Samosas are very old!!!

Satyagraha

I found this site - may be of interest to some.

http://www.samosa-connection.com/origin.htm

Apprently it dates back quite a while!

"Arab cookery books of the 10th and 13th Centuries refer to the pastries as sanbusak (the pronunciation still current in Egypt, Syria, & Lebanon), sanbusaq or sanbusaj, all reflecting the early medieval form of the Persian word: sanbosag."

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Hal

I think I bought one of those original samosas on the street in Delhi

New-South-Welshman

LOL.

Not surprised. A lot of "Indian" stuff is borrowed and modified from the Mid East.

mazha

Or they are a documenting culture, and India is not. See "Arab" numerals.

New-South-Welshman

Don't take it personally. I didn't mean numbers specifically, (going off-topic) but when the Islamic invaders from the Mid East came to India it amalgamated with traditions and concepts in India, i.e. architecture, names.

mazha

Didn't!

Sure, but there was traffic the other way as well.

Just because something exists in two places A and B,

and there is lots of literature about the object at place A,

but none at B,

it doesn't follow that the object came to B from A.

In general, ancient India was not a documenting culture like Greece, China and Arabia. There are no Indian traveler diaries about trips to SE Asia, Greece or China, though there are indications that such trips happened. Most (surviving) ancient writing is about abstract things like philosophy and astrology. And most of the authors of these works went to great lengths to hide their identities by using pseudonyms, which themselves you can make out only by parsing the last stanza using complex algorithms.

I find it interesting that if you go to parks in the West, you see trees with little boards showing names of people who planted them, and benches with the names of people who contributed them. There is a tradition of documentation, where memories are considered important, and are preserved. In many ways, this documentation instinct has served the West well, particularly in different generations being able to build on previous ones.

The Indian tradition is a more spoken one (partly because of invasions and library burnings), where reinterpretation creeps in naturally. When combined with the concept of reincarnation, characters in the stories become amalgams of different people. Memories thus tend to become myths, eventually becoming folklore and losing legitimacy, and then they disappear.

I remember going to Kudjadri once, and asking the priest about the temple. He told me the temple has existed in the same place for 28 yugas, which means 7 creation-destruction cycles (4,320,000 years x 7) of the universe! Maybe such a perspective makes documentation kinda irrelevant!

Now back to the samosa!

New-South-Welshman

Basically, all I said is that India had adopted some Arab/Persian aspects. Not saying it didn't go the other way or nothing.

mazha

Sure.

BTW, after looking at all the three-cornered delicacies with stuff inside, from Peru to Austria, I think everyone thought up samosas, just as everyone thought up pancakes.

The names sound similar in the Arabian and Indian versions. Whether just the name was adopted, or both the name and thing, and who adopted whose name/thing...not very clear.

Aishah

An interesting link, Satyagraha - thanks for posting it here. I thought you were referring to the one I had on the train several years back which gave me a 24 hour horrible illness!

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abracax

Ah yes, but only the Indians perfected the art of deep frying them in old motor oil!

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