A typical thali in Bengaluru would likely come with bowls of chana, dal, perhaps brinjal palya, with the flavours of garlic and ginger underlying the bright red rasam, poppy seeds floating on top. Many of these same ingredients that make up our foods today connect us to people who lived 5,000 years ago in one of the earliest civilisations on the planet – the Harappan civilisation. Pieces of the puzzle of how ancient people lived, painstakingly pieced together by historians through minuscule hints like burnt seeds, as professor Supriya Varma reveals in the first episode of Thali by Thali, a video series recently launched by the Historically Tempered Collective.
“We find them (seeds) when they get burnt; otherwise, they disintegrate. The other way archaeologists find seeds is through ‘flotation’, where you collect soil, mix it with water, and put it through a sieve. When you churn the soil in water, light plant materials float to the top, which can then be studied by paleobotanists.”
Consisting of eminent historian Janaki Nair, INTACH Bengaluru’s convener Meera Iyer, writer Saisudha Acharya and history teacher Ajay Cadambi, the collective aims to educate young audiences about Indian history through the food consumed by civilisations. They were driven by a feeling that engaging materials to teach Indian history were still lacking.
Food, which most have some interest in, acts as a gateway into questions that the group hopes young audiences learn to ask about how these societies worked. “Food engages all levels of society, not just the elites and kings, so it allows us to speak about various things. For eg., during the colonial period, India saw many major famines. When food is scarce, what kinds of historical arrangements were made? What explanations were given? That too is part of our story. We’re not only talking about food as something to enjoy, where it came from, how it is cooked and so on,” explains Nair.
Another concern at the core of the series, a 15-parter being released on the collective’s YouTube channel, is bringing professional historians back into conversations about history, in the process, teaching how experts think. “We are living at a time when non-professional historians are making all kinds of claims about the past, circulating widely on social media and being taken for the truth. All our episodes are with professional historians who have specialised in that period or region’s history. We also wanted to be inclusive of all regions and those who have been seen as people without a history – tribal communities, lower castes and to some extent, women,” says Nair, adding, “The past is not just a body of facts, but something we have to develop an argument about. It has to be anchored in historical sources. The focus is on how historians use or understand these sources to make arguments.”
The videos are made to be engaging, mixing animation, illustration, photos from archaeological sites and interviews with prominent historians like Romila Thapar, Tanika Sarkar, Manu Devadevan and more. The picture they paint of the past is of it constantly taking in new influences, just as Portuguese tomatoes came to be crucial to ‘traditional’ Indian food. “If we can give youngsters a sense of this past that is constantly changing, transforming, adapting new influences, we will have achieved something,” she says.