FOODIE SPECIAL
CREATION MYTHS
We asked around once we had heard
the KC Das story. Every single person we spoke to took it for granted that the
rasgulla was a post-colonial invention and most accepted that KC Das had
popularised it, even though some Bengalis were leery of the claim that the
company’s founder had actually invented it. (In Bengal, everybody’s great
grandfather was either a great artist/author or a genius inventor). And so we
telecast the episode, giving the credit to KC Das.
I recall all this because an angry
dispute currently rages between Bengal and Odisha on the parentage of the
rasgulla. The Bengalis stick, by and large, to the KC Das story. But the Odiyas
say that they invented the rasgulla many centuries ago, long before the first
colonialists arrived in India. They cite classical references about temple food
to back up their claim and insist that the Bongs stole it from them.
Is this a valid assertion? Frankly,
I’m dubious. If the Odiyas were great rasgulla-wallahs for centuries then why
did the rest of India never hear about their great invention? And even today,
while we may ask somebody who is visiting Calcutta to bring back some sweets
for us (mishti doi, even), I know few people who will say, “I am going to
Cuttack/Bhubaneshwar, home of the rasgulla; let me bring some back for you!”
But the truth is: we don’t really
know who invented the rasgulla. Yes, we have KC Das’ version. But no doubt
Odiyas will claim that this is a self-serving assertion made by a commercial
enterprise. We have so few records about our food that nearly every claim made
by anybody can easily be contested by somebody else.
Take the other dispute that is
currently raging. Who invented Mysore pak? Did it come from Mysore (the old
name of Karnataka state) as the name suggests? Or did it come from Tamil Nadu?
You would have thought that answer was obvious. After all, Hyderabadi biryani
does not come from Kashmir. Bombay Duck does not come from Assam. And so on.
But if Bengali sweets can come from Odisha, then who the hell knows?
As part of that same TV series in
which we investigated the origins of the rasgulla (and may have come to the
wrong conclusions, at least according to the Odiyas!), we tried to trace the
first tandoori chicken. We came to the conclusion that the tandoor itself was a
variation of a Middle-Eastern oven used for cooking bread. But, tandoori
chicken, we argued, was invented in undivided India in the 20th century and
then popularised by Delhi’s Moti Mahal after Partition. That still sounds sort
of right. Except that archaeologists have found remnants of clay ovens during
excavations at Indus Valley sites. So did we have tandoors in India in 2000BC?
Were we the real inventors of the tandoor and did we export the first tandoors
to the Middle East? (There is evidence to suggest that there was trade between
the Indus Valley cities and that part of the world).
So it is with the dosa. All of us know that
the dosa is a popular snack in many south Indian states. But we also know that
the large, thin, crisp dosa, sometimes filled with a potato masala, is a
restaurant dish and not one you would have found in many south Indian homes.
AN IMPORTED TREAT Calcutta has
India’s best puchkas (what we call golgappas or pani puri), but these have
nothing to do with Bengali cuisine
At which stage did the home version
of the dosa become the restaurant dish that is popular all over the world? And
who was responsible for this transition? We used to give the credit to
restaurateurs from Madras. But while making the TV show we found many
restaurant-owners from Udipi in Karnataka (whose region’s name became a generic
for a certain kind of restaurant) who claimed that their ancestors invented the
restaurant masala dosa and popularised it in Bombay in the Fifties and early
Sixties.
My feeling is that they may be right
– and we said so in the TV show. But, in the absence of records and research,
who knows what the truth is?
Or take the case of chaat, which you
find all over north and eastern India now. Who created it? There are few
records but I incline to the view that it originated in UP, which is still the
centre of India’s chaat world. My theory is that it travelled from UP to Bihar.
And when migrants from Bihar and UP travelled to other parts of India, they
took it with them.
There was always a
cross-fertilisation of culinary ideas between UP and Delhi (Awadhi cuisine is a
more refined version of the cooking of the Delhi court) so it is not hard to
see how chaat reached Delhi. In Bombay, chaat is so closely associated with UP
Brahmins that the original chaatwallahs of Chowpatty were called ‘bhaiyyas” and
nearly all of them said their surname was Sharma. In Calcutta, which has
India’s best puchkas (what we call golgappas or pani puri elsewhere in India),
these have nothing to do with Bengalis or with Bengali cuisine. All the
chaatwallahs are either from Bihar or UP.
So is chaat originally a UP
phenomenon which reflects the migration of UP-ites and their attempts to fit in
with local communities by adjusting the flavours of their original dishes? I
would argue that it is.
But that’s just an assertion. I have
no proof. And no doubt next year, Odisha or Assam will claim that golgappas
appear in their sacred scriptures.
Even foods that have travelled out
of India have lost their Indian origin. Though Japan’s tempura is clearly a
variation on the bhajiya/pakora, nobody outside of India takes us seriously on
this one. The West ascribes its origins to the influence of Portuguese traders
and missionaries on Japan. This is half-true, but what the West misses is that
the Portuguese were not bhajiya-eaters or pakora-makers. It was the Indian
cooks on their ships (the fleets set off from India) who taught the Japanese
how to make the dish that eventually became tempura.
The Sri Lankans are as leery of our
claim that hoppers, virtually their national dish, are Indian in origin. Anyone
who has been to Lanka and seen a hopper will recognise it immediately for what
it is: an appam. And string hoppers are idi-appams. In fact, there is research
to suggest that the name ‘hopper’ is an Anglicisation of the Indian word
‘appam’. (How can you make ‘appam’ sound like ‘hopper’? Only the Brits could
have managed that!)
But the Lankans dismiss our claims
and I’ve seen no well-documented study conducted by Indians that explains how
this dish, most popular in Kerala, reached Sri Lanka.
One problem with attempts to ascribe
regional identities to food is that there is always so much give and take
between regions that it is hard to pinpoint specific origins. For instance, the
UP chaatwallahs influenced Bombay’s Gujaratis who invented bhelpuri. So is bhel
a Gujarati dish? Probably. Is it still made mainly by north Indian chaatwallahs
in Bombay? Yes it is.
And when borders are porous, or
unclear, ethnic origin is harder to classify. All Gujaratis are horrified when
Maharashtrians claim shrikhand for themselves. And they, in turn, are horrified
when we Gujaratis say that puran poli is ours. (Frankly, they can keep it. I
loathe the dish!) But till 1960, most of Gujarat and Maharashtra were part of
the same Bombay state. So each side can only properly claim dishes that were
invented after 1960 such as the vada pav, which the Maharashtrians are more
than welcome to claim for themselves. (We’ll keep our pav bhaji, bhelpuri,
farsaan etc thank you very much.) As dishes travel, their origins become
irrelevant. We believe that biryani was created by court chefs probably during
the Delhi Sultanate period, by merging India’s spice and khichdi traditions
with the Turkish pilaf recipes. (This is still controversial). So is biryani a
Delhi dish? Hardly. The best biryanis come from Lucknow, Hyderabad, Calcutta
and Kerala. Delhi hardly even gets a look in when we discuss biryani.
So who cares where the rasgulla was
invented? It would be nice to know the history. But ownership?
Forget it. Food is not about
copyright. It is about joy.
VIRSANGHVI
HTBR 23AUG15
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