By Anusha Khan
In the heart of the Mughal palace, the kitchens never slept. Fires glowed in clay ovens, cauldrons simmered with barley and herbs, and the air was thick with perfume—rosewater, saffron, sandalwood, musk. To step inside was to be swallowed by fragrance: rice laced with cinnamon, porridge softened with rose, sweetmeats perfumed with amber, chilled faluda carrying the scent of flowers. Even drinking water was transformed by infusing with blossoms and musk, so that quenching thirst became a ritual of the senses. One text advised that attending a nobleman’s gathering meant leaving “bearing the fragrant smell of scent and flower.”
But these meals were never merely about indulgence. The Mughals believed that every aroma carried weight. Ginger could rouse warmth, rose could soothe the heart, saffron could fortify the spirit. Physicians stood watch in the kitchens as closely as in hospitals, measuring spices for both taste and temperament, guided by Unani humoral science. To dine at the emperor’s table was to enter a pharmacy disguised as a feast.
Abul Fazl, writing in the Ain-i Akbari, put it clearly: “The equilibrium of temperament, the strength of the body, the capability of receiving grace, and the advantages of religion and the world depend ultimately on proper food.” The emperor’s kitchens, then, were not only places of cooking, but sites of governance. Balance at the table mirrored balance in the body, and balance in the body was the foundation for balance in the empire.
A reading into the Mughal culinary practices raises several questions: What does it reveal about an empire when its kitchens doubled as pharmacies? And what can the aroma of a dish tell us about how the Mughals understood the body, the soul, and the empire? To answer, we follow the scented trails of Mughal Delhi, through palaces and bazaars, through cookbooks that read like medical handbooks, and through the rituals where fragrance, civility, and power came together at the dining table.
Travelers, Climate, and Remedies
Long before food reached the Mughal table, it was shaped by air, water, and season. Babur, stepping into Hindustan for the first time, complained of the violent winds, the burning heat, and the dust that clung to his skin. Jahangir too, in his memoirs, wrote of how the climate near Delhi drained the spirits of its people, leaving them weak and melancholic. Their solution was not indifference but movement: summers in the cool valleys of Kabul or Kashmir, winters in the gentler south. The emperor’s body shifted with the seasons, and so did the empire.
Travelers who came to Delhi confirmed this sensitivity. Francois Bernier, the French physician, noted that gut diseases were rampant in hot months, often treated with dietary remedies. Jesuit missionaries recorded home cures: headaches soothed with powdered pomegranate peel and black pepper, toothaches dulled by bread and stramonia lozenges, vertigo eased with wine steeped in frankincense, deafness treated with lemon juice in the ear. Their notes may sound strange today, but they reveal a world where the kitchen and the pharmacy blurred into one.
Even the Emperor himself was never far from such cures. Babur’s Baburnama recalls how, as a child suffering from fever, he was fed a barley flour mixture; foul-tasting, he admitted, but meant to steady his humors. In these moments, health was not just personal but political and the emperor’s body mirrored the body of the empire.
Mughal medicine began not in apothecaries but in nature. Heat, dust, and season dictated appetite and cure. Barley broth could cool the blood, rosewater soothes the heart in summer, pepper sparks warmth in winter. Palace kitchens, with their rows of herbs and spices, were repositories of this ecological wisdom.
Fragrance, Civility, and Health
If the climate made Delhi fragile, fragrance was imagined as its cure. The language of civility (tahzib) wove fragrance into refinement. The Mirzanama, a manual of the norms of comportment in the seventeenth century advised that no gathering was complete without bowls of flowers, vases of rosewater, and foods that perfumed the air. Civility itself was medicalized: to smell fragrant was to be healthy, and to be healthy was to be moral.
The Mughals believed that odor itself could govern the body. Foul smells clouded digestion and fogged the mind, making it unfit for contemplation or governance. Good smells, by contrast, cleared the head and steadied the spirit. Jahangir, in his memoirs, warned that those exposed to badbu—foul air—grew “weak-hearted, feeble-minded, and sickly.” A banquet fragrant with saffron, rose, and camphor was therefore not mere indulgence but a way of cultivating health.
Medical theory lent weight to this practice. In the Unani system, the body was governed by the balance of four humors—blood, bile, phlegm, and black bile—each linked to qualities of heat, cold, moisture, or dryness. Smell, physicians argued, entered the body like food and tipped the scale. Rose was considered temperate, soothing both body and spirit. Musk and saffron were “hot,” quickening the blood. Camphor and sandalwood were “cold,” calming excess heat.
The dishes embodied this philosophy. Rice boiled with cinnamon released warming steam. Harisa, a wheat porridge softened with rosewater, eased digestion. Barley broth with mint, lemon, and sugar refreshed the body in Delhi’s sweltering summers. Sweetmeats carried sandalwood and amber, faluda musk. To taste these meals was to taste a theory of health.
