Why Sabzi Mandi?
Food is one of the greatest equalizers of our modern world. It is also the basis of human connection, our collective memory, and brings people from all walks of life together. My paternal grandmother, always says, “Daane daane pe likha hai, khane wale ka naam,” which loosely translates to “Every grain is pre-determined; each grain is destined for the consumer.”
As a history nerd, I always reveled in tales of peoples and communities in transition – those migrating from one place to another, taking with them their foods and cultures. Human history is full of these stories, and hence, migration and globalization are the oldest tales to tell. If you want evidence, just look at the humble plov, plof, pulao or polow – rice that went all over Eurasia. The name too, so similar – yet just different enough, to showcase how it adapted to the region that absorbed it.
The most important aspect of that my obnoxious and pretentious Twitter description is “pre-21st century globalization and cosmopolitanism.” These are the human stories reflected in the port cities (from Karachi to Zanzibar), the tales of sailors and merchants (of East African Gujuratis, and the Arabs of Kerala), the tales of how people traded in global products (spices, tea, coffee) way before the Europeans colonized this trade, and its results: in people, communities, food, and architecture. These are what I call the “Original Cosmopolitans” and what the historians of the Indian Ocean history school of thought such as Abdul Sheriff, Ayesha Jalal, and Sugato Bose describe as the particular phenomenon of the “Indian Ocean Cosmopolitans.” For evidence, just look at the Dhows sailing across the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, and the Indian Ocean.
One of the most significant pieces of writing to my mind, on this exemplary connection is brought forward by the brilliant writer, Amitav Ghosh. In his piece in the New York Times (December 30th, 2016), he puts forth the beautifully intricate and complex web that was created in the advent of the spice trade and colonialism. He is no stranger to the theory I put forth above, and is not romantic or nostalgic about it either. In “What Nutmeg can tell us about NAFTA,” he writes:
“The obvious lesson of this history is that it is impossible to imagine a world without global connections: They have always existed, and no place has escaped their formative influence. But this does not mean that there is any inherent merit in interconnectedness, which has always been accompanied by violence, deepening inequalities and the large-scale destruction of communities. Nor should proponents of unfettered globalization forget that in the 19th century “free trade” was invoked by Britain and other Western powers to prevent China from stopping the inflow of opium into the country, where it was causing widespread addiction…. These aspects of globalization are often overlooked because the advocacy of interconnectedness has come to be equated with tolerance, while the resistance to it is identified with prejudice. But neither cosmopolitanism nor parochialism is a virtue in itself. We need to ask: cosmopolitanism in the service of what? Protectionism to what end?”
The writings of people like Amitav Ghosh and V.S. Naipaul are exceptionally profound in this case – they put forth the humanity in this history, a “Real Housewives of the Indian Ocean” if you will. Thus I begin, what is a journey to discover, curate, observe, and appreciate – because we are all more than the sum of our parts. Frederick Buechner puts it best:
“You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.”