Every Sunday, the sleepy-eyed family gathers for breakfast. The bespectacled father is reading the newspaper, breaking his silence now and then to comment on the country’s abysmal state. The son, seated across the table, is busy consuming a banana. The daughter, who had just woken up, is moving about making tea for herself. The smell of luchi, deep-frying in oil, is wafting in the air, and the mother is adding her special finishing touches to the alu’r dum. While she does so, she is also deciding on the menu for lunch. As everyone throws in their favourites to be considered, one of the dishes remains more or less unchallenged. The dish may seem bland, even unappealing to someone who is not a Bengali. But in a Bengali household, the lazy Sunday lunch feels incomplete without the presence of this dish prepared out of potato and poppy-seed paste. This humble preparation—alu-posto—may have only two principal ingredients, yet it has the capacity to rouse passion and nostalgia and bind us Bengalis in an overwhelming sense of Bengali-ness.
To get acquainted with the first character of our tale, we travel to the other side of the world to South America. In the Andean Plateau, the air is hypoxic, and straddling at an average altitude of 12,300 feet, the land precariously juggles the forces of nature—active volcanoes, geological faults that trigger earthquakes, landslides and floods. Yet in this seemingly inhospitable terrain rose the Andean Civilization. Potato fueled these people, and they thrived on the tuber for thousands of years. It was probably the first vegetable they had domesticated about 10,000 years ago. The last chapter of this splendid civilization were the Incas, and when the band of Spanish soldiers led by Francisco Pizarro arrived to dismantle it in 1532, they were fascinated to find the natives munching on mysterious round-shaped objects.
By the 1560s, the Canary Islands were cultivating and exporting potatoes to France and Netherlands. However, the Europeans were suspicious; rumour was rife, and they were not ready to take a liking to this strange vegetable that some considered an aphrodisiac, while others thought to be cause for leprosy. By mid-18th Century, Europe was gradually integrating potatoes into its diet. While the king of Prussia, Frederick the Great, was ordering peasants to cultivate and eat it to battle famine, Louis XVI of France was looking for fashionable ways to promote it. As he put potato flowers in his buttonhole, his wife, Marie Antoinette, put them in her hair. By the end of that century, potatoes had become a European staple, and the continent had finally solved the problem of feeding its people. Thus, fueled by potatoes, the rise of the West had begun. They were now ready to dominate the world for the next two hundred years.
As the West rose, the tuber made its way to the Indian subcontinent via the early Portuguese and Dutch traders. However, its influence remained restricted to the western coast, where even to this day, it is called ‘Batata’, the Portuguese word for potato. Once the East India Company secured its foothold in Bengal, they considered the idea of promoting potato. The tuber was still a novelty in Europe, and the English were fascinated by it. Also, in a land where famine was a recurrent feature, it seemed only logical to the British that they could use potatoes as a tool to win over their new subjects by solving the food problem just like it had done in Europe. Foreseeing that the tubers would rival rice in the future, the company agents got down to business; they distributed free seeds and cash among farmers and even exempted taxes. The Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India, established in Calcutta in 1820, held competitions to crown the ‘Best Potato’. The winner took home a cash prize of forty rupees along with a silver medal. All this promotion helped potato extend its reach to the corners of the subcontinent, but it never challenged rice as the English had hoped for. Instead, it began to be used in Indian cuisine as a vegetable would be, and by the end of the 19th century, cookbooks were expounding recipes for anything and everything potato. In the meantime, the English were busy filling their coffers trading, or rather, smuggling in their most valuable commodity—Opium.
