bus to my baby each day (Too much, Magic Bus)

My mother never stopped longing for London and her family, no matter how many years she had been away, but she rarely allowed herself to indulge that longing, even though she could easily have afforded to do so much more often. For me, my mother’s daughter in many ways but much more self-indulgent, the question is, How much is too much? What is the cost of living imaginatively in two places at once—or in my case, three, since my condition, born of my Indian and British parents, is one of triple-consciousness? Should I put away all  other time zones when I am in a given place? Can I? Or, to echo Saleem Sinai in Salman Rushdie’s luminous Midnight’s Children, is it my blessing and my curse?

Perhaps it is living more fully in the here-and-now that gives the most lasting satisfaction. Then again, they say that longing is always more powerful than fulfillment. Perhaps it is my long absences that keep the magic alive.

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561. What to Do With Old Letters?

At last, after five years in this house and one year of retirement, I have begun the process of going through old boxes of papers, deciding what to discard and what to keep. It all began with a search for two bundles of letters that my uncle Ted left for us after his death in 2017, letters spanning thirty years from my mother, my sister, and me—but mostly from Mum—that he had saved, tied up with string, and labeled with our names so as to make it easy for his daughters to return them. My cousin Jacky gave them to me in 2018, when I made my shortest-ever trip to England for a gathering in honor of Mum, and met her for the first time since her dad’s death. That very night in the hotel room, I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning reading all those letters Mum had written to her dear brother, in which she shared her sorrow, joys, and daily frustrations.

When I got home I started gathering together all the letters Mum had received from Uncle Ted, letters both hand-written and typed, long single-spaced letters covering both sides of the sheet of paper. I also collected all the emails from him that Mum had printed out and, before I cleared her old iMac, printed out some of the many, many emails that she had sent him. Over the years, long, frequent (and expensive) phone calls had been replaced in part by letters both handwritten and typed, written on typewriters, later on word processors and desktop computers and, after they had installed dial-up internet connections, sent as emails, a few of which I had been able to save. After Mum’s Alzheimer’s Disease made it impossible for her to use the computer anymore, or even to read easily, Uncle Ted started sending his messages for her to my email address, and I would read them out to her, greeting her in his voice—Hello Glad!—which always brought a smile to her face. I have saved those messages as well.

Of course they had corresponded ever since 1955, when Mum and Dad moved to India not long after my birth, sending long, handwritten airmail letters written on onion-skin paper to save postage, letters that traveled to and from India, then Greece, then India again, and finally, the United States. But those letters haven’t survived the many moves since, and the oldest ones in my possession are from the late 1970s. Once in the U.S., after the years in India of having to wait at least six weeks between letters, Mum far preferred the immediacy of telephone calls, when she could actually hear her the voices of her brothers and sisters. But before the days of cheap calling plans and free online calls, the cost of international long-distance calls was astronomical, and Mum and Dad, like most members of their generation, especially immigrants, were extremely thrifty. I love Dad for never having given Mum a hard time when he saw the phone bills; he knew how much staying in touch with her family meant to her. But some of those bills must have raised his eyebrows as well as making Mum feel guilty, since she herself made the effort to moderate the number and length of her calls to her siblings Bette, Rene, Len, and Ted by writing more frequently, even when she longed to just pick up the phone and hear their beloved voices. How grateful I am that she did!

After Mum died everything was turned upside-down as we had to sort through everything, dispense with much of it, and pack it up in preparation for selling my parents’ house. I knew I had saved the bundle of Mum’s letters to Uncle Ted somewhere, as well as her correspondence with all her siblings, but where, oh where had I put them? I wanted to scan some of them for my cousins before our forthcoming trip to England. Yesterday I sorted through every single one of the nearly twenty bankers’ boxes in my office closet, turning up all sorts of unexpected finds and many letters, but not that precious bundle. I was beginning to fear that they had inadvertently been recycled during one of the massive clear-outs, until I came to the hall closet in which we store my father’s un-framed sketches and two big plastic tubs labeled “precious documents” (ours and my parents’). I searched through the precious documents twice, but to no avail. Then, on the top shelf, behind some picture frames and a box of old Christmas cards (I know, I know), I found two more bankers’ boxes. One was unpromisingly labeled Art Mix, but the other was unlabeled. Standing on a stool, I moved all the intervening frames and boxes, and lifted down this last box. Halleluiah!

