How Mumbai’s masalawaalis make a single spice from 30 ingredients

Bottle masala is impossible to find in stores.

FIRST CAME THE BURNING EYES. Then the uncontrollable sneezing.

I was seven years old and watching three sari-clad ladies, each holding a tall, wooden pestle, adroitly throw their sticks into the center of a deep wooden vat. It was filled with dried chilies, which explained the pungent aroma in the air. Thump-thump-thump. The ladies’ synchronized pounding created a hypnotic beat.

What I witnessed that summer day in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, was the annual tradition of hand-making bottle masala—a fragrant, reddish-brown spice blend named for the darkly colored bottles it’s stored in. Crafted from 20 to more than 30 ingredients, the one-of-a-kind mix is synonymous with the East Indian community—descendants of people indigenous to the North Konkan region on India’s west coast who converted to Christianity. This minority was officially recognized as “East Indians” by the government in 1887.

Where does that nice smoky flavor come from? JUDE ALBUQUERQUE

“When the British took over Bombay, the city’s native Catholic population took up the moniker East Indian to differentiate us from the other Christians who had moved to the city,” explains Reena Pereira-Almeida, creator of the East India Memory Co., a project that documents the group’s history and culture. “Over time, our cuisine, language, clothing, music, etc. came to reflect a mixture of Maharashtrian, Portuguese, and British influences.”

The rusty-hued bottle masala exemplifies this unique amalgamation. Chef Michael Swamy traces its origins back to goda masala, a roughly 20-ingredient mélange made by Maharashtrians using the same hand-pounding procedure that so enthralled my younger self. “Dry blending of spices is a very Maharashtrian thing,” he says.

But this artisanal practice is slowly dwindling. Few families have the space for hired masalawaalis to pound out bottle masala now that Mumbai is a megacity. Instead, they are choosing the convenience of having their mixes made in mills, and some households have filed away their family recipe, reducing the wild, family-by-family diversity of masalas out there. Still, for East Indian home cooks, bottle masala remains at the heart of their kitchen’s spice collection.

The vessels that give the mix its name are often leftover beer bottles.

“It has an earthy, smoky flavor—very subtle,” says Verna Texeira, a Brooklyn resident who was raised in Bombay. “It’s also very versatile—used with meat, vegetables, or fish—and changes the taste of the dish according to what you are cooking.” In The East Indian Cookery Book, first published in 1981 by The Bombay East Indian Association, bottle masala is listed in 34 recipes, including dishes such as duck moile and prawn lonvas, which are celebrated within the community. It’s also the first recipe in Swamy’s tome, The East Indian Kitchen, in which he shares two versions of the blend.

“East Indian food is a mish-mash,” says Swamy. “You have the Indian side, which is very pure and holistic and includes no meat. Then the Portuguese came and introduced meat eating, like pork, and even bread.”

Sarpatel, made with cubed pork and bottle masala, perfectly represents this fusion. Due to the limited availability of the community’s spice blends, though, and scarcity of East Indian restaurants, the cuisine is a mystery to most of Mumbai. Swamy partly blames its underrepresentation on anecdotal evidence that East Indians are “secretive” and notorious for guarding their recipes.

“I got a lot of whiplash from my aunts for sharing our recipes publicly in my book,” he says. Verna’s mother, Georgina Texeira, admits she’s possessive about the bottle masala recipe she inherited from her grandmother. “I have shared it only with close family and friends,” she says.

In some villages, these okhli were built into the floor. JUDE ALBUQUERQUE

This helps make bottle masala, and East Indian cuisine, special: Each family’s recipe differs depending on the area and sub-group they belong to. “The taste and color of the bottle masala will be different for each home and from village to village,” explains my father, who grew up in the former East Indian stronghold of Mumbai’s Pali Village. Some families use a combination of chilies. Others favor the Kashmiri chili, which lends the mix its trademark maroon hue. Common additions include turmeric, black peppercorns, fenugreek seeds, sesame seeds, poppy seeds, wheat, nutmeg, cumin, mugwort … the list goes on.

Like my father, Texeira remembers the masalawaalis going house to house in her hamlet of Kalina to register families interested in having bottle masala or other spice blends made during the warm summer months. She also looked forward to the impending visit from the masalawallah (spice man). Like Santa Claus, he carried a large bag and delivered the pylee—all the spices each family required.

While this home-delivery service no longer exists, Texeira and others visit Mumbai’s larger markets to procure ingredients. Verna, whose mother has been making bottle masala for 30 years, fondly remembers this annual shopping spree and the two- or three-day process of sun drying the spices.

Thump. Thump. Thump. JUDE ALBUQUERQUE

“All the verandahs in the village would have the spices laid out on bedsheets or steel thalis,” she explains. “In the afternoons, my mother would send me to the terrace upstairs to turn the chilies in the sun. It was such a beautiful, sensory experience seeing the yellow turmeric, the round coriander seeds, the red crinkled chilies … ”

Marise Ann Lawrence likens the atmosphere of the masalawaallis’ arrival to a party. As the spice ladies removed the denkhas (stalks) from the chilies, or tossed ingredients in an earthenware dish over a wood fire, they’d chat with her aunts and mother and exchange family stories. “It wasn’t just about the work,” she says.

Depending on the quantity made, the procedure could take a day or a whole week. “It was like a picnic,” adds Texeira. “You’d have to provide them with tea, sugar, milk, and oil, and in the afternoon, they would cook their meal.” My father remembers the spice ladies preparing a dish with dried Bombay ducks, a fish found in the Arabian Sea, which they would char in the wood fire’s embers and smash together with raw onion to make a chutney.

