Red Onion Story
The Vedas dished it.Gandhi endorsed it.Sardar Patel joined the satyagraha movement for it. The pungent root vegetable has played an unexpectedly important role in history
The red onions are just prefect, fat, firm globes, glowing with magenta-red vigour, promising crisp sweet heat when you bite into their packed layers, a nose-clearing pungency that gives way to a satisfying savoury flavour — and that's even before you cook them. In restaurants I can never resist snacking on them when they are put on the table (but not the ones soaked in vinegar, which destroys their taste; salty chaat masala, on the other hand, greatly enhances them).
Pablo Neruda wrote an ode to them: "luminous flask/ your beauty formed/ petal by petal/ crystal scales expanded you/ and in the secrecy of the dark earth/ your belly grew round with dew…You make us cry without hurting us/ I have praised everything that exists/ but to me, onion, you are/ more beautiful than a bird/ of dazzling feathers/ heavenly globe." Neruda, I assume, was writing about the onions of his native Chile, but I wonder how much more he could have written if he had known our red onions.
I am unapologetically chauvinist here, and it comes from suffering onions abroad. I am sure there must be good ones, but the regular onions I have found in places like New York and London were watery, mushy and tasteless, and not a patch on what we get here. You have to cook them for hours to get rid of the water and have the sugars in them caramelise to something vaguely nice. I have an American chef friend who loves Indian onions so much that he loads them in his luggage when he goes home. I have no idea how he gets past the sniffer dogs, but perhaps they take one whiff of our powerful piyaz and decide it's wiser to pretend ignorance.
Onions are at the root of most of Indian restaurant food. Camellia Panjabi recently told me why the UK government's efforts to ban Indian restaurant workers and get unemployed Brits to take on curry house jobs would never work: "For almost the first year the only job an Indian restaurant worker does is peel, chop and cook onions. Where will you get a young British person willing to do that?" The onions are cooked down into the 'base', the sauce that along with ginger-garlic and various spices is customised into whichever dish is required.
The 'base' can be abused, imposing an underlying similarity of flavour across all dishes, but used properly can result in delicious food. This sort of use of onions is often seen as characteristically North Indian, but it isn't unknown in South India either. Recently I saw a packaged masala brand in Chennai that advertised itself as 'Hotel Sambhar' — the main difference from regular sambhar masala was simply the use of onions. Of course, what's used in the South is often the smaller 'Madras onions' which are sometimes shallots, a variant of the family, but are sometimes also really just small onions.
But consider
the conundrum here - we grow wonderful onions and use them well,
yet in probably no other country is the prejudice against onions so
strong. It's true that Western societies have sometimes looked down on
onions for their strong smells, but this is usually an extension of the far
stronger (and equally silly) prejudice against garlic. In fairness, one should
note that food smells can be far more lingering and annoying in the closed,
centrally heated rooms of these countries. But this prejudice is nothing like
the religious abhorrence of onions in India, which has very deep roots.
KT Achaya notes that onions do not feature in Vedic literature and when they do show up, they are seen as food for foreigners or the low caste. He quotes early Chinese travellers to India like Fa Xian around the start of the 5th century who wrote that most Indians did not eat onions and garlic, while two centuries later Xuan Zang noted that "if anyone uses them for food, they are expelled beyond the walls of the town." Today food prepared without onions is typically referred to as Jain, but the proscription predates them and where their belief is consistent with a larger ban on root vegetables, the Hindu feeling seems more directly linked to the powerful flavour and smell of onions.
This prejudice must have increased after the Muslims arrived. They used onions with huge enthusiasm, whether raw as an appetite stimulant, or cooked as the base, or as berishta, the sliced onions fried till crisp and caramelised, and strewn like a blessing over food. All this must have reinforced the orthodox Hindu hatred of onions, but I wonder if one side effect of this was the surprising enthusiasm for them shown by Mahatma Gandhi. For all that, Gandhi had real respect for Hindu traditions, he was also willing to take them on at times, and a dislike at how foods were used to mask deeper prejudices could have been just the thing to stiffen his resolve.
In a rather surprising exchange with Subhas Chandra Bose in 1936, Gandhi wrote that the prejudice against these "harmless vegetables" (onions and garlic) was due to their smell and came with the rise of Vaishnavism. But, he noted, "Ayurveda sings the praise of both unstintingly." To Premabehn Kantak he pointed to a practical benefit: "Onion occupies an important place in the diet of the village people. It is the one vegetable that is of inestimable value for them. While it is present in their diet, they don't very much need ghee." He added that onions should not be an obstacle to practicing brahmacharya.
Gandhi's endorsement of onions must have been a relief to his followers, as relief from his otherwise bland, spice-free food. Louis Fischer, Gandhi's biographer, wrote in his memoir, A Week with Gandhi that he turned down the boiled onion offered by Gandhi, and asked instead for it raw: "It stimulated my palate and was a relief from the flat food of the menu." Gandhi admitted, in a letter to Vinoba Bhave, that he disliked their smell, but suggested that "One may eat them with the last meal of the day, for one meets few people thereafter. If eaten in small quantities as medicine, the odour will probably be less."
