Mamunur Rashid

It has a history stretching back millenniums. Emperors have patronised it, poets have romanticised it, monks have used its colour in their robes and worshippers have adored it. Popularly known as “Red Gold”, the crimson hued saffron has been used for culinary, medicinal and aesthetic purposes.

Poet Jibanananda Das had compared the stunning colour of saffron with the setting sun of an autumn evening.

Saffron, one of the most prized and covetable condiments on the planet, had never been a major produce of a warm country like Bangladesh as it is mostly cultivated in cold environment.

But a teacher and researcher of Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University, Dhaka has created a scope for growing the spice in the country.

AFM Jamal Uddin, a professor of horticulture at the university, has managed to flowering saffron plants in a temperature-controlled room. He successfully collected red coloured stigma from the flowers. This stigma, the distal ends of the plant’s carpels, is separated from the petals by hand and dried to make saffron spice.

“Saffron cultivation is expensive in its usual habitat -- an open terrain. And producing it in a temperature controlled room is expected to be even more expensive. But the chances of losing a yield is little in this process. And saffron can be harvested multiple times in a year in this method,” Jamal Uddin told The Daily Star.

Considering its huge global demand and high price, he said, saffron can be produced commercially in Bangladesh if appropriate support is provided.

The scientific name of saffron is Crocus Sativus. It’s a lily herb belonging to the Iridaceae family. The golden spice, which is called zafran in Urdu, kesar in Hindi, has a worldwide fame as an expensive cooking ingredient widely used in a variety of kitchens, starting from the Mughals and lavish hotels.