Sunday, May 24, 2020

Sesame oil at English Road

I was reading this essay when a paragraph arrested my progress:

Like Colley in The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, Lockwood uses individual life stories to tell his global history. Many of them are familiar to historians of the period, but he has assembled a remarkably diverse collection and writes about them vividly. Dean Mahomet, one of his examples, was a Bengali who served in the army of Britain’s East India Company during its wars against the Maratha Confederacy. In 1784, at age twenty-five, he accompanied his Irish commanding officer back to Europe and later opened London’s first Indian restaurant, the Hindoostanee Coffee House. It failed, but Mahomet bounced back, starting a series of profitable, South Asian–themed bathhouses that featured the newly fashionable Indian hair and body massage called “shampoo.” He eventually became the official “shampooing surgeon” to two British kings and lived into his nineties.

As the 18th century was winding down, a Bengali moved to London and started "South Asian–themed bathhouses that featured the newly fashionable Indian hair and body massage called “shampoo.”  Wouldn't you also stop and marvel at this history?

I remembered that "shampoo" is also a word that owes its origin to the Subcontinent.  Wikipedia helps me out with the details:

The word shampoo entered the English language from the Indian subcontinent during the colonial era.[1] It dates to 1762 and is derived from Hindi chāmpo (चाँपो [tʃãːpoː]),[2][3] itself derived from the Sanskrit root chapati (चपति), which means to press, knead, soothe

Wait, what?  Shampoo and Chapati go back to the same word origin?  I suppose kneading the dough to make the tasty chapati is similar to massaging the head ;)  Who woulda thunk that!

We didn't use any industrial product called a shampoo for a long time.  I think it was every weekend  (Sunday?), or was it one weekend a month, that we had the "oil bath."  Sesame oil (I think) was gently warmed up with a couple of peppercorns.  We then rubbed the warm oil all over and let the skin soak it all up for maybe a half an hour, some of which was spent under the sun sitting on the washing stone in the backyard.

Now, as I think about all that, I value the wonderful practice to maintain a healthy skin.  And the exposure to the sun for the way too important vitamin-D.

Washing the oil off involved no soap, but shikakai powder.  The powder was not smooth; in today's language, they were exfoliating scrubs too.

But then we children fell victim to the advertising blitzkrieg that promoted shampoos and soaps.  Those were used by "modern" people, and we English-medium school kids demanded that we be modern. 

I didn't care when grandma said that the shampoo made our hair look and feel like coconut coir.

A couple of years ago, when visiting with my parents, I decided that I would have an oil bath for old time sake.  I didn't know which container in my mother's kitchen had the oil that I needed. 

"Which oil I should use, amma?" I yelled from the kitchen so that my mother would hear me in the bedroom where she was recovering from her fracture.

My father, who always likes to be involved in any conversation, was literally in the middle--in the living room between the kitchen and the bedroom.  "No, Sriram, you will end up with a fever when you have not had an oil bath for decades," he declared.

I could not see the logic of it all.  Neither did I want to hear the dreaded "I told you so!" if I fell sick for whatever reason.

Those childhood Sundays of oil bath and poondu-rasam seem a lot simpler and attractive a life, especially on this Sunday in the age of the coronavirus.

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