Just as larger families band together for masala-making season, East Indians, as a minority group, unite for community celebrations, religious feasts, and weddings, says Pereira-Almeida, who grew up in India and now lives in Australia. 

“Those who have settled in other countries come together for occasions like Christmas and Easter,” she adds, referencing the sizeable East Indian diaspora. And traditional East Indian specialties, including those made with bottle masala, always play a starring role at these events.

Mixing and sifting. JUDE ALBUQUERQUE

Once the toasted spices cooled, the masalawaalis would start hand pounding. Standing around a chalice-like okhli—built into the floors of homes in some villages—they established their catchy rhythm, taking turns slamming the spices. “It is pound, sift, repeat. Pound, sift, repeat,” says Lawrence of the three- to four-hour operation.

“I remember their bangles clinking as they worked,” says Verna. Decades later, she remains fascinated by the ladies’ strength.

As mounds of vibrantly colored spices piled up, the masalawaalis gently combined the powders with deft circular hand movements. They then filled narrow-necked beer or whiskey bottles, patiently pushing down the masala with a wooden stick and sealing it with a cork and piece of cloth secured with string.

While many East Indians are nostalgic about the hand-pounding process, most find that making bottle masala—including sourcing and roasting the spices—is too much work, even though the mills have sped up the job. Still, a stubborn few do it themselves to ensure quality, and Swamy believes the traditional method releases the spices’ essential oils slowly, giving the blend a mellow flavor, while mechanical methods leave a slightly bitter aftertaste.

Laid-out ingredients can be a colorful sight. JUDE ALBUQUERQUE

The old-school procedure may soon be relegated to memories, but the love affair with bottle masala continues for this community dispersed around the world. “Other communities say everything we cook is always with bottle masala, that we can’t survive without it,” says Texeira. It’s not much of an exaggeration: On her yearly visits to see Verna in Brooklyn, she always has a packet or two of bottle masala stashed in her suitcase.

“If I call my Mom and ask her what to do if I’m stuck with adding flavor to a dish, she will say just put bottle masala,” says Verna, laughing.

(Source: Gastro Obscura)

Seven Parsi men who cycled across the world nearly a century ago

Through resourcefulness and strength, the men from Bombay overcame all kinds of obstacles and hardships.

“I envy the young men who have made the book. I too have some of the red blood which seeks adventure; some thing of the wanderlust which even drives one forward. But fate and circumstances have prevented from satisfying it in the ordinary way – I seek adventure in other ways.”

Jawaharlal Nehru’s foreword to a book by three Parsi men who cycled around the world in the 1920s was just one of the delightful things about it. Chapter after chapter in the book describes the young men’s rollicking adventures, like the time one of them got stones broken on his chest with a hammer while another dragged a car with a rope held between his teeth.

Keki Kharas, Rustam Ghandhi and Rutton Shroff in
New York, USA. | Courtesy: Anoop Babani

Anoop Babani read the book, With Cyclists Around The World, with amusement and interest, but it was the end that intrigued the former journalist and cyclist. There, on “perhaps the last page”, was the hope that the grand reception received by the three Parsis upon their return to Bombay in March 1928 would also be accorded to “another fellow who is coming back”. Who was this fellow? When did he leave India and when did he come back? Babani had to find out.

His research revealed that in the 1920s and 1930s, 10 Indians – all in their 20s, all Parsis, and all from Bombay – chose to cycle around the globe in three separate groups. “Fired by the intense desire to carry the name of the country – Mother India – to the far-flung corners of the world,” they journeyed across mountains, forests and plains, sometimes without food and water. Eventually, only seven of them completed their odyssey.

How it began

The first group to set off on their bicycles was made up of six members of the Bombay Weightlifting Club. They were Adi Hakim, Jal Bapasola, Rustom Bhumgara, Gustad Hathiram, Keki Pochkhanawala and Nariman Kapadia. According to Rohinton Bhumgara, son of Rustom Bhumgara, the six youngsters had attended a public lecture in 1920 by a Frenchman who had walked from Europe to India. Hearing him talk left them deeply inspired.

Their journey began in October 1923 and meandered through Punjab, Balochistan, the Middle East, Europe, United States, Japan and South East Asia. On the way, one team member returned to India from Tehran for “personal reasons”, while two others were so “enamoured” of America that they stayed back.

Adi Hakim, Jal Bapasola and Rustom Bhumgara return
to Bombay after nearly five years.

“Once, he [Jal Bapasola] narrated how they approached the Raleigh Cycle Co of England in Bombay about [the company] sponsoring the cycles,” Babani was told by Bapasola’s 82-year-old son Noshir Bapasola, who lives in New Jersey. “The company refused. “But when they reached England, he said the company was begging them to use their cycles. He asked them why they had a change of heart and was told quite bluntly ‘we did not believe that you boys would be so successful’.”

By the time Hakim, Bapasola and Bhumgara reached India in March 1928, they had covered around 70,000 kilometres. In their book With Cyclists Around The World, they enumerated their achievements with “pardonable pride”: in four and a half years, they had scaled the Alps, crossed “pirate-infested territories” and waded through jungles with “hostile semi-savage tribes”, sometimes “escaping death by inches”.

Overcoming hardships

Their efforts, in turn, inspired a sports journalist from Bombay named Framroze Davar to set off on his bicycle, all on his own. Nine months and 5,000 kilometres later, in Vienna, “he met Gustav Sztavjanik, [a cyclist] who was impressed with his journey,” said Babani. “He joined Davar and they both cycled around the world for seven years. Theirs was the longest, toughest and most adventurous journey.”

Sztavjanik and Davar rode over the Alps, including Mont Blanc, parts of the Soviet Union, the Baltic states and Scandinavia, before turning towards France. From there, they sailed to Algiers in Africa, pedalled in the Sahara and the Amazon forests, and climbed 5,200 metres up the Andes with their cycles – each weighing around 15 kilograms – on their backs.

