The mazy maize: How corn from the Old World replaced millet in India

 

Our last year's (Dec, 2021) Bajra/ Kambu plantation by our dear Organic Farmer Mrs. Pechi Akka in our Cheyyar farm

Roasted bhuttas, or corn on the cob, is a much-loved monsoon and winter treat, especially when eaten hot and slathered with butter and masala, with salt spray adding to the taste. Extra sweet corn kernels, boiled whole and spiced, have become a popular cinema hall snack. But perhaps the best maize recipe is Indore’s bhutte ka kees, where fresh corn is grated off the cob, and cooked into a wonderfully sweet-savoury-spicy mixture and Maharashtra's Rushi chi bhaaji, prepared to mark the end of monsoon 'Rishi Panchami', a festival also that venerates the great Hindu rishis, hence rushichi bhaji, that recalls their living in the forests. The recipe calls for ingredients grown “without the labour of the ox”, which essentially means no grains from ploughed fields. Instead, rushichi bhaji uses roots, leaves and vegetables that rishis could have foraged from the forest, and which are at their best at the end of the monsoon. The slow-cooked dish has a deep, vegetal taste that takes getting used to, but can be oddly appealing, not least for the range of textures it offers. It can include yam, amaranth leaves and stems, pumpkin, arbi roots and leaves, raw bananas, peanuts, ridge and snake gourds and fresh corn, often cooked with the cobs cut into chunks. Corn, or maize, as it is more accurately called, fits because it was developed in the Americas where there was no practice of ploughing with animals. Before oxen and ploughs came from the Old World, native Americans just hand sowed or scattered seeds. Yet, using an American plant in a dish inspired by ancient Indian rishis is also deeply strange, because they would never have known maize.

Maize is India’s third most grown grain, after rice and wheat. In 2018, India was the seventh largest producer, marginally behind Mexico, one of maize’s centres of origin. Most of it goes for animal feed and industrial use, like making starch, sugars, additives (HFCS, Maltodextrin, so on) and industrial alcohol. But dishes are made from it across India, like Punjab’s hearty makki ki roti or corn upma made from broken maize, and similar breads and porridges, particularly in hilly regions.

There isn’t very much though, and it reflects maize’s relatively recent history in India. Histories of maize tend to focus on the Americas, but Anthony Boutard’s 'Beautiful Corn' is one that also looks at its global history. He writes that the Portuguese introduced it in India in the 16th century, but it remained a little-cultivated novelty. 

But before that, from the sangam era, it was stated that corn grew little much beautifully in the hilly sides, as in tamil (kurinji (hilly) landscapes of Sangam era had these beautiful ears of corn, also where temples had inscriptions/carvings of corn) according to the literature. 






Though the real push to grow maize came from the early 19th century as the Agri-Horticultural Societies established by the British to develop commercial crops in India started importing maize varieties. Since it grows across a variety of climates in the Americas, there is a huge range of types and it took time to find the right ones for India. 

Millet culture is very similar to that for corn; it is a tender, short-season, summer annual with large seed heads, easily cultivated and harvested by hand.

Millet is actually a term for  range of quite different cereal grasses — ragi, for example, is very different from jowar and bajra. But they all have small grains, for which they get their name, from the Latin “milium”, meaning the thousands of seeds in a head of millet. Boutard notes that these small grains were very attractive to birds and farmers lost a lot to them. This was made worse by the tendency of some millets to shatter the their heads on getting ripe and scatter the grains wastefully.

Maize is very similar to most millets in its ability to tolerate dry climates and poor soils and they both require much less intense work than wheat and rice. They even look similar — there are maize-like sculptures in Indian temples, which have led people to wonder if they came to India in ancient times. However, the much larger seeds of maize were less vulnerable to attack by birds, and the heads didn’t shatter, staying whole on the stalks until farmers had time to harvest them.

 




Our stash of native red indian corns saved earlier this year (2022)

According to ICAR- Indian Institute of Maize Research, even the colorful ears of corn like the red one are "Indian corn" and isn't exclusive to the North American continent. Experts say that it grew in China, India and South America for centuries. 

 Unlike the typical niblets or corn on the cob that we get now, Indian corn isn't sweet. It's also got a pretty starchy texture when it's cooked. You could compare it to hominy, which is used to make grits. Indian corn can be ground to make flour. 

But Indian corn's texture and composition aren't the most unusual things about it -- its color is. Most of us are used to seeing bright yellow or golden ears of corn. How could blue, red, gold and yellow kernels co-exist on the same cob? The Indian corn you commonly find at the grocery store is one of several hybrid varieties developed within the last 100 years. These calico-patterned or speckled varieties of Indian corn result from cross-pollination of single-shaded plants. In addition to the multicolored ears, there are solid ears in shades of white, ruby, blue and black. With names like Strawberry Popcorn (grown in the hilly North eastern Indian) and Marron- Red and Orangish ones grown in the hilly areas of Southern Indian and Maharashtra, but they taste least and are much suited for corn meal for livestock or as corn meal flour for humans. 

Aross the world, then came, GM maize (one of the first genetically modified crops to come) started displacing millets; the GM helped corn in being soft, sweet and tasty. And it is true that one effect of the growth of maize was the sudden global emergence in the 19th century of pellagra, a deficiency disease caused by the fact that niacin, an essential vitamin, is not easily assimilated by our bodies from maize was the sudden global emergence in the 19th century of pellagra, a deficiency disease caused by the fact that niacin, an essential vitamin, is not easily assimilated by our bodies from maize.

Native American societies solved this by cooking maize with lime, which released niacin for digestion. But this knowledge didn’t spread across the world with maize, and the tragic result was pellagra (luckily Indian diets provide niacin from other sources, so it is rare here). 

But this American maize-millet swap is the best explanation for how the former became part of rushichi bhaji, as a substitute for the millets probably used earlier. Once a year at least we can savour it in this dish, as a reminder of all we have gained and lost through the complex global spread of food species.




Regional Joint Director of Thiruvanamalai, TN Agricultural Dept,  Mr. Duraisamy inspecting our mixed millet plantations. 

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