Perhaps the other reason Gandhi overcame onion prejudices was his memory of the role they played in his development of the satyagraha. This took place soon after his return to India, in 1918, in Kheda in Gujarat where for the first time he applied the concept to a rural area. The crops had failed, but the British were insisting on enforcing the land tax. Gandhi counselled the peasants to refuse to pay it, and this, as the collector Frederick Pratt told him, was a drastic step because the land tax was the foundation of British revenue in India (in a weird connection, Pratt, who got on well with Gandhi, was the brother of the Boris Karloff, the actor who famously created Frankenstein's monster on screen).
The struggle went on for five months when finally, to bring it to a dramatic end, Gandhi counselled one of the main farmers, Mohanlal Pandya, to remove the onions from a field that the British had attached. In his autobiography Gandhi wrote that the British might have been in their legal rights to attach standing crops, but it "was morally wrong, and was nothing short of looting, and that therefore it was the people's duty to remove the onion." Pandya was convicted and went triumphantly to jail.
For Gandhi the 'Onion Satyagraha' was an important test of the principle, and it had another benefit. A young lawyer who played a key role in helping him was inspired to leave his practice and join him fulltime. That lawyer was Vallabhbhai Patel, and what stronger testament need one have of the power and value of Indian onions than their role in helping enlist the Iron Man of the Independence struggle!
- Vikram Doctor ETCD 11F0212
KT Achaya notes that onions do not feature in Vedic literature and when they do show up, they are seen as food for foreigners or the low caste. He quotes early Chinese travellers to India like Fa Xian around the start of the 5th century who wrote that most Indians did not eat onions and garlic, while two centuries later Xuan Zang noted that "if anyone uses them for food, they are expelled beyond the walls of the town." Today food prepared without onions is typically referred to as Jain, but the proscription predates them and where their belief is consistent with a larger ban on root vegetables, the Hindu feeling seems more directly linked to the powerful flavour and smell of onions.
This prejudice must have increased after the Muslims arrived. They used onions with huge enthusiasm, whether raw as an appetite stimulant, or cooked as the base, or as berishta, the sliced onions fried till crisp and caramelised, and strewn like a blessing over food. All this must have reinforced the orthodox Hindu hatred of onions, but I wonder if one side effect of this was the surprising enthusiasm for them shown by Mahatma Gandhi. For all that, Gandhi had real respect for Hindu traditions, he was also willing to take them on at times, and a dislike at how foods were used to mask deeper prejudices could have been just the thing to stiffen his resolve.
In a rather surprising exchange with Subhas Chandra Bose in 1936, Gandhi wrote that the prejudice against these "harmless vegetables" (onions and garlic) was due to their smell and came with the rise of Vaishnavism. But, he noted, "Ayurveda sings the praise of both unstintingly." To Premabehn Kantak he pointed to a practical benefit: "Onion occupies an important place in the diet of the village people. It is the one vegetable that is of inestimable value for them. While it is present in their diet, they don't very much need ghee." He added that onions should not be an obstacle to practicing brahmacharya.
Gandhi's endorsement of onions must have been a relief to his followers, as relief from his otherwise bland, spice-free food. Louis Fischer, Gandhi's biographer, wrote in his memoir, A Week with Gandhi that he turned down the boiled onion offered by Gandhi, and asked instead for it raw: "It stimulated my palate and was a relief from the flat food of the menu." Gandhi admitted, in a letter to Vinoba Bhave, that he disliked their smell, but suggested that "One may eat them with the last meal of the day, for one meets few people thereafter. If eaten in small quantities as medicine, the odour will probably be less."
Perhaps the other reason Gandhi overcame onion prejudices was his memory of the role they played in his development of the satyagraha. This took place soon after his return to India, in 1918, in Kheda in Gujarat where for the first time he applied the concept to a rural area. The crops had failed, but the British were insisting on enforcing the land tax. Gandhi counselled the peasants to refuse to pay it, and this, as the collector Frederick Pratt told him, was a drastic step because the land tax was the foundation of British revenue in India (in a weird connection, Pratt, who got on well with Gandhi, was the brother of the Boris Karloff, the actor who famously created Frankenstein's monster on screen).
The struggle went on for five months when finally, to bring it to a dramatic end, Gandhi counselled one of the main farmers, Mohanlal Pandya, to remove the onions from a field that the British had attached. In his autobiography Gandhi wrote that the British might have been in their legal rights to attach standing crops, but it "was morally wrong, and was nothing short of looting, and that therefore it was the people's duty to remove the onion." Pandya was convicted and went triumphantly to jail.
For Gandhi the 'Onion Satyagraha' was an important test of the principle, and it had another benefit. A young lawyer who played a key role in helping him was inspired to leave his practice and join him fulltime. That lawyer was Vallabhbhai Patel, and what stronger testament need one have of the power and value of Indian onions than their role in helping enlist the Iron Man of the Independence struggle!
- Vikram Doctor ETCD 11F0212
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