The Indian Express
A Moveable Feast
Communal politics
around the biryani has scant respect for its fabled history or
diversity. Is it the Persian pilao, improvised and transformed? Is it
the result of avant garde experiments in royal kitchens? Or is it a
plebeian dish, shaped, like India, by trade and cultural interaction?
Written by Kaushik Dasgupta |
Published:September 25, 2016 1:01 am
Food historian Lizie Collingham believes that “biringe” mentioned by Manrique is what is today known as biryani.
“This city of tents contained market-places, filled with delicious
and appetising eatables… Among these dishes the principal and most
substantial were the rich and aromatic Mogol biringes and Persian pilaos
of different hues… many tents held different dishes of rice, herbs and
vegetables, among which the chief place was taken by the Gujerat or dry
biringe,” the Portuguese Catholic priest Sebastian Manrique wrote around
1640. The friar’s memoirs of his travels in India are replete with the
usual tribulations of the Europeans in India. But the account, abounding
with lament about the difficulty of terrain and the venality of Mughal
officials, acquires an ineffable zest whenever there is a reference to
food. The Catholic priest was fascinated with the variety of breads and
rice dishes eaten by the Mughal royalty. Food historian Lizie Collingham
believes that “biringe” mentioned by Manrique is what is today known as
biryani.
The Portuguese priest visited India during the reign of the fifth
Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan. According to one legend, biryani was first
cooked during his reign. It is said that during a surprise visit to the
barracks, the emperor’s wife, Mumtaz Mahal, found the troops to be
malnourished. She asked the royal cooks to devise a nutrient-rich dish,
and, thus, was born the biryani.
This is one of the many theories of biryani’s origins. Another theory
has it that the Persian pilao was improvised, and ultimately
transformed, into what is today known as biryani in the kitchens of the
Mughals. The word biryani, according to this account, derives from the
Persian word biryan, or frying.
Around 200 years before Manrique visited India, Shah Jahan’s great
grandfather Humayun lost his throne to the Afghan chief Sher Shah. The
fugitive prince found refuge in Persia, where the ruler, Shah Tahmasp,
was a generous host.
Humayun’s stay in Persia was to inaugurate a history of cultural
interaction whose footprints are evident to this day. The Persians loved
rice dishes and the cooks in Humayun’s retinue regaled the Shah with a
dish of rice and peas. Writes Collingham, “the piece de resistance of
Persian cuisine was pilao”. Rice was imported from India, and “the
Persians would soak it in salted water to ensure that it was gleaming
white, when cooked”. “Their cooks developed numerous variations: Fruit
pilaos, turmeric and saffron ones, chicken pilaos for special
occasions,” writes Collingham.
What was once a dish that shepherds devised by combining barley or
broken wheat with meat cooked on campfire became exotica of sorts when
the Persians started importing rice from India. The pilao, then,
travelled to different parts of the Islamic world: it Turkey, it became
the pilav, in Spain, it became the saffron-flavoured seafood-and-rice
dish, paella, and in India, it became the pulao. Here, it acquired
another twist.
“The delicately flavoured Persian pilau met the pungent and spicy
rice dishes of Hindustan to create the classic Mughlai dish, biryani.
One of the most distinctive Persian culinary techniques was to marinate
meat in curds (yogurt). For biryani, onions, garlic, almonds, and spices
were added to the curds, to make a thick paste that coated the meat.
Once it had marinated, the meat was briefly fried, before being
transferred to a pot. Then, following the cooking technique for pilau,
partially cooked rice was heaped over the meat. Saffron soaked in milk
was poured over the rice to give it colour and aroma, and the whole dish
was covered tightly and cooked slowly, with hot coals on the lid and
around the bottom of the pot, just as with pilau. The resultant biryani
was a much spicier Indian version of the Persian pilau,” writes
Collingham.
The pulao- biryani difference is one of the hottest debates of Indian
culinary history. The food historian K T Achaya wrote that the recipes
“in the Ain-i-Akbari show little distinction between pulao and biryani”.
