Both are Indian, without any influence of a foreign cuisine

I don’t understand the logic behind some overenthusiastic people touting to make khichdi the national dish. First up, khichdi is not an Indian or even a subcontinental dish. It came to India 2200-2500 years ago from China.

The Asiatic Society in Mumbai has a torn book written mainly in Cantonese and a few passages in archaic Mandarin (the modern Chinese). The book suggests that a khichdi-type dish from the northern part of China was introduced to the Indian palate by the silk traders of China. It’s worthwhile to mention that India and China had a long history of mutual commercial and philosophical interests; Confucius and Laotse were influenced by ancient Indian philosophers and sages.

Plagiarised dish

So it’s better not to include and acclaim khichdi as an Indian dish, however Indian it may have become in over two millenniums. In other words, it’s a plagiarised dish!

Now come idli-dosa. Can any other dish of the Indian subcontinent claim so much popularity and omnipresence like idli and dosa? Moreover, both are completely Indian, without any culinary influence of a foreign cuisine. Tandoori chicken is Iranian, Bengal’s rosasgula is of Portuguese origin, the roghan josh of Kashmir came from Afghanistan, fish curry came from Burma, and halwa (any type of it) came from the Arab peninsula (halwa itself is an Arabic word). Kabab came from Turkey (it is a Turkish word). The list is interminable.

So which dish is purely Indian and originated here on this subcontinent? Pat comes the answer: idli-dosa. Both the dishes are roughly 1,000 years old and have the stamp of originality that is typical Indian. Arab settlers bringing idli to southern India does not hold water any longer. It very much originated here in India.

Moreover, the ubiquitous presence of idli-dosa from Kashmir to Kanyakumari makes both the dishes worthy contenders of becoming the national dishes. You can get it in any nook and cranny of India, though the taste may differ according to the province’s culinary influences.

The legendary British chef and culinary historian Gordon Ramsay called them an “international dish” because of dosa’s aesthetically unique texture and idli’s cheeky (pun intended) smoothness. He opined that idli and dosa were the safest and tastiest foods conceived and conceptualised by humans. He further stated that an individual could survive on idli-dosa till death and the best thing about both was that they never tasted dull and monotonous. One never gets bored with idli-dosa. You can eat it every day, yet will not get fed up.

Lord Mountbatten requested C. Rajagopalachari to send his Tamil cook to teach his English cook the nuances of making idli and dosa. His wife, Edwina Mountbatten, was very fond of idli and dosa and she herself learnt to make it from Jawaharlal Nehru’s cook, who was from Madurai. The Darjeeling-born Vivien Leigh who starred in Gone with the Wind had a masala dosa at perhaps the oldest South Indian restaurant on Park Street, Calcutta in 1932 and got hooked to it. She never forgot its lingering taste.

Nehru’s South Indian secretary M.O. Mathai mentioned in his book Reminiscences of Nehru Age that Indira Gandhi loved to gorge on idlis.

On my visits to neighbouring countries and even countries such as Tunisia and Morocco in North Africa, I saw and had idli-dosa, though I also had seen the crocodile and baby-elephant meat-filling in a dosa in another African country, Burkina Faso!

The owner, an African, came to India in the late 1960s to learn food-processing in Kochi and innovated on dosa. But he didn’t play ducks and drakes with idlis.

Yours truly had the tastiest idli-dosa at a Malayali-Muslim migrant’s restaurant in Chitral in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa of Pakistan.

sumitmaclean@hotmail.com