According to Babani, their hardships knew no end. They faced eight sandstorms and ran out of water. The terrain was so thorny that they had to stuff their tyres with grass. They even contracted malaria. The biggest challenge for them, though, was the Amazon. Struggling to cycle in the thick forest, they were forced to build rafts. Thankfully for them, a tribe of head-hunters gave them shelter. “It was their first such trip ever from the West coast to the East coast of South America and took them about nine months,” wrote Austrian author Hermann Härtel in a book on Sztavjanik. “This was uncharted territory and very dangerous. Many explorers before them never made it back out again.”

Davar and Sztavjanik crossing an Amazonian river.

When the two reached Burma, they found themselves amidst a herd of wild elephants. Sztavjanik was injured and hospitalised for a month. Davar, who covered a total of 10,000 kilometres, 52 countries and five continents, wrote three books on his travels: Cycling Over Roof Of The World, Across The Sahara and The Amazon in Reality and Romance. “These books are a great study in anthropology,” said Babani. In them, Davar talks about the tribes he meet in the Amazon, “their customs, how they look, their clothing and what they hunt”.

Stories of these adventures inspired a third group of Parsi men – Keki Kharas, Rustam Ghandhi and Rutton Shroff – to cycle around the world in 1933. After covering 84,000 kilometres spanning five continents over nine years, they co-authored two books: Peddling Through The Afghan Wilds and Across The Highways Of The World. In the first, they wrote, “In Afghanistan, we were marooned in the desert for three successive days and nights without either food or water....”

Brand ambassadors

For these cyclists the expeditions were not about challenging their physical and mental ability, but to present India to the world. “They were like brand ambassadors,” said Babani, who displayed his research at an exhibition at Ravindra Bhavan in Margao, Goa, in December.

At the exhibition, titled Our Saddles, Our Butts, Their World, Babani showed a cycle, a part of which was manufactured at the Sen-Raleigh bicycle factory near Asansol in West Bengal. Opened in 1950, it was one of the earliest bicycle manufacturing units in India. Prior to that, bicycles had to be imported, which is why only the wealthy, including Hakim and Co., could afford them.

Babani plans to write a book on the Parsi men’s journeys and the history behind India’s cycling culture. Titled Peddling History: Rise, Fall and Rise of Humble Bikes, the book will be out this year. When asked what struck him most about the intrepid cyclists, Babani said, it was their “genuine innocence”: “That’s what touched my mind and inspired me to do research about their journeys and to write.”

(Source: Scroll)

The Irish slave trader and sea captain who founded the town of Bombay – in New York

Two Bombays played a dominant role in the life of Michael Hogan, writes Anu Kumar in the Scroll. Read on: 

In 1804, when Michael Hogan appeared in New York with his wife, Frances Hogan nee Richardson, he was greeted with a warm reception. The Irish-born ship captain, merchant, land speculator and also, slave trader and privateer, had arrived with a big fortune that, he claimed, was due to his wife – an “Indian princess”.

For the newspapers of the time, the arrival was grist for the newsprint mill: they called Frances a “dark-skinned Indian princess”, and fell in with most of Hogan’s braggadocio, which included the claim that on his marriage, he had received a dowry of “400,000 English sovereigns, or about two million dollars”, or according to other sources, “40,000 pounds in gold”.

In no time, Hogan bought land in the city, and then some months later (in 1806) in northern New York, the region measuring several thousand acres that lay only a few miles to Canada’s south. The land Hogan acquired, he soon renamed Bombay, for his wife, a native of Bombay, which was then in the East India Company’s possession.

Today, the town of Bombay in north New York has, according to the US census, a population of around 1,300. Within it are two smaller hamlets – Hogansburg (Hogan named it after himself) and South Bombay. Its website proudly lists two country clubs and a casino among the town’s attractions. A history section briefly mentions the founder, but doesn’t really answer the question – who was Michael Hogan.

Bombay, Franklin County, New York, USA | Wikimedia Commons CC-BY-SA-3.0

The well-networked merchant
Believed to have been born around 1765 (though this is not certain) in County Clare, in West Ireland, Hogan acquired his sea legs early. As a teenager, he served in the Royal Navy and then only a few years later, in his twenties, references in a book by Michael H Styles (his great-great-great grandson) have him operating as a trader on ships that plied on the lucrative Asian trade route of Calcutta-Canton and then in Macau. Hogan also sailed between western India and South Africa.

Hogan had a gift for striking up relationships with go-getters, those who had the ability to sniff out business opportunities. In another few months, he branched out into the rice trade that led to his first voyages to the United States. He had links with Robert Henshaw, the East India Company’s custom-master who would soon be indicted for his role in hoarding and stockpiling rice during the shortage and famine years of the late 1780s. Soon after, with the help of some Bombay financiers in the early 1780s, Hogan bought the ship Il Nettunno built at the Calcutta docks.

An enduring partnership
Several of Hogan’s early business partnerships were shaped by his fortuitous friendship with William Richardson, a merchant trader, a mentor to Hogan and later his father-in-law. When he was in his early twenties, Hogan married Frances, who was born to Richardson and his ethnically Indian housekeeper referred to as Anna Marie Lacy from Tirhut state in present-day Bihar.

Richardson acquired a charter enabling him to function as a privateer; the “letter of marque” displayed on Hogan’s ship was both a warning and statement of fact. This meant that while Richardson (and Hogan) weren’t employees of the East India Company, they could trade, and as privateers, attack and plunder ships belonging to other nations.

