The East India Company Gave Away Free Potato Seed and Cash Rewards in 1797. As Late as 1938, Doctors in Pune Were Still Trying to Talk Indians Into Eating Tomatoes.

In November 1617 the Mughal nobleman Asaf Khan gave a banquet for Sir Thomas Roe, the English ambassador at Jahangir’s court. Roe’s chaplain, Edward Terry, later wrote that the table held “potatoes excellently well dressed.” Terry spent two and a half years in India with Roe, and the line appears in the 1655 edition of his book.

William Foster, who edited Terry for Oxford University Press in 1921, added a footnote. It reports Sir George Watt’s view that this is the first mention of the ordinary potato in connection with India, and then adds a doubt. “It is, however, possible that Terry was referring to the sweet potato,” Foster wrote, “which was common in India at that time and was well known in England under the name of ‘potato.’”

So the earliest written trace of the potato in India may be a word for something else. The potato, the tomato and the chilli all came from the Americas on Portuguese ships, and each of them took a different road once it landed.

A song with a chilli in it

The chilli took the fast road. Europe went looking for India’s pepper and found America covers how it crossed the ocean, and what India cooked before chilli covers the cooking it replaced. The date usually given for its arrival is around 1542. The historian Stefan Halikowski Smith, who traced the chilli’s global spread for a 2015 paper, says the year cannot be recovered. “The introduction of capsicums is impossible to identify,” he writes.

He points to a silence in the Portuguese record. Garcia de Orta concentrates on black, long and white pepper and cubeb, and never mentions capsicum. Neither does Manuel Godinho de Erédia in a book on the plants of India that he compiled in Goa around 1612, although he describes black pepper at length. “There is every reason to think,” Halikowski Smith writes, “that the Portuguese chose to dislike the capsicum upstart, and deliberately overlooked its diffusion.”

Indians had noticed it. K. T. Achaya, the food scientist, identified the first literary mention of chillies in a song by Purandaradasa, a composer of south India who “lived between 1480 and 1564.” The song says: “I saw you green, then turning redder as you ripened, nice to look at and tasty in a dish.” It goes on: “Saviour of the poor, enhancer of good food, fiery when bitten, even to think of (the deity) Panduranga Vittala is difficult.” The People’s Archive of Rural India, which quotes both passages in a 2022 report from the chilli fields of Ramanathapuram, calls the first line “open, surely, to many interpretations.”

Pepper had been the only spice that added heat, the archive notes, and Achaya explained why chilli displaced it. Chilli, he observed, “could be grown all over the country” with “a versatility much greater than that of pepper.” The names record the swap. In Tamil pepper is milagu and chilli became milagai, and in many other Indian languages the chilli was named after pepper.

By the reign of Muhammad Shah Rangeela in the early 1700s, according to Atlas Obscura’s account of Mughal cooking, chillies had become common in North Indian kitchens. The Nuskha-e-Shahjahani, a cookbook from Shah Jahan’s court that Salma Yusuf Husain translated as The Mughal Feast, contains none of the three crops. “The use of potato came in the later period,” Husain told Atlas Obscura.

India now grows more chilli than any other country. The Acharya N. G. Ranga Agricultural University’s outlook report, using FAOSTAT figures for 2021, puts the harvest at about two million tonnes of dried chilli, some 42 to 43 percent of world output.

Free seed and a hundred rupees

The potato had no such luck. The Food and Agriculture Organization says sailors were among the first to appreciate potatoes as food, because they took tubers on ocean voyages. “That is how the potato reached India, China and Japan early in the 17th century,” its fact sheet says. PotatoPro, citing a 2019 review in the Indian Journal of Agricultural Sciences, adds that Portuguese merchants probably brought it, and that it was growing in the gardens of Surat and Karnataka by 1675.

Gardens were as far as it got. When the East India Company arrived, Atlas Obscura reports, very few Indians grew or ate potatoes, and many Company agents doubted that a crop which likes rain would take to the Indian climate. The Company promoted it anyway.

The 1797 Company ledgers, now in the India Office Records at the British Library, show agents in Bengal giving peasants a “considerable quantity” of free seed. In Bombay the Company waived the transit tax on potatoes, and it set aside 100 rupees to be shared among growers as a reward.

A separate campaign started in Madras the same year, led by the naturalist Benjamin Heyne. He paid peasants about a third of a rupee each to plant potatoes and grew them in the Bangalore botanical gardens as a demonstration. In a letter of 1799 he said he wanted the crop to prevent the “lamentable effects which have too often been produced by a scarcity of grain.” Madras Presidency was among the provinces hit by the famine of 1876 to 1878, which killed millions across British India.

Societies took up the cause. The Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India, founded in Calcutta in 1820, ran contests for the best potato, and winners received 40 rupees and a silver medal.

Happiness till now unknown in India

The idea had British economists behind it. Adam Smith, Atlas Obscura notes, spent four paragraphs of The Wealth of Nations on the potato and predicted that if it ever became the common food of the people, “the same quantity of cultivated land would maintain a much greater number of people.”

