The emperor Jehangir was fascinated by a turkey. In his memoir Tuzk-e-Jahangiri, he wrote: “Its head and neck and the part under the throat are every minute of a different colour. When it is in heat it is quite red – one might say it had adorned itself with coral – and after a while it becomes white in the same places, and looks like cotton.”
This is standard behaviour for a male Meleagris gallopavo, the North American turkey. The skin on its head can switch between blushing red, mottled blue and livid white because of collagen fibres interspersed with blood cells that lie just beneath the skin. As the blood vessels contract or expand according to the male turkey’s mood, they alter how light reflects off the skin, causing the colour to change.
Jehangir ordered that a painting be made of the bird “so that the amazement that arose from hearing of them might be increased”. This was made by Ustad Mansur, the leading painter at his court, and it is an extraordinary image. Partly, it is the accuracy with which the turkey is depicted, both strange and beautiful within a golden floral border. But partly, too, it is for how the image freezes a moment in the complex, centuries long-process known as the Columbian Exchange, the global transfer of plants and animals between New and Old Worlds after Christopher Columbus made contact with the Americas in 1492.
Historians have shown that others probably reached the Americas before Columbus, but his voyages were documented and took American products back to Europe. In that sense, it is appropriate that the Exchange is named after him. Turkeys were among the first products he brought back, along with tobacco, pineapples and chillies (and several Taino natives). Their colour changing heads, swaggering gait, distinctive feathers and tail and, above all, their size – larger than other poultry, but still small enough to transport easily on ships – made them living symbols of the weirdness and wonders of the New World.
Turkeys had already been domesticated by American tribes, so were easier to transport than wild animals. This was an important consideration in the days of long sea voyages when space and fresh water were both in short supply on ships. Birds and small animals, like monkeys, were easiest to transport and a trade soon developed in exotic animals. The Portuguese quickly realised this opportunity. Their king, John II, had declined to support Columbus, preferring to focus on the eastern route, around Africa, to Asia. But on Columbus’s return from that first voyage, bad weather forced him to land in Lisbon first, so the Portuguese were the first to learn of his discovery and the products he got back.
Opposite trajectory
One hundred and twenty years later, Jehangir obtained his turkey from them. In 1612, he ordered Muqarrab Khan, a trusted courtier, “to go to the port of Goa and buy for the private use of the government certain rarities procurable there”. Goa barely features in the narratives of the great Mughals, but it was clearly known as an entry point for exotics, many of them from the New World. The Portuguese acquired a reputation as the catalysts of the Columbian Exchange, credited with spreading products like chillies, tomatoes, potatoes and cashews across the world.
The process was complex. The standard narrative presents a trajectory, across the Atlantic and then Indian Ocean, for products from the New World, with certain places, such as the Portuguese enclaves of Goa, Malacca and Macao, being gateway points. But historians have started paying increasing attention to the opposite trajectory across the Pacific that was taken by the so-called Manila galleons, fleets of Spanish ships that sailed between Acapulco in Mexico and Manila in the Philippines from around 1565 to 1815. This was the link that made the world’s trading network truly global.
Brian R Dott, in his book The Chile Pepper in China, argues that this direct connection with Mexico, a central point for chile biodiversity, explains their rapid spread through East Asia. Analysing the names for chillies in the region, he finds 57 terms that broadly divide into three categories, which, he suggests, indicates the three routes they took from the Philippines – through South East China, North East China and Formosa (Taiwan). The Portuguese may well have played a role here, taking chillies west through South East Asia and then India. But another route might have been overland from Southern China to North East India, which would explain the prevalence of potent chillies like bhut jolokia in that region.
Another crop that probably took this route was the papaya. We rarely think much about the antecedents and importance of this mild-tasting fruit, but in 2022, India produced around 5.3 million tonnes of it, far more than the next biggest producer, the Dominican Republic, with 1.3 million tonnes. That represents 38% of world production, which is quite something for a fruit that originated in Mexico (which grows 1.1 million tonnes). Why India took so enthusiastically to papayas is a mystery, but one key fact in the general dissemination of both papayas and chillies is that they grow easily and fast from seeds, which would have helped their transport and replanting after they crossed the Pacific.
The Portuguese influence in the Columbian Exchange can also be misleading. It is commonly asserted that they brought potatoes to India, again through Goa, but this seems unlikely. Potatoes are temperate crops and their centres of origin are in the Andes, which were Spanish possessions, while Portuguese Brazil was tropical and unlikely to grow them. Even assuming that they took them from the Spanish, like turkeys, Goa does not provide the right conditions to grow them. It seems far more likely that potatoes were a later introduction, by the British in the 19th century.
