Word: mughals
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...most of the Indian capital's 15 million residents, monkeys are as much a part of the cityscape as Mughal tombs and speeding auto rickshaws. Monkeys and humans have long coexisted in India, where Hindus consider the primates sacred. In the ancient Sanskrit epic The Ramayana, the monkey god Hanuman symbolizes wisdom, devotion, righteousness and strength. On most days, devout Hindus feed Delhi's monkeys a feast of bananas and peanuts...
...Hindu-Muslim animosity has had several flash points in India's history, starting with the Muslim Mughal conquest of the subcontinent in the 16th century?something India's nationalist Hindu opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is still attempting to undo with a campaign to demolish some Mughal mosques. That rift has driven the subcontinent's history?from partition, to three wars between India and Pakistan, the long crisis over Kashmir, and a nuclear arms race. Political parties such as the BJP have exploited those tensions to gain votes, further widening the rift. In Bombay, ironically, religious tensions are eased...
...people, Muslims are often a disadvantaged minority. In the eyes of many Hindus, no Muslim can ever truly belong in India. The origins of this antagonism are centuries old. In essence, hardline Hindus regard as a national humiliation the Islamic influence that pervades India's history, starting with the Mughal Renaissance in the 16th century, continuing with the birth of Islamic fundamentalism in Asia in northern India in the 1860s (the same creed followed by the Taliban) and enduring even today in India's national symbol, the Mughal mausoleum of the Taj Mahal. This distrust of Islam has only increased...
...spices. The result, says Collingham, was that "these apparently mismatched culinary cultures came together to produce a synthesis of the recipes and foods of northern Hindustan, Central Asia, and Persia." So the recipe for the Persian rice dish called the pilau, altered by chefs in the kitchens of the Mughal emperors, becomes the Indian biryani. The rogan josh, originally a Persian meat curry, travels down to Kashmir, becomes spicier, and turns reddish in color when a local herb is added. And the vindaloo, the dish that, to foreigners, epitomizes the fieriness of Indian cooking, was brought...
...made with particularly fine meat because a toothless 18th century Nawab would otherwise not have been able to gnaw his way through it. If all these stories make you hungry, Collingham thoughtfully supplies several historically accurate recipes, ranging from the zard birinj, a rice dish eaten by the Mughal Emperor Akbar, to the Besan laddu, a sweet handed out to pilgrims at Tirupati, the most famous of Hindu temples. Although, as the author herself advises, you might want to stay away from the 12th century recipe for roast black rat from the court of King Somesvara...