Steeped In Ancient Wisdom
Text and photographs by Nandita Godbole
The hydrating sarbat made from these ripe kokum fruits in summer is a good example of the innate seasonality of India’s traditional brews
The fuzziness of photographs on messaging apps can be a mixed blessing. We become Alice, choosing an unsolicited rabbit hole of news, spirituality, advice, guilt, nostalgia, or something else. I almost scrolled through one such set that came without warning. They were from my mom. In her classic style, they were an uncaptioned set of eight images and three videos. I wasn’t going to click on them, open them, let them take over.
But the distinct arch of a chubby thumb came through the otherwise indistinct outline of one set of hands. I paused. The patterns of light and dark shadows streaming through an unmistakable grill pattern on a window called my name. They became my rabbit hole. I was transported to mom’s large kitchen of long, polished, black kadappa limestone counters, watching her scoop out the juicy pulp from fresh, plump, red and tart kokum (Garcinia indica) fruits. Although there was no audio, I could almost hear the squelch, squelch, squelch with each flick of her thumb, her finger moving rhythmically, extracting tangy pulp from fresh kokum to convert into two summer staples: kokum sarbat, and amsul (dried kokum) for pots of bubbling hot daal and fish curries that emerged from her kitchen. Fresh kokum harvested from her farm. Our farm. It had been a minute since I was last there. More like two and a half million minutes ago. Life had intervened in the first two million minutes, and the pandemic during the rest. Although I thought it was impossible to do so, I hated the pandemic even more than before I became Alice for the day.
The pandemic exacerbated the distance between me in the US and my mom in rural India. Instead of a summer visit, we added frequent non-verbal exchanges to our weekly, yearning-filled phone calls, sharing photographs from each of our kitchens or gardens. At first, I would share my Instagram teasers from my then unpublished Ayurvedic brews cookbook, or early attempts at cooking videos. She would share photographs of dishes cooked from what she grew, new dishes from familiar ingredients, or a dish learnt from a friend. Sometimes, she shared clippings for Ayurvedic cures from her Gujarati daily, following up with lengthy preventative care tips. I knew that Ayurveda and Ayurvedic remedies are an inherent part of many traditional Indian food and drinks, including teas and beverages, but it took the pandemic to realize how deeply they are ingrained in our cuisine.
Old-world Ayurvedic ‘trivia’ innocuously glazes most food and drink preparations in several Indian households. As the old guard, grandparents became keepers of such knowledge. My grandparents’ generation protected their relationship to traditional medicine, circumventing colonial-inspired contempt towards indigenous Ayurveda and Unani medicine. They snuck spices and herbs into brews and decoctions, sometimes masking them with tea leaves to make the drink socially acceptable. Their food and beverage choices carried forward Ayurvedic principles like heating and cooling properties of ingredients, seasonal eating, or dosha considerations, without labeling them as such.
Born in colonial India, my maternal grandmother, Ba, was a frugal woman of limited means. She relied on traditional brews to treat minor seasonal ailments. Similarly, my paternal grandfather, a young Satyagrahi (or freedom fighter), replaced his tea with a herbal brew of coriander seeds and lemongrass, sweetened with jaggery for digestion. (He wrote a book called Bandilki Chi Vaatchaal about his life, which mentions this medicinal brew). A coffee alternative called sukku kaapi became popular during this time in southern India. Nationalists rejected beverages like tea and coffee because they were expensive and the sale benefited the British. Even today, some of these beverages are popular across India.
As a Master's of Botany student in pre-Google days, if textbooks failed, I asked Ba about plant-based medicines. I can still remember her distinct tone as she rolled her tongue if she offered to make an adulsa cha from the leaves of Adhatoda vasica. Sometimes, she would sharply drag her words, calling it ar’dusa, the ‘ar’ sound scraping the back of her throat and my ears. Her strong brew could cure a sore throat, or the aches of a humid monsoon. She would place a small steel utensil with water on a stove and let it start boiling, walking out to her abundantly blooming rose and herb garden to find a few long emerald green but bitter adulsa leaves. Roughly tearing the leaves, she would slide them into the slowly simmering pot. A pinch of dried ginger powder would make the olive-green water foam for a second; adding long pepper and black pepper berries would quickly make her airy kitchen fill up with a spicy aroma, our eyes smarting as the brew slowly halved in quantity. Then a hint of tea leaves, a splash of milk and sugar, if she felt generous. She carefully strained the adulsa cha into one of her glazed clay cups, adding, “It is very hot, but good for you. Sip slowly.”
