Forgotten Hours #10: The Day the Potato Became Indian

There is a potato in almost every Indian kitchen.

It sits in a basket beside the onions. It turns up in the vegetable sack from the sabziwala. It becomes the filling of a samosa, the heart of an aloo paratha, the comfort of dum aloo on a cold evening, the humble sabzi when there is nothing else left and dinner still needs to happen.

We don’t think about it. We just cook it.

But here’s the thing – the potato is not Indian. It never was. It came from the highlands of South America, crossed the Atlantic with European traders, arrived on Indian shores as a foreign curiosity that most people neither grew nor ate, and spent over a century being largely ignored before it somehow ended up in every kitchen in the country.

How that happened is a stranger story than you’d expect. It wasn’t just one arrival. It wasn’t just one person’s decision. It took the Portuguese, the British, a company that ran half a continent, and generations of Indian cooks who quietly transformed a foreign tuber into something that now feels as Indian as chai.

The Forgotten Hour is a long-form history series on Aspiring Blog, published every 2nd and 4th Tuesday of the month. This is the tenth instalment.

A Crop That Started on the Other Side of the World

Long before a potato appeared in any Indian market, it had been feeding people thousands of kilometres away in a landscape completely unlike anything in the subcontinent.

Its story begins in the Andes, the highlands of present-day Peru, Bolivia, and neighbouring regions where Indigenous communities had been cultivating potatoes for thousands of years. They didn’t just grow one kind. They grew hundreds of varieties, adapted to different altitudes, different soils, different weather. They even developed a technique called chuño, freeze-drying potatoes in the cold mountain air, to preserve them for months or years. This was serious agricultural engineering, centuries before anyone in Europe knew the crop existed.

When Spanish explorers reached the Americas in the 16th century, the potato was among the plants that eventually crossed the Atlantic. It didn’t arrive in Europe as a celebrated food. For decades, Europeans were suspicious of it — it wasn’t mentioned in the Bible, it grew underground, and it belonged to the nightshade family. It took time and, in some places, a fair amount of persuasion before it became a staple.

By the time it reached India, it had already been through a long, unlikely journey.

The First Mention — A Banquet in Ajmer

The potato was introduced in India in Gujarat by the Portuguese at the turn of the 16th century. The Portuguese, who had already established a foothold in Goa and along the western coast, were busy introducing new crops to the regions they traded in – pineapples, chillies, guavas. The potato came along with them, referred to as batata, a word that still survives in several Indian languages today.

The earliest recorded mention of the potato in India is surprisingly specific. The first mention of potato in India occurs in an account by the British traveller Edward Terry, of a banquet given in Ajmer in 1615 to Sir Thomas Roe, Queen Elizabeth I’s ambassador to Emperor Jehangir. Terry, who served as chaplain to Roe, noted potatoes among the food served at the Mughal court, which tells us the crop had at least reached northern India by the early 17th century, even if it wasn’t yet widely eaten.

There’s a catch, though. Historians have pointed out that early European travellers sometimes confused potatoes with other tubers – sweet potatoes, yams – and not every mention in the historical record definitely refers to the potato we know today. So we treat these early references carefully, as signs of presence rather than proof of widespread cultivation.

What the evidence does suggest clearly is this: the potato was here. But for a long time, almost nobody was doing much with it.

The Crop Nobody Wanted — Until Someone Decided They Did

This is the part of the story that often gets left out, and it’s actually one of the most interesting parts.

When the British East India Company arrived in India in the 17th century, they found that, although the Portuguese had brought the crop over earlier, very few Indians grew or ate potatoes. The potato had been in India for a hundred years and had barely made a dent in the food culture.

So the British decided to change that.

The East India Company decided to heavily promote the potato among Indian peasants. This wasn’t charity, it was strategy. The British had watched the potato transform agriculture in Ireland and Europe, feeding large populations cheaply and efficiently, and they wanted the same result in India. Societies sprung up around India seeking to promote various crops, especially the potato. The Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India, formed in Calcutta in 1820, held contests for growing the “best” potato.

In south India, potatoes are a major commercial crop, cultivated on about 10,000 hectares in the Nilgiri hills annually, even though the potato was unknown in the region before 1830. First introduced by a British official named Sulavan, potato research was subsequently carried out by the Government Botanic Gardens in Udhagamandalam, Tamil Nadu.

The British had one goal in mind: make the potato the Indian staple the way it had become the Irish staple. But the potato never displaced rice as India’s staple crop. India, as someone once put it, is the great assimilator, it took the potato, but on its own terms.