But in a few centuries, the difference was much sharper. Food historian
Coleen Taylor Sen quotes the 19th century playwright and historian of
Lucknow, Abdul Halim Sharar: “To the uninitiated palate, both are the
same but because of the amount of spices in biryani, there is always a
strong taste of curried rice, whereas pulao can be prepared with such
care that this can never happen”.
Sharar believes that during the 18th century, when the Mughal Empire
was in its last gasp, the aristocracy in Delhi preferred biryani, while
the Lucknow nawabs loved pulao. When the fourth Nawab of Lucknow,
Asaf-ud-Daulah, built the city’s famous Bara Imambara as a famine relief
measure, he ordered rice and meat to be slow cooked in large cauldrons
for the construction workers. Legend has it that during one visit to the
construction site, the Nawab was struck by the aroma of the meal and
ordered his cooks to bring it to his kitchen. There, it was tweaked to
create the Lucknow version, the pakki biryani — meat cooked with spices
layered over cooked rice and then slow cooked in a sealed vessel.
A meaty role: The Kolkata biryani substitutes some of the meat with potatoes and eggs.
When the British deposed the last Nawab of Lucknow, Wajid Ali Shah,
in 1856 and exiled him to Calcutta, the banished ruler’s cooks
accompanied their master. The kitchen, though, had none of the past
opulence and poverty forced the royal cooks to cut down on the
quantities of meat. They innovated with the potato instead and that is
said to be the origin of the Calcutta biryani, where the tuber
substitutes some of the meat. Another successor state of the Mughal
empire, the Hyderabad Nizamat, developed its variant of the biryani.
Taylor Sen quotes a French soldier stationed in the princely state as
describing a rice dish, “boiled with quantities of butter, fowls and
kids with all sorts of spicery”.
In his India Cookbook, food scholar Pushpesh Pant describes the
Hyderabadi biryani recipe as raw meat tenderised with unripe papaya
cooked in a pan along with the rice, the kachchi biryani. “The art of
cooking biryani is in its perfect timing: the marinated meat must cook
in the same time as the part-cooked rice when the two are sealed
together in a pot. The grains of rice should remain unbroken and
separate and should have absorbed the flavourful stock,” writes Pant.
Sidiq Jaisi, a poet from Lucknow, who found employment at the Hyderabad
Nizam’s court in the 1930s, is quoted by Taylor Sen as describing each
strand of rice “in the biryani to be filled with ghee”.
In culinary history, ascribing origins is a fraught enterprise. That
holds true for the biryani as well. Despite biryani’s royal lineage,
there is something very basic about the combination of rice and meat.
Achaya talks about references to similar dishes in the Tamil literature
of the early centuries of the Christian era. Oon soru, a rice dish made
with meat, ghee, pepper, bay leaf and turmeric, for example, is said to
have been the staple of warriors of the Chola kingdom around the second
century AD. In fact, one theory holds that the pilao itself is an
ancient dish that derives from the Greek word, pilafi.
The relative ubiquity of its ingredients also makes it plausible that
biryani was not solely a royal innovation. One theory has it that while
the pulao was a product of courtly culture, the biryani was the plebian
fare. It would be safe to say that while the more exquisite varieties
of the dish are products of kitchens that had the leisure to experiment
with cuisine, biryani, perhaps, owed as much to the activities of
merchants, traders and pilgrims.
The spice trade on the Malabar coast is one such example. The
availability of rice varieties, the profusion of spices and the cultural
spinoffs from trade combined to produce a rice-and-meat dish, somewhat
different from the ones devised in the courts of the Mughal emperors and
their successors in Awadh and Hyderabad. The Malabar biryani too relies
on slow cooking, but it’s this, and not long hours of marinating, that
gives the fall-of-the-bone quality to the meat. Compared to the
delicately-spiced biryanis of the royal kitchens in the north, and in
Hyderabad, the Malabar biryani has a robustness that could possibly owe
to its association with a community that made its mark by trading in
peppercorns and other spices. The biryani uses the short-grain rice and
has varieties in which the meat is substituted by fish or prawns.
