How Awadhi food came into Kolkata

Awadhi food in Kolkata.

The roghni tikiya came to me steaming off the griddle. Earlier they had been slapped on the metal plate, molten fat hissing and pooling around it like dew on autumn mornings. The golden discs finally flew to my empty dinner plate, as if spilled-over sun. “The roghni tikiya is considered a few notches above paratha in Awadhi cuisine,” I had been enlightened earlier by Shahanshah Mirza — the great grandson of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, the last nawab of Awadh — who apprised that the pandemic uncertainty had pushed back festivities by a year.

It seemed just the right time for a reminder. After all, the tikya was being served at Shaam-e-Awadh, a celebration to mark the 200th birth anniversary of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah in Kolkata, where he spent the last three decades of his life. The celebrations, held at The Westin Kolkata Rajarhat, were also collective memories of an old, lost world belonging to kings and courtiers, and a portal to Lucknow.

The extraordinary footwork of Kathak dissolved on the stage, amid a blur of nimble movements and sounds of a thousand ankle bells. Later, the evening was charged with Soz-Khwani musical compositions, revealing the tragedy of Karbala in a lace-like mesh of languages — Urdu, Farsi, Awadhi and Hindustani.

These were performances, but also reminiscences — meditations on a king whom historians could not place in a box. “He was a composer, singer, poet and dancer. He also wrote and produced plays on Hindu themes (he was a Muslim himself) in which he acted the main part. All this made the King a figure worthy of film treatment,” says Satyajit Ray in his book The Chess Players and Other Screenplays (1989). Ray’s film Shatranj Ke Khilari (1977) is one of the most compelling visual documents on the annexation of Awadh.

One is aware that the story of the 10th and last nawab of Awadh starts long ago. Turbulent and gripping, the tale of political intrigue is set in a native province in what is modern-day Uttar Pradesh. Wajid Ali Shah was part of a cultural and political churn shaped and nurtured by the family line of the Persian adventurer Nazim Sa’adat Khan. The subsequent rulers of this dynasty, buttressed the idea of refinement and sophistication, through vehicles of music, poetry, clothing, painting and, of course, cooking.

An Awadhi meat dish.

“Asaf-ud Daula moved the capital to Lucknow, which came to rival Delhi as the cultural and culinary capital of North India…” writes Colleen Taylor Sen in Feasts and Fasts: A History of Food in India (2014). Taylor Sen goes on to describe an almost fantastical culinary episode involving Wajid Ali, who served meals as riddles or pehle. She talks of a meal where the nawab told his guest — a prince from Delhi — that he was being served a murabba, a spiced conserve made of fruit or vegetables. In reality, it was a qorma or meat curry, cooked to create an illusion of murabba. Wildly imaginative cooking techniques and dexterity of the kitchen hands had visually transfigured the non-vegetarian qorma into the vegetarian murabba.

Part riddle, part storytelling, this trick of a meal is possibly a microcosm of Wajid Ali’s entire life. The unimaginable splendour of the Awadh court and the playfulness of its sovereign can be imagined as the precursor to the prank that fate played on him. A decadent lifestyle marked by patronage of the arts, rose and fell when the Empire rendered Indian provincial rulers like him completely irrelevant. “Even so, there was something rather heroic about a man who refused to bow to changing times, and who single-handedly endeavoured to preserve the etiquette and customs of the great Mughals well into the period of the British Raj,” says Rosie Llewellyn-Jones in Last King in India: Wajid Ali Shah (2014).

For the fallen nawab, the memories of a life of pageantry, lived and lost, stayed forever. He conjured up gilt-tinted images of his kingdom and the scents of the grand kitchens in Kolkata. The roghni tikiya was the thread running through the two cities — Awadh and Kolkata — that held in their hearts the meaning of home for the nawab.

Roghni tikiya is a few notches above paratha.

“Exile,” sighs Mirza, “was not what Wajid Ali Shah was sent to.” Brushing off imaginary crumbs from a dark-as-kohl sherwani, he stressed that the nawab came to Kolkata on his own free will. “After meeting Lord Charles Canning in Kolkata, Wajid Ali Shah realised that the shrewd Governor General was appointed to promote the Company’s interest, not him or the kingdom of Awadh,” says Mirza.

The deposed monarch of Awadh had come to Kolkata to plead his case to the Governor General of India (at that time Lord Charles Canning had replaced Lord Dalhousie) as his kingdom had been wrongfully annexed on February 7, 1856 by the British Empire. The nawab believed that arguing his case to the supreme administrator of British India will catalyse the return of his lost kingdom. Alas, that was not to be.

In an era marked by British expansionist tendencies, kingdoms once annexed, were certainly not given back. All hopes were dashed when the Great Uprising of 1857 swept through the nation, singeing all ties between the Indian royalty and the British rulers in its wake. It did not take long for the Empire to realise that the nawab’s rousing popularity could enthuse droves of Indians to rally behind his leadership and push back against a foreign rule. The deep-seated anxiety translated into the arrest of Wajid Ali Shah on June 16, 1857. The British took him into custody, putting him under house arrest in Kolkata for 26 months at the Governor House building, now known as Amherst House inside Fort William. Upon release, his reception was heartfelt. “It was a joyous homecoming to the start of Wajid Ali Shah’s new life in Bengal,” says Llewellyn-Jones.

Sure enough, the nawab’s life in Metia Burj was enlivened by the promise of the city’s multiculturalism, diversity and an insatiable appetite for culture. Food, along with poetry, music and other acts of leisure found a particular urgency in his salons. Since then, the Kolkata biryani, forever credited to the deposed ruler, has waltzed like an insane tornado around the world, establishing itself firmly on international dinner tables and finding kinship with the city’s street food vendors. Like the nawab, the biryani is talismanic. It has touched ingredients that are humble, routine and dreary while transforming them into symbols of culinary brilliance.

