Food Fables – How nomads influenced Indian cooking

Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently attended the opening of the sixth World Nomad Games in Kyrgyzstan. Kyrgyzstan held the first in 2014 and has used this Central Asia version of the Olympics to raise its national profile. The Games have drawn attention for eye-catching sports like horseback and wrestling (and wrestling on horseback!), but also for focussing on the often marginalised world of nomads.

In Nomads: the Wanderers Who Shaped our World, Anthony Sattin explains why communities in constant motion preferred orally transmitted tales to written histories: “texts needed to be transported, libraries were vulnerable, and words themselves risked being misunderstood or reinterpreted.” But this meant that history was set by people in settled cities who were often hostile to rootless travellers. Nomads were blamed for bringing disease and destruction – and some dubious eating habits.

One example is the myth of the raw-meat eating Mongols or Tartars. They were said to slaughter cattle and put slices of meat beneath their saddles before starting the day’s ride. By night the meat would be tenderised and easy to eat. There’s little evidence of this happening, but it led to a dish of raw meat chopped with herbs and mixed with raw egg being called Steak Tartare. In reality, nomads were more likely to grill or boil meats – kebabs and the boiled dumplings called manti (like momos) are the real nomadic food heritage across Asia.


Sattin notes that the word nomad derives from the ancient Indo-European term nomos, meaning a field or pasture: “Out of this root-word grows nomas, meaning ‘a member of a wandering pastoral tribe’ and implying ‘someone looking for pasture…’” What is intrinsic to nomads is their herding cattle and the constant need to find a place to feed them. Cattle meant sustenance and, far from the myths of city-dwellers, nomads rarely killed cattle, instead consuming their milk or, in cases like Kenya’s Maasai, their blood.

Michael Benanav’s Himalaya Bound documents the life of the Van Gujjars, a Muslim community who herd buffaloes from the Shivalik hills in winter to the Himalayas in summer, making a living by selling their milk. It is a hard life, not least from the constant harassment from officials, who want to end their age-old practices of foraging fodder in the forest tracts. Benanav did one migration with them and noted how hunger was a constant, yet the community never killed their much-loved animals, even burying them when they died. Their diet was vegetarian, based on milk, flour and what vegetables they could buy or forage on the way.

Sattin describes how nomads are acutely tuned to the lands they travel through: “They knew their environment in a way that can only be acquired through living on an equal footing with everything in that world… through a recognition that we humans are dependent on our surroundings, something those of us who live in towns and cities too easily forget.” Nomads must learn to read the weather, the patterns of animal lives and the value of plants, since this knowledge could mean the difference between life and death during a journey.

Nomads were also always looking for products that could be taken to cities to sell. Tea and dried fruits were an example, light to carry, high-value to trade and energy-giving for nomads to consume themselves. Another was asafoetida, a strong-smelling gum produced by a herb that grew naturally in Central Asia. This was used as a medicine, before finding real value in Indian cooking. Nomadic traders, like the kabuliwalla of Tagore’s famous story, brought hing to India, though it was more romantic to write of him selling dried fruits!

India still gets most of its hing from Central Asia, and Kyrgyzstan has been growing in importance as a supplier. Perhaps PM Modi found time to enquire after this trade that originated in the world of the nomads that was celebrated at the Games he watched.