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Why have you named the IndiaOrganix curry house in Brighton Maharaja of Tripura?

posted on Monday, September 01, 2008 11:49 PM

by Sanjay Kumar, Brighton

'Everything connects' E.M Forster

We are often asked by our Brighton customers why we named our curry house the Maharaja of Tripura.

There is no one particular reason why we chose the name. But quite a few different reasons which miraculously came together one late night during a boisterous male bonding/executive brainstorming session in a rather seedy (but toasty warm) Brighton pub, Bulldog in Kemptown, I think.

During the 7th round of Stella Artois and salty nuts we got roud to the all important task of giving a name to our curry house. We talked all night. We still had no idea what to call it. So we just continued talking in a rather meandering, witless manner. We were passed caring at that point. We were just so grateful not to have leeches sucking on our soft softs or having to swat mosquitoes, the size of overgrown mutant pears, of our arse every six minutes.

Our brainstorming session started off badly, tapered off towards the middle, and the resultant name is what we finished up with in the early hours of a cold Sunday morning in Brighton.

Bear with me while I set the scene so you, dear reader, get to see how we arrived at Maharajah of Tripura.

We had just got back from the spice gardens of Assam, Orissa and Tripura and we were all rather chuffed with ourselves. We had (finally, after two days of being stuck up a hill in Dharmanagar with a bad tempered pygmy, his one-legged dog called Kaloy, and a psycho mongoose) managed to sort out supply and distribution channels for our little project in Brighton: IndiaOrganix.

We finally had a reliable supply of 52 (the total number of spice ingredients roasted daily by our Brighton chefs and blended in 27 masala combinations, 12 dry roasted spice mixe's, 8 herb pastes, and 4 types of rustic tandoori marinades) types of premium organic spices & herbs sourced from small-scale producers and farmers groups.

Our tandoori chef was well pleased, and well pissed. He was smiling with a sort beautific look; the sort of smile he has when he's gently roasting his aromatics in the tandoor. He, poor sod, was especially grateful that there are no leeches in Brighton.

The word Maharaja is Sanskrit for 'great king' or 'high king' Its use is primarily for Hindu potentates (ruler or sovereign).

Maharaja is also used to denote the Head Chef at religious, poltical, tribal or wedding feasts. He is the one that prepares all the wet massala marinades and pastes from the dry roasted ingredients and spice oils. IndiaOrganix in Brighton, technically, has two Maharajahs in the kitchen, which is an interesting situation.

Our man in South India, Prakash Omari, was knicknamed PPP by our university friends, short for Prakash the Patiala Peg. In India any serving of alcohol which is double than the normal serving, or unusually large, is referred to as the Patiala Peg. There are multiple stories behind this epithet, most related to the opulent and hedonistic lifestyle of one of the former rulers of Patiala, Maharaja Bhupinder Singh, who was a heavy drinker and something of a sexual athlete during the week long naach orgies, which were a common feature of the British Raj. The Maharaja, who was usually driven around in a motorcade of over 50 Rolls Royces, was a flamboyant and wealthy ruler, believed to have had over 280 concubines in his harem, and fathering over 80 children. In his youth he was a brilliant and hard-hitting batsman, captaining the Indian cricket team on its 1911 tour of England.

Our Maharaja of Patiala was man known to be fond of getting out his big bat and wolloping a few balls when he got that infernal itch. We salute you Sir! We suspect he picked this up from his English friends, possibly the then Viceroy of India, the 4th Earl of Minto, sometime around 1910.

During the 300 year long campaigns of the British Raj in India the Maharajas of Patiala were pliant and docile clients of the British Empire. The relationship was so cosy that the British, in an uncharacteristically generous gesture, ended up making him a Knight Grand Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire and the King George V Coronation Medal in 1911.

H.H Maharaja Bhupinder Singh unveiled The Gateway monument to the Royal Pavilion grounds in Brighton on 26 October, 1921. The Gateway is dedicated to the soldiers, sailors and airmen from the Indian subcontinent and South Asia that were hospitalised in Brighton & Hove, while serving with marked bravery and distinction during the so-called Great War.

The Royal Pavilion is a former royal residence located in Brighton, England. It was built in the early 19th Century as a seaside retreat for the then Prince Regent, who by all accounts was also fond of the opulent and hedonistic lifestyle favoured by some of the Indian royal houses. It is often referred to as the Brighton Pavilion. It is built in the Indo-Saracenic style prevalent in India for most of the 19th century.

The historical gardens of the Brighton Pavilion once contained rare shrubs and ferns, which were shipped to England from the botanical gardens of the Ujjayanta Palace in Agartala, Tripura. Where we had spent weeks in rural bliss working up a daily sweat with macho brawny farm boys in remote turmeric fields, while doe-eyed gazelles and pygmies watched.

I suppose the real reason for the name of our little curry house is because the people behind IndiaOrganix all come from the Indian state of Tripura. I was born in North Tripura, a land of 186 kings, botanical gardens, wildlife sanctuaries, a recorded history of over 2500 years, and ancient spice gardens farmed by the many tribal communities living together and speaking in over 220 regional dialects belonging to the Indo-Aryan, Sino-Tibetan and Austric language families.

I suppose at the end of the day we are just paying homage to a great region of India largely unknown to the West. At IndiaOrganix we think that the spice from the north east of India is probably the finest in the world. India's north east states are connected to the rest of India by a narrow strip of land known as the Siliguri Corridor or Chicken's Neck. Much of this region is notably ethnically and linguistically different from the rest of India. It's a place of enchanting beauty.

So there you have it folks. Lots of different (but interconnected) things led us to the name. That's why we named our little curry house in Brighton Maharaja of Tripura.

Namaste!

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