The Sumerians called papaver somniferum or opium poppy, hul gil, or joy plant, as they cultivated it around 3400 BC. However, remains discovered at Neolithic burial sites in Europe date it further back another 1000 years. In Greek mythology, goddess Nyx (Night) and her twin sons Hypnos (Sleep) and Thanatos (Death) were represented with poppy flowers. The Egyptian goddess Isis had recommended opium to the sun god Ra as a treatment for his headache. Thus, the plant was significant in and around the Mediterranean, where it was native. Its use was plentiful, and apart from its utilisation as a sedative and a painkiller, the ancient medical texts of the region proposed it for treating asthma, stomach problems, poor eyesight and pacifying babies. The Arabs learned from the Egyptians and the Greeks and took it wherever they went trading. The Hindi word, Afeem, is reasonably close to the Arabic Afyun, and thus, it can be safely assumed that the Arab traders brought poppy seeds to the subcontinent around the 8th Century A.D. The Dhanwantri Nighantu, written around that time, mentions the use of opium for various ailments. The fact that it was cultivated as a major crop is mentioned in Ain-i-Akbari, written during the rule of Akbar. The Mughals were quite fond of opium and used it rather extensively as a recreational drug, while the seeds made their way to the royal kitchens to thicken sauces in various meat preparations.
The use of opium in China under the rule of the Ming Dynasty was extensive. They called it wuxiang, or the black spice, and utilised it for medicinal and recreational purposes. The Portuguese, quickly realising that China was a lucrative market, set up trading posts and networks in South and East Asia and began trading in Indian opium. The Dutch expanded upon the business while opium addiction in China reached epidemic proportions. By the end of the 18th century, the East India Company had gained control of Bengal, Behar and Orissa, and had successfully eliminated all competition in the opium trade, establishing its hegemony. Now, they systematically exploited the resources available to them, be it land or the peasants, to cultivate opium poppy. Vast fertile tracts of lands were turned over for opium cultivation. Just like indigo, the cultivation of opium poppy led to the decimation of the region’s economy. The resources previously used to grow food crops were now being utilised for poppy cultivation, with the peasants trapped in a vicious cycle of exploitation; designed by the colonial power, executed by the zamindars.
As the company’s profits grew, so did their greed, and more and more land was brought under poppy cultivation. At the peak of the trade, about 500,000 acres of land and 1.5 million farmers in the province grew opium poppy. Meanwhile, the Chinese banned the opium trade as their economy faltered; silver was being smuggled out of the country to pay for all the opium flowing in. However, the bans did not deter the British. They continued to smuggle opium into China, and as the Chinese tightened the screws further, the British waged two wars, one in 1839 and another in 1856, to bring the Chinese to their knees.
In India, with major food crops abandoned for the labour-intensive poppy cultivation, the farmers were left with nothing; neither grains nor vegetables nor money. Pushed by hunger and lack of substitutes for vegetables, the women of these impoverished households went foraging for alternatives. One of the things available in abundance were mounds of dried poppy seeds dumped as trash outside the opium factories. The women picked up fistfuls of these and made their way home. The first possible use of the poppy seeds was as an accompaniment, kancha posto baata or raw poppy-seed paste, alongside steamed rice. Soon, the women discovered various of its uses. By the early 1900s, poppy seeds had found their way to the plate of urban Bengali households. They were now being used in shukto, fritters, fish, eggs, and—our humble alu-posto.
The father licks his fingers. He declares that alu-posto had been the pick of the items. The son agrees, and the mother is proud. The daughter had skipped her meal to fidget about with a bowl of oats. Now, she regrets. The mother knows; she requests her daughter to have a little bit of rice. The daughter is unrelenting, even a tad bit grumpy, but after repeated appeals, she finally yields. The mother smiles; she serves her a helping of rice and a scoop of alu-posto and watches her relish it. The lunch is complete, and the family departs to their respective rooms. The father yawns; he grabs a book and lies down on his bed. His eyelids are heavy. The world may deride the habit of Bengalis taking an afternoon nap, but who cares. The book slides off his belly, and he quickly melts away into the world of dreams, laced with the soporific effects of the alu-posto.
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Loved reading this. Indeed you are a gifted writer. Waiting for many such writings in the future.
Thank you so much.😃
I know this alu-posto dish is quite delicious but it’s history is awesome i was not aware of,wow i will share this wonderful information among my students
Thank you. 😃
Wow! Reading to this blog was exactly like nostalgia has been addressed beautifully. I must say I relished the history while reading about our humble alu posto. Wishing to read more in future too.
Thank you 😃