Eli - here's another twist... As you know I grew up in India and have an affinity for teak. I now spend much time in Ecuador. I found out on my last visit a few months ago from a businessman friend in Guayaquil that he comes across many Indian businessmen in Ecuador. When I asked him what are they importing or exporting here, he surprised me by saying that most of them that he has met come to buy really huge quantity of raw Teka ("teak") from Ecuador!
Well, it does make me sad that the rape of natural resources continues at the hands of man. When one area gets dried up, just move to another part of the world and continue. 😞
What a twist - and you've written the essay's missing final paragraph. Ecuador as growing grounds, raw logs shipped back to India for processing, because teak's water resistance still makes it the material of choice for superyacht decking. The wood that exhausted Malabar building the Royal Navy's warships now travels from Latin American plantations back to the subcontinent to finish on the decks of billionaires' boats. The extraction and exploitation of nature logic hasn't changed. Only the geography has.
Some other trivia, and it gets closer to food: teak from Malabar and, later, Burma was also used to make opium chests. They sealed perfectly and kept the produce ‘fresh’. Parsi families would often put their monograms on them - Chor Bazaar, many decades later, in Bombay would sell them as Parsi chests. On the return journey, they would be used for carrying silks. And with opium and teak chests, the Sasoon family.
Thank you for the chest detail — I went looking for more on it and hit one snag worth flagging before I use it anywhere: the opium chests I can find documented were mango-wood, purpose-built at the Patna and Benares factories, not teak. I couldn’t find anything tying teak specifically to opium-chest construction. The Chor Bazaar afterlife and the Parsi monograms might still be exactly right — I just can’t independently confirm the teak part yet. If you have a source for it, I’d love to see it; if it was more a general impression, no worries at all, it’s still a lovely image and I appreciate you sending it.
Separately — I’m working on something new that I think you’d enjoy chewing on, and I could use your instincts. It’s about Yehudi Menuhin’s 1952 Calcutta concert: his violin comes apart from the heat mid-tour, and the only people who can fix it turn out to be a Bengali violin-making family on Chitpur Road who are still there today. The essay ends up being less about Menuhin than about a version of Calcutta that briefly held Bengali craftsmen, Armenian churches, a mosque, and Baghdadi Jewish synagogues all within a few streets of each other — and about how thin the documentary record is for the Jewish community’s actual presence in that world, compared to how well-documented the official visits were.
The piece doesn’t have a food angle yet, and every other Beyond Babylon essay does. Is there an object, a trade good, a container — something with the same double life your chest detail was pointing at — that you can see threading into this one?
From what I remember the Mango wood chests were from later. Also, mango wood while being durable was not considered to be as good as teak. I have two, one of them is definitely old but then you never know. For all you know, the East made mango chests and Bombay, teak.
I would absolutely love reading the violin story.
Calcutta and Burma teak have a personal connection as well. My brother-in-law was a furniture maker in Calcutta. Chinese designs from the late 1800’s were still popular till very recently.
I just got around to reading this excellent piece. It put me in mind of Robin Knox-Johnston, the first person to sail solo and nonstop around the world, in the 1968–69 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race.
His yacht, Suhaili, was built of teak in Bombay in 1963–64. Its keelson was hewn from a 25-foot log with traditional tools, an adze, bow drill, and hand saw. Knox-Johnston describes the boat’s construction in his excellent account of the voyage, A World of My Own.
in 1952, Yehudi Menuhin (who was a close friend of Ravi Shankar) gave a concert in Calcutta as part of a tour on a tour organized to raise funds for famine relief. The heat caused the violin to fall apart, and he had to resort to the services of N.N. Mondal & Sons to repair of his Guarnerius del Gesù violin.
Calcutta-specific stories: the Awadhi biryani that became Calcutta’s own, the indian- Chinese food that Tangra gifted us, the Jhal Muri - UP meets Bengal, Oriya cuisine that Bengal optioned ( controversial ), Chinese furniture, colonial architecture... The Armenian bakeries, the most wonderful stories, from the 1920s to the 1980s, around jazz, pop, and rock, and Calcutta. And then there is the Anglo-Indian world of railways, military, and government migrants. Each of these brings in an amazing number of migrants and tradespeople and their families.
We had a teak wall unit when we married and first lived in London in the 1960s. Grew up in
South Africa where stinkwood and yellow wood were valued. Friends who took their furniture with them were shocked when they cracked in the central heating. We have a lamp base of wild olive driftwood from the Orange River in the Western Cape. Regrettably now all our furniture is dark wood which is deeply unfashionable
The oils that let Burmese teak survive a Scandinavian winter are precisely what stinkwood and yellowwood lacked for an English one - beautiful, valued woods, but built for a different climate's logic, not a colder one's central heating.
Different empire, different ocean, same unforgiving lesson about what travels well and what doesn't.
And the lamp base is wonderful - Orange River driftwood outlasting the furniture that came with it. Sometimes the smallest piece is the one that survives the move.
As for the dark wood being unfashionable now - give it twenty years.
Empire's leftovers always come back into style eventually, usually right around the time nobody who actually used them is left to roll their eyes about it.
