This is how tandoor came to India

We all relish the smoky flavour of tandoor, but when it comes to its arrival in India, many of us are not aware about it. Recently, during a lively session at Times Litfest 2019 Delhi, a panel of food experts talked about its origin and it was surprising to know that it came with Babur.

When Babur came to India, he brought with him the tandoor. For an army on the march, it was a kitchen that could be carried around. That’s a direct legacy of the Mughals, said authors Diana Preston and Michael Preston, who are collectively known as Alex Rutherford, authors of a fiction series on the Mughals. Michael added he heard from some Indian chefs that because Mughals couldn’t penetrate deep into south India, the tandoor is unknown there.

This was one of the interesting tidbits shared at a session titled ‘A passage to India: The outsider’s perspective.’ Andrew Otis, author of ‘Hicky’s Bengal Gazette: The Untold Story of India’s First Newspaper’, traced the journey of James Augustus Hickey, the first to start a newspaper in India. To a question about what the Indian media could learn from Hicky, Otis said there is always the value of speaking truth to power that anyone can learn from Hicky. “Journalists should be conscious of the role they are playing and how history will remember them,” he said.

Like Hicky, there were a lot of Europeans who came to India as doctors without having any medical experience. “Tremendous rogues were arriving in the Mughal Empire posing as doctors,” Diana Preston said.

The panelists also agreed that India even today appears as a fascinating place where different cultures interact.