சுருட்டு

The Tamil word curuṭṭu means something rolled or coiled, from the verb curuṭṭu — to roll, twist, or curl. In Tamil Nadu and parts of South India and Burma, tobacco leaves have been rolled into open-ended cylinders — no tapered tip at either end — since at least the seventeenth century. The cheroot differs from the Cuban cigar tradition precisely in this bluntness at both ends: it is tobacco unadorned, rolled tight by hand, democratic and workmanlike. The French colonial presence in Pondicherry absorbed the word first as cheroot or cheroute, and English soon followed.

By the early eighteenth century, cheroot appeared in English accounts of the Madras presidency. European traders, soldiers, and administrators stationed on the Coromandel Coast adopted the habit enthusiastically, finding cheroots cheaper, hardier, and better suited to the humid coastal climate than the rolled cigars they knew from home. The word entered English print in 1673 in a travel account by Fryer, and by the mid-1700s London tobacconists were advertising 'Madras cheroots' as a fashionable import.

The Burmese cheroot — thinner, often rolled with a flavoured tip of tamarind paste or maize — became another distinct tradition, spreading with British colonial administration throughout Southeast Asia. Rudyard Kipling's poem 'Mandalay' immortalised the Burmese cheroot in the line about the 'Burma girl' smoking 'a whackin' white cheroot' — and the image of the cheroot became inseparable from colonial nostalgia and military memoirs. It was the tobacco of the frontier, of the field, of men far from European refinement.

The cheroot never achieved the prestige of the Havana cigar, and that has always been part of its identity. It remained associated with working soldiers, plantation overseers, river traders, and the everyday smoker rather than the gentleman's study. Today, cheroots survive as a specialty item: Madras cheroots are still produced by small manufacturers in Tamil Nadu, and Burmese cheroots remain common throughout Myanmar. The word itself has contracted somewhat from the vocabulary — but the Tamil rolled leaf endures.