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Journalism of Courage
The melodic hum of the evening azaan at Jama Masjid wafts into the courtyard of Moti Mahal restaurant at Daryaganj. The silver-haired Vinod Chadha raises his hands in prayer, looking up at the wall that has a quote from the Quran alongside photos of Shiva. “I always say a small prayer when I hear the azaan, ever since I have known this place,” says the 72-year-old legacy keeper of one of Delhi’s first Punjabi restaurants as he asks his chef to stir up the charcoal in the huge clay oven. The jaded chandeliers from a time gone by flicker back to life as he waits to give a final, ritualistic stir to what has become our greatest comfort food, a reason to eat out and our best gastronomic export — the butter chicken.
The butter chicken and the dal makhni that have brewed in these clay ovens of Moti Mahal for 76 years are now at the centre of a lawsuit between descendants of the restaurant’s original business partners. Little would Chadha, who bought the restaurant from them in 1992, have known that he would be the outsider left to answer a crucial question — who invented the butter chicken and dal makhni? As one of the gatekeepers of Delhi’s culinary history, Chadha has kept the place as it used to be, a neatly preserved time capsule of the 1950s that has hosted late US President Richard Nixon, India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev, Bollywood stars from Raj Kapoor to Amitabh Bachchan, and now Michelin chefs like Gordon Ramsay besides G20 delegates.
Walking past huge vats of tomato gravy, he says, “We have slow-cooked ripe tomatoes, simmered them over the embers for 36 hours with spices, pulped and sieved them through a giant mesh strainer, then reduced them over a fire to the consistency we want.” Though he doesn’t mention the composition or the ratio of spices, the smooth gravy holds hints of coriander, ginger, garlic and turmeric but vouches it is as close to the original as can be.
The tandoori chicken on the skewers is lusciously red, its marinade smoked and charred ever so lightly at the edges for a robust feel. As the chef sprinkles water, it blobs down the sides of the cauldron. It’s time. In go the butter, sugar, gravy, salt, red chilli powder in quick succession, Chadha making sure that the ladle is stirred uninterrupted at the same speed. Then he tosses in the tandoori chicken, piece by piece, as it sucks up the gravy that bubbles up furiously at the edges. He turns down the heat, letting the gravy thicken as the chicken oozes its flavours and holds the butter together, not letting it trickle to the sides. And just when the chemistry between the chicken and tomato is red hot, in goes the cream, settling them down into a silken smoothness. All it needs is a garnish of split green chillies and a dollop of butter.
Just who would have thought of something so divine? That’s just the enigma the court will now sit in judgment on.
Chadha remembers the flavours of the butter kitchen as it was prepared by Moti Mahal’s original proprietor, Kundan Lal Gujral, who set it up after he came as a Partition refugee from Peshawar in 1947 and subsequently had two partners backing him up, Kundan Lal Jaggi and Thakur Das Mago.
“Jaggiji’s son Rajkumar Jaggi was my batchmate at the hotel management institute we went to. That’s how I was exposed to the butter chicken here and became familiar with it. So when there was a fallout between Jaggi and Gujral after Mago’s death, Rajkumar asked me to buy it out, given my experience in working at Gaylord in CP and the Taj before that. I bought the rental rights to this place in 1991 and whatever was left of the establishment. My butter chicken recipe is informed by my memory and smells of the old kitchen as there was no cookbook, nor staff,” he says.
Now both Gujral’s and Jaggi’s grandsons have set up their own restaurant chains and are staking ancestral rights as inventors of the two best-selling dishes. Long after the original Moti Mahal at Daryaganj was sold to Chadha, in 2003, Kundan Lal Gujral’s grandson, Monish Gujral, decided to draw on family tradition and create a new brand, the Moti Mahal Delux, a restaurant chain with 150 franchises in India and abroad. Both Chadha and Monish Gujral co-existed without conflict, each acknowledging — in bold lettering at their entryways — Kundan Lal Gujral as the inventor of their best-selling dishes, the butter chicken and dal makhni.
Until Kundan Lal Jaggi’s grandson, Raghav Jaggi, arrived on the scene. Raghav Jaggi decided to revive the old recipes of Moti Mahal through a restaurant chain called Daryaganj that he set up with chef and restaurateur Amit Bagga. Since Kundan Lal Jaggi had partnered with Gujral to open Moti Mahal in 1947, the owners of Daryaganj claimed they also had the right to its culinary heritage. They then trademarked themselves as the “inventors of butter chicken and dal makhani” and featured in the OTT show Shark Tank based on that plank. Monish Gujral contests this, saying the dish was invented when his grandfather set up the first Moti Mahal in Peshawar in 1927, which he sold during Partition and revived in Delhi. “There are customers from that era who have been recorded by the media of its time and testify to him preparing the tandoori chicken and the gravy to go with it. So this is infringement of a legacy and an unfair trade practice. Even ITC Hotels, while marketing Dal Bukhara, declared that it was inspired by the original dal makhni of my grandfather. I do not have problems with people setting up restaurants and doing inspired dishes but give credit where it is due. He is the OG. Besides, Kundan Lal Jaggi became an investor-partner only after my grandfather opened the Daryaganj outlet,” says Gujral, who is seeking about Rs 2 crore in damages and an injunction on Daryaganj using the “inventor” tag.
