How tribal cuisines benefitted after replacing millets with maize

Maize and monsoons go together. There are few better things to eat than a bhutta roasted on a coal fire, slathered with salt, butter and chilli powder and eaten as you take shelter from the rain or the waves on Mumbai’s seafront, which add extra salt to the taste.

Most of us don’t eat much maize otherwise. In the winter, hearty makki ki rotis are enjoyed with sarson ka saag , while popcorn is a reliable pleasure on increasingly rare visits to cinema halls. But maize is an important crop for many tribal communities who live in the scrub forests and hills of central India, similar to the arid lands of Mexico where maize was first domesticated.

Two recent books, both from organisations working with tribal communities, document this use. In Desi Maize Flavor , Julie Jain, working with the Udaipur-based organisation Banyan Roots, collects tribal recipes like raab and ghugri , porridges made with fine and coarsely broken maize respectively, and paniye , maize bread cooked between leaves of the palash (flameof-the-forest) tree.

Jain shows how maize was adapted to traditional Rajasthani recipes, like theple and daal baati , and how it can be used in even more recipes from across India, like uttappam, dosas and even gulab jamuns . The book valuably documents the diversity of maize grown in India, with deep red, glossy black and pearly white grains. All these, with their many tastes and benefits, are being edged out by the new, super-sweet yellow corn seeds. It is the same loss we have seen with rice, repeated with a grain that isn’t even Indian.

Maize most likely spread through the world with the Spanish conquerors of Mexico, who took it back to Europe and possibly across the Pacific to the Philippines. American missionaries also became enthusiastic promoters of their native grain. We know from reports of the Agri-Horticultural Societies of British India that seeds were widely disseminated — and that maize succeeded by replacing millets. They were similar to grow, but millets had small grains that were easily eaten by birds, or were prone to shattering from the ears, making them harder to harvest. Maize grains were larger, so at less risk from birds and stayed on the plant till they were harvested.

Sheetal Bhatt’s Silent Cuisines , which documents the food culture of Gujarat’s Adivasi communities, doesn’t mention the origins of maize, but the grain is everywhere in the recipes. It is made into flatbreads, dumplings, porridges and broken grains cooked with leafy greens. It is easy to see that these might have been made with millets earlier. Not acknowledging the change caused by this American grain is a rare shortfall in an otherwise really admirable and beautifully produced book.

This also suggests a certain way of thinking about tribal communities by the organisations that work with them, like the Gujarat-based Disha which helped Bhatt with her research. These organisations repeatedly extol the ancient, traditional wisdom of tribal communities, which may be good marketing, but overlooks instances when these communities have happily adopted new products, like maize. Tribal communities are as open to useful innovations as anyone else and this doesn’t diminish the value of what they do.

We can see this with the one problem that followed the worldwide spread of maize — a disease called pellagra, caused by deficiency of Vitamin B3, which maize does not have in a form our bodies can easily assimilate. Mexicans devised a way to process maize to unlock its nutritional profile, but this knowledge did not travel with maize.

Another way to avoid pellagra was to eat a diverse diet, rich in products like pulses and this was what the tribal communities documented by Bhatt did. As a result, pellagra was never such an issue among them, as it was with groups in Europe. The real value of the tribal cuisine that Bhatt documents is its diversity, with maize as much as with all the other ingredients it uses.