It’s Dal! It’s Not Khichri Or Biryani
NEVER MIND the khichri vs
biryani debate. Dal is the defining dish of Indian cuisine
A few weeks ago I caused
a tiny stir when I said that the dosa was now India’s national dish. Many of
you complained that this was a South Indian dish that most North Indians never
even ate at home. So how could it possibly be any kind of national dish?
Fair point.
It was never my intention
to suggest that happy Punjabis hunkered down to cooking dosas every day. I am
well aware that, outside the South, few people make dosas at home.
My point was not that the
dosa had taken over home kitchens all over India. It was that the dosa had
supplanted tandoori chicken, once regarded as India’s most famous dish. Even
more than the dosa, tandoori chicken is a restaurant dish. And even in North
India, I know of nobody who cooks it at home. Besides, I imagine more North
Indians now eat dosas than bother with tandoori chicken.
But the controversy got
me thinking. Is there really a single dish that we could call our national dish
in the sense that it is made in home kitchens all over India, given the
diversity of Indian cuisine?
Inevitably, this took me
back to a controversy from last year. That was when a government-sponsored
initiative declared that khichri was India’s national dish. A photo op was
organised. A cauldron of khichri was made and such noted chefs as Baba Ramdev
arrived to pose for the cameras as this photo-friendly khichri was being
prepared.
Frankly, I didn’t think
that the choice of khichri was a bad one, the publicity stunt notwithstanding.
Khichri is a dish that was created in the subcontinent. During the medieval
period, entire armies were sustained on khichri. Caste Hindus who would not eat
communal food prepared by army cooks, would make individual portions of khichri
for themselves. The dish was easy to cook, required relatively few ingredients
and was a one-pot meal.
When the Mughals got
here, they were fascinated by khichri (which, in those days, was made with all
kinds of grains, not just rice) and adapted it for their own royal cuisine.
Humayun spent over a decade in exile but his cooks took the rice version of
khichri with them and are said to have introduced the Iranians to the idea of
cooking rice with lentils. The Emperor Jehangir was so fascinated by a Gujarati
khichri (probably made with millets) that he took cooks from Gujarat to Delhi
and ate khichri regularly.
Others have been as
fascinated. Few Indians would recognise the British kedgeree has having
anything to do with Indian khichri but that apparently is where the dish – long
a breakfast staple at country houses – comes from. Though the Brits added
boiled egg, smoked haddock and God alone knows what else to the rice, the name
betrays the origins of the dish: kedgeree is how the sahibs would pronounce
khichri.
Sadly, following the
Ramdevblessed photo op, a controversy arose over whether khichri was actually
our national dish. Many people wondered why an ancient Hindu dish that was
entirely vegetarian had been chosen to represent India. Was this a political
statement?
I thought the controversy
was silly. Given that at least a third of all Indians are vegetarians, it made
sense to use a vegetarian dish to represent Indian food. Nor does khichri have
to necessarily be vegetarian (though the government-sponsored version certainly
was). Bengalis make a non-vegetarian version and so do Muslim communities all
over India.
The alternative national
dish, put forward by many of those who were unhappy with the choice of khichri,
was biryani.
This led to another
objection. Wasn’t biryani a Muslim dish? Well, yes, it is associated with
Muslims all over India because it is cooked during celebrations. But so what?
You don’t have to be a Muslim to eat biryani just as you don’t have to be a
Hindu to enjoy khichri. And we are a diverse and secular country, so it
shouldn’t matter whether a dish was popularised by Hindus, Muslims, Christians,
Jains, Sikhs or whoever.
Was biryani an Indian
dish? The sceptics were doubtful. Didn’t it come to us from the Middle East?
The short answer is that
while the pilau may well have originated in Turkey, biryani appears to have
been invented in Delhi (no, not Lucknow or Hyderabad). One theory has it that,
confronted with the Indian khichri tradition, chefs at the Delhi court created
a dish that merged the moistness and texture of Indian rice dishes with the
original West Asian pilau. (And of course they used our very own spices.)
That led to a third
objection. Doesn’t biryani have to be non-vegetarian? Can a dish that depends
on meat be called India’s national dish?
If you are on Twitter,
you will know where I am going with this. My friend Sanjay Hedge has run a
brave campaign to argue that a vegetable biryani is just as legitimate as a
mutton biryani. As of this writing, that Twitter war continues.
I love biryani and I
recognise that all of India is obsessed with biryani these days. But I don’t
think it is India’s national dish, though to be fair, the biryani has the
ability to take on the characteristics of whichever area it is cooked in.
A Kerala biryani is
delicious but its flavours have very little in common with the Lucknow version.
(Even the rice that is used is different.)
But my vote wouldn’t
necessarily go to khichri either. On our greatest dish, my views have remained
largely unchanged over the last decade.
The defining dish of
Indian cuisine through the centuries is dal.
Think about it. The
tuvair, the lentil that goes into Gujarati dal and sambhar, has been around for
millennia. There are references to it in Buddhist literature from as far back
as 400 BC. (Arhar is a cousin of the
tuvair.) Dal turns up in
the Rig Veda (three dals are mentioned: urad, masoor and moong). Archaeologists
have found dal grains at sites dating back to 1800 BC.
Not only is dal truly
Indian from before the beginnings of recorded history, it is also not
associated with any one religion. Everybody eats dal (except perhaps for parts
of the North East). When the Parsis got to India in the seventh century, they
were so taken with dal (then largely unknown in Persia), that they began to
cook it with meat and created dhansak. At Sikh gurdwaras, dal is an important
langar dish. Most Indian Christian communities have their own dal dishes.
When the Moguls got here,
they found dal to be an exotic ingredient, not familiar to them from their days
in Samarkand. But within a generation, they were all eating dal and khichri.
So, if there is one dish
that really unites India, it is dal. Sure, khichri is nice too but it depends
on dal.
Intriguingly, dal remains
a peculiarly Indian obsession. You do find lentils in Middle Eastern cooking
but they much prefer the chickpea. They do have a few lentil dishes in West
Asia and North Africa, but they are not the mainstay of the cuisine and the dal
probably went from India. The kusheree of Egypt is a version of the khichri.
In most of the Western
world, the dals of choice are derived from the kidney bean which was discovered
in America. (The British planted it in Punjab creating the ‘rajmachawal’
craze.)
The French claim a long
history for the cassoulet, but it is made with a bean that was only discovered
in America. There are some lentils in European cooking. France is famous for
Puy lentils (like our moong), but they form a small part of the cuisine
tradition.
So why are we wasting so
much time fighting over khichri and biryani?
Let’s just accept that
dal is the defining dish of Indian cuisine whether it is the sambhar of South
India or the black dal of Punjab.
It is a dish that unites
all Indians and one that nobody can object to.
Vir Sanghvi
HTM30SEP18
No comments:
Post a Comment