An Afghan, two Indian poets and a German

And their connections to Minute Rice and Harvard

What earthly connection can all these people have and how can one mix rice with poetry? Therein lies an interesting tale concerning an enterprising individual, a fiery orator, a German scholar and the Urdu poetry of Ghalib and Mir. I stumbled into this by chance when I was doing an in-depth study on a great personality named Syud Hossain, whom I will write about later. This however has to do with an Afghan émigré named Ataullah Ozai Durrani, his obsession with rice and poetry. Being from a rice farming family myself, the story intrigued me and well, it now finds a place for itself in my collection, delaying the story of Hossain for later publication.

The Durrani’s (remember Salim Durrani the sixer hitting cricketer – also a man from Kabul?)or Abdali’s are Pashtuns from the Kandahar area of Afghanistan. I will not write much about the dynasty or their history, but well, as the story goes, in 1926, when Kandahar was part of the British empire, in the NWFP, a young 30 year old, copper hued, bushy haired Pashtun gentleman named Ataullah K Ozai-Durrani landed up in America, after studies at Aligarh Muslim University and Europe, to continue his chemistry research and make a better living.

Now all of these stories go on to become legends – So let me first recite the popular legend - In 1941 Ataullah K. Ozai-Durrani, an Afghan by birth (1897), cousin of the king of Afghanistan, 5’ 8” and not more than 165 pounds, walked into the offices of the General Foods Corporation, set up a portable cooking stove and asked a few minutes of time to demonstrate his new variety of rice that could be cooked in a jiffy. Well he did that and that was how minute rice became popular in USA and General foods (Kraft) started marketing it and manufacturing it in a large scale. The US military bought the product for packing in K rations and many hundred recipes were published as part of a marketing blitz resulting in an increase of per capita consumption of rice in USA. Durrani got a patent for his par boiling process which is known today as the Ozai-Durrani process and he went on to become rich. That was the story of a tenacious young man and his American dream, but as you can imagine, this neither started here, nor ended there. Some of you may now stray on to other topics; some others would want to know the full story, so this is for the latter.

General foods were intrigued when Durrani demonstrated the reduction in cooking time, though they found that the consistency and quality was still not even. But they had just perfected minute Tapioca, so it was a good idea to replicate it with rice and the company retrofitted their Hoboken NY plant as a rice laboratory, to perfect the par boiling process. It was in 1942, post the Pearl Harbor debacle that the US army ordered GF’s rice for the war efforts, perhaps in line with their involvements in the Eastern and far Eastern rice eating war fronts. They took over the General foods plants at Battle Creek Michigan and Hoboken, to speed up the development process. Can you imagine that scientists were even counting the microscopic holes on par boiled rice to determine their dryness? It was all speeded up since the process was used to prepare K rations and the whole output combined with meat was tested on the US Air force personnel, with success, so much so that it was also used for rice pudding and 5in1 and 10in1 rations. In 1946, the product hit supermarkets, and the USA got to hear about Minute rice. Magazines had full page advertisements and each ad had a quick recipe in it. Minute Rice did well after all this heavy advertising, but nevertheless was not a runaway success. Some housewives reported interesting results cooking the rice with orange juice and tomato juice!! It was called minute rice since it was first produced at the Minute Tapioca plant.

The advertisements were very catchy – Let’s look at some punch lines - You merely add pre-cooked Minute Rice to boiling water and remove from heat, Minute Rice comes out snowy, fluffy, tender every time! And Minute Rice is foolproof — you can't prepare it any way but perfect. A Treat to Eat. . . a Cinch to Make. Fancy preparing an epicurean feast so fast! With this wonderful rice, you can fix a showpiece. These days, to make rice that's snowy, fluffy and tender, here's all you do, just add precooked Minute Rice to boiling water! Prepares itself, just bring to a boil. No need to worry, ma'am, with Minute Rice on the agenda! You can have supper on the table in a flash. Why worry about dinner, when you can fix a slam-bang meal in minutes, with handy pre-cooked Minute Rice. With Minute Rice in your pantry, you can serve a scrumptious supper in no time, Served as a vegetable, Minute Rice is quicker than potatoes, precooked to save work and guesswork.

Well, be informed that Minute rice from the packet still takes a few minutes to cook, not just a minute, but that again was a large improvement compared to the usual 30-40 minutes needed for raw rice, not including the preparation time of cleaning, washing etc. Todays precooked microwavable dishes take only a minute, but this was another era.

