Biscuits: An Indian Love Story

What is the item we all have consumed most during the lockdown (other than broadband)? Well, India in any case, is the largest biscuit-consuming nation in the world and we just raised the bar even higher. Less than a year ago (August 2019), the makers of India’s most favourite biscuit said that the economic conditions had deteriorated so much that they were struggling to maintain the sales volume of even Rs 5 pack of Parle G. And in April this year, amidst lockdown, Parle G recorded its highest ever sales!

Baked left-over breads were the first biscuits - we now call them rusk

Have you ever wondered about the history of this humble yet indispensable snack?  The word ‘biscuit’ came from a French word (bis-qui), which, in turn, had originated from a Latin word (biscotus) – it basically means ‘twice baked’. There is no doubt that at least since the Roman times, people had been baking the left-over bread again to preserve it. This is what we call rusk today. This was handy for the soldiers and long-distance travellers.We know for sure that since the time of the Crusades (1096-1271 CE), European armed forces, especially navies, had been stocking up on biscuits. For more than two centuries, till around 1840 (when canned beef was introduced), the standard ration of the British Navy had two fixed elements – biscuits and a drink, first beer and later rum. But these were hard (and quite inedible) biscuits, which had to be dunked in some liquid first. These came to be known as hard tack biscuits. The oldest preserved biscuit today is one such naval issue from 1784. 

13th April 1784 - the oldest surviving biscuit in the world - today preserved in Britain's National Maritime Museum. A hard tack biscuit given to wood engraver Thomas Berwick

Today it is difficult to imagine that hardly 150 years back biscuit was an absolute novelty for Indians. Just like bread, it was the Portuguese, who introduced biscuits in Bengal (and perhaps in Goa/Western Coast also). The first known reference to biscuits made in Bengal came from the famous French traveller and jeweller, Jean Baptiste Tavernier (1605-1689), who wrote in the 1660s that the port of Hooghly was a good place to stock up on biscuits for return journey. For the next 100 years or so, the bakeries of Portuguese-influenced Hooghly, of Dutch Chinsurah and French Chandannagar remained the main suppliers of bread and biscuits to Calcutta.

Rajnarayan Bose, ;eading intellectual of his generation and maternal grandfather of Sri Aurobindo - when he joined Brahmo Samaj in the 1840, celebrated the event with biscuits and sherry with his friends - having biscuits openly was an act of rebellion for them

The first commercial bakeries in Calcutta came up near the dock area and Khidirpore. These bakeries were run by the Portuguese/people of European descent first and then by Muslims. Right from the beginning, the majority population of the city that is Bengali Hindus, found both bread and biscuits irresistible in taste but these remained forbidden food items for long. In the 1840s, when a young Rajnarayan Bose (1826-1899) – one of the most famous intellectuals of his generation and maternal grandfather of Sri Aurobindo – took the oath to join the Brahmo Samaj, he celebrated it with his friends by sharing biscuits and sherry!! It was an act of revolt for them. Revolutionary leader, Bipin Chandra Pal (1858-1932) recalled in his autobiography that in his childhood it was an exciting adventure to buy bread and biscuits from the only shop (that too Muslim-owned) selling these items in Sylhet town and to consume it at night once the entire household was asleep.

By the 14^th century, biscuits were well-known in England. However, from the 17^th century, British slave trading and subsequent sugar plantations in the West Indies powered by slave labour made sugar easily available and affordable. This completely revolutionized British baking – soon there were great variety of cake and biscuits for every occasion. From the 18^th century, tea, especially afternoon tea, became almost a British ritual and biscuits found a pride of place there.

In the 19^th century, with the growing popularity of tea and travel, a variety of easily consumable biscuits came to be manufactured in Britain. The company, which represented the best of this tradition and one of the first global brands – Huntley Palmers – started their operations in Bristol in 1822. By 1900, their products, perfectly preserved in beautiful tin boxes were to be found all over the world from Tibet to heart of Africa and from North Pole to New Zealand. 

Grand Duchess Marie Alaxandrovna with her husband Prince Alfred

For some time in the second half of the 19^th century, biscuits enjoyed a golden period. When Queen Victoria’s second son, Prince Alfred in 1874 married Tsar’s daughter Grand Duchess Marie Alexandrovna, one of the leading British biscuit manufacturers, Peek Frean, created a special biscuit called ‘Marie’.

