Before the partition, before the greatest carnage that unprecedentedly erupted across the borders with massacres, arsons, mass abductions and violence, before the British docked and moved it all around, before it all — the Indian subcontinent was, in the words of William Dalrymple, ’a deeply intermixed and profoundly syncretic culture’. A brilliant bunch of communities co-existing in relative peace and respect, for more than a millennium. All the identity and religion-based myth-making that divides even the most cozy today is the work of this time and age.

It was common, for example, for Islamic sufi mystics to take up yogic practices and deeply regard the Hindu scriptures as divine, and for Hindu sadhus to leave offerings at the shrines of Sufi masters. Medieval Hindu texts from South India referred to the Muslim Sultan of Delhi as the incarnation of the god Vishnu, and in the 17th Century, Mughal crown prince Dara Shikoh, had the Bhagavad Gita translated into Persian for mass readings. Neighbours would sit and eat together and attend each other’s familial celebrations and deaths alike.

The Indian Subcontinent was a merging of traditions, languages, cultures, religions, and cuisines — twisting and turning, merging and intertwining towards the one pot wonder, the Greatest Biryani.

The names are truly endless. Biryani, Biriyani, Biriani, Briyani, Briani, Birani, Zorbiyan. Huff and Puff. Lo and Behold! Esey aur wesey (this and that). Influence and expertise came from numerous lands and passersby, but just like Urdu, biryani is indeed a product of the subcontinent, very much like the city of Karachi itself — identities are a mishmash of culture, traditions and cuisines from the Arabs, Afghans, Persians, Turks, the Romans, Mughals, and to some extent, the British.

The Greatest Biryani erupted from within them.

Legend has it that the dish, or traces of the dish, originated out of Central Asian nomadic and pastoral culture of combining the staple meat, rice and local spices into a hearty meal. These cultures travelled across the Silk Road and passed this culinary knowledge along. The historian Al-Biruni mentions that when the Persianized Turks, originating from what is now Afghanistan, seized Lahore in 1021, and soon after as far south as Madurai, up to Gujarat in the west and Bengal in the east, they brought with them the alchemic influences of stunning carpets, architecture, and a preliminary version of today’s biryani.

What is fascinating to note here is this. Although this dish is a nationalist, religious and identity-based quarrel amongst the offspring of the South — the Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Yemen and to some extent, the Burmese — in reality, the word biryani derives from the Persian Birinj Birian, which means rice, fried before cooking. And what is even more fascinating is that the Berian found in the streets of Tehran today, with lumps of fried minced heavenly meat served with a large piece of bread, is an entirely different giant.

But these are the lands of ancient folk stories, so essentially there are many more legends. Mahabharata, an ancient Hindu text, narrates an episode in great detail of two brothers, Kaurava and Pandava, who quite enjoyed marinating meat chunks in ghee, ground tamarind, pomegranate juice, various spices and flavoured leaves. Another street legend says that the dish was introduced to the Southern Malabar coast and the Manora Islands of Karachi by the frequent Arab traders (an ode to the Yemeni version called Zorbiyan) centuries ago. Aimperumkappiyam, i.e. the great five epics of Tamil literature, records a rice dish known as Oon Soru, as far back as the year 2 A.D., made of rice, ghee, meat, turmeric, coriander, pepper, and bay leaf — strikingly similarities to the Dindigul Thalakapatti biryani of current-day Tamil Nadu.

And then, long before the Western world collided with the East, ancient Indonesian sailors had developed technology that allowed them to travel across the vast ocean. Spice was very much the first global commodity. The centre of this spice trade was an exclusive, small group of the Spice Islands (Malaku, or the Moluccas) to the north-east of Indonesia, the only place in the world with naturally growing nutmeg, mace and cloves, which was shared and exchanged across the Indian and Arabian world, alongside language, culture, stories and various versions of the biryani that were being developed with these aromatic spices in the royal kitchens. 

Most historians and critics agree, though, that it was during the reign of the Mughals from the early 16th century to the mid-18th century, that the biryani we know today was being explored and as such recipes can be identified in royal court cookbooks of the time. The 1526 historical memoirs of the first Mughal Emperor Babur, who originated from Afghanistan, chronicles a feast of rice, meat, onions, garlic and spices (mainly cardamom), called the bor pilau. More so, Ain-i-Akbari, the 16th-century document that details the court of Mughal Emperor Akbar, describes several imperial rice dishes with biryani-like preparation. Legend also has it that it was at the behest of Mumtaz Mahal, the beloved wife of Shah Jahan for whom he commissioned the Taj Mahal, that the royal chefs concocted the special dish — primarily for her Mughal soldiers who, to her, looked weak and severely malnourished. 

(can this be counted as a precursor to our modern biryani, dear reader, but also, does any of it matter?)