“Both butter chicken and dal makhni were created at the old Moti Mahal in Daryaganj. There are Kundan Lal Jaggi’s own accounts and photos with VIP guests and mentions of how he served them. As a partner, he owned these recipes too,” counters Bagga, who has based his chain’s legitimacy on the basis of a partnership document of 1949.
Any food usually has plebeian origins but their oral storytelling builds a romance. Butter chicken emerged as a convenience food, an idea that Kundan Lal Gujral toyed with when he apprenticed at an eatery in Peshawar in the early 1900s and its owner asked for a light meal diluted with gravy. Years later, when he set up his own restaurant with Rs 12,000 and named it Moti Mahal (palace of pearls), he refined the dish as part of the menu.
Says Monish Gujral, “Without refrigeration, the leftover chicken roasts would shrivel up if they weren’t rehydrated. The brown gravy with onions and spices was pungent and killed the chicken’s taste and its smoky aroma. Tomatoes are tangy, not overpowering, earthy and can juice up the chicken. And to give it a rich finish, he used our home-made butter and malai. And the butter chicken was born.” He also mentions how Gujral thought of the dal makhni by chance when the tomato gravy of a curry dribbled into the regular dal on his plate. “He liked the flavour so much that he added butter and made it look like a new creation for his customers,” he adds.
In one of his interviews to The Indian Express in 1988, Kundan Lal Gujral detailed how his Muslim friends helped him flee Peshawar, requesting the pilot of a Delhi-bound plane to let his family sit on the floor as seats were full. He claimed he made his first tandoor at his Moti Mahal restaurant in Daryaganj, building an above-ground version that would work in a restaurant kitchen. He mentioned how Khrushchev had told him that his visit to India was for “Taj Mahal and Moti Mahal”, how he was the official caterer during the signing of the Shimla Agreement, how his food was always about “chapati and chicken” and how Moti Mahal was “his club and social life” as it allowed him to interact with people.
Bagga’s version of this story — somewhat less documented — has Jaggi as the hero, creating butter chicken “by chance” one night when a group of hungry guests showed up and he had to rustle up something filling with leftover tandoori chicken. “Jaggi even gave a twist to the regular maa ki dal at the request of one of the guests he was attending to. He decided to slow cook the dal on the tandoor with tomatoes, fresh white butter and his choice of herbs and spices, simmering it overnight and we got the wholesome and creamy dal makhni,” he says.
Oral historian Sohail Hashmi, an authority on Old Delhi, says food history is much like spinning a yarn based on hearsay and some local myth-making. “One story has it that Gujral was left with a cancelled order of tandoori chicken because of a death in the family of the customer and so he tossed pieces in tomato puree with spices, cream and butter to preserve them. The customers liked it so much that he made it a regular dish on his menu,” says Hashmi. Moti Mahal in Daryaganj soon became a restaurant that catered to the well-heeled. “There were European restaurants, eateries for migrant labour and some shops selling Mughlai dishes. But Moti Mahal, which opened its courtyard to culture soirees, with live acts by India’s first woman qawwal, Shakila Bano Bhopali, was the first restaurant that kept the North West Frontier cuisine alive. Eating out became an experience in an independent capital,” adds Hashmi.
The search for an original recipe, especially one that has existed since the 1930s, and has a million reinterpretations around the world and in every home, is a bit of a wild goose chase. “Everything is according to the cook’s andaz and that can’t be quantified,” says Hashmi. And without a written recipe, it certainly cannot be patented. “If a consumer can easily identify the ingredients of your product and can derive a process, then a patent is a far cry. But it is possible to trademark your own food item if you intend to use it for branding,” says IPR lawyer Safir Anand.
Although a food trademark does not prevent competitors from using the recipe, it does prevent them from marketing it and calling it by its given name. “Besides, an inventor tag is all about a factual determination of evidence. There is of course a partnership document,” says Anand. But the rest of it is purely circumstantial as both parties rely on testimonials from guests who can link the brand to the dish they consumed years ago. Meanwhile, both dishes have evolved enough for the three outlets to have loyalists of all ages. The Daryaganj Moti Mahal is a haunt of expats and foreigners who find the food easy, light and non-greasy. Chadha even uses milk instead of cream in his dal makhni. Monish Gujral’s Moti Mahal Delux chain has a cult following while Daryaganj’s Bagga and Jaggi have packaged tradition with modernity, what with their kulfis coming with portable anti-drip trays.
Chadha says that when he bought Moti Mahal, he didn’t ask Kundal Lal Gujral or Kundan Lal Jaggi for recipes. He gently throws his hat in the ring, saying, “By the 1990s, restaurateurs had begun replication. I had a memory of the original but tweaked it for the contemporary palate. In that sense, I, too, am an inventor of my kind of butter chicken.”
In the end, all that matters is the velvety fullness of the chicken and dal, one that always leaves a lasting taste that’s hard to forget and makes a memory. Does it really matter then if you knew the inventor or not?