The years of the Napoleonic wars between Britain and France inspired Hogan to play the patriot’s card. Not only did he offer his services first in transporting convicts to Australia, his ship could help Britain by attacking French trading ships, based at Madagascar, the Reunion Islands and southern India, that sailed frequently in the southern Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

The convict ship

Portrait of Il Netunno, later Marquis Cornwallis. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons Public Domain

The ship Il Nettunno was renamed Marquis Cornwallis, and is commemorated in a well-known painting by Balthazar Solvyns. The Marquis Cornwallis made its first convict journey from Cork in Ireland on August 1796, with several convicts (nearly 160 men and 70 women) and soldiers who would form part of the New South Wales guards. At Cape Verde in mid-Atlantic, close to the Portuguese coast, Hogan, as the ship’s captain, received news of a mutiny – planned by one of the guards in liaison with several convicts.

The ship’s log, recently auctioned, records the force with which the mutiny was put down: several mutineers were flogged and the ringleaders, after being tonsured, were put in irons for the duration of the journey. The log also tells us that several of the convicts, women included, were young and were being deported for petty crimes such as stealing watches and gloves.

Ship's log that was auctioned recently. Photo credit: NSW Government

After the ship reached Port Jackson in Sydney in February 1796, an inquiry absolved Hogan. He also bought land at a nominal price in New South Wales and, as is believed, settled his servants/indentured slaves there for some years. His ventures after this involved him in shipping cattle to Australia.

In these years of Britain’s war with France, Hogan had his fair share of controversy. One related to his, or rather his ship’s captain, David Smart, claiming the seizure of French weaponry, and ships off the coast of Mozambique. To the British officials at the Cape of Good Hope, this was impressive, until it was revealed that bribes had been paid to the French authorities for them to give up their ships, albeit in a dishonourable way.

South Africa and the secret slave trade
Hogan made a conscious decision around the end of the 1790s to base himself and his activities in South Africa. The Cape was a location he found ideal, as he immersed himself privateering, slave trading secretly and trading other goods. He was a familiar figure to those engaged in the opium and tea trade with China. An old associate Alexander Tennant, based at the Cape, also cleverly persisted in slave trade, hoodwinking the British authorities by sailing under the Portuguese flag.

Through Richardson, Hogan was introduced to well-known traders who had worldwide links – they sold rice and slaves to the Americas and conducted silk, tea and opium trade in China and the east. Hogan became agent to Robert Charnock, the rich merchant financier based at Ostend (in Western Europe). Hogan also had links with the people who made up a veritable who’s who of international trade back then: David Scott, a friend of Henry Melville, Lord Dundas (the latter would later be impeached as War Secretary), John Parrish, the British merchant who had links with Robert Morris, who in turn came to be popularly labelled the financier of the American Revolution, and Robert Lenox and other merchants who engaged in the slave trade in the southern American states.

Bombay, New York

Bombay is located in New York. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons CC BY 3.0

He moved to New York in 1804, sensing more business opportunities, and because corruption and his hitherto covert operations had made him somewhat suspect in British eyes. For a decade, he thrived in land and trade deals. Despite losing considerably in his trade investments in the Caribbean and South America when the 1812 war with Britain broke out, forcing Hogan to sell some of his property in New York City, he continued to live among high society. He cultivated even more influential friends such as William Bayard, the merchant and close associate of one of the Founding Fathers and the first Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton.

In 1820, he was appointed as US trade consul for Chile and moved to Valparaiso – furthering US political influence in the region and was even called upon to settle sea disputes. Hogan would remain in Valparaiso till 1833, the year he died, presumably in Washington DC. Michael Hogan’s son, William, who had spent his early years in South America, served for a term in the US Congress.

The rest of Hogan’s family – including an Indian-origin indentured servant called Vinissa – that had remained in South America, soon moved to New York. The ship they travelled in, called the Bristol, ran aground close to New York. Hogan’s son-in-law, Arthur Donnelly, who was on board the ship, gave his life up to ensure that women and children were rescued first – an act of heroism that would be commemorated by an impressive gravestone at his burial site in New York.

A memoir: My grandmother’s flight from Karachi to Bombay in 1947

An excerpt from ‘Inheriting the Hamam Dasta and its Stories,’ a chapter by Maya Mirchandani in Looking Back: the 1947 Partition, 70 Years On, edited by Rakhshanda Jalil, Tarun K. Saint and Debjani Sengupta and published by Orient Blackswan:

Sometimes, on Sundays especially, I like to cook. I pull out my old notebook of family recipes and take down a beaten brass mortar and pestle to pound the spices I need. Over the years and several conversations, I have written down recipes for signature Sindhi cuisine, with my grandmother’s spectacularly revealing notes about how she conned us into eating stuff we didn’t necessarily like as children – Sindhi kadhi (no yoghurt, and lots of kokum and lots of vegetables), sai bhaji (put in all the vegetables no one likes to eat, they will never know) or sehal gosht (the easiest mutton curry recipe ever—just toss everything in together and let it cook).

In my home, I don’t think we have ever used the term mortar and pestle. We call it a hamam-dasta. And if it were a living thing, it would be the second oldest member of my family. Second only to my grandmother, Savitri, who arrived by ship to Bombay from Karachi in late October 1947 with two toddlers – my father who was two, and my aunt who turned one that month – one small suitcase of clothes and this hamam-dasta, packed for her without her knowledge by the lady who helped look after the children. So that even as a refugee fleeing the violence of Partition spreading to Sindh, she would be able to set up a kitchen no matter where she landed.

