Can Kolkata's Mughlai Paratha get the revival it deserves?

Last week, spurred by two disparate pieces of news, I grew unusually hungry and uncharacteristically enthusiastic. First, was a New York Times feature headlined, 'In Rome, It's a Pizza Renaissance.' Just a few days later, it was Kolkata's The Telegraph that featured a story, 'Has Kolkata fallen out of love with Mughlai Paratha?' My response to the developments reportedly taking place in two cities 7,220-odd km away from each other felt strange, as I'm not overly fond of either eating or reading about food.

Revival of Rome's signature pizza al taglio (pizza by the slice) is, according to the NYT write-up, 'about taking something simple and making it with tremendous care, so that every piece carries a story, a heritage.' The close-up photo of a rectangle of artisanal pizza, covered with a forest of cherry tomatoes, peppers, and olives, from Francesco Arnesano's pizzeria Lievito made me almost smell the dish from across the screen. 'Coaxing the ultimate expression from just a few special ingredients' is drawing out a 'Roman pizza 3.0' generation that values sourcing, sustainability, and healthy eating.

Cut from the Romans to the Mughlai. The Mughlai paratha, much less familiar than pizza is to most Indians, requires an introduction. The Telegraph does this succinctly: 'Made from flour, thin sheets are rolled out, and beaten duck or chicken eggs are put in the centre. Then the sides are folded, making it into a parcel. And fried on a tava in hot oil over a medium-to-low flame. The egg filling can also be replaced with mutton keema. The slow frying results in a crispy outer layer while the inside remains soft. The parathas are then served with the iconic alu torkari, some cucumber and onion salad and ketchup.'


As far as photographic evidence goes, the dish looks messy, grungy, and frankly, downright inedible. Well, let me tell you, Mughlai paratha is gorgeously edible.

Even in the great litany of Bengali khana, the Mughlai paratha - or simply Mughlai to those close - hardly gets a dekho. This is partly because the dish comes across as a grubby dish from which you're more likely to catch a disease than a food habit. But is the Mughlai, made by the right hands, tasty and worth launching a thousand lunches across the country?

Bengal's curse has been its inability to disentangle value from the dross of nostalgia that it constantly trots up as 'authenticity'. Tagore is hemmed in as a Bengali writer, rather than an Indian one largely because of this neurosis. ('Too much will be lost in translation!') Many other aspects of 'abstract' culture in a materially-scarce place exists in this sclerotic condition. I suspect the same fate has befallen the great material that is Mughlai.

Eateries - or 'cabins' - like Anadi Cabin near my office at the mouth of Esplanade, and Basanta Cabin on College Street are rightly known for their excellent mix of crunch-and-munch Mughlais. But if a golden age of Mughlai paratha is to be ushered in, the place to visit and get inspired from would be Satyanarayan Restaurant in Beleghata in north-eastern Kolkata.

Established in 1970, this was my family's walk-to joint for cutlets, chops, fries - all the good stuff you served guests. But it's Satyanarayan's Mughlai that is what Peking duck is to Quanjude in Beijing, or Oysters Rockefeller is to Antoine's Restaurant in New Orleans: divine.

Pranab Ghosh-owned Satyanarayan is a grubby little place that would make any FDA official want to take a dip in the Gangotri. But Dilip Mal, mute master of the tava and kadai, turns this place into a Bengali-Mughlai forging workshop where he's Hephaestus. The paratha is crisp as duck and dry as fry at the edges, goose-feather pillow soft at the centre, and the holy union of eggs and fried flour - without it becoming a mattress of egg! - served not cut-up as in other places, but whole, like an ancient ship, is a thing to behold, to bemouth.

The Mughlai paratha can have its rinascimento not just if there are more variants of Satyanarayan's corrugated beauty, but if places serving Mughlais become inviting for the less hygienically brave, and have better visual coverage that doesn't make them look like something out of Chernobyl. And have more enticing write-ups than this column hailing la croute doree des Moghols.