Tag Archives: Nawab of Bengal

Dine Like a Nawab of Bengal

Arts, Culture & Entertainment, Books (incl.Biographies - w.e.f.01 jan 2018 ), Community Involvement / Social Issues, Leaders, , , ,

BENGAL :

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Mir Qasim Ali Khan Bahadur was the Nawab of Bengal between 1760 and 1763. He is most famous for his dealings with the British: he was put on the throne through the intervention of the East India Company, but a few years later was defeated by their forces at the Battle of Buxar. This defeat marked the decline of the political power of the Nawabs of Bengal and was an important moment in East India Company imperial consolidation in Bengal.

All of this is important, of course, but I’m here to discuss a far more pressing question: what did the Nawab and his contemporaries eat?

I encountered this manuscript, titled Khwan-e Nimat, “The Beneficent Table,” at the library of Jamia Millia Islamia here in Delhi. Composed in Persian, the text promises its readers a description of “the art of cooking from the private kitchen of the chef of Nawab Qasim Ali Khan Bahadur.”

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The text describes how the Nawab’s chef prepared fish kabab with rice, several types of meat kababs, fried eggs, sweets made with almonds, a few different types of pickles, pulao, khichri, qorma, various dals, mango jam, sheermal (a sweet bread), and on and on.

Although I originally encountered this work in manuscript form at Jamia, after some hunting I discovered that a lithographed version was printed in 1871 in Lucknow.

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The printing was done by a small press, but it means that there was at least some awareness of and interest in the text in the late nineteenth century, a century after the political power of the Nawabs of Bengal had waned. As such, it offers us insight into not only the culinary preferences of Mir Qasim and his court, but also the culinary interests and understanding of food history among North Indians in the high colonial era.

Over the course of my research I’ve stumbled on several cookbooks written in Persian and Urdu over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, but I’ve found there is very little written on colonial-era traditions of writing about food in these languages. Many of the Indian food histories written on this period focus on the British adaptations of Indian cuisine, and exchanges between British and Indian cooks and palates. This text and its later publication tell an alternative (and I’d argue more interesting!) story: that of Indian interest in various local cuisines, and the desire of members of broader literate classes to know and perhaps try to prepare cuisines cooked by regional elites and leaders.

I’m craving fish today, so here’s a rough translation of how the Nawab’s chef prepared his fish kabab. Following these recipes is a bit of a challenge because most of the units of measurement appear to be regionally or temporally specific, and have changed significantly; many are not in any of the Urdu or Persian dictionaries I’ve consulted. I’ve therefore taken educated guesses based in large part on what I know about cooking, and the limited information I could find on the units used.

Ingredients:
Fish (type not specified, perhaps about 650 grams)
Butter (possibly referring to ghee; approximately 80 grams)
Onion (perhaps two-three)
Curd (approximately 15 grams)
Malai (approximately 20 grams)
Coriander (approximately 20 grams)
Black pepper (approximately 15 grams)
Gram (Chickpea) Flour (approximately 60 grams)
Pepper (mirch, presumably red?) (approximately 20 grams)
Cloves
ٓA pinch of lemon juice
A pinch of cardamom
Several pinches of salt

Cut the fish into chunks in the size of kababs and place them aside. Prepare the gram flour well (toast it?). After that, mix it together with the salt, pepper, crushed coriander, and some of the butter. Mix this into each kabab. Then finely chop up the onions, and fry them in some butter and then also mix the onions with some butter into the kababs. Then mix the lemon juice, cloves, and cardamom together. Drain the curd of water and strain the malai, and coat the kababs with these things. Then place these kababs in pot with the (cooked?) rice, and take the remaining spices and sprinkle them into with the rice and kababs. Roast/fry (prepare over a hot surface) and enjoy!

source: http://www.archivaldistractions.wordpress.com / Archival Distraction / by Amanda Lanzillo / July 07th, 2018

Forgotten histories: A library in a Guwahati mosque shares the fate of an old Assamese community

Arts, Culture & Entertainment, Community Involvement / Social Issues, Education, Travel & Tourism, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Guwahati,  ASSAM  : 

Sirat Library finds few mentions in recorded history and it is even fading from the personal histories of the Khilonjia Muslims who live around it.

Image credit: Shaheen Ahmed
Image credit: Shaheen Ahmed

Every time Assam heads into an election, the political discourse in the state invariably veers towards the issue of indigeniety. Who is an original inhabitant (and who is not) becomes a central question, with all the political parties nudging the electorate’s collective memory to recall real and imagined injustices.

With elections having kicked off in Assam again, my thoughts returned to something else, to my childhood when I would accompany my parents to a concrete structure in Guwahati’s Lakhtokia area. The structure was architecturally nondescript, but the images and the experiences of it still coalesced to form fragments of my memory. Known locally as Sirat Library – although the Assamese pronunciation Sirot often rendered the name incomprehensible – it was located within the precincts of a mosque called Lakhtokia Masjid No. 1.

I vaguely recall public meetings being held in the small library. And till the early 2000s, it moonlighted as a voting booth. For a child, it was an unusual sight to see so many people of different religions line up to cast their votes and even more unusual to see them do so in a library inside a mosque.

The structure still stands today. But the only sight that greets a visitor is of a small room bereft of books or readers. Its holdings are restricted to a small glass cupboard and a few Islamic texts in it.

Legacy of the past

The history of the library is really important to the Khilonjia Muslims or ethnic Assamese Muslims living in Guwahati. Khilonjia Muslims have been in Assam since before the Ahom invasion in the 13th century and they have always been known to relate to their ethnic, rather than their religious, identity.

Shehabuddin Talish, the official scribe of Mir Jumlah, the Nawab of Bengal who invaded Assam in 1662, described their encounter with the Muslims in Assam: “The Muslims whom we met in Assam are Assamese in their habits, and Muhammadans but in name.”

The famous colonial historian Sir Edward Gait, in his monumental work A History of Assam published in 1905, extensively employed Talish’s descriptions to map out a definitive chart of Assam’s history. Nevertheless, historical narratives of Khilonjia Muslims remain sketchy. The same fate is shared by the library in Lakhtokia.

There are no written records of when or who constructed the library. It is, however, believed that the structure is among of the oldest libraries in Guwahati, and the mosque it is a part of is among the three oldest mosques constructed in the colonial period.

The mosque finds a mention in an article in 1885 in the journal Assam Bandhu, which was edited by the Assamese intellectual Gunabhiram Barua. The land for the mosque was donated by Col. Jalnur Ali Ahmed, the father of the fifth President of India, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed. Col. Ahmed was a distinguished Assamese of his time: he was the second Assamese associated with the Imperial Medical Services and the first Assamese to receive an M.D. degree from London.

Personal histories

Writer-lawyer Akdas Ali Mir, one of the inhabitants of the locality, points to a letter written in 1915 by AHW Benting, the then Commissioner of Assam, which is probably one of the earliest and only clues to tracing the history of the library. “Benting had issued directions in an Order Letter to shift the Makhtab (primary Islamic school) established by the British from the mosque to the present location, where the Junior Madrassa High School is in Guwahati.”

Mir continued: “We can surmise that Sirat Library is the spot where the Makhtab was and then got converted into a library.” This may be true as Sirat is an Arabic word meaning a “way of life”.

As with all public libraries in the state, Sirat Library too was awarded a monthly grant from the government for its upkeep. But the actual running was done by the area’s Assamese Muslims, with people taking turns as librarians. Renowned Assamese filmmaker Altaf Majid remembers his childhood days spent in the library reading in the quiet. “My uncle used to be the librarian for many years. Every Friday afternoon he would take me to the iconic Lawyers’ Book Stall in nearby Pan Bazaar to buy books. In fact I read the Mahabharata in Bengali in Sirat Library in the 1960s.”

Majid continued: “This library was also a repository of well-known pulp fiction of the period. They were in English, Assamese and Bengali. In fact, I also read my first English novel in this library as well as the famous Bengali Mohan Detective Series and the Assamese adventure series Pa-Phu.”

Credit: Shaheen Ahmed
Credit: Shaheen Ahmed

Mukimuddin Ahmed, another resident, talks of the days in the late 1950s when he would act as the librarian in the evenings. “I was paid Rs 5 every month as the librarian and I worked for a year. Every afternoon after school I would go to the residences to collect the newspapers for the library. In the evenings after the readers had finished reading them I would then return them to the respective households.”

Assamese Muslim women had a strong role to play in the library’s upkeep. In the late 1960s, the only Assamese Muslim women’s social organisation, Anjumaan-E-Khawaateenein Islam, contributed Rs 10,000 to construct the new building for the library from the earlier Assam-type house construction. Noted Assamese woman writer Alimun Nessa Piyar donated furniture to the library in 1960.

As Helena Barranha and Susana S. Martins poignantly observed , “Memory has become both an intellectual challenge and a commodity for easy consumption.” This is true for contemporary India in general, and Sirat Library epitomises the trend. The erasure of the library from popular memory testifies to the erasure of cultural traditions that were once so integral to the Assamese society.

source: http://www.scroll.in / Scroll.in / Home> Memory Lane / by Shaheen Ahmed / April 05th, 2016