Dadima, as I call her, turned ninety-four in September 2016. She insists on living independently in her one-bedroom house in New York in spite of entreaties by her children to move in with them. On Tuesdays, she plays cards with a Sindhi friend she made there, about twenty years younger than her. Someone with whom she can speak in the language of her childhood, and what is still the language of her thoughts. If anyone drops in to see her, they will find her singularly engrossed in the rummy game. But her brood of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who get their stubborn streak from her and insist on disrupting her game by walking through the front door unannounced, never tire of her stories.

Savitri Mirchandani (née Gidwani) was born in September 1922 in Hyderabad, Sindh, to a family of zamindars – the sixth of ten children. She moved to Karachi at the age of nineteen, as a young bride in December 1941. And there she lived with her husband, a police officer, his family and two very young children. Until one day, six years later, around the end of October of 1947, when she was rushed out of the house overnight. She cannot remember the exact date, but does say that my aunt had her first birthday in Bombay – on the 19th of November.

Sindh, especially upper Sindh, and also the cities of Hyderabad and Karachi had stayed calm for some time after the bloody Partition of August 1947. Sindhi Hindus – for whom language and culture came first, and religion second – had no intention of leaving their homes and lands. After all, unlike Punjab or Bengal, Sindh was not divided, but went wholly to Pakistan, and while they were concerned about their new status as a minority community in a new Pakistan, the question of leaving hung in the air without a clear answer. But as a new Pakistan went about the business of nation-building, on the streets and in mixed neighbourhoods, anger simmered. It was only a matter of time before violence flared. As mobs began to loot Hindu homes, and her husband Sunder, was on duty round the clock, helping to maintain law and order, her safety and that of her two young children became paramount.

After having retired as one of the few Indian officials working for the British-run Karachi Port Trust, her father-in-law, Rewachand Mirchandani had become a card-carrying member of Raja Ram Mohan Roy’s Brahmo Samaj, working for social reform in the city. To him, Savitri was a daughter and given the same status and liberties as Mohini and Rukmini, her sisters-in law. He was liberal but strict – qualities Dada also inherited. But that day, there was no discussion; only an order. After assessing the danger, he came home with a ticket for a berth on a ship that was sailing a few hours later to Bombay, where Savitri’s sister Sita lived.

I often tell Dadima that I consider all Sindhis Sufi. According to what I have learned from her over the years, in many families, the first son became a Sardar and many Amil Sindhis are Nanak Panthis, or followers of Guru Nanak, and follow many Sikh traditions, especially during weddings and funerals. My Dadima still recites from the Granth Sahib every day. My grandfather, on the other hand, pursued his father’s Brahmo Samaj ideals and while he was superstitious about the stars and planets (he famously threw my grandmother’s sapphire ring into the Indian Ocean when they lived in Colombo), he didn’t believe in any religious ritual. In that regard, perhaps we are unlike many families, but in my mixed-up home (my mother is Telugu), Dadima ensured that my brother and I learned our prayers from the Granth Sahib, and even today we recite them anywhere and everywhere we feel like or in places of worship, irrespective of faith – at Gurudwaras of course, but also at dargahs and churches or at the most traditional Hindu temples.

Dadima recounts from memory the terror she felt that night. Like most days and nights at the time, my grandfather was at work. The governor of Sindh had cancelled all leaves and rejected all resignations from police officers, irrespective of their religion. After a posting in Larkana, where he made local headlines for having killed a ‘dacoit’ in an encounter, my grandfather was finally back in Karachi. The city was burning and the governor needed his men. Hindu neighbourhoods and their women were suddenly no longer safe, and her frantic arguments against leaving home, her pleas to stay, to contact my grandfather, all fell on deaf ears. Rewachand told her not to worry, Sunder would be told, but she simply could not stay.

Today Dadima loves to tell everyone that she travelled from Karachi to Bombay in the same ship and in the same cabin that Fatima Jinnah had made the reverse journey in. No one understands why she so has clung to this story. Perhaps because it allows her a chance to make sense of her hurried departure from Karachi – after all, others who had made Bombay their home were doing the same, in reverse. Sindh was part of the Bombay Presidency and the two were considered sister cities – bustling, cosmopolitan and wealthy. Telling us about the ship and of strangers tied together by a shared experience must make it easier for her to talk about it. I don’t know about Ms. Jinnah – who left behind a thriving dental practice in Bombay – but I do know about Dadima. The thought of having left for good was somehow inconceivable to her. Maybe my grandmother’s domestic help who packed her hamam-dasta without telling her knew better.

It wasn’t until after some months later, during which there was absolutely no communication, when my grandfather was finally able to resign from his job and make the journey to India; Dadima says it was a little after Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated in January 1948. But there was an uncomfortable condition to his resignation, a final assignment. He had to escort a train-load of Hindus fleeing from Sindh – alive, wounded or dead – across the newly created border. His resignation letter was submitted and accepted only once the assignment was complete, at Khokrapar, on the border inside Rajasthan.

Dada – Sunderdas Rewachand Mirchandani – a lawyer by training and a policeman by profession, was a man of letters. Fluent in Farsi, nothing was more valuable to him than his books. He had some time to prepare before he left for Bombay and so he carried a few things he felt were important – a book of historical essays he had received as a prize in college, a wedding photograph and the front page of The Sind Observer with the lead story of Germany’s unconditional surrender in World War II. And for Dadima, he brought some jwellery and her wedding sari. A royal purple organza with bunches of grapes all over, woven in pure silver zari. So delicate that it is now frayed and split into pieces, one of which I still wear on rare occasions as a dupatta, to much admiration.