Again I sat up until early morning, sitting on the floor in the hall, sorting the letters chronologically, and interleaving the stray letters I had found during the day’s search and the emailed ones that I had printed out. I have several piles now: a bundle of letters from each of Mum’s siblings, the bundle from her to Uncle Ted, and a few emails and un-sent letters from her to her brother Len. Her sisters Rene and Bette weren’t on email or the computer, so I only have hand-written letters from them. I also have handwritten letters from Ted’s younger daughter, my cousin Carol, who corresponded with Mum faithfully over the years.

What to do with all these letters? I know the collection is incomplete and still hope to find a few more. Next I might combine letters sent and letters received, so that I get a sense of their conversations. So far I have only done this for two letters, excerpted below.

Only a few years after Mum and Dad had retired and bought their house out in western Massachusetts, Mum started restlessly looking for another. They were already in their mid-to-late sixties when they retired, and she was afraid that this contemporary house would be too difficult to live in and maintain, and especially to heat, as they grew older. However, moving yet again was a daunting prospect. She wrote to Uncle Ted about this dilemma in 2000, when she was not yet 73:

I’m beginning to think that we are too old and too young to make this move now, because anything that would suit us as impaired elderly people, would not suit us now, and to move twice in the next 10 years (give or take) would be too much stress and too much money.

Uncle Ted, by then 75, wrote back, ever the supportive elder brother:

I feel for your moving predicament. Your phrase “too old and too young” sums it up alright. I could add for my case “too poor, too lazy, and too indecisive.”

As I read, I saw how much this steadfast brotherly support had meant to Mum over the years. Uncle Ted’s love and loyalty never flagged. I have only just noticed a little note, a reminder, that he put on the outside of one of the envelopes after re-reading one of Mum’s 1999 letters:

Note, 2012: How lovely to read and remember how well G. expressed herself–recently, too.

***

Oh, how articulate these letters between the siblings are, and how perfectly they convey each of their personalities! My uncle Len typed at breakneck speed 100% error-free, and in a long stream of consciousness, since he didn’t take the time to breathe between sentences, let alone paragraphs. This, written one Sunday, gives a taste of it:

Lovely smell of roasting chicken coming up the apples [Cockney rhyming slang for “stairs”], and as I’ve just spent almost two hours over the big allotment (on our first dry Sunday for months) and cleared four buckets of weeds, mostly couch grass which is the most insidious of the grasses, and its roots spread extremely quickly. . .it’s high time I furnished my right hand with a glass and I’ve just dug out some beautiful cider we bought at Hereford last September. I’ve got 2 x 1/2 gallon jars—one of scrumpy, and one strong vintage. Ideal to prepare me for carving the chicken, and replace the sweat from my exertions earlier.

Auntie Bette, who wrote with great immediacy exactly as she talked, describing her long London walks in Regents Park, Primrose Hill, and Hampstead Heath, places Mum loved, and conjuring up her traditional British meals and the occasional curry-up in mouth-watering detail.

I’ve made a super Irish stew and dumplings or I love making curries especially when I have company coming, and also I think of you all the time I’m making it, such as is the gravy thick enough is it too hot?

Sure that she is the world’s expert at making curry, she writes to her baby sister: thanks for your advice, but I didn’t forget the coconut.

In one letter, written in April, 2005, she asked, referring to the wedding of Prince (now King) Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles: Did you see the wedding at all? I didn’t they say she looked very nice, what a load of fuss. My family lost very little love on the Royal Family.

Auntie Rene wrote about her own health woes and those of family members. Always the sentimental one, she caught Mum up on news of friends from the old neighborhood and evoked memories of their own mother.

I’m going to J’s school for Harvest Table on Thursday which is Mum’s birthday she loved church and this time of year so when they play We Plough the Fields and Scatter I shall sing it loud for you and Mum I know you like it.

Both aunts of course raved about their grandchildren and, in Auntie Bette’s case, their great-grandchildren.

Did I forget to mention how entertaining these letters are?

Uncle Ted loved language. He often sent Mum books and he and Mum regularly wrote about what they were reading. Here’s part of an extended rant, in 1999, on clichés and Americanisms:

While in the mood for a good moan I’ll get on my hobby horse of clichés. Basically, it’s that no-one can answer a question, begin a speech, or give an explanation, without prefacing their comment with the word “basically”. Absolutely! has replaced “yes” and “agreed” or “that’s my opinion too” and no end of other words and phrases. Regularly we hear it in response to some interviewer’s question. . . Hardly a soul opens his/her mouth without an Absolutely. And these things are infectious. All the interviewers do it. I’m catching it. The same offenders have lost the use of the brain-cell holding the word “no” and replaced it with ABSOLUTELY Not”. . . You know how on TV when a foreigner is being interviewed, he’ll speak his lingo while a translation appear in sub-tittles on screen. This fellow from Kurdistan or some such Caucasian state [Note that Uncle Ted uses Caucasian accurately, in geographical, not biological terms] was “absolutysing” away like mad. I was able to pick up the word before it came on screen. It must be universal.

