Minute Rice and Nineteenth Century Urdu Poetry
Sometimes when you’re researching a topic, you run across a side issue that is almost irresistible. Here’s one of those. There I was trolling through the Encyclopedia Iranica for references to honey and milk way way back in history. The Encyclopedia Iranica, by the way, is a wonderful resource for scholarly articles for anything to do with people who speak Persian very broadly understood.
Well, I discovered that minute rice was invented by Ataullah Ozai-Durrani, an Afghani. The entry is, well, pretty laconic.
“In 1941, Ozai-Durrani brought a portable stove to the office of an executive of General Foods Corporation and cooked the rice that he had invented in 60 seconds, thus becoming wealthy overnight. He had established his method by 1939, after years of experimenting at a home laboratory, and having studied works on rice at the New York Public Library.”
Nothing more on why he was in New York, what had made him decide to try to discover a way of cooking rice quickly, what his home lab was like (could he have been a chemical engineer, for example?), how he got into the office of a General Foods executive, nor about the form of that overnight wealth.
Googling doesn’t help much. There are a number of patents that he took out for his process and a few references but little of substance.
But it just gets more interesting. Ozai-Durrani left half of his million dollar estate (which was worth a lot more when he died in 1964 than it would be now) for the translation of two nineteenth-century poets, Galeb and Mir Taqi Mir. Ozai-Durrani’s bequest was picked up for praise by the New Yorker even though the author rather sniffily added the two Persians “may be terrible poets.”
Well, that was the 1960s. Turns out they were Urdu poets, Urdu being the Persian-influenced form of Hindustani that is now the national language of Pakistan. Anyway, Harvard got the money, appointed a professor, and the poets were translated as Ozai-Durrani had wished.
But does anyone know anything more about Ozai-Durrani? I imagine a highly-educated man, a bit homesick perhaps, a bit of a romantic, but at the same time with a strong practical streak. I’d love to know more.
Edit. Do follow the link on Judith Klinger’s comment. Fascinating background.
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God bless Google. Here’s a link from Modern Mechanics that answers some of your questions. I Modern Mechanix
Scroll about half way down the page.
I’m hoping the link works……
And if you really want to get side tracked, check out Hedy Lamar’s frequency hopping patent.
Judith, Your’re such a much better googler than I am. But yes that does make more sense of the story, doesn’t it?
Rachel
Hi — thanks for that info! I needed it for my own chronology on Afghan American history. 1930s there was a small group of Afghans who came to study in the U.S. Many of them stayed to become American citizens and married American women. Ozai Durrani was one of these men. I couldn’t find what exactly his Ph.D. was in but he must have been from an elite family in Afghanistan to have received this kind of scholarship in the first place. It makes sense that he settled in Colorado since it is the closest in geography to Afghanistan! I had no idea about the funds he left behind to translate Galeb and Mir Taqi, who write in Persian since that was the court language of the Mughals and later maintained by Pakistan. The educated in Afghanistan, whether they are scientists or sociologists, are very much aware of poetry. In fact, the anthropologist Margaret Mills called Afghanistan a country that was literary despite the majority of the population being illiterate. Poetry is a backbone of Afghan culture. I wish I knew more as well. The line where I first heard of him was in The Kingdom of Afghanistan and the United States 1828-1973 written by Leon B. Poullada and Leila D.J. Poullada.
Glad you found it useful. You might look through the comments for some dissenting view points.
My aunt, Sarah Kellams Durrani, met Mr. Durrani on a train after her first fiance was killed in World War II, and was married to him for about a year. She moved from her home in St. Louis to live with him in a mansion somewhere in the south. She was an educated American woman and she found the lifestyle that Mr. Durrani expected her to live was very restrictive. They were divorce and my aunt went back to St. Louis where she became a teacher of the deaf.
Fascinating. Thanks for sharing this.
Dear Sally Weisberg,
My grandmother Louisa was also married to Mr. Durrani. She and my mother (fathered by my grandmother’s second husband) remembered him fondly. I’m curious to know more about him if you have any information.
Thank you,
J