If disgust is not confined to particular geographical regions, neither is it confined to the perceived savage or the primitive. In travel writing on the Mughal and the Ottoman empires, where, as Ania Loomba has pointed out, “medieval notions of wealth, despotism, and power attaching to the East (and especially to the Islamic East) were . . . reworked to create an alternate version of savagery understood not as lack of civilization but as an excess of it, as decadence rather than primitivism,” disgust persists, albeit differently inflected.
Likewise, in writings on the Mughal court the libidinal and the culinary come to be closely linked. Reverend Terry, whose encounter with the Hottentots is discussed above, had a very different perception of food and the foreign in the Islamic East. Yet ugly feelings are common to both ethnographic experiences. In a passage on the monarch’s private realm he chronicles in detail the fine culinary preparations for which the court is renowned. But Terry’s discussion of the culinary pleasures of the court is framed by his salaciousness at its sexual excesses:
There lodge none in the Kings house but his women and eunuches, and some little boyes which hee keepes about him for a wicked use. Hee alwayes eates in private among his women upon great varietie of excellent dishes, which dressed and prooved by the taster are served in vessels of gold (as they say), covered and sealed up, and so by eunuchs brought to the King. He hath meate ready at all houres, and calls for it at pleasure. They feede not freely on full dishes of beefe and mutton (as we), but much on rice boyled with pieces of flesh or dressed many other ways. They have not many roast or baked meats, but stew most of their flesh. Among many dishes of this kinde He take notice but of one they call Deu Pario made of venison cut in slices, to which they put onions and herbs, some rootes, with a little spice and butter: the most savorie meate I ever tasted, and doe almost thinke it that very dish which Jacob made ready for his father, when he got the blessing.
The dish in question, what Terry calls “Deu Pario,” was in fact, dupiyazah, a dish that continues to be a staple of Mughlai cuisine on the Indian subcontinent. Terry’s pleasure in partaking of it is apparent. He appears to relish the seasoning, the spices, and the meats, the extolling of which culminates in his description of “Deu Pario” as a preparation of biblical proportions. But the general air of degenerate consumption in his description is unmistakable. The king’s women, his eunuchs, his boys kept about for “a wicked use” frame this vignette of culinary indulgence. If Terry’s readers are to join in the pleasures of Mughal cuisine, they are also to deplore its sexual licentiousness. Terry’s travelogue seems intent on presenting the culinary and the sexual together as evidence of a regime that is hedonistic in the extreme.
Among the travelers most willing to partake of the bizarre foods of the Mughal court and immerse himself in its unfamiliar food-related rituals is the Italian runaway Niccolao Manucci. As Jonathan Gil Harris puts it, Manucci’s travelogue is a “foodie’s dream.” In his characteristic playful tone, Manucci devotes long passages of his Storia do Mogor to his gastronomic experiences. In such passages, we see a range of affective experiences from pleasure to disgust to shock. While traveling through Surat in the late seventeenth century, for instance, Manucci suddenly notices everyone spitting blood. When he enquires of a female English acquaintance whether the people of the town suffer from a malady or from broken teeth, she clarifies it is their habit of consuming the betel leaf and invites him to share one with her. Manucci gladly accepts the paan, but the taste has him in such shock that he swoons, faints, and has to be treated with smelling salts:
Having taken them, my head swam to such an extent that I feared I was dying. It caused me to fall down; I lost my colour, and endured agonies; but she poured into my mouth a little salt, and brought me to my senses. The lady assured me that everyone who ate it for the first time felt the same effects.
In the schema of contempt-disgust that we have seen at work in travel writing on the Hottentots and others, Manucci’s physiological response here seems atypical. As such, it appears to be neither contempt nor disgust, sim- ply shock brought on by his distaste for paan. But as I have pointed out earlier in this chapter, it is important to note the word “disgust” as drawing its origins from the Latin dis- and gustus (“distaste”). This etymological connection signals the connections between the traveler’s experience of both distaste and disgust. In marking the distaste of food, the traveler expresses a kind of “good taste,” a qualitative judgment.
Manucci’s distaste and disgust become most apparent when he has to dine with the envoys. In a particularly vivid passage he presents a scene of men with food-stained mustaches, digging into the flesh of camels with their bare hands, begging for more fat in their already greasy food, and concluding the meal with their “eructations” as loud as bulls: