Dear Reader,
Fancy getting a sensation akin to a 50-hertz vibration on your tongue. That is what the Szechuan pepper does to you. I tasted this electrifying spice in a harmless-looking bowl of thukpa at a roadside eatery in Tawang, Arunachal Pradesh, and promptly included it in my list of things to avoid. But I am lily-livered when it comes to spicy food. My gourmet friend, who lives in Guwahati and is familiar with the taste of this spice widely used in northeastern cuisine, gushed about the unique flavour of Szechuan pepper, locally known as jabrang or mejenga. Neither hot like chilli pepper nor pungent like black pepper, Szechuan pepper has a slightly lemony, entirely unexpected taste.
The Szechuan pepper is actually not a pepper but the berries of the prickly ash tree, which belongs to the citrus family. When the berries are dried in the sun, they release tiny black seeds, which are inedible. What we consume as Szechuan pepper is the husk, which is painstakingly separated from the seeds, berry by berry. It is an essential ingredient in Chinese-Sichuan cooking, recognised as one of the most subtle and flavourful cuisines in the world. So, even as India and China fight over territories, here is a spice joining the rivals in a piquant bond.
The pepper we encounter most frequently—black pepper or piper nigrum—has also connected empires for millennia. It is chiefly pepper that drew European traders to India. One of the earliest British travellers to India was the merchant Ralph Fitch (1550-1611), who travelled from Goa across the Deccan Plateau to Agra and Fatehpur Sikri to wait on emperor Akbar. His memoir mentions the treasures of India that left him dazzled, including jewels, diamonds, fine cotton textile, and pepper, which, he says, “groweth in many parts of India, especially about Cochin”.
Fitch’s contemporary, Shakespeare, who shared the fascination of his age with the perfumed isles of the East, mentions the pepper in the The Merry Wives of Windsor: “I will take the lecher. He is at my house. He cannot ‘scape me./ ‘Tis impossible he should. He cannot creep into a half-penny purse,/ nor into a pepper-box.”
I read about Fitch in the engagingly written book, Travellers in the Golden Realm: How Mughal India Connected England to the World (July 2024) by Lubaaba Al-Azami, who is a cultural historian specialising in the Global Renaissance. She upends the Eurocentric notion that England was the great superpower that colonised lowly India by showing how, for the English travellers and merchants in the Elizabethan Age, Mughal India was the coveted land, a kingdom of unimaginable wealth that left them goggle-eyed. But they could not curry favour with the affluent Mughals because they had nothing much to offer other than rough woollen broadcloth, which was of no use in sultry India.
Al-Azami writes, “For the first century and a half at least of English travel to India, the English presence in Mughal lands was as struggling merchant petitioners plying an abortive trade whose impact in the thriving state and society hosting them was negligible. While the first trickle of early individual English travellers made way for larger collective voyages and exchanges, the English and their activities remained largely insignificant to the broader concerns of India and its rulers.”
Travellers in the Golden Realm decolonises history and makes it fun. Historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam also challenges European hegemony in his scholarly book, Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640. Using texts and documents in various Asian and European languages, the book examines the history of the Indian Ocean region from a multiplicity of viewpoints—western India, the Red Sea and Mecca, the Persian Gulf, East Africa, and Kerala. Read this riveting review of his book by Radhika Seshan in the latest issue of Frontline.
In present-day India, narratives from the mainland are being challenged and enriched as literature from the northeast, in original English and in English translation, comes more frequently to the fore. The Meghalaya-based poet, novelist, and dramatist, Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, who recently won the 2024 Shakti Bhatt Prize, records the Khasi way of life with the zeal of a chronicler. His latest novel, The Distaste of the Earth, builds on a mythic story of tragic love to not only document the nuances of Khasi belief but also to sound a warning about ecological devastation. Debapriya Basu reviews it with verve here.
Incidentally, peppercorn is an important ingredient in Khasi cuisine too. Piper longum, which grows abundantly in the Khasi-Jaintia hills, is hotter than black pepper. It gives Khasi dishes their characteristic hot and earthy taste, and is also used by traditional healers to cure a range of ailments. Szechuan pepper also grows in Meghalaya—called jaiur in Khasi,it is an essential ingredient in tungtap (fermented fish) chutney.
I will sing again of all things zany and zesty when we regroup next time.
Bye till then. Have a happy and silent Diwali!
Anusua Mukherjee
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