‘A quest to cling to something tangible’: Why Tarana Husain Khan writes about Rampur’s lost foods

Tarana Husain Khan is a writer and food historian with a passion for exploring the intersection of gender, history, culinary culture, and oral history. Her writings based on extensive research on the cuisine of the erstwhile princely state of Rampur have been published in prominent media outlets and in the anthologies Desi Delicacies (Pan Macmillan India) and Dastarkhwan: Food Writing from South Asia and Diaspora (Beacon Books, UK). Her research article, “Narrating Rampur Cuisine: Cookbooks, Forgotten Foods and Culinary Memories” was published in the Global Food History Journal (April 2023 issue).

Tarana is the author of a critically acclaimed book on Rampur cuisine, Degh to Dastarkhwan: Qissas and Recipes from Rampur (Penguin Random House India) which explores Rampur’s culinary history, and a bestselling historical fiction The Begum and the Dastan which won the Kalinga Literary Award for fiction, was shortlisted for Women Writer’s Award by She The People and longlisted for Auther Award. She has co-edited and contributed to an anthology of food writings, Forgotten Foods: Memories and Recipes from Muslim South Asia (Pan Macmillan India). She has also curated and contributed to a highly popular series “Forgotten Food” on Scroll and wrote a monthly column on Rampur cuisine, “Food Fables”, in DailyO.

Khan worked as a Research Fellow and Consultant at the University of Sheffield on an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project, “Forgotten Food: Culinary Memory, Local Heritage and Lost Agricultural Varieties in India” (2019-2023).

In this conversation, Tarana Husain Khan spoke about her literary and culinary adventures.

Can you tell us about your early life and upbringing? How did it influence your interest in history and culture?
My father was an IAS officer which meant that we had to be transferred after every two years. The small UP towns didn’t have good schools so my mother emphasised reading and we learned a lot from the books we read as children. Mamma was a strict disciplinarian probably because of her boarding school background; we had time for everything – work, play, settling our cupboards and school bags. We learned that we could do a lot of work if we managed time. This awareness of time is something all of us siblings have imbibed as life lessons.

Our father used to tell us stories from books he had read. They were historical adventures and real-life stories. My uncle was a historian and he used to narrate the histories of our Rohilla ancestors and how they settled in Rohilkhand and Rampur. Mamma loved to visit historical places and we toured a number of north Indian cities reading their histories and delving into their cultures. She would pretend to have been a princess living in the palace in earlier life; I believe the long conversations and entertaining play acting brought history alive for us. These interactions with history were a significant part of my upbringing and created an abiding interest in history, culture and literature.

What inspired you to pursue a career in writing and cultural history, and was there a pivotal moment or experience that led you to this path?
My return to Rampur, the land of my ancestors in 2010 coincided with the destruction of its ten historic gates. A determined quest to cling to something tangible of this vanishing culture led me to cookbook manuscripts preserved in the Rampur Raza Library. I was amazed at the vast repertoire of dishes which I realised were a part of Rampur cuisine till the 1960s. This was a pivotal moment which turned me towards research and writing. I was probably a foodie in denial gathering tastes and food stories subconsciously through my growing years. Investigating the history of Rampur cuisine, gathering its oral histories and learning the nuances of Rampuri dishes in a bid to revive its forgotten aspects, made me discover a latent part of myself.

I was spurred on in this quest by my young students, who were desperately proud of their identity and heritage, and the stoic hopelessness which pervaded the town watching the last vestiges of their grand history crumbling and being destroyed. Another aspect of my research involved the stories of women preserved in oral family history. Women slip off the pages of written history and are only mentioned in passing if they birthed a royal child. I wanted to highlight these lost stories and the travails of women of Rampur which led to my writing The Begum and the Dastan.

How did you begin your journey as a writer? Did you face any challenges while establishing yourself in this field?
It seemed to me that we were missing a crucial part of Rampur history and culture by ignoring gender and food. I realised that to truly understand a city, its past and the identity of its people, we seek food with history and provenance. Therefore, I began recording oral food histories and translated historical recipes from rare Persian and Urdu manuscripts dated to the 19th century.

