Political Potato

Over the past decade, we have been educated in the politics of vada pao. The batata vada, we are told, is homegrown, and therefore genetically designed to nourish sons of the soil, and what can be more Mumbai than pau?

For years I had considered bhel-puri the quintessence of Bombay. Crisp and feisty, pungent as irony, acid with repartee and generously sweet, it was the finger-lickin’ idiom of city glut at peak hour.

I was corrected. Bhel-puri is an interloper, an arriviste, whose tarty glamour has seduced  the hoi polloi away from the authentic flavour of Mumbai.

No longer can the city afford to ignore the pure culture and perfect nutrition of the vada pao. It is tradition at its tastiest.
I’m letting the pure and cultured bit pass (that’s another column) and this is about words, not food science.

What about batata, they harangued me, home food, no? The vada is typical. Pao also is typical. Regional food, authentic, means vada pao.

I would have been content to enjoy my vada pao, but all those tags bothered me. Typical, regional, authentic, pure, culture—heck, it’s just potato!

Batata, I was told firmly. Language is important. You cannot make a vada out of potato. Vada is typical. Potato is English, you can make chips with it. Alu is for Punjabi food. But for vada, only batata works.

In conjunction with batata, vada  needlessly mutates into wada, but that apart, the Sanskrit word is generic for any lump or globular mass. It’s just a question of shape.
Batata may work for vada, but I’m not sure vada has ever worked for batata . It’s definitely a question of language. Batata, you see, is Quechuan.

Unlike our rational sea-level Mumbaikar, the potato is a ghati. Its home is Lake Titicaca, at 3800m, the highest lake on the planet. Its wilder, less palatable ancestors were cultivated in the Andes for 7000 years before the Spanish Conquistadors hunted down the Inca for their gold.

 The Quechuan -speaking Inca didn’t call it batata: that was their word for the sweet potato, an entirely unrelated tuber. The potato was revered as Mama Jatha, the Mother of Growth. The Inca empire was founded on potato—it was army rations, festive food and standby when the maize crop failed. Vada was not Inca cuisine. They freeze dried the potato whole as chuno.

The Conquistadors wiped out the Inca, and took home the potato more as a curiosity, than as food.
By the time the tuber got to Portuguese Bombaim in the mid-sixteenth century, it was batata. Serendipitously, the batata also brought with it chile.

Bombaim, at the same latitude as Mexico, grew chile quick enough, but the batata had to endure a bloody phase in its home town  before it could be cultivated on our isla da boa vida.
The Conquistadors had a glittering reason to stay on in Peru and patronize the potato: the silver mines of Potosi. Chuno was the staple diet of the Quechuan miners. Its supply was controlled by Spanish profiteers, and most miners starved to death.
The Spanish solution to the labor problem was — the African slave trade. For the next two hundred years, the potato fuelled slaves who were driven like mules to work the ore and transport it to waiting galleons. More than 8 million Peruvians and Africans died to produce the legendary treasure of the Spanish Main.

The Portuguese would prove better, more ambitious slavers than the Spanish, and so the batata, still ‘slave food’, traveled to Bombaim.

What of pau? We took the Portuguese recipe to our hearts.  By 1675 our bakers were making the softest and crustiest bread in the world, as a French traveler testified in Goa.
Quintessential Mumbai? Certainly, it must be the vada pao! A true cosmopolite, it’s Indian, Peruvian, Mexican and Portuguese, the very taste of plurality. And isn’t that what our city is all about?

Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed write as Kalpish Ratna