The Medieval Urban Muslim Poor and the Origin of Biryani
i. Hypothesis
As far as I am aware there is little serious research that has been done regarding the origin of Biryani. The available histories are all obviously myths, and it is my informed opinion that they are all nonsense with virtually no truth to them. They will be handled in more detail later on.
My own thesis has four central claims.
- The upper caste Muslims and lower caste Muslims form more or less separate societies with little to do with each other.
- The lower caste Muslim supermajority, consisting of native converts, tended to converge in unfamiliar urban spaces and often ate communally.
- The lower caste Muslim society actively felt anxious to differentiate itself from Brahminical society and from many of their cultures of origin.
- Biryani was created in this context so that an urban poor would have cheap and ready access to meat and spiced foods.
I will be upfront in stating that this is a hypothesis only. By issuing it I seek not to issue an authoritative or academically rigorous historical thesis, but only to raise some issues in the study of Islamic history in India which I feel to have gone neglected until now. This is to say that there has been a persistent refusal to study the human element of conversion, a persistent erasure of the urban poor, and a campaign in the Brahminical histories to whitewash the implications and even existence of conversions in the premodern era. When I say that I present a hypothesis only, this must be accepted with the caveat that I believe that Brahminical and foreign histories to also be hypotheses — hypotheses which are inferior to mine and are based largely on, and re-enforce, existing class, caste, and religious bias. For all of the complaining the Brahmins do when their religion is analysed through a “Western lens”, I hope it will be well-accepted when I say that a Brahminical fish-eye is unsuited to capturing the nuances of Islamic thought and history.
I would not be surprised to see my thesis disproven, in whole or in part, at some point, should the level of intellectual rigour paid to the subject of the medieval Muslim urban poor come to exceed that currently paid to it. I look forward to this improvement sooner or later, whether the evidence unearthed thereby supports or refutes my claims. In other words this hypothesis is basically a stab in the dark based on things which, thinking logically, were almost definitely true; assumptions so basic that they do require to be eliminated from consideration or else assumed to be true.
As of publication, I am convinced that this is the best explanation and has immeasurably more evidence and plausibility than any of the models hitherto postulated. But my aim is simply to bring more attention to areas of history currently fallen into neglect.
This article was released with a companion article called In Defence Of The Hypothesis of Islam as a Religion of Social Liberation. These two articles explore very similar subject matter, and between them aspire to establish both theory and practice of historical analysis.
Please consider a financial contribution to my Patreon or my Ko-Fi so that I can continue doing the kind of work I do. I do not have a wealthy family nor any sort of wealthy patron, and I am not affiliated with any political party or institute of higher learning, and am legally barred from seeking employment in India due to visa issues. Rather I have lived in poverty my entire adult life and pray one day to escape it. For the time being, I live a modest lifestyle in a shared flat in South Delhi.
- The upper caste Muslims and lower caste Muslims form more or less separate societies with little to do with each other.
The traditions of both upper and lower caste Muslim society hold that the upper castes claim descent from either Arab refugees in the early years A. H., or dynastic and imperial classes in various empires up to and including the Mughal empire, who later made themselves Indian and settled as Indians like everyone else. Meanwhile, the traditions of both upper and lower caste Muslim society hold that the latter consist of Indian converts, and that for the most part these converts were in the subcontinent prior to their acceptance of Islam — generally, this means that they were either members of lower caste Hindu society, Buddhists considered to be Shudras by the Hindus or otherwise in vulnerable socioeconomic positions following the fall of Buddhism, or poorly integrated tribal and semi-tribal peoples.¹ There is in my view no reason to question these suppositions, and nor does anyone to my knowledge. But the ramifications of them have been little explored.
The association of Muslims with foreigners has obvious causes. In modern lay terms, the ruling Muslims were in a great position to “speak over” the underclass with whom they shared identifying characteristics, however tenuous the real historical or social ties may have been. It is somewhat natural² that the events of an upper class tend to eclipse those of the lower class in perceived importance — how much press coverage does Mahaparinirvan Din receive compared to Shaurya Diwas, compared to how many people celebrate each? How many cities would have to be burned down for a Dalit protest to get as much attention as Priyanka Chopra’s wedding? The ruling class is simply, almost by definition, in possession of more psychic capital. People care more what happens to them than to us.
The ruling Muslims probably did not trouble themselves much to remove the association, as it served to distinguish them culturally while increasing their cultural capital. In all likelihood they were as clueless as any other ruling class is to their impoverished coreligionists’ real conditions and dramatically overestimated the importance of their own understanding of religion and all other areas of life simply because it is difficult not to when one constitutes a ruling class.