Simultaneously I also commenced my research on the royal women of Rampur. I wrote on both these aspects in online publications and some of my articles on food caught the attention of Prof Siobhan Lambert-Hurley at the University of Sheffield. As we connected over Skype calls, the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project, Forgotten Food: Culinary Memory, Local Heritage and Lost Agricultural Varieties in India (2019-2023) was born and gave me resources to carry on with my work on reviving Rampur cuisine.

Meanwhile, my book, The Begum and the Dastan was accepted by Westland Tranquebar and my writing career became a reality. Challenges are a part of a writing career as in other careers. I was lucky to be supported by my cousin, the award-winning writer, Taran N Khan and my agent Kanishka Gupta as well as my family who had great faith in my writing abilities. I am still plagued by self-doubt and anxiety before a book launch and an occasional writer’s block – it comes with the territory.

What motivated you to focus on the oral history and culture of Rampur, and how did you conduct research for your writings?
The oral history of Rampur was never archived and the older generation, who had experienced the high point of Rampur culture, were passing away. I felt this need to preserve our history for the next generation. I believe we are not transmitting our stories and culture to the next generation as comprehensively as our parents, possibly due to our involvement with social media. We know a lot about the larger issues, indeed we are obliged to process vast amounts of relevant or irrelevant information on a daily basis which leaves us with very little mind space for our regional histories. I decided to write about the lost and forgotten aspects of the history of Rampur in a form which would interest the average reader across all age groups.

My research involved meeting and talking to old timers, the chefs and members of the royal family as well as reading the written histories and historical documents preserved at the Raza Library. Collating all the sources and writing about them in various forms was the easier part.

The Begum and the Dastan has received critical acclaim. What inspired you to write this historical fiction, and what message did you hope to convey through it?
The book is based on the real-life story of Mamola Begum (Feroza Begum in the book), my husband’s great grandaunt who was forcedly restrained in the royal harem. Her story echoed in courtyards of Rampur homes as a cautionary tale. The young girls were told that Mamola Begum suffered because she dared to disobey her father. The latter’s abandonment of his daughter to her fate was therefore justified.

The story caught my youthful imagination, stayed with me for years and took me on a journey to the grand old houses and the humble gullies, demanding a retelling of oral histories and vocalising a forgotten name. The history books mentioned her in passing because she had birthed a child for the nawab. She lived in our family oral history though we had abandoned her in life and death. The names of women disappear from the pages of history; some names are banished from lips and hearts. Our women are still invisible even though they have stopped observing purda; the veil is still there in their hearts and brains.

In small towns the girls are often stopped from continuing their studies because they have to get married, because they need to look after the house, because the family doesn’t have money; they become the first casualty for any adversity faced by the family. So in my book, Ameera living in contemporary times is still made to give up her dreams at the altar of the familial duty.

How did you balance historical accuracy with storytelling in The Begum and the Dastan and what was the most challenging part of writing this book?
Writing about real life characters and happenings is always challenging especially where the reconstruction of the story is based on oral history which alters with each retelling. I was straddling the fault lines between history and fiction, piecing together written and oral histories, wandering the historical remains of Rampur fort to give context to my story. Finally, I decided to narrate the story like a dastango, to embellish and weave the strands of my tale around a kernel. There were so many aspects of the story; it was a glorious, brutal world which has disappeared and needed to be recreated to tell the story. I often wondered – What was Mamola Begum’s world like? What defined her days in the harem? What were her aspirations, her thoughts? How did she die? How did women of those times negotiate the stringent patriarchal norms?

I collected stories from reliable and unreliable narrators, official histories preserved in the Raza Library, letters, secret diaries, and files from the dusty shelves of regional archives. Putting it all together coherently, revisiting a lost world and conveying the message in an engaging manner was a tremendous task. Right before the final edit I decided to change the names of the characters and set the story in a fictional place to protect the sensibilities of the people associated with the story. This was a very tough decision. In fact my agent said I had killed my book before its birth! My aim was not to hurt anyone but to convey a theme close to my heart. I think with a first book one is bold enough to write and care little for commercial success.