And a little further on:

Then there’s the craze for add-ons. Listen to the wireless [radio] or any soap. Wait for a door-bell to ring, and the resulting, “Hi (hello is dead) Jack! Come on in.” Nobody ever says “come in” same as nobody ever meets anybody. They now only ever “meet up”. Checking has gone too. Only checking up or out or in.

***

How much of the above have I been able to discard? Absolutely nothing! Will I find some way to use these letters in telling the story of my mother and her family? I really don’t know. But in them my mother’s generation lives on, guiding me on how to maintain family relationships and navigate ageing—mine and that of my loved ones—gracefully and with good humo(u)r.

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551. Z is for Zameen

This month I will be blogging about my recent trip to India as part of the annual April Blogging from A to Z Challenge. I don’t aim or claim to be exhaustive, but simply to share moments of the trip with you: observations, fragments of conversations, stories recounted to me, reflections on language, books, food, people and places.

Returning from my trip to India, the perennial question of home turns itself over in my mind. Home is India, the birthplace of my father and much of my childhood. Home is England—London, really—the birthplace of my mother. Home is New England, where I have lived for almost all of my adult life. Home is the people and places and books and songs that I love, that have the deepest meaning for me. So for the Z word, the last in this A-to-Z Challenge, I choose the Hindi-Urdu word zameen.

Appropriately, zameen has different meanings as well: land, ground, earth. While we may claim a certain piece of land as our own, we are all sustained by the land, whether we own it or not. As Jhumpa Lahiri has written, quoting Nathaniel Hawthorne (see TMA #402), while certain people may be used to specific soils and specific places, with sufficient care they can be transplanted successfully into “unaccustomed earth”. We all walk on the ground, or ought to, but particular places are sacred ground to certain people, and we must respect them. We are all children of this Earth and return to the earth when we die.

My home is this one piece of earth where I plant my feet every day; it is the places on Earth that hold special meaning for me; it is the fellow Earthlings who live in my heart. The word zameen has a Persian origin, but it traveled to South Asia, where it has rooted itself in new earth and made itself a new home.

Oh, and another meaning for zameen: the world, our beloved home. May we protect and nurture it for ourselves, each other, and the future.

The image below represents a very personal home for me, my father’s childhood home, that is no longer in our family, and which has recently been demolished. On our recent trip to India, Andrew picked the green mango from one of the mango trees still growing in the compound and slipped the piece of a block cut from the volcanic red rock of the Konkan region into his pocket.  And I picked up the flower from below the old chafa tree that stood next to the house. Zameen, still and always sacred ground.

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550. Y is for Yoga: Reflections

This month I will be blogging about my recent trip to India as part of the annual April Blogging from A to Z Challenge. I don’t aim or claim to be exhaustive, but simply to share moments of the trip with you: observations, fragments of conversations, stories recounted to me, reflections on language, books, food, people and places.

I didn’t manage to get much exercise on this trip to India, especially while we were in the big cities. In the evenings I might take a few rounds in the housing society compound of whichever cousin we were staying with, or a short walk to the nearest ATM and back. Only when we were on the Konkan Coast, in my father’s hometown of Ratnagiri or in Benaulim, Goa, did I manage to go for longer walks, in the narrow streets of the old market or on the firm, damp sand of the beaches. Some of my cousins and/or their spouses regularly practiced yoga, modified according to their own needs, abilities, and time commitments. Another cousin’s practice focused on Brahmavidya, spiritual breathing and meditation rather than physical exercises. Some of their children—now in their 30s and 40s, did more energetic workouts that included some yoga along with more aerobic exercise. Some members of both generations went for trekking, whether in the forests of the Western Ghats or the snows of the Himalayas. But during my trip the only person I actually saw performing yoga was a non-Indian on the beach in Goa.

