A new book brings a Rampur family’s culinary history and cherished recipes created by the matriarch

Musharraf Begum’s beginnings were humble. She was from a small town in Uttar Pradesh called Chandausi. Due to the financial hardships faced by her family, they agreed to marry her off to a rich, much older gentleman from Rampur as his fourth and only surviving wife then. To this day, the tales of how my grandfather’s first three wives died are vague and come in several versions. One story goes that my grandfather’s wife was travelling to him on a ship after the nikah and they were caught in a storm where she passed away. The bottom line was that here was this nobleman with the worst luck when it came to his wives, so much so that no established family was willing to marry their daughter to him. The “jinxed” Abdul Majeed Qureshi had to then seemingly settle for a fair, young uneducated girl from a family that was in desperate need of his financial support. She would later boast that she was chosen based on her beautiful hands and feet since that was all her in-laws saw before her marriage was arranged.

Soon enough, her staff, children and townspeople began to call her Ammi – a moniker she earned early...

Read more

News