The Company’s own reasons were written down. In a letter of 1789, which Atlas Obscura quotes, an official called the potato a “substantial provision for the Labourer” that would “improve and extend materials for foreign trade.” In 1800 the Bengal Revenue Commission said it would “alleviate the Miseries” caused by the frequent failure of the rice crop. In 1838 the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India published its view that by growing European crops such as the potato, “happiness till now unknown in India, will be diffused abroad.”

The food historian Rebecca Earle, author of Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato (Cambridge University Press, 2020), writes that the ruling elite of the time understood public happiness as the “highest aim of government.” By 1814 a British army wife was writing that “the natives are all fond of it, and eat it without scruple.”

The British had imagined a staple on the Irish model. Chitrita Banerji, the food writer, told Atlas Obscura that the potato never displaced rice, and that Indian cooks used it in place of yams and gourds. “India is the great assimilator,” she said.

At the Jagannath Temple in Puri, where food is offered to the deity six times a day, the potato is not among the dishes. “These temples have been making the same food for the past 500 years,” Banerji said. “Since the potato has not been around that long, it is not served.”

A tenth of one percent

In 1893 J. F. Duthie, director of the botanical department of Northern India, published the third part of Field and Garden Crops of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh. The region later became Uttar Pradesh. His potato entry records what a government botanist knew after nearly a century of promotion.

Cultivation on the hills north of Dehra, Duthie wrote, “was first started by Major Young, at which time Mussoorie was indicated on maps under the name of the ‘Potato Garden.’” Potato growing became general on plains and hills “about the year 1839.” He also recorded a rival account of the crop’s origin: “According to Dr. Ainslie the potato came to India originally from the Cape of Good Hope.”

Then came the count. “The average area occupied by potatoes in these Provinces during the three years ending 1889-90,” Duthie wrote, “is represented in the agricultural returns by ·2 per cent. on the rabi and zaid area and by ·1 on the total area.” Rabi is the winter crop season and zaid the short summer one. In plain terms, potatoes covered two-tenths of one percent of the winter and summer crop area and one-tenth of one percent of everything. “It is grown chiefly,” he added, “in the vicinity of large towns.”

By then the potato had regional types. The hill varieties, he wrote, known “under the name of ‘Naini Tál,’” were “largely exported to the plains” and ready for use before the plains varieties reached the market. Around Cawnpore, cultivation expanded when Edward Buck brought kachhi cultivators, or market gardeners, from Farrukhabad, and potatoes sold in the bazaar at 12 annas to one rupee and four annas a maund.

Formal potato research in India began on 1 April 1935, PotatoPro records, with breeding and seed stations at Shimla, Kufri and Bhowali. The Central Potato Research Institute opened at Patna in 1949 and moved to Shimla in 1956, according to the Press Information Bureau. India grew about 1.54 million tonnes of potatoes in 1949 to 1950, on 0.23 million hectares, in the Indian Council of Agricultural Research’s figures as PotatoPro reports them.

In 2023 India grew 60.1 million tonnes, second only to China’s 93.5 million, by the FAOSTAT data that Potato News Today reported. The institute says it has developed 76 varieties. Uttar Pradesh, which covers the ground Duthie surveyed, is now India’s largest potato-growing state.

A foreign brinjal

Duthie’s entry for the tomato, in the same volume, opens with its Hindustani name: “Tomato, or Love-apple; vilayati baigan.” Vilayati means foreign, and baigan is the brinjal, or aubergine. He gives its native country as Peru and notes that “This vegetable is coming more into favour with natives as an article of food on account of its acid taste.”

The name was older than Duthie’s book. Sohel Sarkar, writing in GOYA, reports that an 1801 Persian cookbook called the Nuskha-i Ni’mat Khan, translated from an English one, gave a recipe for tomato soup that described tomatoes as wilayati baigan. Sarkar thinks the name was chosen “presumably to elicit some recognition among Indian readers” who knew the brinjal, a close relative.

Sarkar writes that the tomato arrived in the 1600s with the Portuguese but “rarely appeared in India’s culinary lexicon till two centuries later.” A Hindi recipe for tomato chutney appeared in the popular cookbook Pak Chandrika in 1926. The food historian Lizzie Collingham, in Curry, wrote that its sourness was “particularly well suited to the Bengali style of sweet-and-sour cookery.”

The tomato had competition. The food writer Vikram Doctor, in Sarkar’s account, attributes its slow uptake to the sour ingredients already in Indian kitchens: tamarind, kokum, pomegranate seeds, curd, dried mango powder, raw mango and vinegar.

Pune, March 1938

In March 1938 a convention in Pune, presided over by Dr Tara Chitale, one of India’s first women physicians, heard doctors argue for eating tomatoes. Vitamin C had been identified barely a decade before, and the tomato was a good source of it. The appeal “found few takers,” Sarkar writes, citing the columnist Chinmay Damle. Few of those present knew the fruit, and some did not consider it edible. Locally, an infusion of its leaves was used to kill certain insects, and Damle writes that the tomato was also believed to be poisonous.

