I said once to the tamarind tree: I want to see your red. I know you have it stored deep within yourself because I see it on the frilly tips of new leaves, in the blush of your buds and the veins of your petals. I see shades of it on fruits and seeds. But those are just glimpses. Hints and tints. Hide and seek. The way you play games and make people think of you as something when in fact you are something else. I want to see your color red and catch it and hold it in my hands. Where do you keep it?
The tamarind tree was quiet. So I climbed it as I would as a child sometimes in search of fruit and sour leaves and looked, up in the canopy and between the branches. But I found still only the same hints on leaves and flowers and tints on the seeds. Where is the rest of it? I asked again.
Still, the tree was silent. I decided to consult the sources instead.
The ~ind in tamarind
The first the Western world heard of tamarind was probably from Marco Polo in the 13th century, who found in the Great kingdom of Gozurat idolators who were “the most desperate pirates in existence, and one of their atrocious practices is this. When they have taken a merchant-vessel they force the merchants to swallow a stuff called Tamarindi mixed in sea-water, which produces a violent purging. This is done in case the merchants, on seeing their danger, should have swallowed their most valuable stones and pearls. And in this way the pirates secure the whole” [Chapter XXVI, “Concerning the Kingdom of Gozurat,” 392]. The episode is recounted nearly all subsequent translations of the Venetian’s voyages. Tamarind entered western imaginaries as a “sorte de laxatif” [a sort of laxative] for pearl and diamond thieves.
Before that, tamarind had been a date on account of its “stones.” Garcia da Orta wrote his 1563 Colloquies that the “Arabic name is Tamarindi, for Tamar, as you know very well, is Tamara, or, as the Castilians call it, Datil, so that Tamarindi means the Tamara of India. This was because the Arabs could find no other name so appropriate, and not because the trees or fruit are alike … The Arabs who trade in this land call them tamaras de India because they have stones, and not because they are like dates” [1895: 422, 426].
“The origin of the name is curious” the Hobson-Johnson Glossary concurs in 1886. “It is Ar. tamar-u’l-Hind, ‘date of India,’ or perhaps rather, in Persian form, tamar-i-Hindī. It is possible that the original name may have been thamar, (‘fruit’) of India, rather than tamar, (‘date’)” [1886: 680].
So the tamarind tree, native to tropical Africa (some say Madagascar), but “discovered” in India would acquire the Latin name Tamarindus indica, making it from here in some sense though it is not, as a violent purgative and a date-like fruit.
But none of them remarked on the tree’s red. They may not have even noticed it.
The ghost in the tamarind tree
Ghosts live in tamarind trees, they say, calling it a superstition. A superstition? asked the vaidya [physician] of the man who proclaimed it so, and asked him to travel to a nearby town to consult another doctor there, for a second opinion, as it were. On the way were tamarind trees, underneath which the man slept each night, and by the time he reached his destination, he needed the doctor for more reasons than one. From where did you come? asked the second vaidya, studying the man’s symptoms, and where did you sleep? When he got the answer: aaah, he exclaimed, and prescribed no medicament. Go home, he said instead, but this time take the road lined with neem and sleep under those trees instead. The man did, and slept in his own bed when he returned, a healthy man again. [Sheetal Bhatt told me this story her father used to tell, one afternoon in Ahmedabad on an autorickshaw ride from somewhere to somewhere else.]
In a time long after the vaidyas taught this nameless man the difference between tamarind and neem, Sir Richard Burton [the explorer Orientalist] discovered for himself the same truth, in the same way. “The natives have a saying that sleeping beneath this “Date of Hind” gives you fever,” he wrote in 1877, “which you cure by sleeping under a Nim-tree (Melin Azedirachta), the lilac of Persia. Once, and but once, to shame them out of this notable superstition, I tried the experiment on my proper person; but, sir, like the prejudice-hating commercial gentleman and his ship Friday, I caught a “chill” in the cool, damp shade, which made me even more credulous upon that point than my informers were” [Burton 1877: 92].
