From Sharkara to Sugar : The Fascinating Global Journey of Sugar’s Name

Think of what sugar is called in your native language. Ever wonder how that word came about? Here’s the story.

Now, India is widely regarded as one of the earliest centres of sugarcane cultivation. The unrefined gravel-like sugar that was made from it was called sharaka in Sanskrit, meaning “gritty.”

When traders took it to ancient Persia, the word passed into Persian as shakar and then into Arabic as sukar. Then the Arabs ferried it across the Mediterranean, where sukar became saccharum in Latin, whereas the Arabic term al-sukar became azucar in Spanish.

The French borrowed the Latin word and made it sucre, from where we finally get the English word sugar.

Meanwhile, in India, the Sanskrit sharkara survived in many regional words, such as sakkar in Marathi, sakkaray in Kannada and Tulu, sakkaray in Tamil, and so on.
But that’s not it. It is also believed that Indians were among the earliest known producers of crystalline sugar, which was called khanda in Sanskrit. To this day, the word for sugar in some Western Indian languages is khanda.

In Persian, khand became khand, which you can now find in many words like gulkand and kalakand, for example. In fact, the word khand is believed to have eventually given rise to the English word candy.

Now, the Egyptians, who were skilled craftsmen, also started refining sugar around the same time as the Persians. Their refined rock sugar was so prized that they started exporting it back to India. The Arabic name for Egypt was Misr, therefore, rock sugar coming from Egypt was called Misri.

Meanwhile, sugar cultivation and refining reached China by the early medieval period, likely through traveling Buddhist monks. They improved on the technology used for refining it, turning sugar white. This white sugar was brought to India by Tong Achu (or Tong Achew), a Chinese settler who is said to have established one of the earliest sugar mills near modern-day Kolkata.
The sugar’s porcelain or chini-like appearance and its Chinese connection led to it being called “chini” in several Indian languages.

But there’s a very interesting deviation from this trend. In some parts of Gujarat and Maharashtra, sugar was also called morus. You see, in the 1800s, some sugarcane was imported from Mauritius, among other places, into the port of Surat. The sugar made from this Mauritian sugarcane was called morus.
Fascinating, isn’t it?