It was not love at first sight.
During my student days in Dhanbad the journey home involved a long layover at Howrah Railway Station. On one of those occasions four of us friends went to have Biryani in Esplanade. After many months of unpalatable mess food, a restaurant meal seemed like a seductive idea. We asked around for recommendations, went to a popular restaurant in New Market, sat ourselves down at a table, and without even looking at the menu ordered four Chicken Biryanis.
After some time the waiter emerged from the kitchen and started walking towards us carrying four overflowing plates on a tray. We ogled at the plates as they slowly made their way towards us and what particularly caught our attention were the huge chunks placed on each of the plates. Excited at the prospect of a meat frenzy, we drooled like Pavlov's dogs. But our excitement was short-lived, the moment the plates were put on the table we realised that the chunks were actually big potatoes (Aalu). The chicken was somewhere in the background, a supporting cast in the ensemble. I remember all of us laughing at our shared disappointment. This incident has been retold several times since, and it never fails to recreate the laughter.
This could have been my only encounter with the Kolkata biryani. But fate had other plans, a few years later I married a Kolkatan, and the entire repertoire of Bengali cuisine, its finest version, strode back into my life. I am not that student anymore, I like trying new things and have greatly enjoyed exploring the exquisite delicacies of Bengali cuisine. However, I feel that Aalu and I have had a sort of "previous relationship" before my marriage; so my heart winks at it every time I see it in a biryani.
Over the years I have visited Kolkata numerous times, it's an intriguing city. Each time I try to unravel a bit of its mystique and feel its rustic charm. This time around (in Feb 2022) I decided to pursue the Aalu, to understand how the most commonplace item found such an exalted pride of place.
I had made feeble forays into this before, but never seriously, it was in light conversations with friends and family in Kolkata. The most common answer I heard all the time was that the Aalu was introduced in the Biryani by the exiled Nawab of Awadh, Wajid Ali Khan, as an austerity measure in lieu of his weak finances. The story goes that the deposed Nawab did not have enough money to feed his people, so he had asked his cooks to add Aalu as a substitute for full meat in the biryani, and the practice caught on. This austerity story is one I have always struggled to believe. It has loopholes, and the more I tried to understand the Nawab through books and films (played by Amjad Khan in Shatranj Ke Khiladi), the more improbable the story appeared to me.
The Nawab was actually quite infamous for his lavish lifestyle, which was part reason (or rather pretext) used for his forced abdication by the East India Company. In exchange for his abdication, Nawab Wajid Ali was provided a pension of Rupees 12 lac per year, which I think would make a luxurious pension even today, let alone in the 1850s when it would have been ultra-lavish. To draw a comparison, the last King of Punjab was offered less than half that sum as pension - minimum 4 lacs and a maximum of 5 lacs per year. Basically, I believe the Nawab had neither the need nor the disposition to find cheaper alternatives.
So how did the humble potato gain its entry? I found the first plausible explanation in an interview of a lady who claims Nawab's lineage* (more on that later) and runs a restaurant in the city. In the interview she mentioned a very interesting point, the fact that Aalu was not as common as we take for granted now. A little digging on the Internet corroborated her point - Spanish introduced potatoes to Europe in 1570. They also brought it to the west coast of India in the late 17th century calling it "batata", a name still in use there. The British started cultivating potatoes on the foothills of Himalayas in the 1830s. However, the timing of potato's entry into Bengal is a bit fuzzy. Some records suggest that it was in 1780, when a basket of potatoes was presented to Sir Warren Hastings in Calcutta. Others believe that it was about a hundred years later, as recent as 1879 when a British Resident tried to establish a garden in Darjeeling using potato seeds brought from England. After reading several competing theories, the view I'm inclined to take is that potato cultivation and consumption slowly spread over Bengal in the second half of the 19th century, the period overlapping with Wajid Ali's stay in Kolkata, he lived there for 33 years until his death in 1887. The aalu seems to have been added to the biryani, either by the royal kitchen or someone else, but most definitely as an exotic, novel addition, not a cost saving measure.
Leaving his wife and a 12 year old son in Lucknow, Wajid Ali had sailed down the Ganges and arrived in Kolkata in 1856 to make his plea to the EIC Governor asking for the return of his Kingdom. When his plea fell on deaf ears he sent his mother and brother to England to plead directly with the Queen. However, the political mood changed suddenly with 1857 and instead of regaining the Kingdom, he found himself arrested. When he was released two years later, he had resigned to his new fate. He settled in Metiabruz in the western outskirts of the city and lived there for the rest of his life.
The pursuit of this story took me to Metiabruz. I wanted to see the neighbourhood the Nawab created, the supposed mini-Lucknow in Kolkata, visit his grave in the Imambara there, and most importantly, taste the Kolkata biryani in its original birthplace. Metiabruz is not a tourist place today, its narrow bylanes contain the back-offices of tailoring shops and abattoirs. In the Imambara the fatherly caretaker took me around explaining the photographs on the walls and the Taazias (models of Hussain's tomb in Karbala, Iraq) on display. Later, we sat together on the steps as I put my shoes back on and I asked him my final question - Which was his favourite place to try a Biryani? He smiled and gave me a name.
The caretaker's recommendation was a very modest place a few streets away, the kind where the owner sits at a counter in the front and shouts instructions at one or two boys who run the whole place. There were only a few tables and I found one next to a couple who looked tired after a long day of shopping. When the boy came I ordered 'Biryani', deliberately avoiding to specify the meat option, for I wanted to see what the default option meant. As I had suspected, a beef biryani promptly arrived on my table.
And, once again, I spotted the Aalu showing itself off on my plate, and my heart winked at it one more time ;)
PS - Here's an interesting side-dish to this story. When 1857 started, Begum Hazrat Mahal, the Nawab's wife in Lucknow enthroned her 12 year old son, Bijris Qadir, and joined the revolt against the British. She fought for 2 years before escaping and seeking asylum in Kathmandu, where she eventually died. Interestingly, Kathmandu was also providing asylum to Queen Jind Kaur (wife of the Sikh Emperor Maharaja Ranjit Singh) and the son of the Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar at the same time. One of my biggest curiosities is to know the communication between these prominent families left licking their wounds in Kathmandu, all wronged by a common enemy. There are no records available of any such conversation, but surely they must have happened. Bijris Qadir in fact went on to marry Mehtab Ara Begum, Bahadur Shah's granddaughter.
Back in Kolkata Nawab Wajid Ali died in 1887, and a few years later in 1892 Bijris Qadir came to Kolkata to claim his father's inheritance and pension. Fearing competition, his jealous relatives invited the family to a dinner and poisoned them. Only Bijris' pregnant wife and his sick daughter did not attend the dinner and survived to live. Any genuine claimant today of the Nawab of Oudh's lineage is a very lucky person.