[Note that Burton mis-identifies the neem as Melia azedarach and then incorrectly calls that the “lilac of Persia” [Syringa × persica] which also it is not. Neem is Azadirachta indica; Melia azedarach resembles the neem so much that in Sanskrit it bears its name: mahānimba or parvatanimba as it grows in the hills.]
But neither the vaidya nor Burton remarked on the tree’s red. Perhaps they didn’t notice it either.
I was getting nowhere with the sources. They all led in different directions and not one towards red. I spoke again to the tree, thinking this time to ask permission. I’d like to see where you keep your red. Help me?
The tree still said nothing but I found myself with a handful of seeds.
The kernel in tamarind
Hard as they are to extract, tamarind seeds have their place in rural Indian food which fears not the difficulties of extraction–from the intimidating naattu vadumai or sea almond, the almost wholly unapproachable junglee badam or wild almond [Sterculia foetida] and, indeed, from common tamarind. A family I met here in Pondicherry, migrants from the more rural Bahour, spoke fondly of roasting, soaking, and extracting the “paruppu” or kernel of tamarind to eat. Really, at some point in all our pasts, we did this with everything, from potatoes to jackfruit seeds to any other. It was memorable, it was logical, but it wasn’t easy. Everyone romanticizes rural pasts, but they cannot have been easy ones, and if rural communities are the first to switch away from the laboring life and to easier, more aspirational foods like pizzas–it’s at least partly because in some sense the tamarind kernels were that difficult to extract, and the life that made that extraction necessary and even logical was a tough one.
Bearing that in mind I followed the sepia-toned lead, and went in search of the puliyankottai paruppu, the seed kernel. The proper process would have involved roasting-shelling-soaking in that order, but I tried a shortcut: a long soak and then a long cooking, as we would for any dry bean or grain. The first route is more conventional, and it discards the shells. The second, my shortcut, taught me that the easiest way to extract color was to work with the shells.
Tamarind seeds are just super funny-weird when soaked outright. The seedcoat that you think is so hard, turns soft and almost pulpy, like the fruit itself.
Cooking the soaked fruit doesn’t give you soft, mushy kernels–in fact, it’s near-impossible to get tamarind kernels to soften enough to make for pleasant eating. They do need the “double cooking” of the traditional method of extraction, which is to say that roasting the tamarind kernels is not just about loosening the shell enough to get it off, it’s a first stage of cooking the paruppu. I’ll save the rest of that story for my next post.
But there in the cooking water of the strangely pulpy soaked tamarind seeds was the color red. Beautifully bright and vibrant, and made visible only by accident and a method which did not achieve its intended outcomes (to obtain cooked tamarind kernels!) but found red instead.
There you are then! I exclaimed, as I would to the boys when they were little and had appeared suddenly in hide-and-seek games. Now what shall I do with you?
The red in the seed coat
A length of slub cotton–acquired many years ago with the intention to dye with natural colors, forgotten in a cupboard, recovered thanks to a cleaning spate brought on by the sighting of silverfish–presented itself.
I needed more colorant than my cooking mistake had given me to do justice to that length of slub. Figuring that roasting the seeds would get me both properly extracted kernels and properly separated dyestuff, I went about it the traditional route this time. Here is the process I followed, and what you might do, too, if you ever have an inkling to search out the red of the tamarind tree.
STEP 1. MORDANTING
Weigh your fabric and note its WoF or “weight of fabric.” Mine was approximately 200g). Powder alum or padikaram until you have 12% of the WoF, and measure out 3% soda ash or washing soda [I keep a stock of the latter to make a basic home cleaning powder].
Dissolve each in separate containers first, in a little water. Prep a stainless steel container large enough to accommodate the fabric and allow it to swim around easily, and add some water to that, too.
