: The legend of Indian khansama has become a hodgepodge of fact and fiction #IndiaNEWS Ruskin Bond is a treasure trove of tales, all imaginative and delightful, but none perhaps as delectable as those

The legend of Indian khansama has become a hodgepodge of fact and fiction #IndiaNEWS
Ruskin Bond is a treasure trove of tales, all imaginative and delightful, but none perhaps as delectable as those of Mehmoud the khansama. A family cook at Bond’s childhood home, Mehmoud came to work with a reference from none other than the legendary hunter-turned-conservationist Jim Corbett. Mehmoud’s eccentricity leaps off the pages of Bond’s Tigers for Dinner. He claimed to have shot leopards and wrestled cobras as easily as he cooked kofta curries, pies and duck roasts. But, while his stories were comical and quirky, his job was not. In colonial India, being a khansama was serious business.Back then, British homes were microcosms of the Raj itself. Just as the Empire required a byzantine bureaucracy to function, so too the British memsahib needed a legion of native domestic workers – khidmatgars, bawarchis, masalchees, among others – for her home to run smoothly. With so many cogs in the wheel, the hierarchy was predictably complex, but at its undisputed top stood the khansama.Popular culture would have us believe that the khansama was just a professional cook. But in reality, he was a lot more. In The Hand-book of British India (1854), journalist Joachim Hayward Stocqueler describes the unique position of the khansama in a typical Anglo-Indian home:...Read more

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