Manjunath has made an important discovery about the evolution of South Indian food preferences and culinary habits in general over the last five centuries. According to his reference in Malayalam literature, the Portuguese imported several, now commonplace, agricultural crops to India, which changed the culinary scenario entirely or resulted in a significant evolution. Apart from the well-known vegetables and fruits such as pineapple, guava, papaya, sapota, cashew, bread fruit, sunflower, maize, beans, tobacco ground nut, some gourds,….etc., the Portuguese imported chilies, sweet potato, and tapioca.

I was surprised to see the humble sweet potato on the imported list. When my grandmother used to tell me as a child that Rama and Laxmana ate tubers and roots in the forest, I conveniently imagined them eating sweet potatoes, which are also edible in raw form.

But, as Manjunath assures me, sweet potato is indigenous to South America. Yes, the Portuguese introduced sweet potato to India, but various other similar edible tubers were present long before the arrival of the South American sweet potato. South Indian language words are a revelation. Kireng is the Tulu word for sweet potato (or kereng). Kileng may be present in some Tulu variants. The Tamil word kilenk is also similar to the Tulu word. The Tulu words kir (=lower, or under the soil)+ang (=part) clearly refer to the tuber’s buried growth beneath the ground within the soil. The Tamil word appears to have a similar origin. Kilannu is an analogous word in Malayalam.

Apart from the usual kempu kireng (red sweet potato), bolpu kireng (white sweet potato), and mara kireng, the Tulu Nigantu lists a number of kireng (subterranean tuber) species such as: tuppe kireng, mullu kireng, tooNa kireng, guddoLi kireng, koLLi kireng, pottel kireng, Naa (tapioca).

Apart from the numerous native species, the Tulu and Tamil names for the edible tuber kireng / keelank attest to the tuber’s antiquity in India. First, the mutual influence of Tulu and Tamil words should transport the time machine to the early Christian era. The early Dravidian languages, proto-Tulu and proto-Tamil, may have split somewhere between the third and fourth centuries BC and AD. I deduce that this proto-Tamil-proto-Tulu coexistence and mutual influence occurred during the Pirak-Multan evolutionary stage (circa 1700 BC), which I discussed in previous postings.Tulu is geographically and socio-politically linked to early Kannada after the 4th century AD. As a result, we can expect mutual influence of Kannada and Tulu rather than Tamil and Tulu after this period (4th century AD). Because, after that time, Tulu-Tamil contacts are limited to short-term political warfare in the 7th or 8th centuries AD, in addition to normal trade relations. In fact, Kannada has a completely different word genasu for the aforementioned tuber that has nothing to do with Tulu-Tamil words.

The second point of interest is that most imported vegetables, tubers, and fruits have retained their original names in their country of origin, such as pineapple, beans, cabbage, and so on. However, the term “sweet potato” was not incorporated into local languages. It appears that the name kireng was also applied (circa five centuries ago) to an imported sweet potato with characteristics similar to some of our native kirengs.

The shocking news is that chilies are on the aforementioned imported list. That means our Indian food lacked the hot – khara- flavour with which we are now familiar.

Another Tulu word, uppaD (=pickle), has something to say about this. UppaD is now a popular food accessory, and is often the only one available in low-income households. Summer staples for many rural Tulu families, as well as the wealthy, include boiled rice porridge (ganji) with uppaD. I’ve always wondered why this uppaD, which is typically rich in chilies, only speaks of uppu(=salt) +aD (=food preparation). I was perplexed because the word mentions chilies, which are an important ingredient in that dish.

With the discovery that chilies only appeared about five centuries ago, I now understand why pickles are only called uppaD! Our traditional uppaD did not contain any chilies. It was only the vegetables with salt (raw mango, limbu, cucumber, raw jack fruit, and so on).