Can the humble khichdi be an inspirational integer binding together that motley geopolitical melange called BRICS? The 11-member formation, with 10 more eagerly-beaverly waiting to join up - which summitted in New Delhi not too long back with considerable circumstance and not a little pomp--seeks to act as a counterbalance to a homogenised scheme of things represented by a grouping called the G-7 (Gee! 7 only?) not to mention an Uncle Sam-son seemingly determined to bring down the pillars of a rules-based order in favour of a rule-based disorder of one-man, one-rule, beginning and ending in the Oval Office.
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Like khichdi, BRICS is a hotch-potch of diverse ingredients, which can be customised to suit different, and even divergent, imperatives of ideologies and digestion. Tracing its origins to the Indian subcontinent over 2,000 years ago, khichdi is said to derive its name from the Sanskrit 'khicca'.
It comprises a simple one-course meal composed of rice and dal. With its nutritional benefits and its suitability even for convalescents, the dish finds laudatory mention in ancient Ayurvedic treatises like Charaka Samhita. Mahabharat notes a doting Draupadi feeding invigorating khichdi to the Pandav Brothers-Husbands to sustain them through the rigours of exile.
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Forerunners of globe-trotting tourists, like the Greek Megasthenes of the 3rd c. BCE, and the Moroccan Ibn Batuta in the 14th c. CE, reportedly made praiseworthy mention of it in their despatches, with the wayfarer from Morocco calling it 'kishri'. Khichdi found its way - perhaps by the back-door tradesman's entrance - into the opulent ambience of the royal Mughal court, where it was elevated to haute and haughty cuisine, with the addition of savoury spices and non-vegetarian embellishments. In his 16th c. record of Akbar's reign, Ain-i-Akbari, Abul Fazl provides a recipe calling for equal proportions of rice, dal, and ghee, with a selection of subtle spices.
Via the circuitous route of the British Raj, khichdi found its way to Victorian dining tables as a breakfast buffet favourite in the form of 'kedgeree', which incorporated fish and a garnish of eggs.
With its adaptability to many and varied climes and conditions, khichdi provides an apt, some might say appetising, metaphor for the multi-purpose, multi-polar, cartographically cosmopolitan combo of BRICS that endeavours to lay down the building blocks of a new world order based on a commonality of equitable interests.
But even as the very versatility of khichdi might make it desirable as an all-encompassing comestible of ubiquitous alimentary applicability, the variegated socio-political smorgasbord of BRICS has its internal anomalies and contradictory constraints. The two largest constituents of the federation, China and India, don't see 'I to I' on several issues, including Beijing's persistence in spelling the Indian state of Arunachal as Zangnam, and a 3,488km-long LoAC of disagreement, which includes Aksai Chin and Galwan. Newcomers to the conglomerate - Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE - are, or have been, at daggers drawn.
Meanwhile, from his imperial eyrie in the Kremlin, Tsar Vladimir might well muse on whether such disparate associates would ever be able to assess and appreciate the real, or even the rouble, price of the onion domes of Red Square, even as Brasilia wonders if it's nuts to form such an alliance, and Pretoria begins to feel that the whole thing might be going 'globally south,' in the figurative sense of the term.
With Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda, and Vietnam all waiting to sign up on the dotted line, BRICS+ augurs to morph from a user-friendly acronym to an unpronounceable alphabet soup, a menu of multi-polarity, analogous not to the consonance of khichdi, but to the dissonance betokening a khichdi-sink drama.