The Bohras on India’s west coast use tomatoes and potatoes. The dish,
though, is far milder than the Malabar biryani. The Sindhi biryani is
another variant of the rice-and-meat dish that uses potatoes.
The dish devised in the kitchens of the royals and the camps and
caravans of soldiers, traders and pilgrims has recently become embroiled
in India’s recent conflicts over religion, caste and national identity.
Perhaps, that has something to do with biryani’s propensity to
transcend barriers of class. Street vendors in Delhi sell a version of
the dish, the Moradabadi biryani. It uses the kaccha variety of the
basmati rice, whole spices and has none of the aroma and resplendence
associated with the dish that has claims to royal pedigree. But for
anything between Rs 60 and Rs 100 a plate, the Moradabadi biryani is a
hearty meal, replete with proteins and carbohydrates.
Biryani’s arrival as a cultural-political trope was, perhaps, announced by the
Congress
leader, Mani Shankar Aiyar, in the late 1990s. Piqued by his DMK
opponent’s constant arraigns about his caste, Aiyar decided to prove his
anti-Brahmanical credentials by challenging his rival to a chicken
biryani-eating contest. Aiyar won the elections — it’s debatable,
though, if his appetite for biryani had any role in his victory.
But it’s only in the last decade or so that politics has threatened
to overtake the gastronomical qualities of the dish. Last year, public
prosecutor Ujwal Nikam admitted to cooking up a biryani fib to build up a
case against the 26/11 accused Ajmal Kasab. The public prosecutor had
remarked that Kasab had demanded mutton biryani in jail, but went on to
retract his statement.
Tagging Muslims and biryani ignores the fact that non-Muslim
communities have their versions of the dish. The biryani of the Syrian
Christians in Kerala, for example: unlike the Malabar biryani, this dish
uses long-grained rice and is closer to the pulao. The rice-and-meat
dish cooked by the Kayastha community in north India too has affinities
to the pulao. Food writer Anoothi Vishal notes that Yakhni pulao cooked
in Kayastha homes demanded that, “each grain of rice had to be coated
with enough flavour from the ghee in which it was roasted and then the
stock in which it was boiled”.
Communal politics around the biryani has scant respect for such
culinary nuances and diversity. It has become sharper in the last two
months with the Haryana government targeting stalls selling the dish in
Mewat in the run-up to Eid. Livestock is known to yield more meat
compared to goat and is, thus, a comparatively inexpensive source of
protein for poorer communities. In its mass avatar, the dish, once the
culinary artifact of the royalty and the affluent, uses ingredients that
are staples in the kitchens of the poor.
In Hyderabad, for example, the Kalyani buff biryani is far from the
dish that originated in aristocratic kitchens. It does not use fine rice
and is not suffused with spices. The beef-and-rice dish is said to be
the creation of the erstwhile cooks of the Kalyani nawabs of Bidar, the
underlings of the Hyderabad Nizams. After independence, when the
fortunes of the Nawabs dwindled, some of the cooks moved out and started
small food outlets. Gradually, the hole-in-the-wall joints that sold
the Kalyani biryani began to be frequented by the city’s strugglers —
the unemployed, auto-rickshaw drivers, students, rickshaw-pullers.
Today, there are several such joints in the city, where the dish can be
had for less than Rs 100. At the Cheemalapadu Dargah in Andhra Pradesh’s
Krishna district, biryani is a dish for the indigent. Here, 80-year-old
Attaullah Shariff Shataj Khadiri Baba has been feeding biryani to the
poor for more than four decades.
Biryani today is as much about nondescript joints, pilgrim fare –
even charity – as it is about gourmet cuisine. It’s a hearty meal rich
in carbohydrates and protein. The politics over the dish has little
appreciation for this aspect of culinary culture.