The profitable spices sparked European interest with the 16th century Portuguese explorer, Vasco de Gama, who sailed across the Cape of Good Hope to India and the Far East, and saved a financially slipping Portuguese Empire by opening up the highly lucrative Spice Trade to the Western side of the globe. Others followed, the Spanish, and the Dutch, each desiring a tinge of the spice that the European elite were obsessing over. In the late 16th century, seeing the money that the spices were bringing in, a group of London merchants petitioned Queen Elizabeth I to allow them to expand their dwindling trade to Asia, and in 1600, the charter for the English (later British) East Indies (later India) Company was granted, in those days not as an imperial expedition but a merchant expedition, unleashing a capitalist beast with the sole objective of collecting unburdened money.

The dominance of the Company, the most powerful colonising corporation in history, was in fact, by no means a fact in its earliest days. After some years of the English Crown trying to catch up with its prosperous neighbours, like the Portuguese and Spanish, and being consistently kicked out of the Indonesian waters, their ships sailed through the North-West passage, what is now Canada, initially trading with the Tzar of Russia, before eventually docking in the Indian Subcontinent in the 17th century, where the same spices were moving through and came into a strict trade agreement with the ruling Mughals. By the 19th century, however, the British had grown their way into an all-powerful presence in the subcontinent and were gobbling up most of South Asia — burning, rampaging, and killing to monopolise the spice trade and birthing an almost ruthless form of imperial colonialism. 

While today, theologically, profitable is oil for the West, in those complex days, the agency for the coloniser lay in the spices that the elite could use in their daily recipes, which were more in convergence than divergence with the colonised, such as the British Chicken Pot Pie, a recipe which can be found in opening chapter of The Raj at Table, 1615, by David Burton - a rich chicken stew heavy with butter, currents, raisins, cinnamon, mace, salt and spice, all scooped up with bread.

The English quite enjoyed the rich flavourful food cooked in their Indian courts, as narrated by Aldous Huxley in this brilliant passage:

’...upon the donning of black jackets and hard-boiled shirts. Solitary men in Dak Bungalows, on coasting steamers, in little shanties among the tiger-infested woods, obey the mystical imperative and every evening put on the funereal uniform of English prestige. Women, robed in the latest French creations from Stratford-atte-Bowe, toy with the tinned fish, while the mosquitoes dine off their bare arms and necks. It is magnificent. Almost more amazing is another great convention for the keeping up of European prestige—the convention of eating too much. Five meals a day —two breakfasts, luncheon, afternoon tea, and dinner—are standard throughout India. A sixth is often added in the big towns where there are theatres and dances to justify late supper. The Indian who eats at the most two meals a day, sometimes only one—too often none—is compelled to acknowledge his inferiority... If Indians would stuff themselves as imperially, they would be able to turn the English out of India...’

With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, a European-French influence seeped into the English Cuisine and was considered more civilised and sophisticated to the English eye. It gave rise to a sort of paternalistic and racist attitude of the coloniser towards the society and cuisine of the colonised but also meant a few other things — the bizarreness of imported French wines in a region with no possible refrigeration; the import (read: blissful introduction) of British beloved potatoes into the empire (which now a pot of biryani is incomplete without); a strangely hybrid, completely inappropriate and entirely washed down (read: colonised) Indian food for the British; and an ironic but complete frowning upon the intermingling of the two races — a whole of virtual apartheid.

In the Notes from Madras, Colonel Wyvern demystifies Indian cooking for British colonial wives, and openly believes that the country’s Indigenous people were fundamentally inferior to himself and other Europeans:

’There can be no doubt that in our Ramasámy we possess admirable materials out of which to form a good cook. The work comes to him, as it were, of its own accord. But we should take heed lest he grow up at random, clinging affectionately to the ancient barbarisms of his forefathers. We should watch for his besetting sins, and root them out whenever they manifest themselves.’

By the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the English manipulated and created their Anglicized versions of the Indian Curry, the Curry-with-Rice combination (sort of a biryani) was picked up and seen across Victorian cookbooks, the ’spoonful of curry powder’ a staple in most households, including the kitchen of Queen Victoria who loved it so and tried her best to make people understand and appreciate the gift from her darn-favourite Eastern Empire. Alongside, we see mango pickles and an array of chutneys, a sort of pickled blended sauce to be used as a condiment (fun fact: chut in Urdu means to lick), bastardised versions of what was called Chai (tea) Masala, Madras Powder and Vindaloo Powder, and the advent of the British favourite Tikka Masala and the Coronation Chicken, also ironically called Poulet Reine Elizabeth in France, the latter of which was invented specially for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953 to celebrate her budding Eastern Empire and is interestingly still served at coronation events of the British Monarchy.

Politically, the British began to introduce religion as a factor in politics, using it ’as a way of dividing people in India into categories’. They achieved this by creating separate Hindu and Muslim seats and lists of voters for local elections. In the book Indian Summer, Alex von Tunzelmann observes that when ’the British started to define communities based on religious identity and attach political representation to them, many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged.’

All in all, proving to be successive and pervasive proofs of the British misunderstanding and bowdlerising everything South Asian for centuries, and a living testament to the folly of an empire that can gradually erode community identity and evolution, and force violent state formation in societies that would otherwise have taken very different routes.  