Many Sindhis who arrived in similar ways to Bombay stayed on. The sea air, proximity to Karachi and the ability to speak in their own language with others from the community who arrived under the same circumstances made them feel close to the home they had left behind. In fact, Mumbai today has one of the largest Sindhi communities in the country and many of them have contributed significantly to the city’s cultural and financial character. Their entrepreneurial spirit is legendary – often admired and reviled in the same breath. In fact, my grandfather’s sister Mohini and her husband Gopal Sipahimalani (Sippy, for short) a practising lawyer in Karachi, who reinvented himself in Bombay as one of the most prominent film producers of his time, tried very hard to convince my grandfather to join them. But my Amil grandfather, who had no head for business and perhaps no stomach for painful nostalgia that gripped so many members of his family at that time, wanted to leave the lament of exile he heard all round.

For those who are unfamiliar with the class-based segregations in Sindhi Hindu society, the Amils (from the word Ámal in Farsi, meaning to administer) were well educated and mainly worked as accountants and lawyers. Some even held government positions – of the very few government positions that Indians were allowed during the Raj. Many Bhaibands – the other major Sindhi community of traders and businessmen – stayed back to protect their businesses as long as they could. But with relatively little in terms of trade and business interests to hold them back during the violence, most of the Amils fled, like so many others, across the Sindh province to India.

Savitri and Sunderdas Mirchandani (Dadima and Dada) on their wedding day,
December 20, 1941. Courtesy: Maya Mirchandani

Days after he found Dadima in Bombay (not wanting to be a burden on anyone she had moved out of her sister’s place by then), the reunited family left bag and baggage for Delhi and lived as refugees, crammed into a single room with another of my grandmother’s sisters, Kalavati (Kala) and her family comprising a husband, Rochi and two children. In the Shershah Mess refugee camp, where the Delhi High Court now stands, Rochi uncle and my grandfather searched for work, joining the line every day to meet the government recruiters who came there. Ours is a family of civil servants and so, Sunderdas Rewachand Mirchandani decided he was going to do what he knew best – serve the new India in whatever capacity he could. Several weeks and many queues later, he was re-employed as a police officer, this time with the Gujarat cadre. Together, my grandparents and their three children (my father’s youngest brother was born twelve years after Partition) travelled all over Gujarat, and then overseas, as my grandfather went up the ranks of the Indian Police Service.

In the winter of 2004, fifty-four years after she was forced to flee her home and her culture and thirty years after my grandfather died, I decided to make the journey back to Sindh with Dadima. I had heard several stories of Partition survivors breaking down and bending to kiss the earth upon arrival in their villages in modern- day Pakistan, so as a caveat, I must state that my grandmother is not a sentimental woman. In my lifetime, even though the stories are told and retold, sometimes with embellishment depending on the audience, I have never seen her express either extreme joy or extreme sadness. And so, armed with a walking stick, she wandered about Karachi as a curious tourist more than anything else. We drove around the city’s formerly Hindu areas in circles – what were empty maidans once were now built-up colonies, old bungalows had given way to swanky new buildings, all but obscuring the streets and landmarks of the Karachi that she once knew.

But Hyderabad, the small dusty town of her birth two short hours north of Karachi, was different. The city had grown, but its core felt familiar to her. In the small narrow streets of Hirabad, the formerly Hindu neighbourhood where my grandmother spent so many of her early years, the old havelis still stood (at least twelve years ago, they did). Engraved in stone at the entrance were names of the families who had once lived there and the dates they were constructed – testaments to the affluence of the original inhabitants. It is hard to say what happened to the individual residents of each home, but in all likelihood their stories must be similar to that of my grandmother’s. The journeys and histories of so many like my grandmother’s family who left Sindh and suddenly found themselves landless, homeless and most importantly, stateless, is largely undocumented. While many of the Hindu families from upper Sindh moved south into the cities after these homes were vacated, the vacuum created by the sizeable community’s departure was largely filled by Muslim refugees from India – the muhajirs, as they are called in Pakistan today. While the Muslims from Punjab settled mostly in and around Lahore, those who left Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, settled in Sindh.

So it was a more than special surprise when, while searching for my grandmother’s childhood home in Hyderabad, we were directed to an original resident in one of these havelis. For two complete strangers – my eighty-two-year old grandmother and eighty-eight-year old Dadi Leela at the time – their connection was almost immediate. In 2004, when they met, Leelawati Harchandani, better known to everyone as Dadi Leela (Dadi means older sister in Sindhi), was the oldest living Amil Sindhi in Hyderabad. Her memory was sharp, and her wit still dry. She told us the entire neighbourhood emptied out at the time of Partition, including members of her own family, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave. When I asked her why, she replied: “When I was a little girl, my headmaster told me I had three mothers. I remember getting very offended, as though he was saying things against my father. Then he explained to me who the three were. He said the first was my mother who gave me birth. The second was my mother tongue. And the third, my motherland. I never forgot that.”

My conversation with her was in Urdu; I understand Sindhi but unfortunately, cannot speak it. My grandmother and Dadi Leela, however, spoke in the language of their mothers, their childhood, and their hearts. And as I listened, half understanding their conversation – fast and furious with excitement and nostalgia – I couldn’t help but reflect on the idea of home and the nature of identity. I watched as Dadima, elegant and cosmopolitan – she who called Delhi and New York home – transformed into Savitri, the young girl from Hyderabad, Sindh.

Dadi Leela was a singer. My grandmother has always urged me to learn Sindhi kalams – odes to the Lord written by Sindhi saints like Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai and Shahbaz Qalander, whose shrines in Bhit Shah and Sehwan are visited every day by thousands of people. As my grandmother sat down with her on the charpoy in the sunny courtyard where she spent winter afternoons, Dadi Leela pulled out her harmonium for us, and together she and my grandmother sang these kalams of their youth, and mine – I have heard these songs sung at Sindhi gatherings in Delhi and Bombay all my life. And at the end of our visit, she told us she used to know my grandmother’s aunt, and directed us to the house she had lived in, almost next door. A family from Aligarh opened the door and their home to us and asked us to stay as long as we liked. Karachi, Pakistan’s bustling commercial hub, may have been completely unfamiliar, but this short afternoon in Hyderabad, my grandmother’s city made our entire trip worthwhile – as though we had found home.

