In a lecture delivered to the University of Pittsburgh in 1921, a colonial medical researcher in British India named Dr Robert McCarrison first made reference to a “Himalayan” people he had encountered. According to him, this group of people had exceptional physiques and low susceptibility to illness, leading them to live for an unusually long time. Later that year, McCarrison published Studies in Deficiency Disease. In the book, he confirmed that the Himalayan people he was discussing were the Hunzakuts (henceforth “Hunzas”, but these days referred to as the Burusho people) who lived in Gilgit, northwest India (now Pakistan).
McCarrison attributed their longevity to the region’s traditional diet, which he claimed was made up of “grains, vegetables, and fruits, with a certain amount of milk and butter, and goat’s meat only on feast days”. Crucially, the Hunzas consumed simple foodstuffs, unlike the processed and mass-produced food which McCarrison asserted to be commonly eaten in Britain at the time. By McCarrison’s reckoning, this diet prevented the “tribe” from suffering the kinds of ailment to which supposedly “civilised” peoples were prone.
Dr Guy Wrench, a British doctor and advocate of preventative medicine, was inspired by McCarrison’s work to pen The Wheel of Health (1938). Never having visited Hunza himself, he relied upon McCarrison’s claims to espouse the supposed health benefits of organic vegetables and to warn against industrialised food production. He also drew on selected European travel accounts and second-hand anecdotal evidence to make complementary claims regarding the Hunzas’ physical strength, endurance and intelligence. Like McCarrison, he claimed that these traits stemmed from their dietary choices and agricultural practices. Wrench averred that the Hunzas were predominantly lactovegetarians who consumed large quantities of fruit, wheat chapatis, pulses, vegetables, dried apricots, milk and milk-based products. Moreover, they either ate vegetables raw or ensured that they did not overboil them, gaining the maximum minerals and vitamins from the plants.
Hunzas, according to Wrench, did not consume foodstuffs and beverages like tea and sugar which were popular in Britain. A common thread running through Wrench’s account is that the Hunzas did not consume foods that had been imported from elsewhere or had undergone any mechanised process or chemical adulteration. Such processing, he believed, would have diminished the food’s nutritional properties.
Wrench deployed the Hunzas strategically to argue that Britain and other Western industrialised nations should return to the unprocessed and unrefined diets of yesteryear, in order to obtain a higher standard of health for their populations. The Hunzas, in Wrench’s account, were traditional agricultural practitioners. They collected their own faeces and manure from their cattle, and returned them to the soil to ensure its fertility. In this respect, The Wheel of Health resonated with the embryonic organic movement that was developing in Britain at this time. Leading figures from this movement, such as the writer and politician Gerard Wallop and the aristocrat Lord Northbourne, as well as the agricultural scientists Albert Howard and Eve Balfour, subsequently hailed the Hunzas as a people who testified to the benefits of holistic farming practices and organic diets.
The idea was also picked up by Jerome Rodale in the United States of America, who repeated many of the same claims in his The Healthy Hunzas (1948). Rodale’s narrative, however, was further influenced by James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon (1933), which depicted a fictional mountainside location in Tibet where people lived on average for several hundred years in a state of contentment, peace and perfect health. Rodale constructed Hunza as a veritable Shangri-La where its people experienced similarly high standards of physical health.
In addition, Hunzas were said to suffer from none of the social or psychological problems that prevailed in the USA, such as crime, divorce, juvenile delinquency and anxiety. Rodale attributed this, once again, to the Hunzas’ dietary habits and farming practices. In the 1960s came a series of travel accounts by North American authors. These writers were inspired to visit Hunza and spill much ink about this Shangri-La. Book-length examples include Hunza Land (1960), Hunza Health Secrets for Long Life and Happiness (1964), Hunza: 15 Secrets of the World’s Healthiest and Oldest Living People (1968), and Yoga: The Art of Living: Hunza Way to Health (1969). All these narratives confirmed the notion that Hunza was a paradise on earth, and progressively more exaggerated claims were made during this period.
Indeed, the books claimed some of these Hunzas as the oldest inhabitants of the planet. Renee Taylor in Hunza Health Secrets for Long Life and Happiness even stated that she encountered a 145-year-old man energetically playing volleyball. She also asserted that the Hunzas were consummate meditators, expert breathers and yoga practitioners.
It is important to remember that these travellers all came under the sway of the Mir of Hunza Jamal Khan, who ruled Hunza as a semi-autonomous kingdom between 1945 and 1974. Jamal Khan hosted them and supplied them with information during their stays in Hunza. They were always chaperoned during their tours by a member of the Mir’s family or his entourage. Since they could not understand the native language Burushaski, they were dependent upon their accompanying translators when seeking to obtain information. The Mir was keen for his own reasons to keep an eye on foreign visitors. Although the North American authors presented The Hunza Diet and the Mir as firmly in control of Hunza, his situation was actually more precarious in postcolonial Pakistan.
In 1947, when India was partitioned, Mir Jamal Khan opted to join the State of Pakistan as a semi-autonomous kingdom. However, he was also conscious after Pakistan’s Independence that the Pakistani central government would seek to exert greater control over Hunza and take away more of his powers. Yet Jamal Khan was keen to maintain control and autonomy in the wake of external pressures. Consequently, he was invested in catering to the orientalist preconceptions of these North American authors that Hunza was an idyllic region uncontaminated by the deleterious effects of modernisation. Indeed, he sought to promote the notion that any interference from outside could threaten this supposed Shangri-La.
Excerpted with permission from “The Hunza Diet and the Secret of Prolonged Youth” by Ashok Malhotra in Forgotten Foods: Memories and Recipes from Muslim South Asia’, edited by Tarana Husain Khan, Claire Chambers, and Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Picador India.