South Gujarat Littoral · Western Coastal Strip

The small things

A fire with an itineraryThe Iranshah fire has been moved at least five times in eight centuries — Sanjan, the Bahrot caves, Vansda, Navsari, Valsad, and Udvada since 1742. What is continuous is the flame, not the building, and it was carried by hand each time. India has eight Atash Behrams, the highest grade of consecrated fire; two of them are on this coast.
A sweet with exactly one nightGhari is eaten in bulk on Chandani Padvo, the autumn full-moon night, on Surat rooftops with bhusu. Shops run continuously through the preceding week. The sweet is available at other times and is not the same thing, in the way that a Christmas cake in June is not.
A grain that lasts ten weeks a yearPonk is jowar cut at the milk stage and roasted green. A field yields it for a matter of days and the region for roughly ten weeks. It cannot usefully be dried, frozen or shipped, so it is one of very few Indian foods that has never developed an off-season version — the only way to eat it is to be here between December and February.
The workforce arrived from three hundred kilometres awaySurat's diamond industry was built overwhelmingly by migrants from Saurashtra villages in Bhavnagar, Amreli and Junagadh. The wages travelled back the other way and paid for houses, weddings and temple building across the peninsula, and the Ghogha–Hazira ferry across the Gulf of Khambhat now serves the same traffic. A Kathiawadi Navratri circle in a Surti ward is the visible end of that.
Only diamond cuts diamondA stone is polished on a spinning cast-iron scaife charged with diamond dust, because nothing softer will abrade it. A round brilliant carries fifty-seven facets, each set by hand against the wheel at an angle the polisher holds by feel. Surat does the majority of the world's cutting by volume on that principle, in workshops rather than factories.
A dish named after a mistakeLocho means a mess or a bungle. The standard account is that a khaman batter failed to set, was sold anyway, and became a breakfast eaten with a spoon. The name was never changed, and the idiom and the dish are still the same word — which is why "aa to locho thai gayo" is funnier in Surat than anywhere else.
One painting, three administrations, one registrationThe Warli wedding chauk is painted on house walls across the Dangs, Valsad, the enclave between the states and the Konkan hills to the south, by the same communities using the same rice paste and the same three shapes. The geographical indication registered in 2014 sits under a single state's name. The practice predates every one of those boundaries.
Two halves of one territory, six hundred kilometres apartDaman is on this estuarine coast. Diu is off the tip of the Kathiawar peninsula, in a different climate, dialect and kitchen. They are administered together and share an administrative code, which means that code has to appear in two entirely separate cultural regions in this record — the neatest available proof that administrative units are the wrong unit for culture.
A colonial land payment that became a folk festivalAt the Dang Darbar in Ahwa, the descendants of the Dangs' raja and naik families receive an annual payment from the state, continuing sums first agreed in the nineteenth century in exchange for forest leases. The handover is public and is followed by several days of dancing and a market. A timber transaction has become the slope's largest secular gathering.
The leaf that has to be neutralisedColocasia leaves carry calcium oxalate and will burn the mouth raw. The besan paste smeared on them before rolling contains tamarind and jaggery, and the acid is what makes patra edible. It reads as a flavour decision and is actually a chemistry one — the same reason the leaves are never used without souring anywhere they are eaten.
A narrow gauge built for timberThe two-foot-six-inch line from Bilimora up to Waghai was built under the Gaekwad state to bring timber and forest produce down off the Dangs slope, and then spent a century carrying people who had no other way down. Service has been intermittent in recent years; the alignment and the small stations are still there.
The gate to MeccaSurat was the principal port of Mughal India and the embarkation point for the Hajj, which earned it the epithet Bab-ul-Makkah. Its commercial reflex outlived the pilgrimage traffic and the European factories both — the same estuary now cuts most of the world's diamonds and weaves a large share of India's synthetic cloth.

Small local details of South Gujarat Littoral — customs, quirks and things that are not in any guidebook. (12)