India's love affair with biryani, explained

It is a mild winter day in Kolkata. A 40-year-old man is driving with his daughter on a no-nonsense looking bridge. Suddenly he stops midway, rushing to jump off. After some commotion and timely intervention from the city police, the man is deterred from ending his life, lured by a meal of biryani and a promise of a job. A suicide is averted!

The incident that happened earlier this month made headlines across India, with citizens expressing relief that a life was saved by biryani.

Biryani (also spelled biriyani), is a one-pot meal, usually made with succulent pieces of meat or chicken and long-grained rice, blended with caramelised curls of onions and a host of fragrant spices.

It can be a life-saver and yet in present-day India, biryani has become a politicised dog whistle for the Hindu-nationalist government amid its continuing campaign of "othering."

Despite the recent campaigns against it, biryani remains beloved across India. It is actually the most ordered dish in the country, according to India’s largest food delivery platforms Swiggy and Zomato.

In fact Indians ordered one biryani every 2.25 seconds last year, Swiggy reported. The company also said that a whopping 430,000 biryanis were ordered by customers on the first day of 2023. Meanwhile, Zomato said 2.5 biryanis are ordered on its platforms every second.

Behind the delicious comfort food lies a fascinating story. From its journey as a dish only cooked in royal kitchens to being served "en masse" and becoming the most popular, and ultimate hunger saviour of urban India (for the eighth year in a row) biryani is more than just a meal.

It is a sentiment; an integral part of the subcontinent’s cultural history layered like the food itself, and rooted in early modern India or even before.

The history of biryani in India has more than one interpretation, with the commonly accepted fact that the word is etymologically connected to the word "berenj," which means rice in Persian.

Food historians like Lizzie Collingham believe that biryani emerged from Mughal royal kitchens. Referring to third Mughal emperor Akbar the Great’s life and reign from 1556 to 1605 in her book Curry, A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, Collingham defines biryani as a "syntheses" of the subtle Persian pilaf and the bold Hindustani rice dishes high on spices.

Salma Hussain, another writer who has been documenting Muslim/Mughal food for decades, notes that Indian biryani’s namesake in Isfahan no longer contains rice and is now combined with bread. The relatively spicier version retaining rice and meat is purely an Indian attribute.

Pratibha Karan, author of the book Biryani, speculates that the dish may have been a quick offering to soldiers camping for the night, or in its ancestral form may have travelled to the south of India with Arab traders in the seventh century.

Despite different theories about its origin, the wider understanding is that biryani’s transformation to its Indian form as it is loved today, and how it is cooked and served, stems from the Mughal era.

This is when biryani moved from the royal kitchen to the streets, becoming one of the most consumed foods in the country. So much so that there are loyal fans of schools of biryani, with ever-argumentative Indians championing their provincial variety.

The list is long with every region boasting its own - North to South, East to West. There's the ubiquitous Delhi biryani, originating from Old Delhi.

Old Delhi, also known locally as Purani Dilli, is the area where fifth Mughal emperor Shah Jahan founded his walled city Shahjahanabad in 1648. The city remained the Mughal administrative quarters till 1857.

Other cities that have created their own style of biryani include the Lucknow variety, patronised by erstwhile Nawabs of Awadh to Rampur’s version (another princely state in British India), to the recently popular Moradabadi variety from Moradabad - all in the north.

In the south, there is the legendary Hyderabadi biryani (Hyderabad till today orders the highest number of biryanis in India); Beary biryani from Karnataka’s coastal region; Tamil Nadu’s Dindigul or Thalappakatti biriyani; and Thalassery biryani from Kerala.

Add to that the Sindhi and typical biryani of the Memons, and finally the Kolkata biryani, an extension of Lucknow with a chunky potato always thrown in.

The sheer variety is mind-boggling but enough to prove biryani’s unbeatable popularity irrespective of who and how it got to India; whether by the emperor’s cooks or via travelling Arab traders or the nameless khanshamas whose ingenious mind served the hungry soldiers.

At the turn of the twentieth century, restaurants like Royal in Kolkata (1905), Tunday Kebabi in Lucknow (1905) and Karim’s in Delhi (1923), along with a host of others paved the way for the popularising of biryani, which was once deemed "Musalman khana" (food of the Muslims).

Over the years, these eateries widened their outreach, welcoming patrons across class, caste and faith, transforming biryani from a celebratory Muslim dish savoured by the community on Eid to a joy-filled meal for everyone.

The taboo of frequenting a Muslim eatery because it served meat loosened up as diners from all faiths including some Hindus prioritised the joy of having Mughlai food.

For decades, the lines of "Muslimness" and Indianness were blurred, happily. There was no need to be discreet while enjoying Sunday lunch at Karim’s, Delhi or Shiraz (1923) in Kolkata - until the 2000s.

Then began the decade of othering with the historical win of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India's general elections in 2014, which changed the country's face forever.

This is not to mean that India had been oblivious of its divisions, but that the othering of Muslims, Christians and Dalits was previously neither rampant nor normalised.

But after 2014, the desire to bolster the BJP's popularity spurred the continuous policing of food. This would be reflected in incidents of shutting down biryani stalls during Diwali or Ram Navami, the crime being allegedly serving meat during important Hindu festivals.

More recently, there was a call for the closure of butcher shops in India's capital of New Delhi on the occasion of Ram Navami last year. Shutdown calls reflected a desire to portray India as a country of vegetarians using food as a political foil. In the state of Madyha Pradesh, religious and caste concerns caused eggs to be omitted from the free school lunch program, spurring debate.

These efforts have impacted poorer Muslims financially and morally. Social media too has become rife with aggressive, bigoted behaviour that dehumanises anyone propagating food preference as "personal choice."

Yet biryani continues to be ordered. Chicken biryani reigns as the most globally searched Indian food, with 4.56 million searches on Google in 2019, according to research conducted by SEMrush. Biryani continued to be the most ordered dish online for the next four years.

In a country where historically inaccurate information, bigotry and divisiveness are at its highest, biryani is certainly more than the name of a dish. It is a leveller that unites, not divides Indians, blurring the narrative of "our food" and "their food," and bringing back the memories of another India where eating was all about personal choice and pleasure.