Don't ignore the state of the onion

Over the last few years, tears have repeatedly been shed in India over onions — or rather the lack of them. Maybe that is what we needed to realise the centrality of the allium in our culture, beyond its distinctive presence in curries.

The history of Ireland may have been different had there been no potato blight that sent millions of Irish migrants across the Atlantic. Given the kind of passions that the onion currently arouses in India — which are unrelated to its traditional proscription for those aspiring to an ascetic existence — some day, historians may well attribute future subcontinental upheavals to the battles of the bulb.

Onions, after all, are widely believed to have led to the fall of two governments in India in the last 30 years already. The ancients realised the value of the onion even when prices were nowhere close to today’s Rs 100 per kg.

Egyptian pharaoh mummies have had the vegetable reverentially tucked into their sarcophagi and immortalised on their tomb walls. Russian orthodox churches were deemed incomplete unless surmounted by architectural approximations of the vegetable, whose cultivation was prized by the Tsars.

Now there are calls in India for seers to divine where onion hoards lie hidden rather than gold. Incumbents and aspirants ignore the state of the onion at their peril.