Federico Peliti opened Calutta's first stand alone fine dining restaurant with an in-house bakery in 1881

Back in Calcutta, there were more respectable options for the British now as hotels like the Wilson’s started their own bakeries. In 1881, Federico Peleti opened Calcutta’s first upmarket standalone restaurant along with an in-house bakery. However, the problem persisted for the Hindu upper caste till 1887, when a Bengali gentleman named Girish Chandra Mandal and I do not know anything else about him – opened a biscuit manufacturing unit in Central Calcutta. Soon the business grew so fast that he had to request his neighbour Nalin Chandra Gupta, a lawyer by profession, to help him out. Their venture was known as VS Brothers. Soon Mr Gupta came to be the driving force behind the venture. The company was renamed Gupta and Company and they set up a much bigger unit at Dum Dum and started selling biscuits under the brand name of ‘Hindu Biscuits’. As you can well imagine, during the Swadeshi days (1905-11), the company did roaring business.

In 1913, again under what circumstances I have no clue, this company took on board an English gentleman by the name of C H Holmes and subsequently it was renamed Britannia Industries during the First World War (1914-1919).

In 1970, three major British biscuit makers - Huntley and Palmers, Jacobs and Peek Frean amalgamated to create Associated Biscuits. This Associated Biscuits held a major stake in the Britannia Industries. Now you know how your tea time favourite Britannia Marie came about - traversing the channels of colonial commerce (in 1982, Nabisco acquired Associated Biscuits and in 1989, Nabisco sold the Associated Biscuit brands to Danone; Britannia today is majority owned by Danone and their Indian partner Nusli Wadia).  

World's best selling biscuit - it's an emotion, an identity to millions of Indians

Parle G is not just a biscuit but as it trended in twitter recently, it is an emotion and an identity of our rootedness. Many of us would remember the original ‘Swad bhare Shakti bhare’ Parle G campaign with a dadaji and his grandkids from the 1980s. With sales of more than 5000 crore for this single product, this is the highest selling biscuit in the world. Parle Products baked their first biscuit in the village of Parla, near Bombay in 1939 and right from the beginning branded itself as a swadeshi product (bharat ka apna biscuit).

In most cities of Punjab and North India, still there would be at least one National Bakery, producing old style biscuits and other savouries. I do not know much about them but I am quite sure that their origin was also somewhat like the Hindu biscuits in Calcutta. Frontier Biscuit, today well known for premium eggless biscuits in North India, was established in West Punjab in 1921 and probably came from the same tradition.

In every major airport today, you will find Hyderabad's Karachi Bakery selling famous Osmania biscuit

West Bengal is one of the top biscuit-consuming states (of course along with Maharashtra, home of Parle G) and Calcutta continues to be the biscuit capital of India. Britannia, ITC and Priya – three leading Indian biscuit manufacturers are based in Calcutta today. As the famous Irani chai of Hyderabad is intrinsically linked with sweet and salty Osmania biscuits, similarly, roadside tea stalls in Calcutta sell an enviable range of local bakery-produced biscuits. 

Some of these are rusk (the famous lero biscuit, to be dunked in steaming hot tea, served from a large brass kettle into your earthen cup), biscuits flavoured with kalo jire (onion-seeds) or the all-time favourite, projapoti (butterfly) biscuit (I just discovered that there is a recent Bengali film by that name). 

These biscuits taste somewhat different from the regular ones – I am not sure why. My friend and food blogger, Ranjini tells me, perhaps because they use dalda. 

We have surely come a long way since those days when having biscuits could pose risk to one's religion and also the romance of Huntley Palmers, but our love affair with biscuits continues to deepen. 

Half the Sky: Women in Lockdown

WFH meant both work-from-home and work-for-home

As the nationwide lockdown began, a complete disappearance of maids plunged middle class households into an unprecedented crisis. For most working women, WFH soon came to mean both work-from-home and work-for-home. A friend told me that her husband’s main contribution (during normal times) used to be the regular grocery and veggie shopping and now he was just doing the dishes. As she was praying for an early return of her maids, she was right in thinking that a disproportionate burden of household work had fallen on her.

2001 Nobel laureate in economics, George Akerlof famously showed that when men do all the outside work, they contribute on an average 10% to the household work. But when their share of outside work falls, their share of housework never rises to more than 37%.

In fact, Indian women were not alone in their misery, it was widely reported that during the lockdown, domestic violence has shot up globally. Since long ago I read something about the condition of women during the Great Depression, I decided to check out how their successors are dealing with the worst recession since then.

In recession, generally most job losses happen in male-dominated manufacturing and construction. However, due to social distancing, this time a huge number of jobs were lost in close contact professions and women dominate such jobs. 92% of dental and medical assistants, 89% of home health aides, 89% of hair stylists, and 80% of manicurists in the US are women. This is in addition to the job losses in education, retail, hospitality etc where women have significant share too. Overall, 60% of those who lost their jobs in the first two months were women. This has been particularly hard for 15 million single mothers, many of whom worked part-time and were the first to lose their jobs. As schools and day care centres remained closed, it has put more demand on working women.

