The True Cost Of Posto
Text by Sohel Sarkar
Poppy seeds or posto have a delicate flavour and are an especially prized ingredient in Bengali and Bangladeshi cuisines. Photo by Joanna Wnuk / Shutterstock
Some of my fondest memories of childhood Sunday lunches are infused with the mellow taste of ground poppy seeds, or posto, as it is known in Bengali. In the punishing Kolkata summers, my grandmother would often set down by the side of our plates a small portion of kancha posto baata, poppy seeds ground into a paste and mixed with a dash of mustard oil, salt, and onions or green chillies. While we ate it as a relish, she herself recalled it as a breakfast dish. In small-town Bihar where she grew up, it would be paired with panta bhat — cooked rice soaked in water and left to ferment overnight in a covered vessel — to keep bodies cool in the sweltering heat.
For anyone who might be unfamiliar with it, posto is a residual byproduct of the opium poppy plant Papaver somniferum. Once the drug itself has been extracted from the latex of the poppy seed pods, the tiny white seeds left behind are devoid of any narcotic effect, but have a uniquely delicate flavour. Known by various names such as khus khus in Hindi, afu guti in Assamese, kasa kasa in Tamil, and gasagase in Kannada, poppy seeds are used in cuisines across India, but their most prolific and enthusiastic use is in West Bengal and Bangladesh, where posto can be a spice, a condiment, a thickener for gravies, or simply a relish.
In Eating India, food historian and author Chitrita Banerjee captures the versatile use of posto in the Bengali kitchen: “Combined with ground mustard, it makes a delicious sauce for fish, while the addition of tamarind allows it to be made into a tangy ambal (sour chutney). Whipped together with ground coconut and chopped green chilies, it is the raw material for crisp fritters that go down well with afternoon tea or as a side dish at lunchtime.” As a flavouring ingredient, it balances the bitterness of the vegetable medley called shukto; mixed with garlic and slices of green mango, it transforms into a chutney. In Bangladesh, posto is also used in a vast variety of meat dishes, both chicken and lamb. But the most ubiquitous dish that features posto prominently is probably aloo posto, a humble dish of potatoes in which ground poppy seed paste serves as the main vehicle of flavour.
Postor bora or crisp posto fritters are made of roughly ground poppy seeds shaped into flat cakes, sometimes mixed with coconut or green chillies, coated with rice flour, and then deep fried. Photo by TanBanMi, Wikimedia Commons
Unlike pungent kasundi — a condiment made of mustard paste, mustard oil, and sour green mango (or lime juice) that occupies a place of honour on the Bengali platter — poppy seeds have a mellow, almost nutty taste. Posto is easily digestible in the summer heat and comes with a range of health benefits: it is rich in unsaturated fats such as linoleic acid, which is known to enhance cardiac health. Banerjee quips that its prominent presence in Sunday lunches in the Bengali household is at least partly due to its soporific effect. For Bengalis, famed and often derided for their penchant for afternoon siestas, a mid-day meal accompanied by one of the many versions of posto deepens the post-lunch nap.
It was not until my early twenties, when I moved away from home and in and out of different cities, that I had some inkling of how this modest staple of my childhood carried an air of nostalgia. Especially in Mumbai and Delhi, with their sizable Bengali communities, at least a few posto dishes are a regular feature on restaurant menus claiming to serve authentic Bengali food. As if to heighten its exotic yet homely appeal, food blogs dedicated to Bengali cuisine invariably contain at least one paean to the famed aloo posto and its lesser-known cousins. Having spent a good part of the past decade moving between these and other cities, I would often try to recreate these tastes from memory. Like many other food-loving Bengalis, posto became a comfort food for me, basked in the warm glow of familiarity.
Aloo posto is a dish of potatoes and poppy seed paste cooked with mustard and green chilli. Photo by TanBanMi, Wikimedia Commons
Perhaps because of its routine presence in the food I grew up with, I never paid much attention to when, how, and why poppy seeds had become ubiquitous in Bengali cuisine. The first time I found myself speculating about its origin story was while responding, rather unsuccessfully, to a friend’s curiosity. Amitav Ghosh’s acclaimed novel Sea of Poppies, the first of the Ibis trilogy, was my first point of entry. In this story about a poppy farmer Deeti, set not in Bengal but in neighbouring Bihar, Ghosh traces colonial India’s historical encounter with the poppy seed in ways that are completely at odds with my happy food memories. In these pages, Ghosh explores the brutal and bloody history of the comfort food of my childhood, mired in British colonialism, the two Opium Wars, and the colonial drug trade. Bypassing its culinary uses, Ghosh tells the story of a century of forced cultivation and widespread hunger, exacerbated by caste-based power relations.