The Muslim underclass probably was unperturbed by the association. For one, conversion tended to accompany urbanisation. In a sense, these new Muslims had found themselves in a largely foreign setting; for the most part it doesn’t matter a whiff to a foreigner where she is supposed to be from, and often the question “where are you from?” becomes “with where are you associated?” which is really a question for a postmortem biographer. To be “from” Persia or Afghanistan certainly carried with it a greater social prestige than to be from the unintegrated backwater, outside some village, or in some other place clearly associated with a social class to which an urbanite Muslim feels little attachment but from which she feels much danger or stigma with identification. As today, it’s likely a visible foreign association allowed for a level of social mobility, of which more will be said.
Third, it must be pointed out that the Hindus have deliberately nurtured this image, particularly those of the RSSBJP persuasion for their own, completely unrelated political ends of which enough has been said. The British did not care to challenge it either, as they did not go out of their way to question the narrative of the ruling classes of British India, which is to say, the Hindus. Their historical studies left unchallenged many of the assumptions of India’s thitherto dominant historical hegemons.
The takeaway here is that the assumption of “foreignness” of which India’s Muslims have borne the yoke is based on a statistically negligible segment of the Muslim population and reflective of sociopolitical developments in recent centuries rather than reality. The result is a complete erasure of the urban Muslim poor from popular conception of Indian history.
2. The lower caste Muslim supermajority, consisting of native converts, tended to converge in unfamiliar urban spaces and often ate communally.
Upon urbanisation, one almost always enters the city in an impoverished state. It is not as if one moves to an urban centre and is immediately equipped with a fully functioning kitchen courtesy of the Emperor, and if one was, even then, they might not know what to do with it. Many of these new arrivals were more foreign to their new surroundings than I was upon my arrival in Delhi. The ingredients and culinary culture they were entering into in the cities may have been largely foreign, and entry into the urban underclass may have required amputation of the greater part of one’s food culture, at least on a temporary basis. So people did not enter the cities and then begin immediately eating home cooked meals with their nuclear families. It is more likely that many of these peoples came from cultures in which communal eating was the norm, simply because statistically most people were and are, and ate in communal settings, like houses of worship, just like many of today’s urban poor.
Even if this was not the case, communal dining is a part of the Muslim religion. Muslims continue to observe communal meals today, especially during Ramzan. Another factor to be considered is that we are no strangers to pilgrimage. With the expensive pilgrimage sites for bigwigs being much further west, and visits to them being a major marker of privilege, the Mughals and other emperors facilitated the growth of many pilgrimage cities in their empires. This would have been a major economic stimulus and most of the people who went on these pilgrimages would, like many tourists to and from India today, have had just enough money to afford the trip. Circumstances of a pilgrimage, often consciously, somewhat mirror the circumstances of the impoverished, in that pilgrims are usually without a kitchen, and upon arrival in a city, require to be fed, sometimes in large numbers.
In other words, there is probable cause to believe that there was a need for food which could be produced cheaply in bulk.
3. The lower caste Muslim society actively felt anxious to differentiate itself from Brahminical society and from many of their cultures of origin.
This is sure to be the most controversial of my assertions. To say that Muslims of today use meat to differentiate themselves from Hindus will shock nobody. But many prefer this as a modern phenomenon. Those so hopeful contend that there was a general state of unprincipled syncretism and uncritical accommodation between Hindu and Muslim. In this narrative, the history of caste struggle is allowed to fall to the wayside as if in in sujood to the Brahminical notion of tolerance while it is contended there has never in history been a self-interested Brahmin class. Unfortunately for this thesis, one class has a consciousness of itself and the next has a consciousness of itself as well.
To refute this notion is not the subject of this paper, but I feel the need to acknowledge it if only to state my own rejection of it. The claim itself is based on generally flawed evidence which I hope to write a more dedicated piece on soon. Suffice to say that the Muslims were aware of, and rejected, the Brahmins’ claim to superiority. The premise that this could have been lost on the Muslims, or worse, consciously ignored by them, is ludicrous. When have we ever been able to ignore the Brahmins? To even insinate that they could have is to wax apologetic for Brahminism and to claim there to be a period in history when it was non-destructive — a shaky premise.
The Brahmins are a class defined by their claimed entitlement over a non-Brahmins class which is itself divided into a graded hierarchy. The Muslims are a class defined by their belief in a reality of spiritual equality and an ideal of social equality between individuals. Everyone in India must exist at least in a dialogue with its social “order”, which predates the Revelation of the Qur’an significantly and which Muslim empires do not seem to have made much effort to overturn, preferring to instead work with the ruling classes of Hindus. Remember that the ruling class of Mughal India may have consisted largely of Muslims, but not all Muslims were of the ruling class. The Muslims with which we are here concerned were confused and disoriented members of a fledging urban poor. What happens to confused young people in cities? They end up in weird stuff — drugs, gangs, godman cults. It should not be controversial if I propose that these Muslims were being torn in three directions, between 1. a Brahminism that reviled and despised them, 2. criminal or otherwise negative elements of the city to which they considered themselves and their peers or even children susceptible, and 3. their old identities in jahiliyya.
