Book Excerpt: Forgotten Foods: Memories and Recipes from Muslim South Asia

Sri Lanka is home to a multi-ethnic, multi-religious population of twenty million, comprising Sinhalese (75 per cent), Tamils (11 per cent) and Muslims (9 per cent), the latter including Moors, Malays, Borahs and Memons. This makes Malays a minority within a minority, at a mere 0.2 per cent of the country’s population.

With a complex history of migration dating back to the eleventh-century Chola kingdom, the ancestors of present-day Sri Lankan Malays arrived in the seventeenth century to serve in the Dutch army, among them exiled aristocratic families from Java. When the British took over in 1796, they ‘martialised’ the Malays (as with the Gurkhas of Nepal) and strengthened their forces by inviting more from Peninsular Malaya. With these successive waves of arrivals, Malays brought with them their women, children, food and culture. The community quickly deepened its roots in the country with a distinct culture and language of its own. This was not done without assimilating local influences, especially of the Moors, descendants of Arab and Indian traders with whom Malays share the Islamic faith.

Sharing common roots with present-day Malaysian/ Indonesian cuisine, Sri Lankan Malay food has evolved into a unique repertoire all of its own as it adapted dishes out of necessity (substituting traditional with local ingredients) and to accommodate the taste buds of local cultures. The ubiquitous Malay achar and watalappan exemplify how original dishes evolve and create new flavours whilst retaining their cultural significance.

Yet Sri Lankan Malay food is more than just achar and watalappan. Lesser known are daging–chukka, sukkun–goreng, kolak curry, kueh, pasthol and a range of other dishes with robust flavours of chilli, vanilla grass and lemongrass, rich in spices and usually simmered in coconut milk. Even the popular sweetmeat dodhol has Malay roots and so does bibikkan, a coconut cake influenced by the Dutch and made by the Sinhalese for their New Year. Yet these are facts barely known to the public.

Within this broad spectrum of Sri Lankan Malay cuisine is the less appreciated and much shunned babath–puruth, a tripe curry that usually accompanies pittu, a concoction of flour and coconut shavings steamed in a bamboo utensil to give pittu its cylindrical shape. While pittu traces its origins to Kerala, the babath/tripe curry is associated with Sri Lankan Malays, often with derogation. As a child I was called ‘babath’, a slur directed at Malays. This epithet reflects a history of racialised stereotyping of communities based on what they eat, particularly food perceived to be undesirable. The strong emotional reaction, if not revulsion, that babath or any offal dish evokes is a reflection of the fearof ‘strange’ unfamiliar foods, prejudice against other cultures, and sheer ignorance. Offal is a big part of Malay cuisine that encourages the prevention of waste in line with Islamic teachings.

I grew up eating babath several days a week, but fought shy of acknowledging it publicly. In the face of my non-Muslim friends’ exclamations, ‘Yuck’ and ‘Gross’, I did not want to be seen as one of the primary ingestors of this much-disparaged dish, reducing my enjoyment of it to a source of shame until I met my Sinhalese husband. His mother not only cooked it as deliciously as my own but served it with aplomb. As it turned out, Malays were not the only community that was consuming offal.

Today, with hoof-to-tail food trends gaining traction, popularised by television shows like MasterChef, it appears that attitudes towards offal may be changing again. At the same time, a new wave of veganism is countering that trend. As food bloggers battle out their differences, singing hosanna or decrying it, offal remains caught in a binary world of love and hate that misses nuances of culture, power and politics tied up with the colonial history surrounding food. Babath is thus still far from making an appearance in the menu of five-star hotels and posh restaurants.

Yet efforts to reclaim and recuperate the ‘offensive’ dish are seen in several home-based Malay caterers who are boldly offering a range of offal curries with other Malay dishes, suggesting a demand that goes beyond the Malay and Muslim community. That said, I still have friends who return from holidays in Scotland with brave tales of trying out haggis and black pudding, but who continue to turn up their noses at babath.

These efforts to preserve an authenticity of Malay food in an ever-evolving hybrid culinary scene mirrors the community’s efforts to maintain its distinct culture that is deemed to be at risk of extinction. The Malay community is known to be more liberal than other Sri Lankan Muslims. Ironically, this quickness to adapt and assimilate has also had an impact on the community’s identity, traditions and language. As a result, the Sri Lankan Malays find themselves caught between modernism and a rising Wahhabism which seems intent on turning Islam into a monocultural global faith.

Excerpted from 'Sri Lankan Malay Cuisine Walks the Tightrope' by Rizvina Morseth de Alwis in Forgotten Foods: Memories and Recipes from Muslim South Asia, edited by Tarana Husain Khan, Claire Chambers and Siobhan Lambert-Hurley. Published with the permission of Pan Macmillan India. All rights reserved. 

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