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Opium had a long history in pre-colonial India as a medicinal and recreational drug. Some accounts suggest that opium was introduced to India in the 11th or 12th Century. However, Emdad-ul Haq in his book Drugs in South Asia concludes that Arab traders and travelling physicians brought it with them as early as the eighth century, having discovered its narcotic and medicinal uses from the Greeks. In fact, Indian medical treatises dating back to roughly the same time, like the Dhanwantari Nighantu, mention opium as a remedy for a number of ailments. And as if to establish the Arab connection, the Hindi word for opium, afim or afeem, can be traced back to the Arabic afyūn.
For centuries, poppy seeds remained an unutilised byproduct of the opium generation process. Chitrita Banerjee traces their early culinary application in India to the 15th or 16th century. She writes that they were used in “Islamic recipes for meat and chicken in which poppy-seed paste was used to thicken sauces and lend texture, the way flour is in a roux”, probably coinciding with the start of Mughal rule. In The Peasant Production of Opium in Nineteenth-Century India, historian Rolf Bauer writes that this was also when opium poppy began to be cultivated in India for the first time. Trade in Indian opium was started by Portuguese merchants who established colonies and trading networks in South and East Asia and imported small quantities of opium from India to China. In Opium (Drugs: The Straight Facts), Thomas Santella writes that soon after the Portuguese, the Dutch took over the opium trade, growing it extensively over the next two centuries and creating an epidemic of opium addiction in China.
Things changed drastically after the conquest of Bengal by that legendary agent of British colonialism, the British East India Company. Having dislodged Bengal’s last independent nawab in the 1757 Battle of Plassey, the Company established a stronghold in the vast, fertile province that included present-day West Bengal, Bihar, and Odisha in India, and Bangladesh. British merchants quickly discovered that trade in opium from India to China — where it was by now illegal — was highly profitable. They also found that the opium grown in Bengal was of a vastly superior quality than the crop from western India. Following these twin discoveries, the East India Company began to force Bengali peasants to turn their arable land over to opium poppy cultivation, setting in motion a systematic decimation of the region’s economy that would continue for more than a hundred years.
By the end of the 18th century, Santella writes, the British had declared a monopoly on opium in India, making Bengal the capital of opium production and eliminating all competing sources. At the height of the trade, opium fields covered nearly 500,000 acres of prime land, employing 1.5 million small-farmer households across Bengal and Bihar — the main areas under opium cultivation in colonial India — who grew the highly labour-intensive crop on their fields and delivered massive quantities of opium to the British-controlled processing factories in Patna and Benares.
With narcotic supplies thus ensured, the British began smuggling large quantities of opium into China at huge profits. When the Chinese emperor tried to restrict Britain’s clandestine operations, the British fought back, resulting in the two Opium Wars of the 1840s and ‘50s. Both ended in China’s defeat, a heavy death toll, and humiliating trade treaties that favoured the British. By 1858, the opium trade had resumed in full swing. Originally meant to pay for Chinese tea sent to Britain, by the 19th century, opium became the second largest source of revenue for the colonial state, after land taxes.
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Opium production in Calcutta, India, in 1900. Workers are mixing and balling opium. Photo from Plant Cultures and Wellcome Library, London, Wikimedia Commons
As this colonial manipulation continued, villages across Bengal suffered not so much from opium addiction, but from an extreme shortage of food. Turning vast fields of fertile land over to poppy cultivation meant that precious little land was left to grow food crops. Deeti, Ghosh’s protagonist in the Sea of Poppies, watches winter food crops steadily shrink in acreage as “the factory’s appetite for opium seemed never to be sated”:
“In the old days, farmers would keep a little of their home-made opium for their families, to be used during illnesses, or at harvests and weddings; the rest they would sell to the local nobility, or to pykari merchants from Patna. Back then, a few clumps of poppy were enough to provide for a household’s needs, leaving a little over, to be sold: no one was inclined to plant more because of all the work it took to grow poppies – fifteen ploughings of the land and every remaining clod to be broken by hand, with a dantoli; fences and bunds to be built; purchases of manure and constant watering; and after all that, the frenzy of the harvest, each bulb having to be individually nicked, drained and scraped. Such punishment was bearable when you had a patch or two of poppies – but what sane person would want to multiply these labours when there were better, more useful crops to grow, like wheat, dal, vegetables?”
Ghosh’s fictional retelling fits squarely with — and in fact inspires — Bauer’s research on the “extraordinarily high labour and capital” that went into poppy cultivation as well as the coercive labour relations that forced peasants across Bengal and Bihar to produce opium at a loss for over a century. Nearly 10 million peasants across North India, Bauer estimates, “produced poppy against a substantial loss and they were coerced to do so by the mechanics of a vicious triangle of debt, power, and dependency relations” set in place by the coloniser and executed by the local land-owning elite.