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Kokum sarbat. Photo courtesy: Seven Pots of Tea: An Ayurvedic Approach to Sips and Nosh
Seeing mom process several pounds of organic kokum harvested from one wild tree in the throes of the pandemic elicited memories of thick red, succulent syrup becoming tall, fuchsia-colored cooling drinks. I was nostalgic, envious. She had included kokum sarbat in my school tiffins, its long sips designed to combat the heat. In summer, we would offer guests kokum sarbat instead of chai or coffee. My experiments in the US had failed; fresh mangosteen available in the US was Garcinia mangosteena or purple mangosteen, its rind inedible because it wasn’t Garcinia indica or kokum. For several decades, a small bottle of mom’s kokum syrup accompanied me whenever I traveled back to the US from India.
Sharing my frustration, I asked her how a once-city girl had learned to process kokum. An unlikely duo — my paternal grandfather and his sister, my grand-aunt ‘Atya’, who oozed deep kindness — had taught her more than fifty years ago. Mom was visiting them in coastal rural Raigad in western India. In her first trimester with her first baby, she was pitifully uncomfortable. Atya offered her kokum sarbat made with sugar, rock salt, and a pinch of roasted cumin. Although never a fan of sour drinks, mom found her panacea. Atya chose to teach her: meticulously cleaning the fruit, halving it, scooping the pulp, and dividing the skin for two things — macerating one batch in sugar and sunning it in a glass jar for sarbat, and salting the other in a large platter to be sundried for amsul. Atya shared that kokum sarbat was cooling, reduced pitta, and was essential in the humid coastal Indian summer. She hadn’t studied Ayurveda; she shared what elders before her had taught her.
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Just as festivals dotted our calendar, we have sipped our way through the seasons. Atya’s kokum sarbat or cold glasses of rose milk with sabja or sweet basil seeds marked the end of my school days in Vasanta ritu, or Spring, because kokum, rose and sweet basil seeds are considered cooling in Ayurveda. Hot ‘cha’ and kaadhas were perpetually brewing throughout the monsoons or Varsha ritu, and winter months or Shishir ritu. Nutmeg, cardamom, saffron and dried nuts transformed into a confetti-like masala milk to shepherd us into winter or Shishir – the ingredients nourishing the body and skin, and warming us from within. And lemongrass bundles lay in wait, along with cha masala, for brews that provided all-season care.
Beverages such as masala ksheerapaka and masala milk are meant to nourish bodies from the inside out during the winter months. Photo courtesy: Seven Pots of Tea: An Ayurvedic Approach to Sips and Nosh
But I am not alone in treasuring seasonal, traditional drinks. Food blogger Swapneel Prabhu recalls the soul-quenching comfort of a pastel green sherbet from his childhood, served instead of summer afternoon tea. His aunt prepared a vetiver or khus based drink at their family home in Murdeshwar, Karnataka. After soaking the vetiver overnight in water, the pale green, khus-infused water was slowly decanted over freshly grated, hyperlocal melons. Prabhu’s memory of the drink was strong, but the flavors evaded his experiments. Several attempts later, he settled on replacing the melons with grated cucumbers, replicating the fragrant sweetness of melons with a cardamom syrup drizzle. Prabhu noted that sometimes, guests were also offered panagam or panakam made with water, dried ginger powder and jaggery, alongside summer fruits. He noted, “In summer, day labourers are offered nachnya-cha udda made from the paste of nachni or soaked finger millets and jaggery for a nourishing energy boost.” In Ayurveda, khus, finger millets, and cucumber are considered cooling and are excellent for summer drinks. But in winter, Prabhu notes the ‘udda’ or drink was made instead with sesame seeds instead of finger millets as in Ayurveda, sesame seeds are considered warming to the body.
Atlanta-based Debashri Sengupta’s mother’s recipe for kacha towk is not only a refreshing Bengali summer staple but also offers a glimpse of the food heritage she has carried forward decades after she left India. Sengupta first bruises tamarind, jaggery, salt and Gondhoraj lime leaves together with green chilies. She adds this paste to a pitcher of lime juice and water. Sengupta notes that makrut lime leaves are a near-acceptable replacement for the preferred Gondhoraj leaves. She recommends resting the drink for an hour before straining and enjoying it, adding, “You feel so hydrated, [and] very balanced after drinking it on a hot summer day.”
Mumbai-based Sangeeta Manghani-Bhadra had a pleasant, albeit life-altering, encounter with a family recipe for chandan (or sandalwood) sharbat. She traced it back to migrating family members who carried it with them from the Sindh province during India’s partition in 1947. One of Bhadra’s oldest aunts shared it with her mother, who included it in the welcome spread when Bhadra was to meet a matrimonial prospect, her now-husband. She shared, “Simply boil the edible sandalwood powder into a sugar syrup and store the concentrate. Mix it with water for a summer drink. As chandan is cooling, in the winter, I add a pinch of saffron for warmth.”