Today, after over a decade since we went, the stories of that trip, rounded off with a visit to Panja Sahib Gurudwara in Hasan Abdal, have been added to Dadima’s kitty of tales that make up our family history. Her travels in Sindh, like her memories of 1947, are told and retold to family and friends. At home in New York, where her self-taught English has become her first language, the only one who can speak in Sindhi with Dadima is her Tuesday afternoon Rummy companion, and the occasional extended family member who visits.

It wasn’t always like this. When she first moved there in 1985, there were many like her – Sindhis of her generation who had lived all over the world and finally decided to create a home where their children had come to live and work. When they met, conversations were a happy, even if sentimental mix of nostalgia and entrepreneurship, of what home has come to mean for so many of them – where statelessness and exile were superimposed with discussions of new horizons and challenges. While Delhi and Mumbai particularly, followed by cities like Ajmer and Ahmedabad have sizeable Sindhi communities, the community has spread itself all over the world. From Japan to the Caribbean, from South America to Europe, and every place in between, Sindhis are running businesses, own real estate, and adopting new cultures and nations along the way. That is what happens when an entire ‘nation,’ in the ideological sense of the word, becomes stateless.

Dadima, like her few surviving friends, has learned to adapt to new cultures and identities, even within our family. While for some of them the adapting has been about new cities and cosmopolitanism, at home my Telugu mother has introduced the Mirchandani clan to a new cultural sensibility and cuisine; my brother is married to an American of Irish and Danish heritage. In that, I suppose we are not an oddity. Generation after generation, like with so many other cultures and communities, the ‘Sindhi- ness,’ as it were, is getting diluted. Today, even though she tells us not to disturb her concentration when we walk through the door, Dadima speaks our language and listens to our music.

I like to think, though, that the core of who we are as a culture, as a people, has not changed much. My grandmother’s resilience, her perseverance in the face of adversity are to me singularly the most impressive and abiding traits of an entire community. She has held on to them for dear life and passed them on to her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, despite our mixed identities and the many places we call home. We all still look forward to our Sunday lunch. In New York, her recipes – including her famous methi fish curry – have found their way into the menu of my brother’s Manhattan bistros. And in my kitchen in Delhi, I pound my spices fresh in that precious hamam-dasta, checking my recipe book as I cook lunch for my retinue of friends who walk through the door in much the same way as we walk into my grandmother’s house – demanding our favourite food. As the sai bhaji simmers in its pot, the scents of my kitchen remind me of Dadima and the flavour of home she carries with her, and that will stay with me wherever I am.

(Source: The Wire)

Can a Bombay strongman explain Trump?

As I watched Donald J. Trump campaigning, I thought, I’ve seen this show before. It was in the 1990s in Bombay (now called Mumbai). And the man playing the Trump part was Bal Keshav Thackeray, the leader of the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena party, who rode to power on a wave of outrageous stories, bluster, lies, bigotry and showmanship. He died in 2012 after ruling — and ruining — the city I grew up in. The road to understanding Mr. Trump might just lie through understanding Mr. Thackeray, and what became of Bombay.

Mr. Thackeray, who founded his Shiv Sena party in 1966, began his career as a political cartoonist. He had a gift for outrageous parody. His own appearance was a caricature of a Bollywood guru: In his later years, he took to wearing dark shades, an orange robe and a necklace of holy beads, holding a Cohiba in one hand and a glass of warm beer in the other. His party workers, his ministers and the press referred to Mr. Thackeray as “The Supremo.”

He was a master of the art of the outrage, of politics as performance. He would castigate his opponents as “vampires,” “a sack of flour” and various untranslatable epithets like calling South Indians “yandu-gundus.” Periodically, he would express admiration for Hitler, immediately attracting thousands of news pages of free publicity. He regularly called for books and films that he felt were antithetical to Hindu values to be banned. Egged on by his invective, his legions would go out and beat up artists and journalists.

Though Mr. Thackeray neither inherited nor ran businesses as Mr. Trump did, the two men’s support base was remarkably similar in its political contours. The people Mr. Thackeray represented were the native Maharashtrians, the “sons of the soil.” The list of his enemies varied with the seasons, from Communists to South Indian migrants to Gujaratis to Muslims and, eventually, North Indians.

Working-class Maharashtrians felt excluded from booming Bombay, capital of Maharashtra State, as it made the transition from manufacturing to a postindustrial financial and services economy. They resented both the moneyed cosmopolitan elites as well as the North Indian migrants who competed with them for low-skill jobs.

Mr. Thackeray promised to restore their jobs, by threatening mob violence against industrialists who hired non-natives. He promised to make Maharashtra great again by reversing the clock: His idol was the 17th-century warrior-king Shivaji, who held the Mughal emperors at bay. He demanded the requirement of a visa to enter Bombay.

Mr. Thackeray played fast and loose with the facts, claiming that the Indian Constitution allowed the imposition of a ban on non-natives in Bombay. His party newspaper, Saamna, was the Breitbart News of its time, chock-full of fake news about Muslims, outsiders, celebrities.