Eli - here's another twist... As you know I grew up in India and have an affinity for teak. I now spend much time in Ecuador. I found out on my last visit a few months ago from a businessman friend in Guayaquil that he comes across many Indian businessmen in Ecuador. When I asked him what are they importing or exporting here, he surprised me by saying that most of them that he has met come to buy really huge quantity of raw Teka ("teak") from Ecuador!
Well, it does make me sad that the rape of natural resources continues at the hands of man. When one area gets dried up, just move to another part of the world and continue. 😞
What a twist - and you've written the essay's missing final paragraph. Ecuador as growing grounds, raw logs shipped back to India for processing, because teak's water resistance still makes it the material of choice for superyacht decking. The wood that exhausted Malabar building the Royal Navy's warships now travels from Latin American plantations back to the subcontinent to finish on the decks of billionaires' boats. The extraction and exploitation of nature logic hasn't changed. Only the geography has.
Some other trivia, and it gets closer to food: teak from Malabar and, later, Burma was also used to make opium chests. They sealed perfectly and kept the produce ‘fresh’. Parsi families would often put their monograms on them - Chor Bazaar, many decades later, in Bombay would sell them as Parsi chests. On the return journey, they would be used for carrying silks. And with opium and teak chests, the Sasoon family.
Thank you for the chest detail — I went looking for more on it and hit one snag worth flagging before I use it anywhere: the opium chests I can find documented were mango-wood, purpose-built at the Patna and Benares factories, not teak. I couldn’t find anything tying teak specifically to opium-chest construction. The Chor Bazaar afterlife and the Parsi monograms might still be exactly right — I just can’t independently confirm the teak part yet. If you have a source for it, I’d love to see it; if it was more a general impression, no worries at all, it’s still a lovely image and I appreciate you sending it.
Separately — I’m working on something new that I think you’d enjoy chewing on, and I could use your instincts. It’s about Yehudi Menuhin’s 1952 Calcutta concert: his violin comes apart from the heat mid-tour, and the only people who can fix it turn out to be a Bengali violin-making family on Chitpur Road who are still there today. The essay ends up being less about Menuhin than about a version of Calcutta that briefly held Bengali craftsmen, Armenian churches, a mosque, and Baghdadi Jewish synagogues all within a few streets of each other — and about how thin the documentary record is for the Jewish community’s actual presence in that world, compared to how well-documented the official visits were.
The piece doesn’t have a food angle yet, and every other Beyond Babylon essay does. Is there an object, a trade good, a container — something with the same double life your chest detail was pointing at — that you can see threading into this one?
From what I remember the Mango wood chests were from later. Also, mango wood while being durable was not considered to be as good as teak. I have two, one of them is definitely old but then you never know. For all you know, the East made mango chests and Bombay, teak.
I would absolutely love reading the violin story.
Calcutta and Burma teak have a personal connection as well. My brother-in-law was a furniture maker in Calcutta. Chinese designs from the late 1800’s were still popular till very recently.
I just got around to reading this excellent piece. It put me in mind of Robin Knox-Johnston, the first person to sail solo and nonstop around the world, in the 1968–69 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race.
His yacht, Suhaili, was built of teak in Bombay in 1963–64. Its keelson was hewn from a 25-foot log with traditional tools, an adze, bow drill, and hand saw. Knox-Johnston describes the boat’s construction in his excellent account of the voyage, A World of My Own.
in 1952, Yehudi Menuhin (who was a close friend of Ravi Shankar) gave a concert in Calcutta as part of a tour on a tour organized to raise funds for famine relief. The heat caused the violin to fall apart, and he had to resort to the services of N.N. Mondal & Sons to repair of his Guarnerius del Gesù violin.
Calcutta-specific stories: the Awadhi biryani that became Calcutta’s own, the indian- Chinese food that Tangra gifted us, the Jhal Muri - UP meets Bengal, Oriya cuisine that Bengal optioned ( controversial ), Chinese furniture, colonial architecture... The Armenian bakeries, the most wonderful stories, from the 1920s to the 1980s, around jazz, pop, and rock, and Calcutta. And then there is the Anglo-Indian world of railways, military, and government migrants. Each of these brings in an amazing number of migrants and tradespeople and their families.
https://beyondbabylon.substack.com/p/when-an-indian-orders-chinese-takeaway?r=32dxtv&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
We had a teak wall unit when we married and first lived in London in the 1960s. Grew up in
South Africa where stinkwood and yellow wood were valued. Friends who took their furniture with them were shocked when they cracked in the central heating. We have a lamp base of wild olive driftwood from the Orange River in the Western Cape. Regrettably now all our furniture is dark wood which is deeply unfashionable
The oils that let Burmese teak survive a Scandinavian winter are precisely what stinkwood and yellowwood lacked for an English one - beautiful, valued woods, but built for a different climate's logic, not a colder one's central heating.
Different empire, different ocean, same unforgiving lesson about what travels well and what doesn't.
And the lamp base is wonderful - Orange River driftwood outlasting the furniture that came with it. Sometimes the smallest piece is the one that survives the move.
As for the dark wood being unfashionable now - give it twenty years.
Empire's leftovers always come back into style eventually, usually right around the time nobody who actually used them is left to roll their eyes about it.
🤣🤣🤣🤣I’m over 80 and husband is nearly 90!
@sam dalrymple