Palash Bakshi
Bhopali Cuisine
Worlds Within Worlds
The New Afghan Hotel, owned by Karim Ullah Khan, lies hidden down a blind alley in the bazaars of Old Bhopal, the capital of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. From the bylane that passes for a main road, the restaurant is completely invisible, blocked by a second restaurant, which is confusingly, and inaccurately, called simply the Afghan Hotel and is owned by Sayeed Ullah Khan, one of Karim’s ten brothers. The front of that second “hotel,” a word that in India often means a simple, canteen-like restaurant, opens directly onto the street. Bright lights from inside shine on skewers of mutton and chicken that dangle over a row of grills sending banks of smoke like ghosts into the night. The pungent smells of meat, charcoal, and oil from deep-frying would be familiar to anyone who has spent time in the historic Muslim quarters of Old Delhi or Hyderabad, cities celebrated for their rich courtly cuisines. The specialty at Khan’s restaurant, a dish simply known as Afghani machli, or “Afghan fish,” would almost certainly come as a surprise.
I arrived at Khan’s restaurant at 10 p.m. on my first evening in Bhopal. The official declaration of moonrise just an hour before had marked the end of the fasting month of Ramazan and the beginning of Eid celebrations in the Muslim city. Few people had begun eating until then, yet Khan told me only one serving of the machli was left. His signature dish always sells out early, gone on most normal nights by 8 p.m. In urban India, and particularly the bustling old Muslim quarters, where small restaurants and street vendors routinely serve food late into the night, this is very early indeed. He showed me into the kitchen, a dark cave of a room lit by a pair of tungsten bulbs and by the high, orange flames of gas burners going full force under several cauldrons. Khan ladled a rust-brown gravy from the first of the pots onto a tin plate, then led me back into the fluorescent-lit dining room. I settled into a plastic chair at one of the six linoleum-topped tables, facing a wall papered with brightly colored tropical fish.
Most fish eaten in Bhopal is either samal, the snakehead murrel native to south and southeast Asia, or rohu, a carp with firm, white flesh. Both are taken from the Upper Lake, the immense body of water that forms the old city’s southern boundary. To prepare his Afghan fish, Khan cooks an inch-thick cut of rohu in a coarse sauce of tomato, onion, yogurt, sugar, and a mixture of spices that he refused to reveal: a family secret. What I noticed most — after the sweetness of the fish (an unusual base protein for central Indian Muslim cooking) and the molasses-like char on the caramelized onion and tomato — was the conspicuous absence of both the heat and the densely layered spices typical of North Indian cooking.
As I ate under Karim’s supervision, one of his younger brothers, Rashim, came into the dining room with his two-year-old son and sat down near the door. An elegant foil to his brother, Rashim wore a white skullcap, an impeccably crisp and delicately embroidered white kurta, and a long gray beard, the outward signs of a devoutly religious man and hints at his status within one of Bhopal’s oldest and most important religious families. “This restaurant was founded by our grandfather, Bashirullah Khan,” he told me, bouncing his son on one knee. “It’s been here for 60 years, three generations.” The restaurant out front, with its kebabs and grills, opened just a few years back, the result of a split in the family business—not, so far as I could tell, a particularly acrimonious one. Though not as old as Karim’s fish joint, the newer restaurant also represents an essential part of the city and family’s Muslim history. “The first feast in the Qu’ran,” Rashim told me, “was a barbecue for the angels.”
Islam’s rise in northern India began in the 10th century with a long series of invasions from central Asia and culminated in the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate in the 12th century. All of those invasions were led by warriors from modern-day Afghanistan, many of whom went on to settle in North India where they were known as Pathans. Bhopal itself was founded in 1722 by a Pathan mercenary, Dost Mohammad Khan. The new settlement quickly attracted immigrants from the large Pathan communities in central and eastern India, among them Karim and Rashim Khan’s ancestors. Though Bhopal today sits squarely in North India’s Hindi-speaking heartland, the Khans still communicate in their ancestral tongue of Pashto.
By the time the mercenary Khan had laid the foundations for his capital, northern and central India were already crowded with principalities. The three great Muslim cities of Delhi, capital of the Mughal Empire, the largest power on the subcontinent; Lucknow, which became the capital of the princely state of Oudh, or Awadh; and Hyderabad, capital of its own eponymous state and one of the largest powers in southern India, were thriving centers of art and culture. Cooks in these older, richer kingdoms — patronized, along with poets and musicians and dancers, by notoriously decadent rulers — spent centuries developing and refining their local cuisines as badges of courtly honor. According to Vincent Marques, the Goan chef de cuisine at Under the Mango Tree (widely considered the best place for traditional courtly cooking in Bhopal), these cooks were the modernist cooks of their age. “Today, Europe has a lot of restaurants doing research in food,” he told me. “India, 100 to 200 years back, was doing exactly the same.”
