Discovering Bombay on a plate: Meher Mirza's debut book dives into the history of how Mumbai eats

Representation pic

There are always a hundred different ways to read a city, and understand its gradual evolution, expanding cultures, transitory built heritage and the zeitgeist of its spirited population. That food - what, why and how we eat - could be one of them, feels not just unlikely, but also too inadequate and narrow a lens, especially when attempting to capture the enormous exploits of a metropolis like Mumbai.

Writer Meher Mirza at the iconic Gaylord restaurant in Churchgate, where diners would be entertained with live music in the 1950s and '60s. PIC/SAYYED SAMEER ABEDI

But writer-editor Meher Mirza's debut non-fiction, Sea, Salt & Spice: A History of Mumbai Through Food (HarperCollins India), dismantles any such doubts with its startling and sweeping ambition. In 270-odd pages, she centres, with literary brevity, the transformative story of a clutch of disparate islands from pre-colonial India into a modern-day financial behemoth around what it served at its dinner tables. "Food is inescapable," says Mumbai-based Mirza, of why she was curious to explore this prism to tell the history of her home city, "… nothing touches people's lives quite as closely, deeply and tangibly as food. What is on your plate is who you are."

Tea drinking was once seen as a patriotic act, and store names reflected this. PIC COURTESY/MEHER MIRZA

Over four years in the making, the book, says Mirza in an email interview, was pieced together through long hours spent inside libraries - largely, the two centuries-old state central library, The Asiatic Society, in Mumbai - where she fossicked through "a veritable treasure box of colonial-era newspapers and books" which she says are "aplenty and extremely easy to access".

But that also made research doubly challenging as Mirza "wanted to make a conscious effort to include the pre-colonial city in her book" - a time period about which there is very little material available, even though Mumbai's story dates back to the Stone Age. To bring alive that world, once sparsely peopled with indigenous communities that fished and tilled here, before it attracted a multitude of rulers, from the Mauryas, Western Chalukyas, the Rashtrakutas, to the Bahamani Sultanate and the Marathas, she extrapolated from "poetry, travelogues, archaeological accounts", a process that she describes as "rather fun".

The waferwalas was a vanishing sight even in the 1940s and 1950s. COURTESY/The Bombay Chronicle, March 28, 1949; Sea, Salt & Spice, HarperCollins India

What she surmised was that, even in ancient times, Mumbai was a gift that kept giving. For instance, Mirza writes that the medieval text Bimbakhyana, named after King Bimba or Bhimadev, who ruled over parts of the western region with his capital in Mahikavati (present day, Mahim), "tells us that the soil of the area was so fertile that even the fiercest warrior could lay down his arms and take up agriculture". "The food of that time, though, was really a fraction of our plate today - fish and millets are amongst those, along with a few fruits."

As a resource-rich land that hugged the coastline, the region has always been a prized trading jewel. Its erstwhile power centre was in the north, where the port of Sopara (today Nallasopara) drew the Romans. Later, the Arabs, and then the spice-hungry Dutch and Portuguese sought their share in this pie. The latter arrived with a more robust missionary zeal - Bassein (Vasai) serving as its citadel.

The Portuguese were eventually knuckled out by the British (who received Bombay as dowry during the 1661 marriage alliance between King Charles II of England and Catherine of Braganza) and later, the Marathas who seized Salsette from them in the late 1730s. Colonial Bombay saw the Parsis, Goans, Iranis, Chinese among many other communities, share space with the Kolis, Agris and Bhandaris. Subsequent reclamations, courtesy the British, changed the contours of the region, merging the islands into a composite whole. In the book, Mirza describes these events with great felicity, while exploring how the trading and colonial expansion informed what was being cooked, eaten and preserved.

The Portuguese's obsession with the sweet and delectable mangoes, for instance, saw a slew of experiments by horticulturists using "indigenous pulpy chooswani (sucking) mango grafts to create table fruit that could be easily cut and eaten using cutlery". The hapus or the Alphonso mango, named possibly after its creator, the botanist Nicolau Afonso, or the second governor of Portuguese India, Afonso de Albuquerque, was born of such an attempt, and quickly won over anyone and everyone who'd tried it. But for Mirza, the coastal fruit tadgola, comes an important second.

"The tari from its palm has certainly influenced Mumbai's history in multiple ways," she says, adding, "It carried tremendous historical freight - not only was it grained into the culinary and even religious customs of communities such as the Parsis and many of the indigenous people of the land, it was also at the root of the British Government's draconian Abkari Act, in which the colonisers heavily taxed the indigenous liquor industry. Later, Gandhiji too would use it as part of his abstinence movement."

The book is imbued with many such tales of food, reinvention and entrepreneurship, from the birth of the notorious taverns and sophisticated colonial clubs, to how the British acquired a taste for dried bombil aka Bombay duck, and the birth story of the dabbawallas. Mirza, however, believes "that somewhat elliptically it's the community of millworkers who have shaped the city's foodscape significantly - from the Maharashtrian khanawals to the invention of snacks such as pao bhaji."

What the book also manages to do is reveal how Bombay endured every challenge, even as it consistently changed hands. In the aftermath of Independence, when India struggled with massive shortage of food resources, the city was far from spared. "But to me what was endlessly interesting was how residents and establishments resisted in some way or other. Restaurant owners in particular were constantly being hauled up by the police for serving too many samosas, or too many servings of rice. One poor Parsi fellow was arrested because his dinner party swelled from 20 guests to an illegal 25," says Mirza, adding, "And newspapers were thick with people complaining about the horrible quality of rations they were given - you can depend upon a Mumbaikar to never take anything lying down.

The modern story of the city, we discover, continues to be built around newer ways of imagining how to eat, but Mirza hopes that Mumbai manages to hold on to some of its best servings. "Everybody talks about the loss of the Irani cafés and of course I agree, but I wish that we had more (or any) eateries of the food of the Koli, Agri, Warli people," she says, ruing, "Our indigenous communities are being left entirely out of the conversation."