Kolkata biryani. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

“It would be right to say that Wajid Ali Shah created a mini Lucknow in the Metia Burj area,” Mirza is quick to add. The nawab also added deeper imprints, including building the Sibtainabad Imambara. “While in Metia Burj, he wrote 100 books, which were published in his private press called Matbua-i-Sultani,” says Mirza.

Assorted cultural pursuits defined the deposed monarch. But rising above his panoply of achievements, like a hot-air balloon on a windswept terrain, was Wajid Ali Shah’s contribution to Kolkata’s cuisine. Today, the Kolkata biryani seems to be framed through the quirks and obsessions of the Nawab. While there are conjectures that the potato in the city’s biryani was a means to stretch the dish by the king, his descendants argue vehemently against this version of events.

Through the years, Mirza has been speaking on various platforms about how Wajid Ali Shah encouraged his cooks to experiment in the kitchen. He claims that post the introduction of the potato, a New World vegetable in the early 16th century, it gained an exotic status in the country. The royal chefs, in one of their experiments, added the tuber to the Awadhi biryani. In the dumpukht style of cooking biryani, the potato got infused with aromas of spices, saffron and meat to engineer an alchemic reaction on the palate.

The nawab, impressed with this flavour wizardry, proclaimed that potato should be included in biryani forever. Mirza proudly spotlights the monarch’s enduring contribution to the city’s food map: “He introduced the Awadhi cuisine to Kolkata.” He hastens to correct other misconceptions about the cuisine: “Awadhi food is not rich. It was prepared after consulting hakims,” he clarifies.

Over the years assorted Awadhi delicacies have tightened their fists around the heart of Kolkata. Shaami kebab, kakori kebab, nahari and qorma have found adequate representation in restaurant menus. A popular city eatery, Oudh 1590, lists the Metiabruz Biryani on its menu, elaborating on its “Dum Pukht method of cooking rice,” while calling the dish a “Kolkata speciality.”

Organically the ties that bind Kolkata and Awadh extend beyond food. They are symbolic of a calm stoicism in the face of adversity, resilience and an enduring appreciation for the genteel way of life. The dinner spread orchestrated by Lucknow-based Sheeba Iqbal at the nawab’s birth anniversary celebrations was also shot through with similar emotions. Iqbal has been serving heirloom Awadhi recipes at her home-dining venture Aab-O-Dana, attracting a stream of note-worthy guests, including politician Mani Shankar Aiyar and filmmakers Mira Nair and Nitesh Tiwari.

She is untiring in forging connections between her centuries-old recipes and their storied past. “Awadhi food puts down its roots in Persia or modern-day Iran as the Awadh rulers were Persians,” says Iqbal, who belongs to Lucknow’s acclaimed Azim ally family and hosts diners at her 122-year-old house in the Chowk area. Iqbal surmises that some of these Awadhi dishes with Persian ancestry were adapted later to represent local ingredients and cooking techniques.

Awadhi food spread.

However, once it donned regional clothes Awadhi cuisine acquired a bold identity of its own. One of its finer expressions is the roghni tikiya or roghni roti, bearing imprints of a million shards of nuts. The bread, where the flour is kneaded with ghee and curd, honours the legacy of Awadhi cuisine like no other. Its linguistic ancestor is the Urdu word roghan meaning grease or oil. Flaky and rich, the bread is almost pastry-like in its mouth-feel and decadence. “Ideally one should have the roghni roti with few spoons of fresh cream or balai,” says Mirza.

Iqbal laments that the roghni roti is now losing currency. It has been ceding space as commercial establishments in Lucknow have failed to champion the bread, fearing low economic dividends. She, therefore, has the unenviable task of bringing roghni roti back on the food map. “To make it popular, I cook accompanying dishes to go with the roghni roti. There will always be shaami kebab or khagina (egg preparation) so that the bread is in focus,” she explains.

Taylor Sen describes why kebabs and Awadhi cuisine dissolve into each other like sugar and water. “Two of Lucknow’s best known contributions to Indian cuisine (are): the dum (Persian for "steam") style of cooking and the local kebabs.” Staying close to this theme, Iqbal showcased a not-so familiar platter of ghutwan kebab to an enthralled set of diners in Kolkata. Cotton candy clouds of minced meat with its emissaries of aromatics — cardamom, mace, poppy seeds, kewra water, ittar — were served like acts of spiritual deliverance.

Shahi tukda, an Awadhi sweet dish.

Iqbal speculates that ghutwan kebab, also known as majlisi or pateeli kebab, may have arrived on the scene to feed large gatherings at the Muharram majlis. “At these Shia religious congregations, tabarruk or tokens of blessings, in the form of food, are handed out. Sheermal and kebab were a staple,” she says. It is possible that a wise bawarchi decided that frying individual meat patties for thousands is not a workable idea. He subsequently simplified the kebab cooking ritual, frying meat mince in bulk on a pateeli to create ghutwan kebab.

Awadh’s king, like the complex vocabulary of flavours in its cuisine, is difficult to pin down with adjectives. The buffet at Wajid Ali Shah’s birth anniversary, also a parade of tales about colonialism and immigration, compelled modern diners to ask questions. Why do cuisines we hold in high regard conceal in its core truths that are not easy to digest? Perhaps, they are emblems of the precarity of the human condition itself. Exactly as Llewellyn-Jones describes the enigma that was Wajid Ali Shah: “We are left with…the portrait of a man who lived through eventful times and whose name, despite his undoubted failings, is still synonymous in India today with tehzeeb — the grace and courtesy of kings.”