But not in Bhopal. Saleem Quraishi came to Bhopal from Lucknow nearly 30 years ago to help run the Jehan Numa Palace Hotel, which is a heritage property owned by a branch of Bhopal’s royal family and the elegant backdrop for Under the Mango Tree. He told me over dinner one evening: “This was a newer state. These other kingdoms — Lucknow, Delhi, Hyderabad — made their fortunes during the time of the Mughals, conquering other territories. They were rich states. By the time Bhopal was established, that had all been done.” The city’s modest young court hadn’t the resources for culinary experiments.
Through Bhopal’s first century, it struggled even to maintain its independence, locked in a constant state of war with the surrounding Hindu Maratha kingdoms of Gwalior, Indore, and Nagpur and threatened by the powerful Nizams of Hyderabad farther south. In 1813, the city suffered a nine-month siege at the hands of the united Marathas. According to Sikandar Malik, the young food historian and occasional fantasist who guided me through Bhopal and is writing the first book ever devoted entirely to Bhopali cuisine, that period of hardship resulted in the creation of one of Bhopal’s best known local delicacies, a mouth freshener known as gutka, “During that very difficult time,” Malik told me, “Bhopalis took tamarind seeds, some kinds of wood and oiled leather, I’ve heard, and they consumed it because there was no other source of energy left.”
It’s worth noting that gutka is not at all specific to Bhopal, but that Bhopalis take particular pride in their version of it, which they consider to be the finest. Today, gutka is a digestive, offered as a gift, typically after meals, and it includes cloves, cardamom, betel, a tannic acacia extract called catechu, dried fruits, and, depending on the person making it, a range of other aromatics that might include fennel or aniseed. Gutka, like its cousin sweet paan, is a potent mixture of flavors and textures: sweet, crisp, chewy, extremely tannic, and menthol-fresh at the finish. (A traditional gutka might also contain tobacco, but in 2012 that was made illegal in Madhya Pradesh.)
In 1818, the Nawab Nazar Muhammad signed the Anglo-Bhopal Treaty, forming the Bhopal Princely State under the protection of the British East India Company. With Nadir Shah’s sacking of Delhi in 1738, the East India Company’s formal annexation of Awadh in 1856, and Britain’s establishment of direct imperial rule following the revolt of 1857, two of India’s most important centers of Muslim culture collapsed, scattering their finest cooks across North India to places that remained in good standing with the British. Bhopal had come under British protection at the right time and survived this tumultuous period unscathed. But while Bhopal absorbed some of those cooks, the city’s culinary culture was already more or less in place.
This period of peace and relative prosperity coincided with the accession to the throne of a series of four female rulers known as the Begums of Bhopal. The only matrilineal Muslim dynasty in Indian history, they ran the princely state into the early 20th century and built most of the monumental structures that grace the city’s historic center. Where the Mughals, the Nawabs of Awadh, and the Nizams of Hyderabad had developed immense courts of wives, consorts, and children, the Begums — powerful but not entirely exempt from Islamic tradition — were allowed just one husband each, usually a Pathan or a Muslim Rajput, ensuring that the court remained small and the local cuisine humble. The former capitals of India’s old Muslim kingdoms, whose culinary cultures have been showered with literary and academic attention, elaborated highly sophisticated cuisines that combined the richness of India’s spices with the techniques of their central Asian ancestors. The cuisines of Delhi and Lucknow and Hyderabad had, through centuries of experimentation, become deeply Indian. Bhopal’s cooking, in its comparative simplicity, had remained both simpler and closer to its Pathan roots, offering a glimpse of an intermediate evolutionary stage between the food of Afghanistan and the elaborate cuisines of India’s Muslim courts that it eventually spawned.
