Afanasij Nikitin & ‘Indian Corn’
This piece appeared on my Patreon account way back in 2022. I thought I’d move it here so that it would be more accessible.
A while I ago I wrote a piece on errors of translation or interpretation brought about by Columbian exchange-related misunderstandings. These misapprehensions may generally be attributed to the application of the same word to both an Afro-Eurasian plant or animal and an American one, like the use ‘pepper’ in English to refer to both black pepper (Piper nigrum) from Asia as well as various species of Capsicum (chillis, bell peppers, etc.) from Central and South America. Translation errors of this kind often go unnoticed in editions of medieval South and Southeast Asian texts; they’re less common in translations of medieval European works, perhaps because most translators and editors don’t need reminding that they didn’t have potatoes and chillis (etc.) in Europe before the sixteenth century. The emphasis on continuity over the longue durée among scholars of the Afro-Eurasian tropics has tended to mask the impact of the Columbian exchange and seems to make these errors more likely: chillis are traditional in Java; this must mean that they’ve been in Java for a long time.
I thought I would share an interesting related philological mishap that I came across while researching something else. It concerns an English translation of the account of the travels of fifteenth-century Russian merchant Afanasij (or Athanasius) Nikitin (Афана́сий Ники́тин) by Count Mikhail Mikhailovich Vielgorski-Matyushkin (1822–1855), a Russian noble of Polish ancestry. More specifically, it concerns the (im)possibility that maize was being grown and eaten in India before Columbus.
The Japanese polymath Minakata Kumagusu submitted this query to the journal Nature (61:392) back in the year 1900:
‘IN the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” vol. xv. p. 309, it is stated that no mention was ever made of maize by Eastern travellers in Africa or Asia prior to the 16th century A.D. Slight doubts about this statement have occurred to my mind lately, while I was reading the Hakluyt Society’s “India in the Fifteenth Century.” There, in the English translation by the late Count Wielhorsky of the “Travels” of Athanacius [sic] Nikitin, the Russian, whose Eastern travels took place about 1470–1474, when the work was written by himself, we read concerning the Indians: “They live on Indian corn, carrots with oil, and different herbs” (p. 17). Has this mention of the cereal any weight to countenance the theories which seek to assert that maize was known in the East before the discovery of the Western Continent? Or, does what is meant or translated by the word Indian corn here differ materially from Zea Mays [sic]?’
Minakata goes on to discuss a couple of early (i.e. sixteenth-century) references to maize in Japan, which are of course very interesting, but what intrigued me here was the possibility of the existence of a term in Afanasij Nikitin’s description of India that could plausibly be translated as ‘Indian corn’ or ‘maize’ (Zea mays). Maize is native to the Americas; it was domesticated from teosinte in prehistory in the highlands of Guatemala and certainly was not present anywhere in Afro-Eurasia until the very end of the fifteenth century, some time after Afanasij Nikitin died.
Nikitin was a traveller from Tver in what is now the Russian Federation. He lived during the mid-to-late fifteenth century and perished in 1472 at Smolensk on his return journey from Bidar, in India, where he had spent some time living and working. He had written a diary or itinerary, the main biographical narrative of which is interspersed with interesting comments about commodities and local customs and, notably, the occasional digression consisting of Islamic religious expressions in Arabic. Nikitin may have converted to Islam during his travels, although his account does suggested that he regretted having done this if he had in fact done so. Anyway, his diary was added to and copied alongside collections of chronicles in Old East Slavic, the literary form of the ancestor of Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian, which was heavily influenced by Old Church Slavonic. The diary thus acquired an enduring place in the Russian canon under the title Хожєнїє за трї морѧ (modern Russian: Хождение за три моря, ‘journey beyond the three seas’).
Nikitin was incidentally the first author to write an account of Java in Old East Slavic or, indeed, in any Slavic language. Like Marco Polo, Nikitin had not actually visited the island, but he does appear to have heard about it from a knowledgeable source. His information about India is also seemingly accurate and quite fascinating, unburdened as it is by the baggage carried by Latin Christian accounts of Asia following Marco Polo.
So, does Nikitin’s Хожєнїє за трї морѧ mention ‘Indian corn’, i.e. maize (Zea mays)? Nope. Of course not.
The image above is from f.378v of the Троицкий список (Troickij Spisok, or Trinity Recension) of the text containing Nikitin’s Хожєнїє за трї морѧ, which has been published in facsimile and transcription by Sebastian Kempgen. (You can also find higher resolution images of the manuscript on the Kodeks German Medieval Slavistics site.) This manuscript was copied in 1563 but it is nonetheless considered a reliable witness for Nikitin’s text.
The passage here is a description of food and foodways in India; here’s Vielgorski-Matyushkin’s translation of the relevant section, the rest of which isn’t too bad:
‘[The Indians’] fare is poor. They eat not with one another nor with their wives, and live on Indian corn, carrots with oil, and different herbs. Always eating with the right hand, they will never set the left hand to anything nor use a knife; the spoon is unknown.’
I have highlighted the word that probably misled Vielgorski-Matyushkin (and Minakata-san) in the image above. It isn’t a Russian word; it says кичири, or kičiri in scientific transliteration. If you’re familiar with Indian food then you’ve probably already sussed that this is a reference to khichdi or khicṛī (खिचड़ी), a dish of rice mixed with lentils or mung beans (with spices and butter or ghee, as suggested by Nikitin’s text), and the source of the English word ‘kedgeree’ (incidentally one of Britain’s best breakfast foods). Khicṛī is attested earlier than the fifteenth century — Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, writing of Indian cooking in the fourteenth century, describes a dish made of mung beans and rice cooked with ghee and known as kishrī (كِشْرِي) — and we shouldn’t be surprised to see it here, particularly as Nikitin sprinkled his text liberally with untranslated Hindustani, Turkic, and Arabic.
Why would Vielgorski-Matyushkin translate this as ‘Indian corn’? Well, there’s always the possibility that the text he was working from was corrupt, and there’s no doubt that the Journey Beyond the Three Seas is a difficult text. I’d guess, though, that he took the word кичири to mean, or to be a copying error for, кукуруза (kukuruza), the modern Russian word for ‘maize’. Кукуруза has cognates in most other Slavic languages and in Romanian; its etymology is nonetheless a bit of a mystery. Whatever its origins, it’s almost certainly unrelated to khichdi. Awareness of the Columbian exchange wasn’t strong in the 1850s — the term wouldn’t be coined for another century — so the error seems forgivable.
Incidentally: Serge Zenkovsky translated this section in his 1963 book Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales thusly:
‘[The Indians] eat rice and rice meal [кичири] with butter, and various herbs, which they boil in butter and milk.’
The moral of the story, I suppose, is that it’s not a good idea to rely on old translations when trying to find out about the past — and that sometimes an accurate translation depends on a proper understanding of the global historical context.
A. J. West — Lisbon, 2022 (posted here 2024).