What unique aspects of Rampur’s history and culture did you aim to highlight in The Begum and the Dastan, and how did these elements shape the narrative and characters?
The Begum and the Dastan weaves the strands of historical cultural narrative, mythical fantasy and socio political reality encompassing several timelines, each mirroring the other. Binding it all together is the frame of reference – the city of Rampur in a constant state of destructive reincarnation as each despot, real and mythical reinvents the city in his own reflection, wiping out the vestiges of his predecessors. This is the story of several small towns in India.

The intricacies of cultures which took centuries to hone and represent an important part of our history is systematically being wiped out or simply forgotten. I wanted to represent one of these cultures in its glory and its ugliness highlighting the lives of women who negotiate the rigid confines of patriarchy and social norms to confront their own realities with courage and dignity. Mamola Begum, despite being confined in the harem, doesn’t lose her spirit and stood up for herself and for other women suffering in the harem. This struggle forms the core of the narrative and drives the plot forward.

In your book Degh to Dastarkhwan, you explore the cuisine of Rampur. What made you decide to delve into food writing, and how does it connect with your interest in history and culture?
At the core of my quest for exploring and reviving Rampur cuisine was my unlikely encounter with the Persian cookbook manuscripts at the Rampur Raza Library in 2016. After wrangling them from the reluctant librarian by evoking the names of my Rampur ancestors, I was amazed at the vast repertoire of recipes; there were several styles of pulaos, qormas, kababs and sweetmeats with intriguing names. With no knowledge of Persian– – which was the reason for the unwillingness of the librarian to hand them to me – I could only manage to read the names of the dishes in red ink. Were all these really cooked in Rampur, and what happened to my fifty shades of pulaos?

We only have one yakhni pulao, one biryani, one qorma, about four styles of kababs on even the most prolific Rampur tables. The names of sweetmeats were barely recognisable. The small collection of cookbook manuscripts had never been a part of any research. Intrigued, I started learning Persian and deciphering the cookbooks with the help of Isbah Khan, a junior, kinder librarian. Thus began my journey into the forgotten aspects of Rampur cuisine and the daunting attempt to reimagine nearly two hundred year old dishes.

To decode and revive the recipes, I worked with the repositories of Rampur’s culinary knowledge: the local chefs and members of royal families and women well-placed to attune the recipes to a modern palate. My exploration was supported by the Forgotten Foods project and a team of scholars, writers and chefs headed by Prof Siobhan Lambert Hurley.

Could you share a memorable anecdote or discovery you encountered while researching the recipes and stories for Degh to Dastarkhwan?
I translated recipes from two or three Persian manuscript cookbooks, noting down the difference in procedures, ingredients and their measurements before consulting and working with the local khansamas who with their tacit skills and knowledge added and subtracted from the translations.

There were several “aha” moments and culinary disasters while researching and the recipes and trying to recreate them in my kitchen with the help of local khansamas. The ingredients – in ancient incomprehensible (for me) measurements in daam, tola, maasha and ser or sometimes in even more indecipherable dots and slashes – came in first followed by cryptic and confusing instructions. Literal translation was the easy part but it was nearly impossible to prepare the dishes following the recipes which advocated procedures within procedures and archaic cooking terminology. The style of cooking had undergone a tremendous change since the 19th century.

For instance, how was one supposed to pilu karo? Did the curries involve using pilu biranj, rice powder, for thickening? What was dough and why was it used in so many recipes. Isbah Khan said it was flour; this translation resulted in a thick, flour-filled curry! After further research, I realised the word was “doogh” – with the same spelling as dough – which was now a Persian yoghurt drink. We still use curd in some recipes, so it was plausible to use thin yoghurt to cook the curries.

