Although history is usually written on plants – specifically, trees – it is rarely written about them. The injustice of this is painful. We will, for example, never know the identity of the chickpea’s first quick-witted gleaner; whereas the brutal deeds of the Mongol tyrant Genghis Khan – whose bloodthirsty horsemen could methodically devastate all land within a radius of sixty miles every day of the week – are recorded in every kindergarten history book. The chickpea was a staple food for the illiterate Khan and his hordes (they became familiar with it during their conquest of Afghanistan if not before) but they were hardly worthy of its enjoyment. Jacob Bronowski explains:
“It is tempting to close one’s eyes to history, and instead to speculate about the roots of war in some possible animal instinct: as if, like the tiger, we still had to kill to live, or, like the robin redbreast, to defend a nesting territory. But war, organized war, is not a human instinct. It is a highly planned and co-operative form of theft. And that form of theft began ten thousand years ago when the harvesters of wheat accumulated a surplus, and the nomads rose out of the desert to rob them of what they themselves could not provide.”
The antagonism between warlike nomads and placid farmers is almost as old as our species; in a way, it is the history of our species. Khan and his hordes (the word means “tent” – an indication of their rootless lifestyle) were the last of the nomad-tyrants – living as parasites on the farmers and growers: contributing nothing, consuming everything, hogging the historical limelight. Farming – unspectacular, hard, menial-goes largely unchronicled. Well, that’s history for you. Except for this: the Perfect Warrior’s noisy dream to forge a Universal Empire quickly dissolved, while the farmers eventually prevailed.
Khan’s Mongol empire – as brief as it was bloody – fleetingly extended from the Pacific Ocean in the east to the Black Sea in the west, and from Siberia in the north to China further south; a vastness which took two whole years to cross. Then it was gone. Because war, after all, is not a permanent state of being; sooner or later it has to stop, when there is nothing left to plunder and no more food to steal. Ultimately, the feckless Mongols were themselves quietly absorbed into local and more adaptable cultures; where they became settlers, builders, villagers – and farmers.
In India, Khan’s descendants founded the Mogul dynasty (the name is Arabic for Mongol) where they met a curiously appropriate end. Shah Jahan, fifth Mogul, was born in 1592 and-with his ancestor’s distinguishing ruthlessness-assumed power by the simple but expedient means of having all his other male relatives assassinated. An enlightened despot, Shah Jahan commissioned many splendid buildings, including the palace in Delhi, the entire city of Shahjahanabad; the pearl mosque at Agra; and-most famously of all-the spectacular Taj Mahal, a mausoleum for his favourite queen, Mumtaz-immortalised today in the names of countless Indian restaurants.
But the Old Khan’s bloodline still ran strong, for Shah Jahan’s son, Aurangzeb, proved nearly as callous as his father. Impatient for power, Aurangzeb masterminded a successful rebellion, killing his brothers (something of a family tradition) and imprisoning his father in Agra Fort for the last eight years of the old man’s life. Yet Aurangzeb – the last Mogul emperor of India to wield effective power-was not entirely without mercy. Before condemning his father to a slow death in prison, he offered to grant the old man one last request. A favour, perhaps, or some small luxury to take with him into incarceration? Shah Jahan thought for a few moments. What trifle could compensate for the loss of an Emperor’s throne and kingdom? Then it came to him. Something versatile, pleasurable, and wholesome. Shah Jahan solemnly faced his usurper. He requested, and was instantly granted, a lifetime’s supply of the little legume that had quietly sustained his rapacious ancestors from the time of Genghis Khan onwards – the humble chickpea.