Upon my return, my bad habits of staying up too late at night and sitting at the computer for too long have taken hold again, and I am gearing up—yet again—to restart a regular yoga practice, however modest. So far all that this has entailed has been reviewing my books on yoga, each of them from a different era, geared to different audiences and attention spans. Most of them begin by identifying their yoga lineage—their teaching and that teacher’s tradition. Some of them focus on hatha yoga:

a branch of yoga which uses physical techniques to try to preserve and channel the vital force or energy. In the 20th century, a development of hatha yoga focusing particularly on asanas (the physical postures) became popular throughout the world as a form of physical exercise. This modern form of yoga is now widely known simply as “yoga.”

However, many of the books that made their way to my bookshelves over the years, by Swami Sivananda, B. K. S. Iyengar, André Van Lysebeth, D.V. Trivedi, Swami Vishnudevananda, Michaeline Kiss, and Yolanda Pettinato, root themselves in an older tradition even if they translate it into universal terms. Whether or not they explicitly draw upon a religious tradition, they all acknowledge their teachers and how their own practice draws upon and/or adapts theirs. And they all emphasize that yoga must be practiced steadily, with concentration and moderation, in order to cultivate harmony and balance in the mind and the body.

My own yoga practice, such as it is, has moved in fits and starts, sometimes linked to mindfulness meditation, sometime simply a series of physical postures, sometimes at home, other times at the teacher’s home (Karen Sheingold) or the premises of a local yoga center (with Patty Townsend), sometimes alone, at other times with a friend, but if truth be told, most often in abeyance. I first took it up in my early twenties, using my father’s copy of B. K. S. Iyengar’s Light on Yoga (I have written about Dad’s own yoga practice in TMA #141, The Yogi of Beals Street ). I developed a pretty regular practice using a succession of asanas (poses/positions) that Iyengar recommended for beginners, starting with several repetitions of surya namaskar, or sun salutation. But somewhere along the line the practice was abandoned, until the next time, months or even years later. I have taken it up at particularly stressful times in my life, and dropped it again when I have been unable to make regular time for it. But the ideal of a regular yoga practice continually recalls me and makes me recall myself.

from Pant Pratinidhi’s 1928 book The Ten-Point Way to Health: Surya Namaskars

Many friends and relatives outside India, whether or not they are of Indian origin, also practice yoga, and some have encouraged me to attend classes with them when I might never have made myself go on my own. Yoga is well established worldwide, and generations of teachers have been popularizing it since at least the 1940s. My Auntie Angy, now 90, went to yoga classes every week for years in the northern suburbs of London and my cousin Lesley often accompanied her. My friends Maureen and Ruth, who live deep in the woods of North-Central Massachusetts, meet regularly to practice yoga in their own homes. One of my former students, Shazia Omar, teaches yoga and yogilates in her hometown of Dhaka and around the world. Here she is, performing surya namaskar. I personally have no interest in scrutinizing these practices for their “authenticity.” All I know is that I am inspired by the commitment of both the students and their teachers.

In recent years, there has been a concern expressed by several of my Indian American friends and and more widely, on the internet, that yoga as it has been commercialized in the U.S. is a form of cultural appropriation—defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the practices, customs, or aesthetics of one social or ethnic group by members of another (typically dominant) community or society. I certainly have sympathy for the feelings of alienation and exclusion from “one’s own” tradition that an Indian American may have in a yoga class run by white American fitness guru. That cringeworthy mispronunciation of namaste! Especially for Indian Americans who have been raised in a religious Hindu household, the chanting of Om and various mantras or the commercial use of gods and goddesses can be deeply offensive. At the same time, I would dare assert that most yoga teachers in the U.S., and elsewhere around the world, whether or not they are of Indian origin, have a serious commitment to the form of yoga that they practice. There are charlatans who are primarily looking to make money and who may even be teaching practices that are harmful to the body. However, with any cultural practice, whether in or outside of India, there will always be those who have been studying and practicing for a lifetime and those who have only a superficial understanding of the subject or who are driven by ignoble motives.

Surya Namaskar installation at Indira Gandhi International Airport, New Delhi

To the question of whether or not yoga “belongs to India”, I have my own personal answer: No. Yoga had its origins in India, but now it belongs to the world, like all good ideas and beneficial practices. Yes, Indians can be proud of it, but–in my opinion–that pride should not be harnessed into an excess of exclusive nationalism. Practices akin to yoga have emerged and been developed in many different traditions and parts of the world and as human beings we can all study these traditions and draw upon these practices.

Since returning from India I have been reading and watching discussions of the issue of yoga and cultural appropriation, and seeking balanced and respectful perspectives that consider various points of view. I would like to share with you this piece (from Wikipedia!) that introduces the issue, and this January 2023 lecture by scholar of religion Neil Dalal, Yoga and Cultural Appropriation: Parsing the Complexities. I’d welcome your views on the subject. 

