Exchange of culture and food on the Grand Trunk Road

Interestingly enough, it isn’t mustard that ties each of these states together—it is a road that, in the next two decades, will officially be five centuries old.

The erstwhile Grand Trunk Road was an engineering marvel at the time it was built—connecting two far-flung ends of the great Indian subcontinent together. While this served a critical geopolitical purpose for emperor Sher Shah Suri, the Grand Trunk Road rose in history as the inadequately celebrated exchange route for cultures across two ends of a vastly estranged nation—unbeknownst to Suri’s brief rule.

Over time, the Grand Trunk Road became the chief route for exchange of culinary traits, as nawaabs, noblemen and traders travelled between the far-west (now Pakistan and Afghanistan) and the far east. While some argue that the GT Road ended in modern-day Bengal itself, others offer evidence of the road extending well into what is Bangladesh today.

The road itself has now been obscured in favour of multi-lane, freshly laid national highways. Yet, what hasn’t been obscured in this grand old road trip is the cultural significance that it left on our eating habits.

“All along this grand old road came up the caravan serais—pit stops for meals, rest and refreshment. These would, in the olden days, serve simple hot food for the weary travellers. As individuals stopped by, the proliferation of unified food cultures took place. For instance, Persian travellers on this road likely brought along tea, spreading it across all of the present-day states of Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal. The eggplant, which we all call brinjal, is one such vegetable too—its robustness making it a staple in affordable vegetarian fare that such serais would offer alongside daal and roti—and later, rice,” said food anthropologist, Kurush F Dalal.

The instance of this is clear as one drives down from West Bengal to Punjab. What Bengalis celebrate as begun bhaja is found in Punjab as baingan ki kachri—both, incidentally, cooked in mustard oil itself. Over time, the two dishes have been diversified in terms of the spice levels in order to suit them better to the taste palates of their respective regions. But, the cultural exchange is not to be missed.

|Sayantani Mahapatra, a Kolkata-based food blogger and photographer, notes that there were exchanges at the other end, too. One such instance is the ‘torka’—a take on Punjab’s maah di daal. “The idea of fishballs also likely originated down the GT Road (through foreign travellers)—today, they exist in dishes like chitol machh’er muithya (a fishball made of a variant of a knifefish found in many Indian rivers) and chingri’r jolbora (prawn curry) in Bengali cuisine,” she said.

But, the east-west road trip of a lifetime isn’t just about the dishes themselves. In his 2005 bildungsroman on this very journey, titled Food Path: Cuisine Along the Grand Trunk Road, celebrated food historian Pushpesh Pant wrote that the historic significance of this journey need not be entirely ancient.“When the partition came, the Grand Trunk Road bore the painful burden of the traffic of refugees—helpless victims of unprecedented bloodshed. The influx of the homeless, with countless separated families, had an unexpected outcome—the community kitchen, sanjha chulha, centred around the tandoor, became an essential life support system for the immigrants,” Pant wrote.

This, over time, gave birth to eateries that we see not just along the east-west corridor—but practically everywhere today. “With passage of time, the tandoori style of cooking would radiate like spokes from a hub, and engulf the entire nation in its warm glow. Hole-in-the-wall outlets in earthen huts with thatched roofs began to mushroom along the Road—the ubiquitous dhabas. It was not long before (that) the dhaba became synonymous with great value for money, just like a mother’s home-cooked, nourishing fare,” he further added.
Eating and snacking habits, too, find common threads down this lane. The presence of an assortment of vegetables, deep-fried and served with sprinkles of rock salt, is the mainstay of snacking across almost all of India. At the advent of the Portuguese, onion fritters, known less austerely as pyaaz ke pakoda, spread across the breadth of the nation, and is today popular at pretty much every stop along the Grand Trunk Road. Tea became a mainstay at the forever-open dhabas, as cart-riders of yore and truck-drivers in the modern day would stop over all day and night long for it.

Breakfast experiences, meanwhile, also find unison along the road. In Punjab, aloo-puri, a lightly gravied potato with wheat flatbreads, became a popular breakfast amid the abundance of both the items in the region. While it may not be clear as to whose eating preference influenced whom, the ubiquitously love for aloo-puri exemplifies the cultural exchange route even further through Agra’s bedai-aloo, Kanpur’s kachori-subzi, and Kolkata’s radhaballavi. So much so, that Amritsar’s Kanha Sweets today is a splitting image of Kolkata’s Maharani (an eatery in the upscale southern part of the city) in terms of the breakfast that each serves.

Much like the advent of the Portuguese brought onions to our shores, the Grand Trunk Road’s extent helped Afghan traders reach the far eastern limits of Bengal. Even until the late 2000s, travelling dried-fruit traders from Afghanistan remained popular in Kolkata—especially in the bylanes of the city’s oldest locales. Coming from Kabul, they came to be known in erstwhile Calcutta as Kabuliwalas.Alongside dried fruits, visitors from the GT Road’s western-most frontier brought with them a cuisine that introduced kebabs to the masses of our nation. Even the naan, wrote Pant in his book, was contributed to by the Afghan visitors.The iconic Grand Trunk Road, therefore, offered grandeur unlike any other road of deep historical and cultural significance across the nation. In its heavy history that has seen emperors, colonial strife and post-independence yin-yang of progression and regression under the same breath, the Road’s tryst with the history of India’s food significance is not lost by any means.To tie it all up in what must now be ordained as custom, in the words of author Rudyard Kipling: “And truly, the Grand Trunk Road is a wonderful spectacle. It runs straight, bearing without crowding India’s traffic for 1,500 miles—such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world.”

Vernika Awal is a Delhi-based food and lifestyle journalist