ETYMOLOGY

Sugar

Caution: If you’re on a diet, skip paragraph one.

We love sugar, don’t we? From chocolates to ice-creams and from cakes to candies, sugar makes up things that are like basic ingredients of an ideal life these days. In the Pakistani society, the mere fact that sugar has something (which is a lot) to do with tea, makes it a necessity in every household. Oh, and then it is also responsible for good relationship with neighbours - some people visit neighbours only when they run out of sugar! Today we shall see how the stuff, without which our halwas wouldn’t be the same, isn’t called anything other than “sugar”.

Sugar is one of those words in English language whose etymology leaves a clear trail leading us to the historical events it has witnessed; just like a Nutella jar, with its bottom tinted with Nutella would leave evidences of where it has been. It isn’t the first paragraph? Sorry! So, the tale begins here, as in this geographical location. Yes, sugar was first produced in its current form in the Indian subcontinent and the evidence comes from Sanskrit and Pali texts. In Sanskrit, the word sharkara mean ground or candied sugar.

It was around eighth century that the Arabs thought of the idea to grow the crop in whole of the Abbasid caliphate, just like the Indians were doing. As a result, by 10th century in Mesopotamia, there wasn’t a single village that did not cultivate sugarcane. In Farsi, the Sanskrit sharkara had become shakar (that’s how we got that in Urdu), and it became sukkar in Arabic. The Abbasid caliphs then started growing the crop in Spain and Sicily, which was in a sense the introduction of sugarcane to Europe. The West was not deprived of sugar before that though; the trade with India had been going on since the times of the Greeks, who used to marvel at the idea of “honey without bees”.  However, it wasn’t until the Crusades that the West considered sugar as a substitute of honey as their sweetener. The Arabic sukkar became succarum in Latin. Later, English got its share of sugar (the word) from the French sucre.

The concept of sugar the Arabs introduced was of a sugarloaf, which was a semi-hard sugar cone that required a hammer to break it down. Till the 18th century in Europe, when you asked for sugar from a shopkeeper, you would get a broken piece of sugarloaf. The Europeans were so gaga over sugarloaves that they actually named a hill “Sugarloaf Mountain”  in Brazil!

In fact, during the colonisation of Americas, sugar made up an important part of the economy. Sugarcane was brought to the Caribbean by Christopher Columbus in his second voyage to the New World. Hence, began a gruesome trade triangle between America, Europe and Africa: sugar was cultivated in the New World; taken to Europe where rum was made out of it; the profits were used to purchase manufactured goods which were then traded for African slaves. These slaves were taken to the New World to cultivate more sugar.

The Brazilian sugarcane cultivation first began after its colonisation by Portugal. Yes, football came to Brazil around the same time. The sugarcane crops started in 1532 and were handled by African slaves. The conditions were so severe that the average life expectancy of a slave working in Brazil in sugar production was 23 years! Situation in the British colonies were relatively better: the slaves were at least able to reproduce and keep growing. So the Brits were able to maintain an ever-growing population of slaves at their service, and this way, the people of African descent eventually made up a significant population of the United States. In Brazil, however, more slaves died than were born, so there always was a need for importing more slaves into the country till 1880s when slavery was abolished.

Today, Brazil is one of the largest producers of sugarcane in the world. That’s not because they have a sweet tooth, which they also might, but actually a lot of it goes into the production of alcohol fuel, of which they produce 18 billion liters annually.

Anyway, thank God we got a name for the commodity that sweetens up our desserts: sugar. Gosh, even the word “sugar” itself sounds sweet! Wouldn’t it be a shame if we some-etymological-how ended up having another name for it? I would still call it sugar!