When I explained the recipe for the Rampuri shabdeg, Aslam insisted that it could be prepared in an hour; it was just a meat curry with turnips and meatballs. “It is called shabdeg; ‘shab’ means night and shabdeg was cooked through the night,” I insisted. I had a mental image of families sitting around the fire in winter nights cooking the shabdeg. The bone broth was the key to the shabdeg. I refused to do without it. Aslam finally cooked the bone broth from trotters and brought it in a pot the next day for the shabdeg. Even my husband commented that it was the best curry he had ever tasted.

How do you believe food and recipes serve as a medium for storytelling and preserving cultural heritage?
I believe it is food, culture and history that give the sense of a place. I returned to my ancestral roots in Rampur as an insider-outsider with a plethora of intergenerational food stories and culinary colloquialisms narrated by the women of my extended family. These became both my motivation for writing and a part of the narrative. Because food is the most tangible and immediate part of lived culture, I decided to record food histories of Rampur and initiate a revival of its famed royal cuisine.

Unsurprisingly the repositories of food histories and culinary techniques are women whose role in crafting this nuanced cuisine, in close partnership with the traditional chefs, has been obliterated in the written histories of the cuisine. Food was at the heart of every memory in Rampur which is a land of passionate foodies.

As the women recounted food memories interspersed with their personal histories, I was inspired to look up cookbook manuscripts preserved in Rampur Raza Library and write down their stories and recipes. My narrators helped me decode the processes and the textures of the forgotten dishes; food became the medium of writing about the oral history and heritage of Rampur.

How do you perceive the culture of writings on food in India, and do you see a growing interest in documenting culinary traditions and food heritage?
When I first started writing about food and culture of Rampur, I was surprised by the interest my articles generated. I started reading other food writers and realised that writers, chefs and historians were trying to preserve and highlight culinary cultures and food memories. Food writing and research had become a significant part of historical and contemporary essays.

For instance, The Locavore is a magazine which explores diverse foods and its producers. There is a conscious movement towards sustainable foods, a turning back towards the foods of our ancestors –the millet movement for instance – as well as reviving lost recipes and documenting food cultures. Food festivals are being hosted all over the country bringing “authentic” regional foods to the ever hungry public. There are highly popular local cultural events like Mahindra Sanatkada in Lucknow and Sanchaari Sanskritik Parv in Allahabad which combine history, food and literature in a wholesome meal.

The popularity of food and travel shows on TV like Raja, Rasoi aur Anya Kahaniya – which was originally shown on Indian channel EPIC and later bought by Netflix – Dakshin Diaries and YouTube channels based on food exemplifies our desire to archive and document our food histories. Looking at the success of books on food like Masala Lab, Dining With the Maharajas, Dastan e Dastarkhwan, Forgotten Foods: Recipes and Stories from Muslim South Asia, The Calcutta Cookbook and several more illustrates that food writing and preservation of culinary heritage is a movement and I became a small part of it.

In your opinion, how does food writing contribute to the preservation and understanding of cultural heritage, especially in a diverse country like India?
India is home to food cultures and subcultures which are rooted in local traditions, histories and even dialects. When we speak of food we look at foodways, the etiquette of eating and the customs around food – all these aspects form the culinary cultures and heritage. We Indians ate food seated on the floor, then we started imitating our colonial masters and tables and chairs were introduced. Even today sitting on the floor and eating food from a dastarkhwan or served on banana leaves is a totally different experience. So when we write about our food cultures, we highlight these lost customs in the hope of revival. Professor Rachel Berger observed that since 2018 food history is becoming a popular area of study in South Asia.

My writings on Rampur cuisine and its history have helped in generating interest and awareness about the cuisine. The complex richness of the Rampur cuisine stems from its willingness to lend itself to becoming a petri dish of culinary cultures and to allow a transmogrification and an amalgamation through its historical trajectory. Flavours, aromas and zests seeped through the determinedly erected boundaries of caste, religion and regions. Within the wider categories of curries, kababs, pulaos and sweets, nearly two hundred dishes with several variations and astounding creativity were conceived in the royal kitchens with the collaboration of Rampur, Delhi, Awadhi and Kashmiri cooks and bearing an imprint of all these traditions.

Ashutosh Kumar Thakur is a management professional, literary critic, and curator based in Bangalore.