Sugar toys: A sweet ode to Diwali

There’s a phrase in North India that denotes good news or festive cheer. ‘Muh meetha karna’, or to taste something sweet, is an idiom that particularly marks the Diwali season. But as I see boxes and boxes of sweets, all gaily wrapped with translucent paper, I feel that before we gorge on laddoos and barfis, we need to pay homage to the one ingredient that is at the heart of all these sweets — sugar.

Sugarcane, from which sugar is produced, is believed to have originated in Papua New Guinea, from where it came to India way back in time. Nearchus, a Greek officer in the army of Alexander the Great, mentioned a ‘reed tree’ in India that produced ‘honey without bees’. In the 11th century, Al-Idrisi pointed to the abundance of sugarcane in India; Ibn Battuta, in the 14th century, remarked on the quality of the sugarcane of Barkur, a major trade centre in the South. India’s tryst with sugar and sugarcane carries on — it is today the second-largest producer of sugar in the world, after Brazil.

There was a time when sugar was rationed, and there was much joy in homes because Diwali meant a spike in the sugar quota that was allotted to each family. And there was good reason for the increase, as sugar played — and continues to play — a significant role in the festival. Chashni, or sugar syrup, goes into various kinds of sweets — from rasgulla and gulab jamun to jalebi and balushahi.

One of my favourite all-time sugar sweets is Mysore pak, prepared with nothing but sugar and ghee (and some gram flour).

I grew up in a sugarcane belt, in the midst of fields of swaying cane reeds. Every year, cane would be transported on what we called buggies to sugar factories in nearby towns. The neighbourhood reeked of a special kind of smell triggered by the manufacture of sugar (and gur, too, of course).

One of my earliest childhood memories of Diwali is of sugar toys being sold on the roadside. These were primarily white, made of just thickened sugar syrup, and shaped like animals and other forms. Some of these were garishly coloured and caused much drooling (and, I fear, terrible indigestion, too). Some street vendors carried sticks with a sugar contraption shaped like an animal. There are different versions of the toy candies in the country. In Karnataka, for instance, the sugar syrup is thickened with a bit of curd and milk.

Sugar toys were part of a ritual called gharkunda. In some regions, Chef Ashwani Kumar tells us, the men in the family would build a little house out of bricks, mud, or thick paper. This would be painted, and then, inside the house, family members would place sweets like laddoos, some kheel, murmura, diyas and sugar toys. The little girls in the house would distribute the sweets among friends and neighbours.

Similar to these toys are our batasas, relished and revered in many parts of the country. A white, almost flat sugar candy, it is used in many prayer rituals and is offered as prasad. A tiny variation of that — small, round and a bit hard — is called ramdana, or nakuldana in the East. Another predominantly sugar-based sweet is one I saw a lot of as a kid but hardly get to taste now. This is a thin sugar sheet, dotted with peppercorns. The pungency of the pepper ably complements the sweetness of the sugar. Another all-time childhood favourite was ghee bhura. Bhura is a powdered sugar that is non-milled but refined. Mixed with desi ghee, it tastes like ambrosia. My roti intake went up manifold whenever ghee bhura was being served.

And that reminds me of another popular idiom. ‘Aapke muh mein ghee shakkar’ — let there be ghee and sugar in your mouth — is an oft-repeated phrase. We say that to someone who has wished us well, and we hope that it turns out to be true. And what could be sweeter than that?

Sugar toys

Ingredients

Sugar 1 cup

Water 1 cup

Method

Get wooden moulds of animals and other shapes. Wash them, and keep them ready. In a pot, heat the water and melt the sugar. Keep stirring till you get a thick, four-string-like consistency. Pour this into the mould, and let it set. If the consistency is just right, the figures won’t take long to form. Take them out, and share with friends and family.

— The writer is a food critic