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In this holy month of Ramzan, the date is celebrated as the first sweet antidote to the fatigue of an arduous fast. The fruit has become a metaphor for endurance in all desert cultures, so historic is the hardihood of Phoenix dactylifera , the date palm. But is it a desert plant? Hardly.
It was first cultivated along the banks of the Indus, circa 7,000 BCE, in Mehergarh, the earliest outpost of subcontinental memory. Still, the strolling botanist will stubbornly locate the ur-date palm along the Nile. Centuries ago, an Arab wandering Hindustan cried out “ Tamar al Hind !” at the sight of brown fruit clusters dangling from an entirely alien tree.
The fruit’s jammy pulp looked as succulent as his own domestic delight, but there the resemblance ended. The date of Arabia is bland benevolence. The date of India is all tickle and tease.
Linnaeus, who probably didn’t taste either, ran with the Arab, so it is Tamarindus indica today. Irritating? Tautology apart— Indian ? Agreed, we have grown tamarind for millennia, and the tree runs wild in every part of our country, but its home is in Africa, or perhaps, in Madagascar. Instant relief How does a tree name itself? What is the memory of a tree? The question was forced on me last week when I was in Mandu, Madhya Pradesh.
Mandugarh is memory erased. Wandering its ruins is like attempting to read life in the fragments of an exhumed skull, trying to imagine thought from silence. And that silence is the wind rush of Time.
It reverberates in emptiness till the hot air is leached of movement, and then hangs dense and impenetrable, excluding the past, dismissing memory. A painting depicting Baz Bahadur and Roopmati from the India Office Library. | Photo Credit: Wiki Commons Mandu’s history feasts the senses.
The luxuries of Mahmud Khilji, his silks and perfumes, his jewels for which kingdoms were bartered. From the faded pages of the Ni’matnāmah Naṣir al-Dīn Shāhī waft the spicy scents of Ghiyat Shah’s samosas and the luscious and pungent kashk . The heartbreaking romance of Roopmati and Baz Bahadur is saffronised now to a vague political detente.
Fled, all fled. The ruins now only trap the heat, white and shadowless, a slow burn by 9 am. No matter, said the locals, and for instant relief, offered sweet tamarind.
Sweet tamarind? An oxymoron if I ever tasted one! But no, my friends swore by the sweetness of their gigantic tamarind. Mandu ki imli they said could cure any disease, was relished like chocolate, and kept unspoilt for a decade. What’s more, the pods were as thick as a man’s arm.
I was about to dismiss this as braggadocio when I recalled the stalwarts we had just driven past. There were four of them on the horizon, four upside-down trees. The African term describes them best.
Their canopies erupt from bulbous trunks like tangled roots as if some malicious hand has planted them upside down. We know them by their Arabic name Abu al-hibab , or Father of Seeds, colloquialised to baobab . It is one of the oldest trees, and can survive for more than a thousand years.
It began in Madagascar. How did it get to Mandu? Baobab seeds, locally known as Mandu’s tamarind or Mandu ki Imli. | Photo Credit: Wiki Commons Ruda, the Bhil lady who tells me all about Mandu ki imli , is certain the tree has been here forever.
Why, it is Mandu’s mithai and dawai all in one. The Bhils swear by the fruit, the bark, and the roots to treat any number of ills. So do Africans and Caribbeans.
Delicious pulp The two giant pods on my kitchen counter are part of Ruda’s gift of six. I am assured of immortality if I work my way through them all. The clumsy bolsters of olive green suede look like estranged bits of furniture.
I would be content to treasure them as they are, but the knife gleams beguilingly, and I open one. The fibrous pith is gemmed with white-fleshed seeds. The pulp is delicious: sweet, a hint of tart that quickly turns bland.
One pod is going to last a long long while. It keeps, they tell me, for years. Now I realise what this really is.
Travel food. Baobab trees in Madagascar. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStock In an African village, the baobab tree is all things: food, shelter, medicine, community.
To the traveller, each white nugget is a capsule of home. Sucked clean of succulence, the seed was swallowed or spat out—to tell its story elsewhere. On my own island, once Shashti, then Salsette, and now a Mumbai suburb, baobabs dot the trade route from Ghodbunder where the horses landed to Mahim where they embarked for the stables of rajas and sultans in the 16th century.
Mandu’s sultans had legendary bodyguards of fierce Ethiopian warriors—all women. No medieval Indian kingdom lacked an African contingent in its infantry. So perhaps the baobab arrived with them.
That’s a pretty story, but the memory of the tree clings closer to the truth. Within Africa, the baobab follows trade routes and it tracks the long embittered memory of the slave trade. From western Africa to the Caribbean, in the infamous triangular trade that fed Europe sugar for three centuries, the captured and enslaved hoarded their nuggets of hope.
It travelled as food, as medicine, and at destination took root as memory. From the east coast of Africa, the Indian Ocean slave trade enslaved men, women and children to work the Portuguese and Dutch territories. The baobab, no matter where it grows today, speaks its memory of human treachery, loss and pain.
Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed are surgeons who write together as Kalpish Ratna. They are the authors of Gastronama: The Indian Guide to Eating Right (Roli, 2023). CONTRIBUTE YOUR COMMENTS SHARE THIS STORY Copy link Email Facebook Twitter Telegram LinkedIn WhatsApp Reddit.