Nevertheless, how did Durrani get to where he got to? Durrani struggled to find his moorings in America after majoring in Petro-chemistry in Europe and working in Iran (?). Unable to find a job in this field, he got into the importing business, though not enjoying it. One night at a dinner party in his Larchmont, N. Y., home, Durrani served his guests a combination of chicken with presumably Basmati rice. One of the guests, Dr. Herbert A. Baker, soon to become the president of the American Can Company, suggested that the taste was so good that rice should be introduced to the larger masses and perhaps canned. Durrani decided then that Rice and not oil would become his research subject and devoted the next 10-14 years on it, but for that he needed money. Like many others, he soon drifted to Hollywood (1934) where he became a consultant for exotic Eastern movies such as ‘King of the Khyber rifles’. His royal links got him many a star connection and his dinners became popular in the tinsel town. By 1939 he had made enough money and moved to Arkansas, America’s rice country. In Stuttgart, Ark., he got the Arkansas Rice Growers’ Cooperative Association and HK Smith interested in his method. The Association provided him a small laboratory and the support to devote all his time to perfecting the process. Which is what the ‘furriner’ did, toiling for days, till he perfected his par boiling process, deciding finally that rice should be pre-cooked, dried and sold in boxes rather than cans. And thus he was finally back in NY in 1941, to demonstrate his process to General foods. As the story goes, ‘With an electric stove, one dish, one copper pan and some rice carried in a “39-cent bag bought in a drugstore” Durrani went to New York and visited the offices of General Foods, finally meeting Clarence Francis Chairman, Thomas Rector & Ray M Schmitz. He set up his materials on the desk of the company’s head research executive and gave a convincing demonstration. The inventor was given a retainer, a royalty agreement was worked out and a patent was obtained in Durrani’s name. But while he gave them the idea and patented the process, the mass production methodology was perfected by the people at General foods and marketed by Thomas J Lipton Inc.

As you can imagine, this story does not end with the success of Rice introduction to the US army or the Minute rice marketing by General foods for the US public. Durrani continued to live at Stuttgart Arkansas working on Rice forms and later while at Denver Colorado married an American, but his wife and daughter were soon separated from him, and Durrani meanwhile made a lot of money from his rice patents. Throughout his life, Durrani had one other passion, which was the poetry of Mir Taqui Mir and Mirza Ghalib.

At the age of 66, in 1964, Durrani died at the Swedish hospital at Englewood CO, after a battle with lung cancer. As Time magazine reported ‘ Ozai-Durrani's will, probated six weeks after his death at 66 in Denver, leaves more than half of his $1,000,000 estate to Harvard "or some such nonprofit institution" to translate the poets' works into English and underwrite biographies. Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib and Mir Taqui Mir are not exactly U.S. household words. But Minute Rice is, and it is the wish of its inventor, Afghan Immigrant Ataullah K Ozai-Durrani, that the two little-known 19th century Persian poets roll trippingly off American tongues. Ozai-Durrani's lawyers are being besieged by half a dozen non-profiteers anxious to investigate, but Harvard is ahead by a Yard’.
Durrani also left $300,000 to his estranged wife Louisa Ebbs Harrison and her daughter. His entire technical library and $30,000 were left to the Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge to prepare an encyclopedia text on Rice culture. The Ozai Durrani Chair of Indo-Pakistan Studies was created with his endowment, in Harvard in 1964.

According to Durrani’s will, the half million dollar endowment was to be instated in the name of one Syud Hossain, a longtime friend of Ozai-Durrani. NK Singh writing for the Tribune, in 2005 states- When a rich Afghani, Ataullah Khan Ozai Durrani, left a considerable fortune of half a million dollars to be devoted to the translation of Ghalib and Mir, not many in America knew who these great men were. The New York Times reporter who contacted the librarian at the Indian Consulate in New York was told that he should contact Pakistanis, who might know about them. The Professor of Iranian studies too directed them to contact Pakistanis. So appalling was the ignorance about the works of great poets in Urdu literature abroad!

Michael J Arlen, studying the bequest and writing in the New Yorker in 1964, compares men who have made heaps of gold & on their deathbeds can think of nothing better to do with it than swing it along to the New Dormitory Fund for Renwick College, or donate another gymnasium to St. Olaf's… take note here of the late Mr. Ozai-Durrani's handsome bequest, and feel the richer for it: richer in anticipation, by the poems of the two Persian poets, even though (there's no telling) they may be terrible poets.

Now let us get to the poets. I am not too fond of poetry though I am of books and music. Somehow, the intermediate version has still to catch hold of me, and if it will or not, I cannot venture to fathom how good it is. But I have heard quite much about these fabulous Urdu poets who wrote in Persian and Urdu during the Mughal times. Here, I will provide you only a brief introduction of these two revered poets, picking up information from the public media.

Muhammad Taqi Meer (1723-1810) a.k.a Taqi MeerMir was born in Agra, and lived much of his life in Mughal Delhi. However, after Ahmad Shah Abdali's sack of Delhi each year starting 1748, he moved to the court of Asaf-ud-Daulah in Lucknow. Mir lived at a time when Urdu language and poetry was at a formative stage - and Mir's instinctive aesthetic sense helped him strike a balance between the indigenous expression and new enrichment coming in from Persian imagery and idiom, to constitute the new elite language known as Rekhta or Hindui. Basing his language on his native Hindustani, he leavened it with a sprinkling of Persian diction and phraseology, and created a poetic language at once simple, natural and elegant, which was to guide generations of future poets.

Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) started composing poetry at the age of 11. His first language was Urdu, but Persian and Turkish were also spoken at home. He received an education in Persian and Arabic at a young age. Ghalib is still very popular today, and his poetry is well known. Many singers from all over South Asia have sung many of his ghazals. Although Ghalib himself was far prouder of his poetic achievements in Persian, he is today more famous for his Urdu Ghazals. Ghalib was a very liberal mystic who believed that "the search for God within liberated the seeker from the narrowly Orthodox Islam, encouraging the devotee to look beyond the letter of the law to its narrow essence.

Interestingly, before the bequest to Harvard, Durrani had tried getting Aligarh Muslim University to start up a Syud Hossain endowment to work on the English translations of Mir & Ghalib. However it was a failure. Ralph Russell explains in his article ‘Urdu & I’ that Durrani, a friend of Zakir Hussain (VC AMU) entrusted the project to Ali Ahmed Surur a few years before his death. However it appears that the result was not satisfactory and Durrani even threatened to sue Surur.

So these were the poets who enamored the millionaire Durrani, who left half his fortune for their exposition in the USA. What did Harvard do? They had to find somebody worthy enough to do justice to the bequest. And they did, they persuaded the German linguist and scholar, today fondly remembered as Annemarie Apa (Sister Annemarie) to work in Harvard. The legendary Annemarie Schimmel had spent years in Ankara working on Jalaluddin Rumi’s poetry and had moved back to Germany when Harvard contacted her. According to the Harvard Gazette - In August of 1965, on her first visit to the US, attending the 11th Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions in Claremont, California, she was approached by Harvard's Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who told her that substantial funds had been given to Harvard by the inventor of Minute Rice, Mr. Ozai-Durrani, to have two major Urdu poets, Mir and Ghalib, translated into poetic English. Of course, the position would consist of more than just this translation project. Would she be interested in coming to Harvard? She declined, claiming that as a non-specialist in Urdu she was ill prepared to do the job. But Smith and others at Harvard pursued her doggedly and finally convinced her.

Annemarie says - It was the famous Minute-Rice Chair which a wealthy Indian Muslim, infatuated with the Urdu poetry of Mir (d.1810) and Ghalib (d.1869), had dreamt of in the hope that his favorite poets would be translated into English to enchant the West as much as Fitzgerald's renderings of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat had done more than a century ago. Annemarie goes on to explain that she finally moved to Harvard mainly because she had no hopes of furthering her career in Germany. In the spring of 1967 she started at Harvard as Lecturer on Indo-Muslim Culture, and in 1970 she was appointed full professor and helped author many a paper and book on the subjects that Durrani wanted covered. She travelled regularly to Pakistan and attained such legendary status in Pakistan that a major boulevard was named after her in Lahore. On January 26, 2003, Annemarie died leaving behind a treasure trove of publications on Islam and poetry.

And who is Syud Hossain? A person Indians must be thankful to, for he was the one who advanced India’s case for independence in America. I will get into further details and introduce him to you in my next essay, the story of a remarkable fellow, who endured a sad life, after losing in love, but still forged on, all his life, for the freedom of his nation – India.

And so, you now know the connection between Ozai Durrani, rice and Urdu poetry. But what still remains unclear is the extent of friendship between Ozai and the person Durrani wanted his endowment to be named after, Syud Hossain. That they met in USA is clear, but Syud lived in South California while Ozai lived in Arkansas. How did Syud become so dear to Ozai? Perhaps it was Syud who introduced the Rice Chemist to Urdu poetry of Mir and Ghalib and changed his material life; perhaps they knew each other at AMU. While we may never know the real reasons, we know that Syud was also fond of Ghalib and Mir and so the two men shared that passion for poetry, so much so that when Ozai tried to give the same endowment to Aligarh MU, he named it after Syud and then later after Syud’s death, when he offered it to Harvard, it was in the name of Syud, which is how it remains today.

Perhaps Durrani’s life was mirrored in Ghalib’s words where Ghalib describes his own marriage as a second imprisonment after one’s initial confinement which was life itself. The idea that life is one continuous painful struggle which can end only when life itself ends, is a recurring theme in Ghalib’s poetry, just as they say in Buddhist and yoga philosophy - Sarvam Dukham (all is suffering)………

His gravestone states – ‘Vision hath he who before the power of love he measures has seen the dance, within each stone of uncreated figures’

References

Advertising Agency and Advertising & Selling, Volume 42, Issues 7-12
The Reader's Digest, Volume 55 – Robert Mullen article
Better Than Homemade: Amazing Food That Changed the Way We Eat - Carolyn Wyman (Pages 15-17)
A life of learning - Annemarie Schimmel Charles Homer Haskins
Urdu & I – Ralph Russell
Harvard Gazette articles
Article 1
Article 2
Minute rice ads

Satirist Mark Russell should be given a prize for remarking– what is the only thing (US) congress can get done in 10 days – Answer – Minute rice!!