How a Tuber Found Its Way Into a Thousand Dishes

A crop becoming common in the fields is one thing. A crop becoming part of how a culture cooks and eats is something else entirely.

The potato had one remarkable quality that made it easy to love: it had almost no strong flavour of its own. It was a blank canvas. It could absorb turmeric, cumin, coriander, mustard seeds, chillies, ginger – whatever the kitchen offered and give back something completely different every time. It could be boiled, fried, roasted, mashed, stuffed, curried, or eaten on its own with salt and lime. Very few ingredients are that flexible.

Indian kitchens noticed.

In one region, the potato got mashed with spices and stuffed inside bread – aloo paratha. In another, it was cooked with cauliflower and simple spices – aloo gobi. Somewhere else, it was mixed with peas, shaped into patties and fried – aloo tikki. And then there is the samosa.

Here’s a detail worth knowing: the samosa was once a rugged, high-calorie snack for Silk Road merchants and nomads, traveling Central Asian traders who stuffed these durable, savory pockets into their saddlebags for long journeys. By the 13th and 14th centuries, Central Asian traders, scholars, and armies brought the pastry across the Hindu Kush into South Asia. The potato filling, the thing we now think of as the whole point of the samosa – came centuries later, only after the Portuguese introduced the potato to India. Local cooks quickly realized that the cheap, starchy potato was an ideal canvas for bold spices like cumin, coriander, ginger, and garam masala.

What feels like one dish with one history is actually two completely separate histories, a Central Asian pastry and a South American tuber – meeting in an Indian kitchen and becoming something neither of them started out as.

That is how food actually works.

The Aloo That Took Over a Language

One sign that a food has truly been absorbed into a culture is when it stops being described and starts being assumed.

The potato in India crossed that line a long time ago.

The word aloo is instantly understood across the country regardless of region or language. It shows up in dish names the way a colour or a texture might, not as a special ingredient being highlighted, but as a given. Aloo paratha. Aloo tikki. Aloo gobi. Dum aloo. Aloo matar. Aloo baingan. The prefix just tells you what’s in it; the potato itself has stopped being remarkable enough to need explanation.

Across western India, the Portuguese influence lives on in the word batata – batata vada in Maharashtra, batata nu shaak in Gujarat. In the east, it shows up differently again. The same vegetable, absorbed differently depending on who was cooking it and what was already in the kitchen.

This is what cultural assimilation actually looks like, not a single moment of adoption, but a slow, uneven accumulation of uses until the foreign thing stops feeling foreign at all.

The Quiet Agricultural Revolution

The potato’s transformation in India wasn’t just about food. It was also about farming.

As cultivation expanded, pushed along by British promotion, then by independent India’s own agricultural research, the potato became one of the country’s most important crops. Today, potato is India’s fastest-growing staple crop, with 2022 production more than 20 times that of 1961, transforming from a colonial novelty into a vital contributor to food security, rural incomes, and agricultural innovation.

An important institutional milestone came in 1935, when organised potato research began at stations in Shimla and Kufri in the hills of what is now Himachal Pradesh – work that eventually led to the development of varieties suited to India’s different growing conditions and climates.

Today, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, and Bihar together produce the bulk of India’s potato crop – regions that were not major potato-growing areas at all two centuries ago. The crop crossed the subcontinent the same way it crossed the ocean: slowly, unevenly, carried by a mixture of commercial interest, agricultural experiment, and people simply figuring out that it worked.

The Vegetable We Stopped Noticing

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the potato in India is how completely ordinary it has become.

We save our attention for expensive ingredients, unusual dishes, food we’ve travelled to discover. The potato doesn’t ask for any of that. It just turns up, does its job, and leaves the cooking to whoever’s holding the pan.

But behind that ordinariness is a journey that covers several continents and several centuries. Andean farmers who cultivated it in the mountains long before any European arrived. Portuguese sailors who carried it east. A company that ran half a subcontinent and decided, for reasons that were not remotely altruistic, to push it into Indian fields. And generations of Indian cooks who took a bland foreign tuber and turned it into aloo paratha, into samosa, into dum aloo, into something they would eventually stop thinking of as foreign at all.

The potato didn’t arrive in India with a plan to become indispensable. It arrived as a curiosity, sat mostly ignored for a century, got pushed on people by a colonial trading company, and then quietly became one of the most beloved ingredients in one of the world’s most diverse food cultures.

The next time you’re eating aloo paratha on a weekday morning without thinking about it at all – that is the proof that the journey worked.

Next time on The Forgotten Hour — another quiet arrival, another transformation that history forgot to announce, another hour the record almost didn’t keep.

---

Missed the Previous Forgotten Hour Stories? Read Here