What the Portuguese probably did introduce were sweet potatoes, a tropical American crop which grows easily in Goa. Their Portuguese name, batata, was appropriated by potatoes, and even in importance were sidelined by the temperate crop. India is the world’s second largest producer of potatoes, after China, but this comes with a cost of cold storage and reliance on intense winter production in relatively limited parts of the country. The argument can be made that India should have promoted sweet potatoes, rather than potatoes, because they grow more widely, have a superior nutrition profile and produce a valuable secondary crop in their protein-rich leaves (potato leaves, by comparison, are mildly toxic).
Unclear origins
Turkeys have also taken their time in India. Jehangir admired his turkey, but there is no evidence he ate it. In Europe, their size and impressive appearance quickly made them a valued addition for feasts, like Christmas, where they displaced other poultry like geese. But Europeans in India looking for a Christmas turkey were disappointed, like the Swedish botanist and priest Olof Toreen, who noted in his diary of his trip to India in 1750 that he “only found them in one place, and to the best of my remembrance I was told they were foreign in this country”.
Toreen was possibly confused by the Swedish name for turkeys, Kalkon, deriving from Calicut (Kozhikode). In several north European languages, this Kerala port is assumed to be the source of many exotic products, so quite likely these weird-looking birds as well. This may have been a trading tactic on the part of the Portuguese to keep their real origins unclear. Their own word for the birds, Galinha de Peru, acknowledged its American origins – Peru being at one point a general term for all the Spanish American possessions. But other languages often assume an Indian origin, like the French d’Inde, which became Dindon. The Turkish name for the birds is similar: Hindi, meaning Indian. The British went out on a limb of their own by assuming they came from Turkey.
By the early 19th century, turkey raising for the British had started in a small way in India. In 1835, Daniel Wilson, the bishop of Calcutta, noted that there were turkeys in Chinsurah, the settlement up the Hooghly that had been started by the Portuguese, then passed to the Dutch. Much to Wilson’s irritation, the river boatmen refused to bring live birds to Calcutta, which he attributed to “the wretched, absurd and unalterable distinctions of caste”. Quite possibly, the boatmen just did not want to deal with large, irritable birds on their boats.
Turkeys are not suited to hot humid climates like Bengal. In Flora Annie Steele and Grace Gardiner’s Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook (1888), they write that “turkeys are very easy to rear in India, at least Northern India, owing to the dryness of the climate”. They recommend feeding them dahi and plenty of chopped greens. During World War II, most turkeys were commandeered to feed the Allied troops stationed in India, much to the irritation of the wife of John Lall, the commissioner of Agra district, who insisted on a turkey for Christmas. Their master cook, Ramzan, came to the rescue: “He laid breasts of chicken under the shrunken skin of the lean bird until it looked for all the world like Mae West. The roast turkey was a culinary triumph.”
Livestock census
Turkey raising remained very small in India for decades, mainly sustained by the old British clubs that would serve them for Christmas, and occasionally through the year. Americans in India often got them from US Embassy commissaries, part of a vast global shipment of turkeys that leaves the US every November. But in recent years, a surprising new market for turkeys has grown in the North East. The last Livestock Census, whose results were released in 2019, showed Assam with 34% of all turkeys in India, a startling increase from the 9.9% in the 2012 Census. The total number of turkeys in India was still a modest 4.23 lakh in the census, compared to 80.78 crore chickens, but it showed an odd enthusiasm for the bird in Assam. The next Livestock Census is currently underway, and it will be interesting to see if these numbers have held up.
Turkey production has been revolutionised in recent decades by a move away from the seasonal market, to a year-round market based less on whole turkeys than processed products like turkey ham, turkey sausages and extruded turkey meat. Much of this has been led by Israel, which saw in turkeys an easy way to raise a lot of meat from limited space. Turkeys, like most poultry, are acceptable under kosher rules, but also take less space than cattle. The unfortunate result has been the creation of intensive turkey farms, with all the cruelties and health issues seen with broiler chickens.
Poultry World, an industry website, recently stated that an unexpected result of the Gaza conflict is that a bill in the Knesset to improve living conditions of chicken and turkeys has been put on hold. It was seen as likely to cause too many problems for poultry farmers as they strive to ensure food security for Israel. Meanwhile, on the Gaza side, the website quoted Marwan al-Helou, head of the Poultry Breeders and Animal Husbandry Syndicate of Gaza, “with a chilling estimate that nearly 90% of the poultry industry in the enclave have been reduced to rubble as a direct result of the hostilities”.
Humans generally benefited from the Columbian Exchange – though, the slaves and indentured labourers who toiled on Caribbean sugar plantations (an Old World crop taken to the New World) or workers on rubber plantations in Malaysia (New World to Old World) might disagree. Does it make sense to ask if turkeys benefited as well? From the strict viewpoint of numbers, perhaps the answer might be yes – 620 million are domestically raised every year across the world. But these are increasingly subject to the cramped conditions and intensive growth and slaughter of the wider poultry industry. Jehangir’s resplendent turkey, strutting down the centuries, might question the real value of that exchange.
Vikram Doctor is a writer based in Goa. His email address is vikdocatwork@gmail.com.
