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

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 mdash what why and how we eat mdash 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 MumbaiWriter Meher Mirza at the iconic Gaylord restaurant in Churchgate where diners would be entertained with live music in the 1950s and rsquo60s PICSAYYED SAMEER ABEDIBut writereditor Meher Mirzarsquos debut nonfiction Sea Salt amp Spice A History of Mumbai Through Food HarperCollins India dismantles any such doubts with its startling and sweeping ambition In 270odd pages she centres with literary brevity the transformative story of a clutch of disparate islands from precolonial India into a modernday financial behemoth around what it served at its dinner tables ldquoFood is inescapablerdquo says Mumbaibased Mirza of why she was curious to explore this prism to tell the history of her home city ldquohellip nothing touches peoplersquos lives quite as closely deeply and tangibly as food What is on your plate is who you arerdquoTea drinking was once seen as a patriotic act and store names reflected this PIC COURTESYMEHER MIRZAOver four years in the making the book says Mirza in an email interview was pieced together through long hours spent inside librariesmdashlargely the two centuriesold state central library The Asiatic Society in Mumbaimdashwhere she fossicked through ldquoa veritable treasure box of colonialera newspapers and booksrdquo which she says are ldquoaplenty and extremely easy to accessrdquoBut that also made research doubly challenging as Mirza ldquowanted to make a conscious effort to include the precolonial city in her bookrdquomdasha time period about which there is very little material available even though Mumbairsquos 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 ldquopoetry travelogues archaeological accountsrdquo a process that she describes as ldquorather funrdquoThe waferwalas was a vanishing sight even in the 1940s and 1950s COURTESYThe Bombay Chronicle March 28 1949 Sea Salt amp Spice HarperCollins IndiaWhat 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 ldquotells us that the soil of the area was so fertile that even the fiercest warrior could lay down his arms and take up agriculturerdquo ldquoThe food of that time though was really a fraction of our plate today mdash fish and millets are amongst those along with a few fruitsrdquoAs a resourcerich 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 spicehungry Dutch and Portuguese sought their share in this pie The latter arrived with a more robust missionary zealmdashBassein Vasai serving as its citadelThe 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 preservedThe Portuguesersquos obsession with the sweet and delectable mangoes for instance saw a slew of experiments by horticulturists using ldquoindigenous pulpy chooswani sucking mango grafts to create table fruit that could be easily cut and eaten using cutleryrdquo 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 whorsquod tried it But for Mirza the coastal fruit tadgola comes an important secondldquoThe tari from its palm has certainly influenced Mumbairsquos history in multiple waysrdquo she says adding ldquoIt carried tremendous historical freightmdashnot 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 Governmentrsquos draconian Abkari Act in which the colonisers heavily taxed the indigenous liquor industry Later Gandhiji too would use it as part of his abstinence movementrdquoThe 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 ldquothat somewhat elliptically itrsquos the community of millworkers who have shaped the cityrsquos foodscape significantlymdashfrom the Maharashtrian khanawals to the invention of snacks such as pao bhajirdquoWhat 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 ldquoBut 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 25rdquo says Mirza adding ldquoAnd newspapers were thick with people complaining about the horrible quality of rations they were givenmdashyou can depend upon a Mumbaikar to never take anything lying downThe 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 ldquoEverybody talks about the loss of the Irani cafeacutes and of course I agree but I wish that we had more or any eateries of the food of the Koli Agri Warli peoplerdquo she says ruing ldquoOur indigenous communities are being left entirely out of the conversationrdquo