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
in the world of literature, authors of a fiction series on the Mughals. Michael added he heard from some Indian chefs that because the Mughals couldn’t penetrate deep into the south of India, the concept of tandoor is unknown there.
The couple also said they figured from Babur’s memoirs that he was an opportunist who had come to India to claim his inheritance as a descendant of Timur after having been pushed out of his Central Asian homeland.
These were some of the interesting tidbits that were shared at a session titled ‘A passage to India: The outsider’s perspective’ on the concluding day of
Times Litfest 2019
. The session moderated by Jonathan Gil Harris also had Andrew Otis as a speaker.
Otis is the author of ‘Hicky’s Bengal Gazette: The Untold Story of India’s First Newspaper’. He traced the journey of James Augustus Hickey, an Irishman who started as a clerk before becoming a surgeon’s mate on board an East Indiaman. When he reached India in search of a fortune, he said goodbye to the crew and entered Calcutta and eventually became the first man to start a newspaper in India.
To a question about what the Indian media could learn from Hicky’s example, Otis said that there is always the value of speaking truth to power that anyone can learn from Hicky. “Also, journalists should be conscious of the role they are playing and how history will remember them,” Otis said.
Like Hicky, there were a lot of Europeans who came to India as doctors without having any medical experience. This was especially true of the Mughal Empire where many Europeans picked up employment as doctors even though they practised different trades. “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. The Prestons said while studying the Taj Mahal, they had gone to Uzbekistan to see the Timurid homeland and the buildings and the domes there. Then they went to Iran because Mumtaz Mahal was Persian. And then they saw all those architectural trends merge with the Hindu one and result in the Taj Mahal. They found that fascinating.
Start a Conversation
Post comment