Turmeric
Haldi, the Yellow of Weddings
- Earliest record
- 26th century BCEStarch grains of cooked Curcuma (cf. turmeric) from a cooking pot at the Harappan site of Farmana, Haryana (2600 to 2200 BCE), reported by Arunima Kashyap and Steve Weber in 2010. That is evidence of the plant's use, not of a rite. The ritual record begins with the Kauśika Sūtra, the Atharvaveda's ritual book, whose date is not fixed here.
In Vedic ritual turmeric worked by colour. In the Kauśika Sūtra's jaundice rite the patient eats turmeric porridge and is washed onto yellow birds. Bloomfield (1897) read it as yellow returned to yellow.
Maurice Bloomfield, Hymns of the Atharva-Veda, together with Extracts from the Ritual Books and the Commentaries, Sacred Books of the East 42 (Oxford, 1897), hymn I.22 and commentary.
Curcuma longa, turmeric or haldi, a ginger-family plant whose yellow rhizome is used in Hindu rites.
More context
William Crooke, writing of northern India in 1896, described the anointing now known by the Hindi word for turmeric, haldi. A few days before the wedding, bride and groom were rubbed with oil and turmeric, a paste called abtan. The bride then wore a turmeric-dyed robe until the wedding, and invitations were coloured with it. Married women who died went to the pyre in a turmeric-dyed shroud. In the Kauśika Sūtra's rite for Atharvaveda hymn 1.22, a jaundiced patient eats turmeric porridge and is daubed with it. Starch grains of cooked Curcuma, compared with turmeric, come from a cooking pot at the Harappan site of Farmana (2600 to 2200 BCE): evidence of use, not of rite.
Light
Crooke finds turmeric at both ends of married life: a bride's anointing and a wife's shroud.
Shadow
The same yellow clothed the widow burnt alive: Crooke records a turmeric-dyed shroud for satī.