Change came after independence. Sucharita Kanjilal, in a paper in Gastronomica that Sarkar cites, writes that hybrid tomatoes were among the most profitable early projects of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, because they gave high yields in varied climates and could be rotated with legumes. Vernacular cookbooks such as Pak Ratnakar promoted it as part of a nutritious diet. “When Madhur Jaffrey wrote the canonical Invitation to Indian Cooking in 1973,” Kanjilal observes, “tomatoes had made it to the book’s cover image.”

Regional habits held out. Samaithu Paar, a 1951 book on Tamil Brahmin cooking, let cooks choose between tamarind and tomato as the souring agent in sambar. Doctor adds that “rice eating regions like South India are fine with thinner gravies that don’t need tomatoes.”

Achaya called the tomato “an aggressive colonizer in the Old World.” In 2023, Sarkar writes, tomato prices rose above 200 rupees a kilogram, and households and even McDonald’s cut back. Prices later crashed to 10 rupees, and many farmers dumped their crop by the roadside. In FAOSTAT’s 2024 data, as StatRanker ranks it, India grew 21.3 million tonnes of tomatoes, second to China’s 61.6 million.

Vinegar, garlic and bread from Goa

Much of this cargo came ashore at Goa, which the Portuguese took in 1510 and held until 1961. Vivek Menezes, writing in Scroll in 2017, quotes Colleen Taylor Sen’s description of Goa as “a key link in a chain of Portuguese forts and trading posts.” Chillies, corn, tomatoes and potatoes, he writes, “flooded into India via Goa.”

The Goan kitchen took techniques as well as plants. “Vindaloo,” Menezes writes, is “the desi version of a Portuguese speciality.” The Portuguese dish was carne de vinha d’alhos, meat marinated in wine vinegar and garlic. Without red wine or wine vinegar to hand in Goa, Taste of Lisbon’s account of the dish says, cooks turned to palm vinegar and added tamarind, black pepper, cinnamon and cardamom. Menezes also credits Goa with the pao, the leavened bread that “spread across Asia from Goa.”

The origin of chhana, the curdled-milk base of many Bengali sweets, is still argued over. Achaya held, in D. Balasubramanian’s 2004 summary in The Hindu, that the cottage cheese behind Bengal’s chhana came from the Portuguese. Scroll calls this “the most enduring theory” and gives the logic: deliberately curdling milk was taboo in Hindu tradition, so the idea would have come from outsiders. Menezes, summarising the cultural historian Fatima Silva Gracias, puts the technique’s origin in Goa.

Two states have fought over the sweet itself. Odisha and West Bengal have disputed the rasagola since 2015. West Bengal says confectioner Nobin Chandra Das invented it in 1868. Odisha says Puri’s Jagannath Temple has offered it as prasad during the Rath Yatra. West Bengal was awarded a geographical indication tag for “Banglar Rasagulla” in 2017, and Odisha received one for its own rasagola on 29 July 2019.

The rest of the cargo

Achaya’s list of what came with the Portuguese, as Balasubramanian summarised it, runs to potato, tomato, tapioca, groundnuts, corn, papaya, pineapple, guava, avocado, rajma, cashew, sapota, capsicum and chilli. A few of those entries can be dated.

A 2022 manual from the Indian Council of Agricultural Research’s cashew directorate and MANAGE says Portuguese travellers brought the cashew in the sixteenth century “as a soil binding crop, to control soil erosion in coastal areas.” Terry described the pineapple, which he called the ananas, as “a pleasing compound made of strawberries, claret-wine, rosewater, and sugar, well tempered together.” Foster’s footnote says the Portuguese had introduced it from America. Jahangir wrote in his memoirs: “Among fruits, one which they call ananās (pineapple), which is grown in the Frank ports, is of excessive fragrance and fine flavour. Many thousands are produced every year now in the Gul-afshān garden at Agra.”

Tobacco reached Akbar’s court through his envoy Asad Beg, who came back from Bijapur with stems of the plant, a bejewelled pipe and a gold lighter. The Salar Jung Museum says the Portuguese probably brought tobacco to Bijapur around 1580.

Southern farmers took to some of them quickly. Of south-east India, the historian David Washbrook writes that its agriculture was “rapidly taking on board the new crops brought from the Americas (potato, tobacco, chilli, tomato) as if they were its own.” Groundnut, he adds, “was virtually unknown before 1850 but came to be exported in huge quantities by the time of the First World War.”

From the late nineteenth century, Washbrook writes, there were suggestions for an Indian industry to press groundnut oil instead of shipping the kernels abroad. European exporting companies objected that domestic demand would raise the price of the crop. The government refused to take part, and it denied a private consortium formed to build a processing plant access to government land, without which the plant could not be built.