The current spike in onion prices is something that now seems to happen every second year. It makes one wonder about the inefficiency of agricultural production and distribution (in the home state of the Union minister for agriculture) — or perhaps at a higher efficiency which may deliver excellent profits to onion traders and their political patrons.
But the other oddity about the onion price rises and the pain they cause consumers, is that this happens in the one country with a major anti-onion tradition. Other countries have cuisines that don’t use much onion, and several are even more wary about garlic, but almost none have culinary traditions that ban them as absolutely as the Jain and Vaishnava Hindu ones.
If any country might seem best prepared for onion shortages it might be India, and yet it hits us hard. We seem neither able to abide nor avoid the alliums (onions, garlic and leeks)! Frederick Simoons, the cultural geographer, delves into this allium aversion in his book Plants of Life, Plants of Death. He notes that in ancient and modern times there has been “a widespread conviction that onions and garlic are tied to underworld forces, to darkness and evil.”
This obviously derives from their strong odour and tear-inducing power, which comes from the presence of compounds rich in sulphur, a mineral with pungent links to the deep forces of the earth. The gods of the underworld were to be feared and propitiated, and often, onions were the offering.
Strong taste and smell
As is often the case, these proscriptions may have had a practical basis — the smell of onions and garlic lingers on the breath, and in the centuries before proper dental hygiene, this was a real issue. Simoons notes specific proscriptions on their use in monastic communities where many people had to live close together — the Buddha, for example, is said to have banned their consumption by monks after he noticed one monk at a lecture sitting far apart from the others so as not to bother them with his onion breath.
And yet, alongside this dislike, a fascination with alliums existed in India, the sense that such strong taste and smell must have potent properties. Simoons notes the belief “that garlic and onions have aphrodisiac qualities [which] makes them inappropriate to persons, such as celibates, who are concerned with avoiding sexual stimulation at all times.”
This became linked to meat consumption, which was felt to have similar properties, and one can see how this could lead to further prejudice among certain orthodox Hindus since meat was a signal for anti-Muslim prejudice. Simoons notes allium aversion in the Muslim tradition too, since the Prophet is said to have disliked them, and one story described how when Satan was expelled from the Garden of Eden after the fall of man, “garlic sprang up from the place where his left foot had been, and the onion, from where his right foot had been.”
But this prejudice did not reach India since the food of the Muslim courts here, like that of the Mughals, became famous in the Islamic world for their use of onions, as in dishes like do-piaza, where onions were used twice. Farouk Mardam-Bey, in Ziryab, his collection of essays on Muslim food, refers to Morocco and India as the great “onion heavens.”
A shift clearly happened in India, with onions and garlic moving from being avoided to being seen as essential, and sometimes this can be seen with an individual, most notably Mahatma Gandhi. He was predisposed to dislike them, since he was born into a Vaishnava Hindu family and the importance of those values can be seen in his love for Narsingh Mehta’s beautiful hymn, Vaishnava Janato, which describes these values (but no mention of onions!).
He also grew up in a part of the country strongly influenced by Jain traditions, which forbade onions, along with all root vegetables. Gandhi had to eat onions when he went to Britain. Anne O’Connell’s book Early Vegetarian Recipes gives a good picture of the sort of food available in the vegetarian restaurants and Vegetarian Society meetings that Gandhi frequented.
Today, thanks to the wider availability of ingredients and spices, you can get good, tasty vegetarian food in the West, but at that time onions and garlic were among the few ways to add flavour to the basically stodgy food on offer. Gandhi acknowledged as much in a guide he wrote for other Indian students like him where, among the cheap and easy ways to fill oneself, he listed “soup made of potatoes, onions and haricots.”
His experiment with diets
Gandhi seems to have started avoiding onions and garlic again in South Africa. This was where he tried many experiments on his diet, and began his lifelong practice of communal living and celibacy. He did not specifically forbid onions and garlic for these reasons but it is notable how, in the collections of his writings on diet and health Key to Health and Diet and Diet Reform, mainly compiled from those early years, there is almost no mention of onions and garlic.
By the time he returned to India to start his work as a campaigner in the 1920s, he seems to have been avoiding them as much as he could. Reginald Reynolds, the young British man, who came to work at Sabarmati, and who would famously convey Gandhi’s letter to the viceroy announcing the start of the Dandi March, recalled in To Live in Mankind, his memoir of Gandhi, an incident when they were gifted a hamper of vegetables, including onions.
