why did Rinchen and her mother pack a basket of food for a family they did not even know?
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Answer:
During the festive season it is hard to put a foot down in Crawford Market. Every inch of floor is covered by baskets of fruit being made – the best-looking (not necessarily best-tasting) fruit selected, apportioned between baskets so each has the same mix of regular (bananas, apples) to exotic (persimmons, dragon-fruit), with the latter carefully placed in most prominent position, and then everything swathed in cellophane and made ready to send as a Diwali, Christmas or New Years gift.
Others might choose trendier gifts, but fruit baskets have their loyalists. Those who give them know that fruit baskets are acceptable to all, are large and eye-catching, require eating soon and even have a healthy image. You groan at another box of sweets, but fruits are taken home for the kids to eat. And if fruit baskets used to have a cheap image, expensive, often imported fruit has changed that.
Fruit baskets are also a very old Indian tradition. Hindus gave them since fruits were free of problems of caste, and could even be eaten during most fasts. Since fruits are eaten uncooked there is no issue about who cooks them and the skin that covers them protects them from both the hazards of transport and being touched by ‘unclean’ hands. The Mughals were great connoisseurs of fruits, from Babur missing the melons of Ferghana to Jehangir sending envoys to Goa to buy the latest botanical novelties brought by the Portuguese from the Americas.
The innocent ubiquity of fruit baskets meant they were sometimes been put to non-gastronomic uses. Shivaji famously escaped from Aurangzeb by hiding in the big basket of fruit he sent everyday to Agra’s Brahmins. Maharana Udai Singh of Mewar was saved as a baby from assassins when his nurse Panna concealed him in a basket of fruit, substituting her own son as victim. Fruit baskets have concealed snakes and scorpions, but also letters and tokens of love.
The British called the baskets ‘dollies’, from the Hindi dali. Hobson-Jobson (1886), the compilation of British-Indian language cites “the daily basket of garden produce laid before the owner by the Mali or gardener,” which became “the Molly with the dolly.” A gift basket of fruit or nuts was accepted as a simple courtesy from a visitor: “They represent in the profuse East the calling cards of the meagre West,” is how another quote in Hobson-Jobson puts it.
Dollies became a problem as the British moved from the free-wheeling days of the East India Company to the Victorian proprieties of the Raj. The giving of bribes for official favours or kickbacks from Indian contractors, which had been routine earlier, was now strictly banned. But an exemption was allowed for flowers, like the garlands that have always been a mark of honour in India, and for those complimentary baskets of fruit and nuts.
Such entrenched system was not going to disappear overnight though and this is where the baskets became useful, the fruits covering up the inducements beneath. Hobson-Jobson notes, rather sadly, that what was merely complimentary 20 years back “must have grown into a gross abuse, especially in the Punjab.” It records a letter to the Pioneer which told of officials getting dollies that now consisted of “bushels of fruits, nuts, sugar-candy…and in addition the number of bottles of brandy, champagne, liquor.”
Rudyard Kipling, who was a young journalist with the Pioneer found himself receiving an even more direct dolly from a local ruler who wanted his help getting the British to upgrade his status: under the fruits was a five hundred rupee note and a Cashmere shawl. “As he was high-caste, I returned the gift at the hands of the camp-sweeper who was not,” wrote Kipling, an action that his bearer warned could get him poisoned by the insulted Prince.
This was the sort of encounter that a report published in the Times of India on October 12, 1859 deplored. While the report did not exactly condone the practice of giving expensive dollies, it noted that its rapid abolition “mainly helped to increase the alienation between the natives, and the English authorities which is now so much deprecated.” Unethical as they might have been, dollies were a form of communication and interaction, expressed through a traditional Indian means, that helped life in India proceed smoothly and peacefully.