Now hold the alum solution in one hand and the soda ash solution in another, and pour them both into the large container. The mixture will froth and bubble. Allow the reaction to subside. Then add the fabric here, too, and enough water to submerge. Mix with a stainless steel spoon or dosa thippi. Don’t use wood.
Leave the fabric in this mordant bath for about 3 or 4 hours, or up to overnight. Then remove the fabric and squeeze it until it’s not dripping wet. Set it aside, but do not allow it to dry.
Note that the mordant bath can be re-used, so save it and label it if you intend to do so.
STEP 2: DYE EXTRACTION
- Roast the tamarind seeds in a cast iron wok on very high heat for about 10-15 minutes, turning them constantly to ensure an even roast. [I had about 3 cups of seeds.] Once the seeds have darkened a shade or two, turn off the heat and allow them to cool in the same pan. They’ll start to pop and crackle as the temperature drops. Listen to them talking!
- Shell the seeds. Once they’re cooled enough to handle, the easiest method would be to put the seeds in an ural (stone mortar meant for pounding), and pound until the shells are broken, and maybe all the kernels, too! Then use a winnow to separate the materials by weight. If you don’t have an ural, however, as I didn’t either, then you will have to resort to tapping each seed with a pestle–on its side works best, I found–to get the seed coat to pop off.
- Weigh the seed shells. Not mandatory, but gives you an idea of how much gives you what intensity of dye. [For reference, I had about 2 cups or about 300g of tamarind shells. That’s what I used and it turned out to be quite a lot–I could have used just that to dye the length of a sari.]
- Boil the shells in sufficient water for about 30 minutes. Then add 1 teaspoon of salt, and 2 more of soda ash and continue boiling for another 30 minutes. [As an experiment, I added a small amount of seed coat+water to an iron kadhai, and dyed a handkerchief sized cloth there. Iron mordants are well-known to dull color, so the result of that was a beige-brown. The added soda ash in this step seems to help make the dye a little more vibrant, red-purple-pink. If you prefer, you can skip the soda ash in this step.]
- Take the pot off the heat and strain out the dyestuff. If you prefer, however, you can also just add the fabric to the vat with the dyestuff directly–this will result in a blotchier coloring (also nice!) and will allow the tamarind shells to continue to deepen the dye as the fabric soaks.
STEP 3: DYE THE FABRIC
Add the fabric to the dye bath. Mix it well and keep turning it about every once in a while, especially if there’s dyestuff still in there.
Once you are happy with the color, take it out — this could be anywhere from a few hours to overnight. Rinse in cool, fresh water to get rid of any excess dye and sticky dyestuff, and shade-dry.
Enjoy the deep satisfaction of having pulled a hidden and entirely unexpected dusty rose color from something as ordinary as tamarind seed discards such that you can wear it.
Why you secret romantic, you, I said to the tree who’d never said a word; you with dusty rose? But I sat in its shade and with the rustle of its leaves and hundred birds being noisy and placed the cloth on its branches and said: you beautiful thing, thank you.
Sources
- Burton, Richard F. 1877. Sind Revisited. London: Richard Bentley and Son.
- Marco Polo and da Pisa Rusticiano. [1298] 1903, 3rd edition. The Travels of Marco Polo: The Complete Yule Cordier Edition. Trans. Sir henry Yale, Ed. Henri Cordier. Volume 2.
- Morton, J. 1987. “Tamarind.” p. 115–121. In: Fruits of warm climates. Julia F. Morton, Miami, FL.
- Garcia da Orta. Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India (Portuguese: Colóquios dos Simples e Drogas e Coisas Medicinais da Índia). 1895, New Lisbon Edition. Trans. Sir Clements Markham. London: Henry Southeran and Co.
- Yule, Henry, Sir. [1886] 1903. Hobson-Jobson: A glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, and of kindred terms, etymological, historical, geographical and discursive. New ed. edited by William Crooke, B.A. London: J. Murray. Tamarind entry: 1886: pp. 680-1/ 1903: 894-5.
