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Vol. XXXII No. 9, August 16-31, 2022

Chakkarai, Cheeni, Askã in the 1970s Madras

-- by Anantanarayanan Raman, anant@raman.id.au

Many of us in Madras may recall that white sugar, chakkarai (spoken Tamil), was popular as cheeni (rather cheeni-ch-chakkarai) and askaa as well, in the 1970s. Gritty, crystalline, particulate véllam (jaggery), as against the ûrûndai-véllam (mandai-véllam), is sarkarai — a term that originates from Sarkaraa (Sanskrit). Historically Sarkaraa meant ‘gravelly’, ‘gritty’, and ‘dirty’, although these meaningshave lost currency presently. Sangam period Tamil people primarily used honey as the sweetening agent. The extraction of the unbleached, crystalline sugar from sugarcane (species of Saccharum, Poaceae) is indicated in the Rig Veda (1500-1000 BC). Patanjali’s Mahaabasyaa (estimated 2nd Century BC) speaks of crystalline form of unbleached, crystalline sugar. International sugar technologists indicate this sugar type as ‘brown sugar’, although this term means differently in India presently.

Picture courtesy: The Hindu.

The term cheeni started in usage in Calcutta and gradually spread to the rest of India, including Madras. Yang-tai Chow, a Chinese immigrant, and a few of his fellow Chinese, arrived in Calcutta in 1778 to work in the developing Calcutta harbour. In the next few months, these Chinese men established a sugar mill there, because China had already mastered industrial-level sugar production. Following the technique then known in Europe, Yang-tai and colleagues produced refined sugar, removing the particulate impurities in extracted sugar. Yang-tai et al.’s product came to be referred as cheeni in Bengal, because it was produced by the Chinese. However, it needs to be noted that the term cheeni originated from Arabic, and with the sugar produced by the Chinese in India, the term cheeni spread throughout India via Urudu.

Now to askaa. Askaa (presently, Asikã) is a small town in Ganjam, a district of the erstwhile wider Madras Presidency and now in Odisha. What is today known as the Aska Sugar Works and Distillery Limited (ASWDL) was established by the popular business group of Madras, the E.I.D. (East-India Distilleries) Parry & Company (hereafter ‘Parry-s’) in 1856. The Parrys – started by Thomas Parry in Madras in 1788 – established their sugar (jaggery) mill in Nellikuppam, presently under the Cuddalore city administration) in 1842. Shortly after, the Parrys established the Aska sugar mills to produce unbleached crystalline sugar, because Aska region farmed substantial volume of sugarcane, as was in Nellikuppam–Cuddalore region. However, transportation was a major hiccup for the Parrys administration in Madras and Aska sugar mills in Aska. One Fredrick Joseph Vivian Minchin, a book-keeper with the Binny & Company in Madras procured the Aska sugar mills from the Parrys in 1856 and ran it successfully for the next couple of decades. Frederick Minchin produced refined, bleached sugar by introducing the available latest German technology. Minchin obtained the state-of-the-art European sugar technology known in the large-scale production of sugar from sugar beet. A six-page writeup on the production system and economics of the Aska sugar mills by Lt. Col. F. C. Cotton of the Madras Engineers is available in Madras Journal of Literature & Science, II (N.S.; XVIII, O.S.), published in 1858 (dated 1857). The refined, bleached sugar from the Aska production unit marketed in Madras in the early years of the 20th century came to be referred as aska, as with the silk of Kanchipuram referred in spoken Tamizh as Kanchi, Kanhcipuram in spoken Tamizh.

Industrial production of sugar from sugarcane in India and other south-eastern nations was largely stimulated by the industrial production of sugar from sugar beet in the mid-19th century. In 1747, Andreas Sigismund Marggraf of the Prussian empire discovered that sugar-beet tubers include as much sucrose as sugarcane did. Through selective breeding, sugar content in sugar beets was raised to 16 per cent in the early 1800s. Modern hybrids of sugar beet include up to 20 per cent sucrose, matching with the sucrose content of sugarcane. In 1801, Franz Carl Achard, a student of Marggraf, opened the world’s first beet sugar factory in Silesia (on the banks of the Oder, modern Poland). Production process was refined over time to make beet sugar production more effective. By 1850, beet sugar was able to compete with the production and pricing of cane sugar, essentially produced in warm countries such as the West Indies and Indonesia.

In the past, ‘bone char’ (natural, activated carbon obtained by burning animal bones) was used as a decolorizing filter to remove the coloured particulate impurities from raw-cane sugar. Bone char filters enabled the sugar of sugar-cane source in particular to stay white. Modern technology has largely replaced the use of bone char by using granulated carbon instead. Because bone char used to be prepared by incinerating animal bones, obtaining the left active carbon – a bit like making wood charcoal, some of the highly conservative temple administrations in southern India, e.g., Guruvayur Sri Krishnan Koil, reject refined, white sugar in the temple’s dedicative foods.

In spite of a rich sugar legacy and knowledge of sugar extraction from sugar cane in India, India experienced severe sugar shortage in the early decades of the 20th century. The knowledge that sugar content could be improved with selective breeding inspired Indian plant breeders to seek better options via selective breeding of sugarcane. Research centres to develop sugarcane hybrids were established in India and the Sugarcane Breeding Institute (SBI), adjacent to the Madras Agricultural College (earlier in Saidapet, Madras, and presently in Coimbatore) made great strides in changing the sugar production complexion in India. The most remarkable science in this direction was by Tiruvaadi Saambasiva Venkataraman (1884-1963).

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