DesiLit Magazine

Jaggery is an unrefined dark brown sugar, made from palm sap or sugarcane. The word jaggery comes from the Portuguese jgara, and from the Malayalam chakkara and Sanskrit sarkara (gritty substance, sugar) before that; its first known use was in 1631. For the relaunch of DesiLit Magazine, we wanted to choose a new, more evocative, name a name that ev... oked South Asia, but also the shared colonial history of South Asian nations and the contribution that South Asian languages have made to English, the primary language of our journal. We considered many options, such as calico, juggernaut, pyjama, teak there are hundreds of words that have immigrated to English from a variety of South Asian languages. Some of the words were problematic mango, for example, has been sadly overused for South Asia in general (and for South Asian women and their breasts in particular). Cashmere holds connotations of wealth and privilege that we thought it best to avoid. Bangle feels explicitly feminine, or possibly queer, and while were certainly open to such writing, we dont plan to exclusively focus on it. Jaggery, though, offers a treasure of richly relevant significance. Jaggery is often used in place of refined sugar as a more accessible, cheaper, and healthier sweetener. In colonial times, it was the choice of the poor (which was almost everyone brown, relatively speaking) those who had no access to the refined sugar of the colonizers could still sweeten their lives with jaggery. Its used in both sweet and savory dishes; a pinch of jaggery is sometimes added to sambar, dal, and other Indian staples a sweet element balancing the spicy, salty and sour components. Jaggery contains many minerals not found in ordinary sugar, and is considered beneficial to health by the traditional Ayurvedic medical system. Jaggery is also life-giving, and soul-sustaining. In rural Maharashtra and Karnataka, water and a piece of jaggery are given when someone comes home from working under a hot sun. All over India, jaggery has religious significance; ...Read More