Great Depression for American women, on the other hand, was a catalyst for positive change. During the First World War, just a decade prior to the Depression, they gained entry into formal employment. Apart from teaching, they took up jobs in sales, as office secretaries, telephone operators and as clerks – soon these came to be known as ‘lace-collar’ jobs. During the Depression, at times their salaries were cut but mostly they managed to hold on to their jobs. But massive job losses in manufacturing adversely affected a very large proportion of working men. As a result, women became the primary earning member for many families.

Underpaid but employed, American working women in the 1930s

Between 1930 and 1940, the number of US women working outside their home actually increased from 10 million to 13 million. Far from looking at it as a progressive step, the contemporary American society blamed them for robbing men of much-needed employment. Today it appears impossible to believe but the US government had a formal policy of not giving women any employment under the New Deal. And the government refused to change this policy of completely banning women from public employment programmes despite protests from the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt.

Even as they managed to improve their position outside, within the household, it created new friction. Losing their traditional status as the sole breadwinner, husbands started feeling insecure. This insecurity put a serious strain on marriages and family life became more acrimonious. Though they spent more time together but to cut cost, American families took to contraceptives in a big way. Household budgets were limited and at times, people lived in extended families. Women tried hard to save money by every possible means – sewing clothes for family, preserving fruits etc. And of course they had to do most of the cleaning and washing too.

World has moved a long way since the Great Depression but still a recession is more difficult for women than men. And this is because they continue to share higher burden of family/household work and in general, they face more difficulties outside and get paid less. And this is true across the world.

In fact Akerlof is not alone, economists and social scientists have been trying for a long time to understand why despite rising education and employment levels, women still continue to do more household work than men (when both have equal stake in efficiently running the house). A number of empirical studies show that not more than 10-30% women prefer home over career by nature (don’t go by matrimonial ads) and an equal proportion of women prefer career over home. So most women take up additional household work because either they feel more responsible for running the household or they simply want to avoid friction.

Another friend, when she moved to the States many years back, noticed that the second generation Indian girls were generally reluctant to marry boys from their own community and the reason was not difficult to find. How much house work guys share that is also a cultural trait (Indian women do more unpaid domestic and care work than women of any country, except Kazakhstan). But things do change. In the West, even in the 1970s, men did almost no housework. Today they do a lot of cleaning and cooking though child care remains almost exclusively women’s responsibility. Outside home, women’s work is far better recognized today but parity eludes them even in the USA – for every one dollar a man earns, a woman earns only 81 cents.

This lockdown has taught middle class Indians the value of household chores. Respect for maids has gone up considerably. A number of friends have promised to enhance their salaries. I do not know how many will keep that promise but definitely we are going to buy more robotic vacuum cleaners and such gadgets. A whole range of new cooks – more men but quite a few women too – made their kitchen debut recently. I guess a few are going to stick around as some men would remember their promise of helping their wives even after the lock down ends. 
We know, cataclysmic events like the two World Wars and the Great Depression have fundamentally altered the traditional gender equation in the West. Will this lockdown prove to be a similar turning point for Indian middle class women?

The Great Depression

Through the “Roaring Twenties”, the urban and industrial US economy had a crazy bull run. Europe was ravaged by the First World War (1914-19). As the Great War was coming to a close, a spate of revolutions marked the end of the 19th century bourgeois liberalism. But unscathed by these troubles, the USA continued its dizzying rise to the summit of the industrialized world. This was best epitomized by the emergence of New York as the world business capital, where stock prices on Wall Street rallied more than four times between 1921 and 1929.

Flapper - the new woman in short (knee-length) skirt and bobbed hair defined a new modernity

People started buying cars and installing radios and telephones at home. This decade saw the first colour movie as well as the first ‘talkie’ (Jazz Singer 1927). Both commercial aviation and commercial sports (in newly built stadiums) took off. Fashionable young women, wearing short (knee-length) skirt, bobbed hair and smoking in public defined a new modernity. Rise of Jazz music, described as the classical music of the USA, culturally marked the decade. The Great Gatsby of F Scott Fitzgerald, who also coined the term ‘the Jazz Age’, best captured the spirit of the “Roaring Twenties”.

Stock prices crashed for the first time on the Black Thursday (24^th October, 1929).  But at that moment, it was difficult to imagine that this sounded the death knell of capitalism itself. As the crisis spread from the financial market to the real economy, demand collapsed completely, triggering a melt-down in the US housing market. In two years, industrial production fell by a third and automobile production halved. As plants closed down and small businesses followed suit, millions lost their jobs.

