I recently made a few trips to India, and drinking chai (tea) was definitely a highlight. [Here's an interesting post about the Portuguese and tea.] To sweeten a classic masala chai, I was offered some jaggery. While it looked like brown sugar to me, this was the first time I'd come across the word 'jaggery', so I promptly checked it out and discovered yet another delicious trace of the Portuguese influence in Asia and beyond.
Jaggery is a traditional dark-brown unrefined sugar made from palm tree sap and/or sugarcane, and it's common across South and Southeast Asia. This English word, however, comes from the Portuguese jágara, which in term was derived from Malayalam ശർക്കര (śarkara) with much older roots in the Sanskrit शर्करा (śarkarā). Interestingly, the etymology of the English word 'sugar' can be traced thus: sucre in French ← zucchero in Italian ← سُكَّر (sukkar) in Arabic ← شکر (šakar) in Persian ← Sanskrit. This means that 'jaggery' and 'sugar' are doublets, that is to say words from the same source that took very different paths!
Why did the English borrow this word from the Portuguese? This was undoubtedly due to the much longer presence of the Portuguese in India, with Goa as the crown jewel. It is noteworthy that in the Malay language, the equivalent of jaggery is gula melaka, meaning Malacca sugar. It so happens that the Portuguese reached (and conquered) Malacca in 1511 with forces from Goa.
The Portuguese nowadays use the term açucar mascavado, confusingly meaning 'refined sugar' even though this is technically an unrefined form of sugar. However the word jágara lives on in the dictionary, along with a multitude of variants: jacre, jagra, jagre, xágara.
Final sweet note: the English also borrowed the Portuguese word mascavado, turning it into 'muscavado', which is a type of sugar with a strong molasses content and flavour, and dark brown in colour (and differen from brown sugar). The largest producer and consumer of muscovado in the world is, unsurprisingly: India!
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