Thook de, India!

On lending a splash of post-colonial colour to London

London was in a pother, and the legendary British stiff upper lip was noticeably aquiver. The causes of this disquiet were great blood-red splatters appearing everywhere, on the walls of buildings, on pavements, in parks.

What were they, and what caused them? Were they blood stains, and who was responsible for them? Was there a sudden outbreak of vampirism, a possible side effect of the Covid pandemic, manifesting itself as a symptom of the bug making a comeback? Was a latter-day Jack the Ripper on the prowl? Scotland Yard was called in to investigate. Samples of the red substance were collected, and sent for forensic analysis.

The results revealed that the ominous splotches and globs were not blood stains, but the products of human salivary glands, stimulated by the chewing of the leaves of the Piper Betel climbing vine, which, stuffed with chopped areca nuts, and liberally smeared with katha paste (Acacia catechou), made up the Indian digestive aid-cum-mouth freshener known as paan.

However, while the mastication of paan did induce the production of copious amounts of saliva that required ejection, the question arose whether the practice of paan chomping caused spitting, or whether the determination to spit created the paan. What lay behind the spitting image of India?

Social anthropologists shed light on the matter, tracing the origins of this oral practice to the large signs displayed in Indian post offices, in 1950s and 1960s: Do Not Affix Stamps With Sputum.

This official proscription provoked the innate response of swaraj, so characteristic of the Indian ethos – not permitted to affix sputum on stamps, the populace began to affix sputum on all and sundry else: streets, trees, offices, vehicles, parked or passing.

As the Culture Correspondent of The Guarjian newspaper, Anne Arky, noted in an article titled ‘Great Expectorations’, this free-spirited expression of individual independence was exported to UK, and to London, as an ongoing extension of the Freedom Movement, against 250 years of colonial rule, and the expropriation of the Kohinoor, without so much as a by-your-leave, and was a legitimate statement, worthy of the Turner Prize for Installation Art.

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