Unsurprisingly, hatred and animosity simmered across the British Empire. Post WWI, their new creative ideology of reigns based on religion versus nationalism was applied to Ireland and ruminated upon Palestine, which would all prove to be impending disasters for supposedly free territories that would remain under the imperial tie of the British Commonwealth — one of which was the hastily dismantled Indian Subcontinent.

To the colonisers, partition seemed to be a quick and simple solution to the chaos in their massive Eastern Empire. Having amassed enough wealth, they decided to depart in 1947, and on their way out, they ensured history's greatest migration, a whirlpool of hate and divide, a crumbling of cultures, traditions, languages, heirlooms, food, and people. 

(but dear reader, the biryani survived, and i will tell you how bohot jaldhi (very soon, an expression of supposedly faster time) soon.)

AUTHOR’S NOTE

dear reader, i hope i have not bored you with all this historical silliness, as some might call it, but i do think that it is all necessary information, because even today, you would be surprised to know, that this dish called the biryani is contested and everyone wants to call it their own, but i believe that it does not belong to any one fragment of the indian or arabian lands and is for all, and it would have perhaps stayed for us all if identity was still fluid and open, and if racism was not a topic to divulge in, dear reader, we would all still be eating together, with our hands, on long dastarkhwans (long floor cloths used as a sort of floor seating, to eat on either side of).

in case it may have any historical value, dear reader, i would also like to add here the irony of the father of our nation of pakistan, muhammad ali jinnah, who used the onset of religious politics to advocate for a separate Muslim land, and this was coming from a man who himself was a staunch secularist, drank whiskey, enjoyed ham sandwiches, rarely could be found in a mosque, was clean shaven and stylishly garbed with beautifully cut row-suits and silk ties, was himself educated in england and married a parsi woman who was quite known for her glamorously revealing saris, and this seems all quite ironic even today, but it is not that i religiously follow much, nor do i judge people who do, it is a brave new society, is it not, so free for all to follow and do what their hearts yearn, but this idea proposed by the ruling and political elite seemed like a failed promise of the future freedom of religious expression bounded by territorial borders, but don’t get me wrong, dear reader, all this matters for the history of the Greatest Biryani, because amidst all that was happening in the subcontinent, the migration resulted in a mass swarm of foot caravans and trains of destitute refugees fleeing either side of the border, the hindus trudged along wearily towards delhi, the new capital of independent india or hindustan as they called it, and the muslims towards karachi, the newly announced capital of pakistan or the islamic republic of pakistan as they liked to call it, the amassed recipes of generations of south asians combined and amassed in the newly formed countries, but all these years later, it is perhaps indeed still difficult to say whether the partition proposal made any real sense or not. 

as i wrote this chapter, i was also sipping on a cup of Elaichi darchini wali chai (cinnamon and cardamom chai), have you ever tried it, that some in the western hemisphere tantalisingly call chai latte and that makes me cringe, dear reader, because they sell it at an abominable price, and while i do not mind versions, dear reader, because after all, i am pakistani by origin, with migrant ancestors from across india, iran and afghanistan, maternal and paternal family living in karachi and some parts of present-day india, more proficient in english than urdu ode to colonial rule, born and brought up in the modern metropolis of dubai, now living in germany and using soya sauce with my mother-in-laws homemade chaat masala (a homeblend of roasted spices) to marinate my chicken, while i prepare to wash it all down with a shot of japanese whiskey later, could hardly make such high and mighty claims, eh reader, and i believe the latent mix to be utterly ubiquitous and fascinating, in fact, but wouldn’t you be utterly aghast if your dearest and greatest culinary masterpieces, like my Greatest Biryani, were all boiled down to a merely inconsequential and unbelievably universal curry powder mixed with tomato sauce that is drizzled over boiled rice, which most in the west eat as a horrendous version of what they call a biryani.

in germany, a widely popular curry wurst is indeed sausages bathed in tomato sauce that is spiced with store bought curry powder, and has a shelf life beyond what is possible for such a mix of spices, and often when some unfriendly-looking germans glare towards me and my brown skin with utter internal disregard for anyone who is not remotely white with superior german ancestory, and an almost fear of the plausibility of the brownness being contagious, and huff and puff while exclaiming how i should head back to where i have come from, but where have i really come from, i do want to remind them where the bastardised version of the curry powder in their beloved curry wurst originates from, but it is just that i am a shy person, dear reader, and the response comes to me much later, and so i write to you and wonder what you think, but just as a clarification, and a hope that the reader would make some sort of allowances in case of confusion, we are now up to where the narrative had opened with the greatest migration, and the journey of the biryani till 1947, and in subsequent parts, we will explore what will happen to it next, but dear reader, it is meant in the best spirit of friendship when i say that i am sorry if i have made your stomachs rumble, because i, for one, cannot think straight or write anymore, and as a matter of fact, and i am utterly frank about such matters, and so i will go eat something for my dupehar ka khana (food of the afternoon; lunch) and do a bit of kaeloola (afternoon nap, especially  to escape the heat in the summers).