Although this is not adhered to now, unfortunately, at the time of Revelation it was considered quite rude to inquire of one’s activities prior to acceptance of Islam. The reason for this is because today’s Muslim was, yesterday, often something inescapably embarrassing if not humiliating. As far as I am aware, we do not have many written records of what it was like to be a convert in medieval India and therefore must speculate. Better students of medieval history might have better speculation than mine, and if so, I welcome it. But it is my contention that a discomfort around this question must have been something felt by at least a significant minority, and so efforts were made to adopt new cultural markers that would serve in order to, if not wholly anonymise one’s origin, at least eclipse it in importance. I do not claim necessarily that this translated into the same rude feeling about asking about one’s prior social position — though I could speculate that this sunnah receives more or less emphasis depending on the ratio of converts in the general Muslim population of a time and place — but I can attest that I have not yet met one person who appreciates being asked their “convert story” again and again. I don’t see any reason why medieval people would have been any more comfortable about it than I am or the early Muslims were. To be mum about one’s culture of origin is actually well-accepted religious praxis among Muslims. Even those rare few of more prestigious backgrounds might have felt the need to anonymise out of sincere revocation of their unearned privileges or else out of shame in a situation in which they were clearly outnumbered and their offence no longer spared.
In any case, the creation of new cultures, including new food cultures, is inevitable in situations where multiple cultures converge onto a new urban space, especially when a significant number of those people converging intentionally adopt a new identity in the process of doing so.
4. Biryani was created in this context so that an urban poor would have cheap and ready access to meat and spiced foods.
Islamic attitudes towards food and especially meat differ appreciably from those of the surrounding cultures. The Brahmins, as we know, have a negative attitude towards meat in most of India. Yet the lower castes continue to eat it. But even the meat is in itself often a humiliation. There are many people in India whose food culture revolves around more what they are able to procure than their preference. There are castes whose traditional diet is heavy in carrion because it is their job to dispose of carrion. There are others who eat bugs or caste Hindus’ leftovers, things which caste Hindus consider to be degrading to eat. Far from the stereotype, Indian food is not typically spicy — Hindu food is, but spices have not been easily accessible to most of the population until recently and are still out of reach to many. Spices probably functioned as a class marker and their use was probably harshly policed by upper class Hindus, out of reach except through the corporate protection of the other Muslims.
Islamic food culture therefore differentiates itself happily from both Brahminical purity politics and from the degradation which the same purity politics visit upon its others. Eating meat is considered in Islam to be neither polluting nor a humiliation. The attitude towards procuring it is also very different. Slaughtering animals is not considered to be polluting, as in Hinduism, or immoral, as in Buddhism. Halal butchers are the backbone not just of their own communities but of the surrounding cultures as well.³ But carrion disposal could not be a source of meat, as Islam forbids consumption of carrion. Therefore eating halal meat was a way of differentiating oneself not only from Hindu and Buddhist attitutes towards meat but also from earlier life circumstances which had been defined by oppression. One finds also that Indian Muslims are pickier with leftovers than Muslims in other countries. Indians are more likely (than, say, Arabs) to interpret that food which has touched pork is haraam and that food should not be cooked on cookware which in the past was used to cook pork. Despite these understandings being arguably countertextual, I believe they are rooted in a sort of drive towards dignification which was not a factor for Muslims in other places — a way of actively refusing to eat foods considered to be degrading in Indian contexts. They are not then simple issues of textual misinterpretation, nor an issue of petty consumerism(!) as has been supposed by commentators, but rather a means of communal dignification very much in keeping with the letter and the spirit of the Shari’a.
My simplest contention is that they simply wanted to eat in ways which spite vegetarians. Even disregarding that meat is tasty (which I am sure was also a factor), who doesn’t resent having a food culture forced onto them? Even in countries like the United States with absolutely no history of anything like Brahminical vegetarianism politics,⁴ vegetarian proselytisation is enough to provoke one into ordering an extra McDouble. Delhi beef crawls are to this day a valued pasttime pursued by everyone from South Indians to Northeasterners to foreigners to teenagers rebelling against their Brahmin parents to, yes, Muslims. Every law, as they say, every moré or custom creates an outlaw, and the more petty and arbitrary it is the more eagerly its outlaws take it as a dare. Modern beef crawls are in fact a mode of civil disobedience and to flaunt beef laws is considered a respectable and fun pasttime. For as long as there have been meat taboos dictated by petty meat tyrants, there must have been meat outlaws whose stories are waiting to be discovered.