Mumbai-based travelling video storyteller Shubhra Chatterji documented hyun from Uttarakhand. This snow cone-like preparation uses the season’s first snow, the juice of foraged local sea buckthorn (Hippophaes rhamnoides), cumin, salt, and occasionally, a concentrate of preserved apricots. Chatterji also recorded the making of buransh, another Uttarakhand drink. This hyper-local Spring drink is made from the short-lived blooms of the evergreen rhododendron, which is the state tree. Flowers are meticulously collected, petals separated and washed. The petals are cooked into a sugar syrup to make buransh or braunsh, a bright red beverage with hints of watermelon and rose, preserving the tartness of fresh rhododendron petals. Some locals preserve the petals as a jam-like preparation, but buransh syrup is not shelf-stable and not available easily outside the region.
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Indian beverage traditions extend deeper than chai, lassi and nimbu pani (lemonade). Old-fashioned seasonal drinks like kokum sharbat, adulsa cha and chandan sharbat are part of India’s food culture. But, unlike appropriated versions of Indian-origin drinks like golden milk lattes made with coconut milk, coconut oil and maple syrup, these are rooted in Ayurveda.
Developed more than 5,000 years ago, Ayurveda remains an actively practiced form of traditional Indian medicine. Simply put, Ayurveda suggests that all humans have humours or dosha (although dosha can also mean ‘fault’, this is not the meaning that applies to Ayurveda); all foods have six inherent flavours or rasas and energy-producing heating or cooling potential, called virya. Its tenets recommend seasonal eating. A diet conscious of food rasas, virya, and seasonality is believed to balance a person’s dosha and keeps them healthy.
Ayurvedic cures address dosha imbalances. The cures are made in different ways, based on the method of extraction and the medium used to do so, which varies by raw material. All of it is part of the cure. Each method corresponds to a different name, and many are in the form of beverages. A pulverized fruit extract is called swarasa, a milk-based brewed preparation like turmeric milk or masala milk is called a kshirapaka; a hot brew is called kwatha or kaadha and so on. Made and administered correctly, they are a cure, not otherwise.
A guide to how Ayurvedic principles can be used in beverages. Photo courtesy: Seven Pots of Tea: An Ayurvedic Approach to Sips and Nosh
While learning about Ayurveda, researching and writing my cookbook, Seven Pots of Tea, I recognized the direct connections between classic Indian beverages and Ayurveda (rasa, virya and seasonal eating). For instance, the vetiver drink uses a cold-infusion technique known in Ayurveda as sita’cashaya or hima. Nachnya-cha udda, til-cha udda, and kacha tawk use an Ayurvedic technique called kalka, which breaks down the outer covering of raw materials and ‘activates’ them. Panagam uses a technique called modaka, of mixing ingredients directly into water, and chandan sarbat uses the Ayurvedic method called paniya. Additionally, each drink uses one or more Ayurvedically beneficial ingredients. Cooling ingredients like roasted cumin, kokum, vetiver, sandalwood, rose, and lime are unmistakably reserved for summer. Nuts, sesame seeds and whole spices offer enriching immunity and their use varies by season. In addition, drinks like kacha tawk and kokum sarbat offer a combination of Ayurvedic rasas, creating a well-balanced drink. In each preparation, the ingredients and methods enhance its beneficial qualities.
As a botany student, Dutt’s Materia Medica (1877) and Kirthikar and Basu’s Indian Medicinal Plants (1912) were considered the holy grail for understanding Indian flora. Dutt captured broader Ayurvedic principles and preparations, sporadically including how ‘natives use the herb’, but with skepticism. Influenced by the colonial disdain for indigenous medicine, he excluded herb-specific Ayurvedic information, missing the opportunity to preserve indigenous knowledge for future generations. Kirthikar et. al documented a braunsh preserve, and old Glycodin advertisements, a popular Indian cough syrup, mention vasaka, like Adathoda vasaka from Ba’s brew. Their current-day presence tells us that some traditions have continued across generations, and that our ties to plant-based medicine remain deep, complex and old. This ancient connection is in sharp contrast to the turmeric milk lattes of the modern day, which seek to capitalise on the buzz of Ayurveda without being holistic in their construction.
Each summer, in Grishma ritu, my garden's old-fashioned roses beckon. I gather them, bathe the petals in water and then sugar, place them in a large, muslin-covered jars in the humid sunshine, only to rescue them from unannounced Georgia showers. All for the promise of a decadent, cooling gulkand or candied rose jam, its aroma holding childhood memories. Homemade gulkand melts effortlessly into fragrant summer sarbats and afternoon teas. On cold Sharad mornings, I reach for mom’s masala milk blend, or her cha masala with hints of nutmeg, ginger, and pepper. Embedded within each of these are rituals, tales of kitchens and gardens, kindness, and patience, and the promise of healing. Preserving my family recipes lets me protect their legacy for future generations. I engage, reclaim, celebrate my heritage in its glorious, complex, layered victuals, its esculent forms, basking in its molten brilliance. The delicious mangosteen I find in the US isn’t the same as what grows at the farm. So, while in the US, K may stand for Ketchup, Kale, or Key Lime Pie, to me, K will always stand for Kokum.