This attention to scent also shaped ideas of civility and masculinity. In the akhlaqi tradition, the virtuous man was one who mastered his appetites under the rule of intellect. At the table, fragrance became a way to perform that mastery. Too much spice agitated the body; too little failed to fortify the spirit. The refined man knew the difference. Hosting a fragrant feast proved mastery over self and household. Perfume clung as evidence of order: the empire ruled through the senses, beginning with the nose.
Cookbooks, Pharmacies, and the Politics of Taste
If fragrance embodied civility, the kitchens themselves embodied power. Behind the grandeur of Mughal feasts was an extraordinary structure of management. Physicians supervised the kitchens like superintendents, ensuring that every dish aligned with humoral principles. Cooking became collaboration: a bowl of rice or lamb was a delicate equation; too hot, and it could inflame the body, too cold, and it might dampen the spirit. Food became an intimate form of governance, a way to care for the emperor so he could care for the empire.
Abu’l Fazl makes this clear in the Ain. Akbar himself ate sparingly—once a day, never to fullness—yet a hundred dishes were always ready, prepared by cooks brought from Iran, Turan, and Hindustan. The emperor’s restraint signaled self-discipline; the abundance of his table reflected the empire’s reach and prosperity. The kitchen mirrored the court: humility met grandeur, and eating carried weight beyond the body.
Cookbooks reflected this careful orchestration. If kitchens were pharmacies, these were manuals of pharmacology. The Fawaid al-Insan (1590) by Ainul-Mulk Shirazi exemplifies this union of care and science. Written in verse for Akbar, it catalogues foods and drugs from Iran, Arabia, and India, noting temperaments and medicinal virtues: almonds for memory, quince for the stomach, pomegranate to cool excess heat.
Ornate plates and spoons from Nur Jahan’s period.
Cookbooks in the Mughal period also served as instruments of elite authority. Recipes, often named after emperors or courtiers, reflected refinement, wealth, and alignment with imperial taste. Preparing and serving such dishes signaled both cultural sophistication and political awareness.
Under Shah Jahan, the Alfaz-i Adwiya classified foods and drugs by humoral properties: rice was light and cooling, barley broth (ashjaw) refreshing, rosewater temperate, saffron warming. Composite dishes—harisa, sarpacha, halwa and rishta—were prepared with precision. These catalogues reveal Shah Jahan’s aim to infuse care, knowledge, and order into every meal.
The Ilajat-i Darashukohi, dedicated to Dara Shukoh, fused Unani, Ayurveda, Sufi mysticism, Greek learning, and Hindu medicine. Musk, camphor, sandalwood, amla, and neem were reframed as instruments of care. Fabrizio Speziale calls it “a mirror of its patron”: syncretic, ambitious, spiritual. Later works, like the Khulasat al-Mujarrabat, extended this vision globally, introducing chinese teas,scented with musk and ambergris, spiced coffee, quince and violet sherbets, pineapple murabba, saffron-tinged pulao. Every preparation had a humoral effect; every dish tended the body while delighting the senses.
Mughal kitchens and cookbooks were never merely culinary. Each dish balanced the emperor’s body and reinforced imperial authority. Dining was intimate, where philosophy, medicine, and politics converged and the kitchen became both pharmacy and theatre of care.
Nourishing the Empire
If the imperial kitchen disciplined the emperor’s body, public kitchens nourished the city. Akbar’s langar-style kitchens served pulses, barley, rice, and bread to the poor, turning generosity into a daily act of care. In Shahjahanabad, where famine and fever stalked the streets, these kitchens became sites where ruler and ruled met over nourishment. The emperor’s meals mirrored the empire: restraint reflected moral authority, feasts displayed sovereignty, and public feeding enacted care. From physicians tending imperial tables to hakims selling sherbets in the bazaar, the same principle prevailed: to eat was to heal; to balance the body was to order the world.
To ask what it meant that kitchens doubled as pharmacies is to glimpse how the Mughals thought about the empire itself. Just as a dish had to be balanced, so too did the empire. The ruler’s body was a metaphor for the body politic, and his meals a stage on which health, civility, and power were performed. The aroma of rosewater or saffron was never only sensory: it was ethical, medical, imperial. In the end, the Mughal feast was not only a banquet of perfumes. It was a philosophy of rule made edible, a vision of the body, the soul, and the empire, all governed through the healing table.
References
Ahmad, Rizwan. “Food and Medicine in Mughal India.” In Food, Faith and Gender in South Asia: The Cultural Politics of Women’s Food Practices, edited by Nita Kumar, Routledge, 2020, pp. 129–156.
Baliyan, Renu. “Nature, Health and Healing in Mughal India: A Study of Contemporary Chronicles and Travelogues.” Sudarshan Research Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, May 2023, pp. 47–60. ISSN 2583-8792.
Narayanan, Divya. Food and Medicine in the Mughal World. PhD dissertation, Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2020.
Vermani, Neha. “The Perfumed Palate: Olfactory Practices of Food Consumption at the Mughal Court.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 64, no. 1–2, 2021, pp. 13–45.