However we are still dealing with a largely poor group, and this means they were not ancient Brahmins who could have a cow sacrificed for them every day. It was enough for these purposes just to have one or two little pieces of meat mixed in with a cheaper crop like rice. Heck, to mock an upper caste superstition it’s enough to just have a bit of polluted gravy if you’re in an especially tight spot.
ii. Accounting for Folk Histories
As for the prevalent folk histories of biryani, I find them to be in and of themselves the greatest evidence for my hypothesis. What they have in common is that all of them attribute a foreign or otherwise ruling class origin to the dish. Otherwise they have nothing in common. One states that it was a common Persian dish — it does not seem to be a common Persian dish nor do any other mainstays of Persian cuisine seem to have been adopted en masse. The attribution of a Persian origin, then, although interesting if true, seems unlikely and does not actually explain the popularity of the dish. The attribution of it to one or the other emperor or palace chef seems rooted in a largely inaccurate historical belief that the Muslim ruling class was concerned with, or even qualified to handle, the concerns of the Muslim urban poor, a claim which is honestly kind of silly or even kitschy. The claim that it was brought over after having been invented in Timur’s army is flatly silly — the only war one is fighting after eating a bowl of biryani is the greater jihad against falling asleep. Biryani is a dish notoriously unfriendly towards one’s digestive system. As a wartime ration one actually struggles to think of a food less suitable.
What these stories are are marketing schemes. They are basically celebrity endorsements. By eating a Persian food, one can align oneself with a foreign and prestigious culture. By eating a food endorsed by the Emperor’s head chef, one equates one’s own culinary genius with that supposed to be had by the superior ruling class. By eating a food endorsed by military conquerors, one gains the skill to accomplish one’s own ambitions, however steep the obstacles to their realisation may be!
Even today one observes this. Biryani is not expensive. One can easily acquire a bowl of it for ₹40 in any major city. But if one goes into a fake Perso-Arabic syncretic restaurant in an upscale neighbourhood, there are evidently people willing to pay exorbitant prices for the same dish. One traumatic event in my own life is walking into such a restaurant and seeing that, although the restaurant itself was only a ten or fifteen minute walk from one of suburban Bombay’s many predominantly Muslim slums, one bowl of biryani cost ₹1,650. Nothing could be a more effective marketing scheme than a cheap facade which can increase the price of a dish fortyfold!
Otherwise, these myths may have been invented by the Muslim upper castes to distance the dish from its lower-status origins — either to hide the ongoing conversions so as to not sour relations with upper caste Hindus, or simply to make them feel better about eating it — or innocently assumed to be of foreign origin simply because Muslims were and are, in popular consciousness, associated with a foreign origin.
It is in any case silly to suppose that any of these stories are true. The simpler explanation is that they are fabrications.
This article was released with a companion article called In Defence Of The Hypothesis of Islam as a Religion of Social Liberation. These two articles explore very similar subject matter, and between them aspire to establish theory and practice of historical analysis.
Please consider a financial contribution to my Patreon or my Ko-Fi so that I can continue doing the kind of work I do. I do not have a wealthy family nor any sort of wealthy patron, and I am not affiliated with any political party or institute of higher learning, and am legally barred from seeking employment in India due to visa issues. Rather I have lived in poverty my entire adult life and pray one day to escape it. For the time being, I live a modest lifestyle in a shared flat in South Delhi.
Footnotes
¹ Hindu members of the ruling class tended not to convert or need to convert in order to enter the ruling class; on the contrary, upper caste Hindus tended to be a vital component of the power of the Muslim ruling class just like they were under the British. Considering that between rulers and subjects, rulers already form a superminority, and of that superminority, only a superminority tended to convert, upper class conversions to Islam were statistically negligible.
² By this I mean not that it is inevitable or desirable, just that it is a tendency observed in many if not all human societies which we have, unfortunately, not managed to excise from our own.
³ In Freedom in Exile, the 14th Dalai Lama praises them, saying that Muslim butchers are a valuable part of the food culture of both Tibet proper and the Tibetan diaspora in India, because Tibetan Buddhism discourages slaughter, but not eating meat. The Dalai Lama is, himself, not vegetarian owing to health concerns, and vegetarianism is highly impractical in Tibet due to geographical factors.
⁴ American vegetarianism politics are extremely classist and racist, but they don’t have anything even remotely approaching the cultural influence that their Brahmin counterparts do. The fact that vegetarian diets are financially prohibitive in the United States ends the conversation before it starts much of the time.
