KT Achaya’s book on food, shows the value of indexing

In KT Achaya’s Indian Food A Historical Companion, the only general index entry for omelette reads “from crocodile eggs.” The page reference is for a mention in Charaka’s texts on Ayurveda on the aphrodisiac power of “vrysyapupalika, made of crocodile eggs and rice flour, fried in ghee”.

Understandably, Achaya says nothing about its taste or potency. His work was to document or, more precisely, organise information about Indian food. At a recent event organised by Science Gallery in Bengaluru, food writers such as Antoine Lewis, Marryam Reshii and Sourish Bhattacharya joined me to discuss Achaya’s legacy. (The discussion can be viewed on Science Gallery’s YouTube channel.)

We agreed that Achaya’s work was foundational in showing how to write about food when the knowledge was passed on orally, encouraging myths and assertions about food backed by belief rather than facts. It didn’t help that until recently, food writing was treated as trivial in the media, fobbed off on writers more focussed on meeting deadlines than getting details right.

Achaya was a chemist who started by researching oils and fats. This led to an early book on ghanis, India’s traditional oil mills, which exposed him to the complexities of food production in a country where sources of oil were many and production was often controlled by community-based groups. Oil was one of the first commodities to be traded, which showed how products moved across India. The characteristics of different types of oil dictated their use in the kitchen, exposing Achaya to more culinary lore.

This deep dive into the materiality of food showed Achaya how food could be documented with rigour yet presented accessibly. Achaya saw that food habits were a snapshot into the social lives of Indians and that these stories had to be told. The writer could even take speculative leaps, as long as these were grounded in facts (and clearly signalled as speculations).

An example was his theory for why chillies succeeded so well in India when they came from their American homelands. Achaya speculated that they replaced a similar spice with a long shape and pungent taste, probably long pepper, a once-important spice which got sidelined due to difficulties in growing and using it. Chillies offered an easy alternative, quick to grow almost anywhere in India, and offering reliable heat. Practical Indian cooks saw the benefits and soon shifted. It was a pattern repeated with potatoes, tomatoes and many other ingredients.

Achaya’s scientific rigour is best seen in his indexes. Indian publishing often treats indexing as an irrelevance. They are done shoddily, or omitted altogether, with authors often told to do their own rather than employ a professional indexer. City of Gold, Gillian Tindall’s history of early Bombay was even published with an index from an earlier edition, so the page references were incorrect. Yet, Achaya ensured that his Historical Companion ended with five ways to access its information, accounting for 94 of its 322 pages.

The ‘References’ section gives detailed sources for the information, educating later researchers about hundreds of original texts. The ‘Glossary of Non-English Words’ gives brief explanations of Indian food terms, their language of origin, and page references, making it a ‘glindex,’ a rare combination of glossary and index. The ‘Index of Latin Names’ matches scientific names with common Indian names. The ‘Author Index’ offers another list of sources. And finally, a ‘General Index’ offers an overall guide to the book.

It is a quietly extraordinary display of the importance of indexing. This might seem unimportant in the internet age, yet as Dennis Duncan points out in his fascinating book Index, A History of The , because the worldwide web is an index of global information, “today, the index organises our lives.” And he notes how, for all the promises of computerised indexing, it is still best done by humans who combine a rigorous approach to data with a human understanding of the material being indexed — which is exactly what Achaya did with Indian food.