India, Sept. 24 -- By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik - Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist

On the outer walls of the Chennakeshava temple in Belur, built by the Hoysala kings in the 12th century, stands a woman holding betel leaves. But the tambula or betel appears nowhere in the Vedic Samhitas, the Ramayana or the Mahabharata. It was not part of that world.

It arrived much later, carried on trading vessels from the Indonesian archipelago and the Malay Peninsula, entering India during the Gupta period (around 4th century CE) through the eastern coast. Its presence, carved in stone into a temple wall in Karnataka, however, reveals how quickly the leaf had ceased to be a foreign import. No Hindu ceremony was considered complete without it. ...