A special report on Bhatkal Biryani: How India Colonised A Persian Speciality
12:35PM Mon 30 May, 2011
By: SOURISH BHATTACHARYA, India Today
I had first heard the name Bhatkal in the context of an alleged terrorist belonging to the Indian Mujahideen, the shadowy organisation that gets everybody excited at periodic intervals in our newsroom.
The name came back to me like a flash of inspiration when the waiter at Gajalee - a Mumbai restaurant chain that has long outgrown its humble beginnings at Vile Parle because of a dedicated fan following acquired over the years - recommended that whatever I did, I had to end my meal with their Dum Biryani. My host, film and television honcho Amit Khanna, who can talk about food with the same ease with which he narrates stories about the shenanigans of Marlon Brando, said what I was going to get was actually a Bhatkal Biryani, which was served only at the Ali Baba restaurant at Fraser Town, Bangalore.
I have never ceased to be impressed by the way we've colonised the biryani, which came to us from Safavid Persia (the root of the word is beryan, Persian for 'fried'). We have turned into a work of gustatory art what was essentially an uncomplicated Persian dish that involved marinating chunks of lamb overnight in yoghurt and spices, grilling them in a tandoor, and serving them on steamed rice.
We have as many biryanis as we have cooks capable of dishing out a good one - Pratibha Karan's information-loaded and illustration-rich book, Biryani, lists 100 recipes - and we even have a meatless egg biryani (go for it the next time you're in Chennai) in our national repertoire.
The Bhatkal Biryani gets its name from a small town near Mangalore in Karnataka that is otherwise known for the neighbouring Murudeshwar beach, which has just been discovered by tourists but not as crowded as the more established seaside destinations. A community of Arab traders, who were fleeing the tyranny of an infamous governor of Iraq during the caliphate of Abdul Malik Marwan, settled in this speck of land around the eighth century and they acquired the tag of navayath (newcomers). Today, their descendants call themselves Navayathi Muslims and they have a website (www.bhatkallys.com) that'll tell you all about their past and present.
You'd expect a proud community such as the Navayathi Muslims to have a biryani with a distinctive flavour - like their language, whose base in Konkani and the script Persian, with words from Arabic, Marathi, Persian, Sanskrit and Urdu.
The biryani is cooked in two stages: chunks of mutton (beef, fish and prawns are the other options) are first cooked with onion and spices, and then rice is added and the combination is cooked in dum in a ceramic pot. The centrepiece of the biryani is a whole potato which is dum-cooked along with the rice and mutton (or one of the other options). The Navayaths are big on rice and seafood, but the dishes I'd love to have more out of curiosity are the Navari (steamed rice cakes stuffed with coconut shavings, fried onions and jaggery), Shinawniyo (spicy oysters), Goda Appo (jaggery oysters), Shayya Biryani (made with sevian, or vermicelli), and of course, the Macaroni Godan (kheer made with macaroni and coconut milk). No wonder they say food takes on another meaning after every 50km in this mind-bogglingly diverse country of ours.
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