The system of coercion often operated in less obvious and more insidious ways. Peasants who agreed to cultivate opium poppy received cash advances from the Opium Department precisely when rents on land were due. This seemingly allowed them to escape being in debt, but growing poppy also meant paying higher land rents. In turn, the greed for higher rents made landowning zamindars push their tenants to continue sowing poppy, tying in all their labour and capital for months on end. The success of this system was further cemented through caste and class hierarchies. Poppy peasants typically belonged to lower agricultural castes, and as small tenants with hardly any land rights, they were entirely at the mercy of upper-caste landowners and the Opium Department agents.
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A busy examining hall in the opium factory at Patna, India. Photo from Wellcome Library, London, Wikimedia Commons
Like indigo, the other major cash crop that decimated India’s agrarian economy during British colonialism, the expansion of opium cultivation resulted in widespread hunger as the space for food crops shrunk. Peasant families were once able to grow some vegetables between major crops. Now, with prime land and labour given over to opium poppy, they were left with neither grains nor vegetables during the long, arduous months when opium would be painstakingly extracted and processed.
It is against this backdrop that dire necessity and imagination combined to spur a culinary upcycling of the enormous quantities of poppy seeds that had become available as a byproduct of opium poppy cultivation. In the absence of other food crops, resourceful women, desperate to put together a meal for their families, turned to the giant heaps of dried poppy seed left as trash outside the opium factories. There are many instances of such culinary repurposing in a region ravaged by some of the deadliest man-made famines under British colonialism, and later plagued by the horrors of Partition and the subsequent migration. In fact, compared to the food cultures engendered by the traumatic 1943 Bengal Famine, the uptake of poppy seeds was a benign and propitious coincidence.
It is unclear when posto made its way into the more affluent and urban Bengali households. However, references to it can be found in recipes penned by women of the Tagore household in the early 1900s, including Pragyasundari Devi’s Amish o Niramish Ahar (Vegetarian and Non-Vegetarian Cuisine) first published in 1902. It is likely during this period that more innovations with posto became part of the Bengali kitchen. In affluent urban households, it was added to eggs, fish, and meat preparations, and to the bitter, mixed vegetable medley called shukto that uses a mix of posto and mustard paste as the main flavouring ingredients. It became an integral part of the Vaishnav vegetarian fare prevalent in certain parts of Bengal. Elsewhere, it was used to create edible ornamental kitchen art known as goyna bori. Much later, replicating the poppy seed cakes and garnished bread of the British and Jewish settlers of Kolkata, the professional sweetmakers of Bengal would use roasted poppy seeds in some versions of sandesh (or sweetmeats typically made of milk and sugar) to lend crunch and texture.
While the list of innovations piled up in the urban kitchens, the easy availability of posto began to peter out in the poorer rural households where the tiny white seeds were first used as a culinary ingredient. By 1914-15, the India-China opium trade had come to an end, and from the mid-1930s onwards, the acreage under poppy cultivation shrank considerably, with its use limited to the domestic market. Not only had the amount of byproduct reduced, but it was also now being packaged and sold commercially. Post independence, the government adopted a new opium policy of strictly controlled production solely for medicinal purposes. Opium poppy is currently cultivated only in certain areas of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh by licensed farmers under the surveillance of the Narcotics Control Bureau, and the extracts are handed over directly to pharmaceutical companies to produce a range of medicines. The entire stock of poppy seeds for consumption is imported and sold by a handful of commercial retailers. A 2019 news report pointed out that the poppy seeds imported into India, primarily from Turkey, may have their origins in the Taliban-controlled opium fields in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In any case, price fluctuations in the international market can make it unaffordable for both retailers and consumers. Barely two years ago, the West Bengal government unsuccessfully sought permission to legally cultivate poppy in the state after prices skyrocketed to more than Rs 1000 per kilogram (roughly $14).
For some time now, this delicious addition to the Bengali platter has been out of the reach of communities that had once cultivated poppy under violent and coercive conditions. In Eating India, first published in 2007, Banerjee recounts an encounter with an old man from the Santhal community — indigenous to India and Bangladesh — in the Birbhum area of Bengal. Posto, once a staple of the Santhal cuisine, was now “becoming very expensive”, she was told. A key site of forced poppy cultivation in the colonial era, Birbhum is one of the five districts of Bengal that emerged as a hub of illicit poppy cultivation in postcolonial India. The legacy of colonial atrocities lingers among peasant communities in these regions as they find themselves caught in the crossfire between drug cartels, the underground mafia, Maoist rebels, and law enforcement agencies.
It is in the entanglement of a brutal origin story and its present-day colonial legacy that I now find myself trying to place this specific facet of my food memories. Food is no doubt a source of comfort and familiarity; reclaiming food stories and traditions can be an act of ownership and care for communities. But food is also a site where power relations have historically played out — between those who labour to produce it, those who can afford it, and those who can wax nostalgic about it. The danger of a single story about food — one woven from nostalgia — is that it crowds out the less palatable and more disquieting stories about these entrenched power relations and our own ignorance of and complicities in sustaining them.
