How good was the food of the Mughal court?

If we are to assess the culinary and gastronomic legacies of the Mughals then we must begin by dispelling two myths.

The first is that today’s so-called Mughlai food is authentic: actually it has nothing to do with the Mughal empire and no self respecting Emperor would have deigned to eat it.

 

Over the last few decades the term has come to be associated with greasy meat and chicken based dishes that are sought to be linked to the Mughals. Few, if any, of these dishes were created during the Mughal period and though the term ‘Mughlai’ is a code word for ‘Muslim’ some of these dishes were created centuries after the Mughals had disappeared by Hindu Punjabi chefs.

 

   For instance Butter Chicken is not Mughal in origin though it turns up on ‘Mughlai’ menus. The dish was created in Delhi in the 1950s by Hindu refugees from West Punjab after Partition. No tandoori kabab can ever be of Mughal origin. Tandoors were not used for cooking meat in India till the 1920s in Peshawar where a restaurateur called Moka Singh invented Tandoori Chicken.

 

   The second great myth about the Mughals is that they came to a vegetarian Hindu country, subjugated its residents and made them eat beef. This is wrong on so many levels that it is hard to know where to start. As the food writer Colleen Taylor Sen has demonstrated, as far back as the Maurya kingdom, Indians were eating snakes, rabbits and frogs. We were no strangers to non vegetarianism. Moreover the Mughals were not great beef eaters. There are few beef recipes in the very few cookbooks that survive from that period and many Mughal Emperors were largely vegetarian.

 

   The implicit assumption in much of this myth spinning is that India was a Hindu-ruled country till the Mughals got here. In fact Babar won the first battle of Panipat in 1526 defeating Ibrahim Lodhi whose ancestors had founded the Muslim Lodhi dynasty in 1451. Nor were the Lodhis the first Muslim kings in India. Muhammad Ibn Qasim had captured parts of Sind as far back as 710. So India had experienced centuries of periodic Muslim rule long before the Mughals conquered Delhi.

 

   All this is important because we sometimes try and link every gastronomic connection between India and the Middle East to the Mughals. In fact there were such strong links between South and West Asia that many of the dishes and ingredients we try and attribute to the influence of the Mughals -samosas, pulaos, saffron etc. - had got here long before Babar was even born. Unfortunately so poor is our recording of food history that it is hard to ascribe exact dates to the introduction of different foods to the subcontinent. We are forced all too often to rely on foreign sources and the accounts of visitors and travellers.

 

   We do however have Babur’s words about India. It is safe to say that he did not seem to love it. As he complained, there were “no good horses, no good dogs, no grapes, muskmelons or first-rate fruits, no ice or cold water, no good bread or cooked food in the bazaars, no hot baths, no colleges, no candles,” and so on.

 

"Mutton DoPyaza which features in the Ain-I-Akbari, a text from Akbar’s time, uses spices that are characteristically Indian."

   This led to the first great Mughal legacy: fruit. Till Babar came along we could only boast of our mangoes. The Mughals taught us how to love all kinds of fruit planting melons apricots and other fruit that Indians were not familiar with. And as Colleen Taylor Sen records ‘Ice, used for cooling drinks and making frozen desserts, was brought daily from the Himalayas by an elaborate system of couriers.’ That’s how Indians discovered that sherbets tasted better cold and that is how the kulfi tradition sprung up.

 

   When we write of the glories of the Mughal court we sometimes forget that Babar was a chieftain from Central Asia, a region with no tradition of gastronomy. It was his son Humayun who tried to merge Indian traditions with West Asian influences. For instance, legend has it that when he was in exile in Persia he introduced the Shah to Indian long grain rice which then went on to feature in Persian cuisine.

 

   Because Babar’s descendants knew that they had no great royal traditions from back home they embraced Persian culture making Farsi the court language. Ironically that would later confuse food historians who would argue that because dishes had Farsi names they must have come from Iran; actually they were invented at the Mughal court.

 

   The Mughals combined Persian influences with the ingredients of their new home. They had never before encountered Indian spices and they began to incorporate them in court cuisine. Mutton DoPyaza which features in the Ain-I-Akbari, a text from Akbar’s time, uses spices that are characteristically Indian. Rogan Josh, an Iranian dish, became totally Indian after the spices were added.

 

   Not that Akbar ate much Rogan Josh or DoPyaza: as time went on his food habits became less Mughal and more Indian. He banned cow slaughter, advised against eating garlic and onions, became mostly vegetarian and drank Gangajal.

 

   His son Jehangir, who we would describe today as an alcoholic, discovered a Bajra khichdi while travelling through Gujarat and liked it so much that he took the cook back to Delhi with him. Khichdi then became a staple of Mughal cuisine and Shah Jahan’s cooks later made a fancy khichdi that was a signature dish at the court.

 

   Though we like to think of the Mughal food tradition as being one of importing Middle Eastern dishes, its defining characteristic was that it added flavour to West Asian dishes with Indian ingredients and techniques.

 

   The most famous example is biryani which moved away from the fancy Persian pulao tradition to create a moister, spicier dish that could be made easily in large containers. Biryani became the food of soldiers and humbler people while pulao remained a court dish.

 

   How good was the food of the Mughal court? It’s hard to say because few genuine Mughal dishes have survived. Biryani may have been invented in Delhi or Agra but nobody is quite sure what the original biryani tasted like because the versions that have survived come from post Mughal courts in Awadh and Hyderabad. Even Calcutta biryani came from the Awadhi court in exile in Metiabruz.

 

   On the other hand, without the Mughal empire there would have been no Nawab of Awadh and no Nizam of Hyderabad. So perhaps that was the greatest culinary contribution of the Mughal emperors. They came to India as foreigners but by the end they had become so Indian that their influence spread to the cuisines of regions as far apart as Telangana, UP and Bengal.

 

   The empire is gone but the legacy lives on.