Bal Keshav Thackeray, the founder of Shiv Sena. His party workers, his ministers and the press referred to Mr. Thackeray as “The Supremo.” Credit Raghu Rai/Magnum Photos

Bombay accommodated every faith and was relatively untouched by the mass violence that accompanied the Partition of India in 1947. But after a Hindu nationalist mob destroyed a medieval mosque in the North Indian town Ayodhya in December 1992, Bombay erupted in sectarian riots, which continued through January 1993. More than 1,100 people, most of them Muslims, were killed. Mr. Thackeray organized the violence, leading his troops “like a veteran general,” according to a judicial inquiry.

In June 1993, when a court was about to admit a case against him for his writings in Saamna, Mr. Thackeray responded, “I piss on the court’s judgments. Most judges are like plague-ridden rats against whom direct action must be taken.”

After the riots, Muslims were pushed to or sought out their own ghettos. Muslim dons of the Bombay underworld retaliated by exploding 13 bombs across the city, which killed 257 people, Hindu and Muslim alike. Mr. Thackeray had destroyed the cosmopolitan, secular Bombay of my adolescence. The violence consolidated the Hindu vote behind Mr. Thackeray and propelled his party into power, in Bombay and in Maharashtra.

On assuming office, Mr. Thackeray’s party got into bed with the very elites it had scorned. Mr. Thackeray and big business loved each other. Trade unions controlled by his men were much more malleable than the left-controlled ones. On a return to Bombay in 2008, I met the Shiv Sena street fighters I had known in the 1990s, and the Muslims gangsters they had battled. They were all in real estate now. They had been hired by developers to extort slum dwellers into consenting to their houses being razed, in exchange for shabby tower blocks under a government program. The alligators in the Bombay swamp had never feasted better.

Mr. Thackeray never held a political office. He had to appear bigger than politics. “I hate politics,” he said, and bragged that he ran the state by “remote control.” I went to interview him in his bungalow, which had a perennial line of favor seekers waiting in the antechamber. They could be Bollywood stars, the chairman of Enron, gangsters or clerks. At one point during the interview, he burst into an unprompted, extended soliloquy about rats in Bombay. His answers had no relationship to my questions; they were simply stray thoughts that seemed to occur at that particular moment. It was a mismatch of scale: this small-minded man controlling this enormous city.

Mr. Thackeray had no use for theories or data; he was all about action, or the illusion of action. “I like people who can get the things done!” a sign in his office proclaimed. His solutions to the city’s vast problems were precise and petty: rename Bombay as Mumbai; increase water flow in the city’s hydrants to enable the flushing out of rats.

Mr. Thackeray was the most powerful man in the city because, like Mr. Trump, he knew how to tell a good story. Mr. Trump’s victory was the triumph of stories over numbers. Hillary Clinton had the research, the voter data. Mr. Trump went with his gut, told stories, ripping yarns. The audience laughed, cried — and voted.

I teach journalism at New York University, and none of the esteemed journalists I know predicted a Trump victory. In the 1980s, nobody in the Bombay elite could predict Mr. Thackeray’s electoral victories. Mr. Trump entertained and outraged. We sought comfort in data. FiveThirtyEight and The Upshot reassured us hourly with numbers predicting a Clinton victory. But people are too sophisticated, too nuanced, too complex, to be captured in numbers. We respond with our head to numbers; we respond with our heart to stories. God speaks to us in stories. The scriptures of every faith are collections of stories, not assemblages of data.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Thackeray understood the power of stories and spoke not in policy, but in parables. A populist is, above all, a gifted storyteller. At this point in our great democracy, most voters are … bored, and they don’t respond well to policy statements. Mrs. Clinton’s address to a Bollywood show in New Jersey read like an academic paper on multiculturalism. Mr. Trump, on the other hand, was succinct: “It’s a weakness. I love the beautiful Indian actresses. There’s nothing like them.”

Every fall during the Hindu festival of Dussehra, Mr. Thackeray would get on the stage at Shivaji Park in Bombay and deliver a performance lasting several hours, part stand-up comedy, part paranoid conspiracy theory, part scurrilous mockery of his political opponents. Hundreds of thousands of his followers cheered, laughed, engaged in frenzied call-and-response. He never used a written text. A high, or low, point was his mockery of Sonia Gandhi, the Congress Party leader. Mr. Thackeray would pull a sari over his head and mimic the Italian-born daughter-in-law of the Nehru-Gandhi family in a high falsetto, mocking her fumbling Hindi.

After the Bombay riots, one of his followers told me that Mr. Thackeray had powertoni, their contraction of “power of attorney”: the awesome ability to act on someone else’s behalf, to sign documents, to have people killed. Powerless factory workers in Ohio and coal miners in Kentucky see Mr. Trump as the man with powertoni. Every time your hero, your attorney, humiliates the good and the great, you feel a swell of pride; you feel, in your shabby house with the leaky roof, that you have obtained a measure of power, in Manhattan, in Washington.

Mr. Thackeray’s men took pride in watching industrialists, bureaucrats and politicians bow before him, touch his feet. They spoke in awe about Michael Jackson’s calling on Mr. Thackeray on his only visit to Bombay, in 1996. Jackson used his toilet; Mr. Thackeray later led reporters to the sanctified bowl.

He used mob violence to rule Bombay. The Muslims who were attacked in the riots were from all social classes. Their killers walked free; they had powertoni.

I don’t know if Mr. Trump’s America will bring rioting and mass violence. But his ability to sell a false story well, and our voracious need to be entertained, means that the walls are already coming up — not on the border, but between city and village, red and blue state, white and nonwhite, man and woman, native and immigrant. Bombayites never imagined that Mr. Thackeray’s riveting speeches could lead to dead bodies on the streets. Since the election, hate crimes have risen by 115 percent in New York, Mr. Trump’s birthplace and my home since I was fourteen. What happens if the violent incitement of Mr. Trump’s campaign continues into his presidency?

(Source: NYT)