“They were still classified by ashramites as ‘stimulating food,’ enemies of Brahmacharya and almost too indecent to mention,” he writes. Gandhi’s other British disciple, Mirabehn, who had the ultra-orthodoxy of a convert, ordered them discarded, but Reynolds protested and was suddenly supported by Vallabhai Patel. “Reginald and I will eat them,” he said firmly and the two sat apart and ate the onions “viewed with some horror by our companions, rather as though we had been cannibals.”
'Onion thief’
Patel’s liking for onions should not come as a surprise since they had brought him to Gandhi. This was in 1918 in Kheda in Gujarat in one of Gandhi’s first attempts to use the satyagrahaconcept he had developed in South Africa in India, and in a specifically rural content. The British were insisting on collecting land tax despite failure of crops which, in that area, included onions.
The local collector, Frederick Pratt (who was the brother of Boris Karloff, the actor who created Frankenstein’s monster in the cinema) told Gandhi that land tax was the basis of British revenue in India, which made him realise the power of a campaign that refused to pay it. With the help of Patel, a young local lawyer, Gandhi led the farmers in refusing to pay the tax and when the British attacked their lands in revenge, he got one of them, Mohanlal Pandya, to harvest his crop of onions, which lead to his prosecution and conviction.
Pandya went to jail in triumph, hailed by Gandhi as “Onion Thief ” and hero of this Onion Satyagraha. Patel became a key associate of Gandhi after this, and the model was set for tax defiance to become a key weapon for satyagrahain India. Despite this practical demonstration of the powers of onions, Gandhi remained a non-consumer until the 1930s.
The shift that happened then seems to have been linked to his blood pressure, a hardly surprising condition given the stresses he was under, but an extra annoyance since he seems to have felt he should have been able to contain it with his diet. Since he would take no medicines, it had to be treated by some new food and his personal physician, Dr Ansari, suggested garlic.
This was backed up by Sushila Nayyar, the younger sister of his secretary Pyarelal, who was a medical student and would take over control of Gandhi’s health from Mirabehn. Nayyar was a firm believer in the value of garlic and onions and Gandhi went along with it: “The sin of the foul odour is on your head and also the sin of any harm that may come from its use,” he wrote to Nayyar in 1941. But he was already convinced of their powers and, typically, had started advocating them to others.
In a letter in 1936 to Subhas Chandra Bose, not yet politically estranged from him, he wrote that raw garlic and onion was much recommended in the West, and that he personally was taking raw garlic regularly: “It is the best antitoxin for internal use. It is also recommended for tubercular patients.” Many others, like GD Birla, Jayaprakash Narayan and Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, would also receive instructions to eat onions and garlic.
Change of heart
In that letter to Bose, Gandhi admitted Vaishnava prejudice against “these two harmless vegetables” arose from their foul odour. But he pointed to how “Ayurveda sings the praise of both unstintingly,” and also to a practical reason for his change of mind. “I do not know what villagers would do without garlic and onion,” he wrote, admitting its value for poor people with few other ways to make their food tasty.
It had the same value for visitors to his Wardha ashram where the food was very bland. Gandhi’s American biographer, Louis Fischer, complained about the lack of taste, but was happy to note he could ask for raw onions to stimulate his palate (though Gandhi tried to get him to have boiled ones). Gandhi would become such an advocate of garlic that Mabel Davis, a young English girl whose father, Godfrey Davis, was the ICS officer in charge of him during some of his jail sentences, recalled that the many foreign visitors who came to visit, and who often stayed with the Davises, came back smelling strongly of garlic.
In her memoir Dal and Rice she writes that Gandhi even convinced her father about the value of garlic and that, years later when retired in England, “Pa applied garlic to the beaks of his most beloved golden pheasants when they developed a severe cold… Miraculously they recovered.”
Gandhi might hardly have expected his changed views on onions and garlic would be used to benefit birds, but the fact of his change should be noted by the Indian government, and perhaps commemorated with a Mahatma Gandhi Kanda-Lasoon Yojana to prevent these periodic price rises that continue to hurt those Indians who, like Gandhi, remain devoted to devouring onions and garlic.