Is yoga as practiced today outside of India and outside of a fixed religious tradition a cultural appropriation, a cultural ambassador, or simply a discipline for the cultivation of mind and body?

Closing with these words from Swami Sivananda (quoted in André Van Lysebeth’s Yoga Self-Taught (1968, English translation 1971):

An ounce of practice is worth several tons of theory.

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549. X is for Xacuti

This month I will be blogging about my recent trip to India as part of the annual April Blogging from A to Z Challenge. I don’t aim or claim to be exhaustive, but simply to share moments of the trip with you: observations, fragments of conversations, stories recounted to me, reflections on language, books, food, people and places.

While we were in Goa we ate fresh fish and seafood whenever we had the chance, and we made sure to try some Goan specialities. We had Goan fish fry with surmai (kingfish) and recheado, but didn’t get the chance to try a xacuti dish. So while I was at the one of the little supermarkets in Benaulim I picked up a packet of fresh xacuti masala to take back to the U.S.

Xacuti (pronounced shakuti or, in Konkani, shagoti ) is a Goan coconut-based dish most often made with chicken, beef, fish, or lamb. Xacuti masala is a roasted and ground powder made from its unique blend of spices, which can be used in vegetarian dishes as well. The packaged preparation that we bought, Karma’s Goan Xacuti, contains coriander, aniseed, mace, cumin, turmeric, star anise, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, green cardamom, pepper, and sun-dried chillies. You can find instructions for making your own here.

Xacuti is thought to have been based on Portuguese cooking. However, all mentions of it in Portugal refer to it as part of Goan cuisine. In an interesting article, How Portugal Influenced Indian Cuisine, Zara Quiroga, food and culture writer at Oh! My Cod Tours, suggests that in fact Xacuti “originated in Goa (as explained by the use of local ingredients) yet it did so during Portuguese rule, and included animal proteins which wouldn’t have even been considered prior to the Catholic influence on the local Hindu majority.” It’s worth reading the whole article, which mentions the most popular ingredients that the Portuguese brought to India (chief among them chillies, tomatoes, and potatoes) and, in addition to xacuti discusses the origins of Goan Indian dishes like pav, vindaloo, sarapatel, recheado, chorise, bebinca, balchao, and cafreal. Quiroga also makes the important points that the cultural exchange that resulted from Portuguese trade and subsequently colonial rule “wasn’t linear nor one-sided” and that the cultural mixing that resulted from it must be discussed “against an interesting, complex and often even grotesque historical background.” I would also recommend her companion piece, How India Influenced Portuguese Food. 

Another interesting article Goan Cuisine: A Confluence of Cultures, on the government website Indian Culture, introduces Goan cuisine as having: 



developed out of a merger of various cultures that it came into contact with over the centuries such as the Portuguese, Arab, Brazilian, African, French, Konkani, Malabari, Malaysian and Chinese. The three major communities of Goa – Hindus, Muslims, and Christians, contribute to the culinary tradition in their own manner. The Konkan farmers and fishermen consume fish and rice on a wide scale. The Christian community patronises items such as beef, seafood, and pork. The intermixing of multiple cultural elements is mirrored within the cuisine of Goa in a distinctive mix of richness and subtlety.

Last night I got home late, planning to write on xacuti for the usually-elusive “X” post in my A to Z blogging challenge, and was greeted at the door by the most wonderful aroma. Andrew had looked up vegetarian xacuti recipes and made an elaborate xacuti paneer coconut biryani that was so delicious that I was utterly unable to write my X post in its blissful aftermath.

Andrew found the recipe for his winning biryani on Srivalli’s Spice Your Life, a vegetarian food blog with step by step recipes. By coincidence, she had created her fusion dish, Xacuti Paneer Coconut Biryani, as the entry for X in the 2019 A to Z Biryani/Pulao/Khichdi Festival, another April blogging marathon. You can find links to her other entries on the post. For a more common non-vegetarian xacuti dish, you might check out the instructions for making Chicken Xacuti on Archana’s Kitchen or here, on Hema Magesh’s website.

chicken xacuti (from hemamagesh.com)

Xacuti is now officially part of our diet. I expect that xacuti paneer coconut biryani will be featured at some of our special occasions in the future. Just one of the many ways that our recent trip to India will continue to infuse our everyday lives with “richness and subtlety.”

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