The most typical Bhopali dishes are relatively restrained. Chicken Rizala, for instance, in its base masala uses a modest five ingredients — ginger, garlic, green chile, coriander powder, and turmeric (ubiquitous in Indian cooking as an antiseptic and antibacterial) — and flavored primarily with large quantities of fresh cilantro, which grows abundantly in the region, is cooked down into a fragrant green gravy (yogurt gives the creamy, liquid texture). Malik told me that rizala has its origins in the simple culinary traditions of the local Gond tribes who are the indigenous inhabitants of the region, a claim that’s difficult to document but, given the rusticity of the dish, seems reasonable enough. He said that it was popularized by wild-game hunters in the jungles surrounding the city. A basic version of a dish like rizala could be prepared in situ using minimal and relatively common ingredients (the recipe that follows, from Under the Mango Tree, is a more sophisticated iteration of the dish). Though today rizala is usually made with chicken, traditionally it contained any wild fowl, including quail or peacock.
On that same night, my first in Old Bhopal, Malik and I stopped at a relatively new food stall called New Pakiza Hotel near Peer Gate, one of the city’s 11 old entryways, to try shami kebabs, patties of spiced and finely pounded mutton stuffed with fresh onion, chile, and coriander. These are deep-fried and served with a chutney, nearly identical to the rizala gravy, combining fresh coriander, green chile, ginger, garlic, and mildly sweet yogurt. “This chutney,” Malik told me, “is an eternal part of Bhopali cuisine.”
The Bhopali version of the meat and rice dish biryani is also notably milder than the ones prepared in Hyderabad, Delhi, or Lucknow. It’s flavored almost exclusively with the juices and stock of the meat itself, rather than the rich array of aromatics (clove, cinnamon, black and green cardamom, among others) favored in other regions. Nihari, a dazzlingly spicy Old Delhi dish of beef or mutton shank stewed overnight in a mixture of up to 40 spices, is also much milder in Bhopal, where the version I tasted derived practically all its heat from the clear, bright bite of fresh ginger.
Pasande, across India’s former Muslim principalities, describes thin strips of pounded goat’s meat. Here, it is pounded using a sil-batta, a flat, rough stone and large stone roller, and then tenderized overnight with a mixture of ground unripe papaya (unripe mango powder works too) and salt. The next day it’s marinated with a combination of onion, garlic, ginger, whole red chiles, poppy seeds, coconut, almonds, dry-roasted chickpeas, and garam masala (cloves, black and green cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, peppercorn, cumin), all fried and ground into a powder. Once combined with the pounded meat, the entire mixture is smoked for about 45 minutes using a technique called dhungar.
Typical of Awadhi cooking, that involves placing a small “bowl” made from half an onion layer in a pan surrounded by the spiced meat, putting a live coal inside the bowl, then dousing it with ghee and covering the pan quickly to trap the smoke. Madhur Jaffrey, an expert on Indian cooking and author of numerous cookbooks, told me that this style of smoking meat is common to most of India’s Muslim communities and typically associated with an elegant but not necessarily courtly style of cooking. Once smoked, the meat is cooked with a bit more oil and a small amount of yogurt until it gives off no more liquid, then finally smoked once more for an additional 20 minutes. Of the traditional dishes I tasted over nearly a week in Bhopal, pasande was by far the most complex in its technique. Though both pasande and dhungar are common to Awadhi cooking, Bhopalis say that the combination of the two is unique to their local cuisine.
The breakfast and snack foods that I encountered in Bhopal, humbler than the meat dishes I’ve described, originated outside the royal court and, in fact, outside the Pathan tradition, arriving in Bhopal from the Maratha state of Indore to the southwest. Poha, a dish of flattened rice flakes, rehydrated then fried with spices, is common in some form or another across the subcontinent, but its preparation in Bhopal is a near exact replica of the Maratha version prepared in Indore, cooked with mustard seed, turmeric, chile, and onion and served for breakfast with sweet jalebis (fried dough soaked in simple syrup). Other Maratha specialties that migrated to Bhopal are the varieties of street foods known as chivda, made from fried and spiced dough, grains, pulses, and rice, sometimes mixed with peanuts or raisins. On the night of Eid, in the old city immense bushels of the stuff lined the brilliantly lit main bazaar, which looked to me like a close replica of the Bombay lane known as Chivda Gully or Chivda Alley, located in one of that city’s most staunchly Maharashtrian neighborhoods.
Other culinary origin stories I heard — most of them related with wide-eyed gusto by Malik, whose royalist tendencies make him a veritable encyclopedia of the city’s Nawabi history — ranged from the fanciful to the almost certainly apocryphal. Yet even the most far-fetched were based in the city’s compelling history.
Malik cited the tendency in Bhopal to add spices only in the final stages of cooking in order to preserve their flavor and pungency. “Probably,” he explained, “this is the French influence because they also want to enjoy things in their original flavor.” That French influence is typically attributed to the Bhopal Bourbons, descendants of Jean-Philippe de Bourbon, who in 1560 killed a relative in a duel and was forced into exile. Over the next two centuries, his descendants moved through the courts of North India, finding favor under Akbar and the Princes of Gwalior, before settling in Bhopal in the late 18th century. Shawkat Mahal, their grand, if dilapidated, palace, was given in the 19th century to the Begums, whose descendants generously invited me to share their family lunch on the day of Eid. The notion that the Bourbons would have retained their French culinary tastes 200 years after arriving in India seems to me unlikely. And yet, even now, the city crest — two fish flanking one of the lost city gates and crossed by three arrows, representing the royal family’s Pathan lineage — is crowned by a fleur-de-lis.
By the time of Indian Independence in 1947, Bhopal’s culinary heritage had long since settled into its present form. During the late 1950s, when the city became the capital of India’s largest state by area, it began to change rapidly, drawing a significant population from the surrounding countryside and importing skilled labor from South India to work in its electrical and chemical industries. Through the 60s and 70s, Bhopal was one of India’s fastest growing cities. The chemical industry that drove Bhopal’s rise also brought about the disaster that for the last 30 years has stained the city’s name.
In early December 1984, the Union Carbide plant just north of Bhopal’s old city leaked 40 metric tonnes of a highly toxic pesticide, methyl isocyanate, which resulted in 2,000 immediate deaths and over the succeeding decades as many as 300,000 injuries. The Bhopal Tragedy remains the worst industrial disaster in history, and although it left no mark on the city’s architecture and lakefront, the tragedy recast Bhopal’s image as one of horror, negligence, and death. Search “Bhopal” on the digital library JSTOR and you’ll go through at least eight pages before you find writing on Bhopal that deals with any other subject. Few people seem to know about the city’s monumental architecture or its matrilineal dynasty, fewer still about its cooking.
Yet that horror also, to a degree, prevented the dramatic cultural changes that have swept through Delhi, Lucknow, and Hyderabad. Bhopali cooking, like the brothers Karim and Rashim Khan, represents a direct line to the city’s heritage. Where the Pathan elements of India’s other Muslim kingdoms were absorbed and adapted over centuries, Old Bhopal, in its food and in its culture, remains to a large extent a Pathan city.
Bhopal today is rebuilding itself for the 21st century. In 2013, the state of Madhya Pradesh won a national award for best comprehensive development in the tourism sector. I’ve heard praise from urbanists, albeit tentative, for concerted efforts by the city and state governments to develop quality infrastructure to outpace population growth. If successful, these programs could set a new standard for India’s booming secondary cities. After three decades of recovery, Bhopal and the immense state that it leads are both finally beginning to emerge into the tremendous promise of post-liberalization India with all its concomitant hazards. As this happens, it will require more projects like Malik’s to preserve the city’s singular cultural heritage.
After my evening meal at the New Afghan Hotel, Rashim, who wrote his doctoral thesis on animal imagery in the Qu’ran, took Malik and me down the street to the family home to show us his library. The room was blindingly white, save for the back wall lined with books in Persian, Pashto, Urdu, and Arabic. In one corner, he keeps a personal sort of wunderkammern: glass cases loaded with stuffed zebra feet, petrified fish, and other souvenirs from his travels around Asia and Africa, which he displayed with the broad enthusiasm of an explorer, rather than the explanatory precision of a scholar. Karim and Rashim don’t spend time telling you about the type of fish they serve or the provenance of the tomatoes they cook with. Even Malik, whose work focuses primarily on food, is far less interested in the pedigree of ingredients or their nutritional value than in their relation to the families and people who might first have used them.
Obscure in their origins and individual meanings, Rashim’s objects are not meant for science or study; taken together, they illustrate the breadth and beauty of Allah’s inventive power. Bhopali cuisine does something similar. Despite the best attempts of people like Malik to tease out the individual histories of Bhopali dishes, those histories will always combine myth and fact. Compared with culinary trends in the West that increasingly pursue food as a scientific endeavor, whether through cooking technique or nutritional and environmental impact, Bhopali food is much like Rashim’s wunderkammern: an often surprising, consistently pleasurable collection of dishes whose real past might remain obscure but that together offer a singular portrait of a city. ●
Here are the recipes for Bhopali Pasande and Chicken Rizala.
