Railway lamb Curry
You have heard of the 'Military' hotels in India – the name implies that they are eateries that serve non-vegetarian meals. This weekend however, while grocery shopping at a local grocery store, a pre-cooked meal box that read "Railway Mutton Curry" caught my eye. I already had an inkling that it had something to do with India. Curious, I picked it up to read the details and sure enough it was a throw-back to the British times in India, in the league of the "mulligatawny soup' and other such British Indian delicacies.
Surely, one can expect a few Indophiles to fall down if you shake a tree in London. What surprises me about these things is the extent to which India influenced that era not just in England but also amongst the various British colonies. This recipe therefore has travelled from the Chennai Central railway station to not just Britain but also subsequently to colonies such as South Africa and is being sold to this day, 100 years later! That is remarkable isn't it? (Remember, all of this happened without any internet, Facebook or other social sites!)
Amongst other similar surprises that I have had, is coming across a 100 year old Dravidian Tamil Hindu temple right in the middle of Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). What was even more surprising was that it had a Tamil Pujari ( who could speak Tamil sparingly), was married to a Vietnamese women and still performed the rituals of the Puja, albeit, the Communist government that Vietnam had discouraged people from religious beliefs and had taken over the precincts of the temple for hand making toothpicks and other such things. On my father's prodding he told us the whole story of how he came to be at Saigon, as a little boy who escaped in a ship with his father. The temple however, was already there and he didn't really know much about who built it. ( Subsequently, with donations from a few Indians who were working there, the temple was renovated, the tooth-pick factory was moved out, although it needed some persuasion and the temple is in fine form I am told). For good measure, the Pujari also pointed us to the other (infamous though) India connection- a house that he said belonged to Charles Shobraj's Mother (the infamous crook, whose father was Indian, mother was Vietnamese).
Then, in the library of the University of the Philippines at Los Banos, I came across a book titled "Indian influences on the Philippines" (See the link below).
http://openlibrary.org/books/OL5345917M/Indian_influences_in_the_Philippines
It was actually a Phd. Thesis in the form of book written by a Filipino gentleman, who did his PhD. from University of Madras. If you read the book, you will find that many 100's of words that Filipinos use to this day, originated from either Tamil or Sanskrit. (The South African fruit 'Naartjie' at first sounds Dutch but its origins are Tamil) One of the major highways linking the mountainous North of Banuwe to the Bicol region in the East is called Maharlika. "Mukha" in Filipino means face. Fascinating! At one traffic circle in a small town, somewhere in the Visayas islands, is installed an idol of kali. However, there are no records of how it reached there. Visayas itself is the corruption of the name Vijendra (after King Vijendra, who ruled the parts of the Indonesian Islands).
Finally, however, one's elation at learning all of this is instantly punctured looking at today's India. Perhaps best explained by the title of the book "The Wonder that WAS India". The operative word being WAS.
PS: For those of you, who may be interested, this is the 150 th year of the arrival of Indian indentured labour in South Africa. Many books have been released on the gruesome history of what South African Indians went through. You may want to read: http://www.hsrcpress.ac.za/product.php?productid=2277
