Comment

I’m at Breach Candy, eating brinjal grilled in gingelly oil. Across the road from me is a British club where, till very recently, Indians were not admitted. All around me are shop signs hastily painted over in Marathi. Connecting these dissidents is Indian ink, and the tale is told.

Their common ground Breach Candy is neither British nor Marathi. The Candy honoured in the Breach is no nautch-girl. Nor is Breach that gap in Bombay’s rocky shoreline I long thought it was.

Breach Candy is Burj-al-khari, Arabic for ‘tower of the sea’. The Arabs, master mariners, noticed a geological formation we’ve forgotten. The name was a clue. It sent me on a map quest a year ago, and yes, there was a Burj here, right in the khari! A massif to begin with, but when the Arabs named it a millennium ago, it had been weathered down to a minar, easily spotted on the horizon from far out at sea.

It doesn’t stop there. Burj isn’t Arabic. It came over from Europe during the Crusades when invaders dotted the Eastern landscape with castles.

Sweets we knew as ‘peppermints’ fifty years ago, we now call ‘candy’, and fancy we’re speaking American. Oh no, we were saying ‘candy’ long before 4 July 1776.

The juicy little word is Tamil, or as it should more correctly be written, Tamizh. The Tamil word for crystallised sugar, kal-kand, was adopted by Arab merchants who shopped for it. The subcontinent’s coastline has been a bazaar for millennia. All you needed was a boat to zip you over to the mall. The Arab with a sweet-tooth sold his kal-kand as qandi at Cueta where, in the days before Vasco da Gama, all Europe queued up to score.

From there on to Venice, perhaps, or Genoa, whence a roving Englishman took it home as ‘candy.’ The first mention of candy in English is in the early 16th century, nearly a hundred years into Portugal’s monopoly of trade with India.

The Elizabethans took madly to the stuff and by the turn of the century Shakespeare had absorbed the word into his idiom. When Hamlet said “let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp” presumably the pit knew what he was talking about.

Did the Tamilian return short-changed from the bazaar? Not a whit. When today’s purist demands gingelly oil he ignores the northern til and the Latin sesamum as upstarts. The sine qua non of Tamil cuisine can only be gingelly — which, in fact, is not Tamil at all. It is 100 per cent Arabic. They called it al-juljulan (onomatopoeia for the rattle of ripe seeds in its capsule), and loaded jars of the aromatic oil onto their ships along the Coromandel. The adventurous but zelotypic Portuguese, who loathed the Arabs but loved their discernment, craftily cornered the market and sold the oil back to the people who made it — as gergelim. That other Tamil staple, coffee, is grudgingly acknowledged as Arabic. It isn’t. Kaffa, in what is now Ethiopia, naturally, is where ‘coffee’ comes from.

Around the time coffee arrived here from Yemen, as seven beans concealed in Baba Budan’s cummerbund, the other Kaffa, the one we now call Feodosia, exported quite a different kind of merchandise to Europe. Although it took five hundred years to get here, Bombay boasts memorials to that export at every street corner. Can you guess what it was? Two years ago, while writing a book about it, we discovered Indian ink flows really far out to sea…
Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed write as 'Kalpish Ratna'