As stocks continued to collapse through late October, crowd gathered everyday on Wall Street

As all the major currencies were tied to the gold standard, the US price deflation spread through it fast. The USA was also the largest exporter and second largest importer in the world and the leading global lender. Between 1929 and 1932, as both the US import and export fell by 70%, global commodity prices slumped. Cotton farmers were ruined in Gujarat as prices crashed to less than half in Bombay, cocoa prices fell by as much as 90% in Ghana, forcing the growers to stop import of basic food items like rice. And in Brazil, fearing a complete price collapse, coffee growers forced the railways to buy coffee beans. And in 1932, people looked, rather smelt, in astonishment as steam engines ran on coffee instead of coal!

Another bank run!

This was a truly unprecedented scenario but the policymakers tried to stick to their traditional solutions. Even as national economies collapsed around them and world trade fell by 60%, governments instead of spending more, actually tried to balance their budgets by cutting costs (came to be known as penny pinching). The US Federal Reserve did nothing to address the liquidity shortage, leading to multiple waves of bank failures. Soon the dominant images in urban US were long queues in front of soup kitchens, shuttered factories and shanty towns (derisively named Hooverville, after President Hoover, who failed miserably to address the situation). 

Great Depression directly led to the rise of Hitler and Mussolini

Meanwhile in Europe, the issues related to the German reparation payment, hyper-inflation and mass unemployment further precipitated the breakdown of the 19^th century laissez faire capitalism. Savings were wiped out and unemployment skyrocketed everywhere. Such dire economic situation paved the way for the rise of Hitler and Mussolini in Germany and Italy. By 1935 or so, Nazi Germany could create enough jobs and re-ignite the economic engine. And on the left, the Soviet Union powered ahead with planned economic development. It led a generation of politicians/students to believe in state-led industrialization as an alternative.

President Hoover in the US and the Labour governments in Britain and Australia sank without a trace. Army Generals threw out the incumbents in many Latin American countries. In the colonial world, this crash in commodity prices either fuelled another round of anti-colonial struggle (like India) or led to the emergence of it. As situation deteriorated everywhere, policymakers were not only forced to innovate but even had to give up their fundamental beliefs. In 1931, in a moment of great symbolic importance, Great Britain gave up free trade and gold standard.

In 1933, Franklin D Roosevelt became the 32^nd President of the United States and initiated his famous “New Deal’. He launched massive public works programmes to provide employment. Securities and Exchange Commission was set up (1933) to regulate stock markets and the Glass-Steagall Act was passed (1934) to regulate the banks after one fifth of them failed in just two years. New Deal envisioned Welfare Capitalism – the land of unbridled capitalism, passed the Social Securities Act (1935) and hiked tax on riches (New Deal and the Second World War took the top marginal tax rate from 24% to 84%).

One of the most famous photographs of the Great Depression - Migrant Mother - destitute pea-picker Florence Owens Thompson, age 32, mother of 7 children at Nipomo, California March 1936

Even as the economy was slowly coming back on track, the worst drought in modern times struck the Great Plains in 1934. This vast flat region around Oklahoma turned into a ‘Dust Bowl” and more than 2.5 million people were forced to flee. Most of them went to California in search of a better life but the reality turned out to be quite different. John Steinbeck’s classic novel, The Grapes of Wrath presents perhaps the most vivid picture of this tragedy.

At times it seemed that the American society was on the verge of a total breakdown – children grew up quickly, teens drifted away, people postponed marriages and babies, families just fell apart even without formal divorce (it had a very different impact on American women but it would require another post). The most popular tune of the time was “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”

Jobless Americans turned to radio (first radio soap operas and comic shows took off in the 30s) and then to television (Roosevelt, who used to do a popular half an hour fireside chat in radio, became the first head of state to be live telecast in 1935), inexpensive board games (Monopoly was invented in 1935) and above all to Hollywood. As a famous historian noted - giant movie theatres rose like dream palaces in the grey cities of mass unemployment. These movies, made by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or Twentieth Century-Fox, including the iconic ones like Frankenstein, It Happened One Night, Gone with the Wind transported the viewers to a dreamland and hardly ever portrayed the grim reality outside.

Vivian Leigh and Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind - movies transported jobless Americans to a dreamland and hardly ever showed the grim reality outside

The USA till then had never witnessed recession, poverty and deprivation at this scale. The onset of the Second Word War (1939) and the subsequent US involvement in it, plunged the economy into another crisis but at least, resolved the unemployment problem. It was only in 1950, five years after the end of the War that the economy was again fully back on track.