Wasn’t There Islamic Cuisine in India before the Mughals?

That’s a question I have been asked several times. In my Mexican Kitchen’s Islamic Connection I mention only the Mughals.

Yes, clearly there was. Muslims conquerers had begun entering India around 1200, 300 plus years before the Mughals. The traveler Al-Biruni describes (more or less accurately) meals at the sultans’ courts. The Sultans of Mandu (central India) ordered the recipes for their exquiste sweets to be recorded in the fifteenth century (Look for a translation by Norah M. Titley, The Ni’matnama Manuscript of the Sultans of Mandu, Routledge-Curson, 2005). The accompanying miniatures offer a stunning glimpse of palace kitchens.

All of which, of simply strengthens the core argument of the article that it useful to think of a belt of Islamic Persian-inspired Cuisine that stretched from India to Spain (and then in the sixteenth century to Mexico). Obviously it varied from place to place and time to time, variations that at the moment we don’t have the historical research to tease out.

That said, I think that there are various clues that suggest that the Mughals made more difference to cuisine in India than earlier Muslim invaders. Here are a few speculations.

1. When the Mughals arrived in India, they did not say “Ah ha, our cuisine is already here.” Instead their diaries are full of complaints about how they miss the foods of their homeland in Central Asia. They go about importing the culinary package: cooks, plants, gardens, irrigation systems etc. What had happened to the cuisine of the Sultans? Had it vanished? Was it so different that the Mughals did not see it as their cuisine?

2. Both are possible. At the end of the fourteenth century, Tamerlane had sacked Delhi and it took a long time to recover. The cuisine of the Sultans in the northern part of India which depended on wealthy courts could well have more or less disappeared from that part of the country. Again the Mongols had conquered Persia in the 13th century. By the 16th century when the Mughals enter India, Persia is again a major power. If only we had a decent history of Persian cuisine (any history in fact) we might find that Persian Cuisine and Persian-influenced Central Asian cuisine differed significantly from the Persian Cuisine of two or three hundred years earlier.

3. The Mughals adopted a different pattern of rule from earlier Muslim invaders. They gave a bigger role to the Hindu population. While the Sultans remained rather remote from their conquered subjects, the Mughals succeeded in making Persian (or its successor language Urdu) the diplomatic language, Persian dress the standard, Persian poetry a preferred taste, and Persian ideas of monarchy melded on to Hindu ones. Why not a much greater influence on food too?

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