Sweet Branding: IMF pedas, scam-free jalebis break mould

MUMBAI: During Diwali every second shop in Mumbai’s downtown financial district seems to be selling sweets. But only one has IMF pedas. Fountain Dry Fruit Stores stands at the corner opposite the High Court and HongKong Bank with Dalal Street at its back. And piled high on a tray and prominently labeled are the cream-brown piles of IMF pedas.

Are they named because they’re made with tariff-free milk imported from New Zealand? Or does over-consumption require a Structural Adjustment Programe to your pants, perhaps even necessitating an austerity programme?

Neither. “IMF stands for Its My Favourite peda,” laughs Narendra Mewawalla, the shop’s owner and son of the man who set it up in 1922. Mewawalla is fond of giving his mithais innovative names, which he says come to him late at night.

Befitting his location near the stock exchange he has a Scam-free Jalebi (no false colouring, only pure saffron) while those afraid of legislative action can console themselves with his JPC pedas (Just Peace and Confidence, with a whole almond, pista and cashew inside).

Mewawalla doesn’t limit himself to India either. Since the Iraq invasion he’s been selling a round cashew-paste call called an American Bomb. He’s happy to note these have been popular with some policemen, who sometimes come to his shop to ask for half a kilo of bombs!

After the Kargil war he had a special Kargil package, not on offer at the moments thanks to the Diwali rush. On a more romantic note a heart-shaped mithai is titled Khatha Rahe Mera Dil.

Mewawalla says he’s not sure how much funky names help sales, but they certainly help him stand out in a crowded market.

Mewawalla’s names might sound unusual, but he stands in a long tradition of mithai makers who all used unusual ways to sell their products. In their early days the moiras, professional sweetmakers of Bengal, used to dedicate their sweets to eminent personalities or customers. Bhim Nag, one of the most famous, named a variety of sandesh called ashu bhog for Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee, famous advocate, historian and vice chancellor of the Universityof
Calcutta. He named another Nehru Sandesh, not for Jawaharlal, but for his father, the famous advocate Motilal Nehru, when he visited Calcutta in 1927-28.

The sweetmakers were careful to recognise the British as well. There are records of a Lord Rippon sandesh, but the only one of these celebrity sweetmeats to survive till today is the Ledikeni, essentially a rossogulla fried in ghee.

It was named after Lady Canning, wife of Viceroy Lord Canning, with different reasons given for why: it was for her birthday; it was in response to a challenge from her; it was to commemorate a feast thrown by a local worthy for the Viceroy. Whatever the reason, Ledikenis, golden-brown and lusciously floating in syrup can be consumed to this day in Bengali sweetshops.

Bhim Nag and the other moiras of his time were ready to indulge in such gimmicks because they were selling a new concept. The sweets they were selling, based on channa or split milk, were a relatively recent innovation.
As Chitrita Banerji notes in The Hour of the Goddess, her study of the roots of Bengali food, there are no references to channa in Bengali and Sanskrit texts till the 17 th century.

Milk was consumed in many ways — whole, curds, boiled down to khoa, with creamy layers skimmed off as rabri — but never split. Her contention is that the practice was introduced by the Portuguese who do have a tradition of splitting milk for cheese, and who started establishing settlements in Bengal from the 17th onwards.

Mr Banerji argues that this status as an imported, faintly suspect, practice was why the making of channa based sweets was never taken up in Bengali houses. These stuck to the traditional reduced milk desserts like payesh, while channa based sweets, starting with sandesh, and then other varieties like rossogulla and rasmalai, were left to professional sweetmakers. This fitted into a tradition of the making and wide distribution of sweetmeats that make them arguably among the first branded products in India.

Sweetmeats are more solid that desserts, and are made from long lasting ingredients like ghee, sugar, dried fruits and khoa. This made them easy to transport and store, helping their dissemination as products. Their status as brands probably came from their link to the most basic ‘brands’ in Indian culture — the gods and temples where they were worshipped. Today the Tirupati ladoo is one of the most recognised and valuable branded products in India, but there are other sweets which originated as temple prasad.

These were made by professional sweet sellers, who branched off by themselves as more avenues opened for their sales. Anil Kishore Sinha’s *Anthropology of Sweetmeats*, a rather idiosyncratic scholarly survey of the sweetmeats of Bengal and Bihar, gives an indication how this might have happened.

His study is localised, but it’s easy to see how the process could have happened across India. Sinha starts by noting that sweets were usually linked to particular towns and districts, for example in Bengal: “Jal Bhara Sandesh of Chandannagar (Hooghli district),Kacha gulla of Ranaghat (Nadia district), Kheer pantoa of Raghunathganj (Murshidabad district), Lengcha of Shaktigarh (Barddhaman district), Malpua of Jiaganj (Murshidabad district), Manohara of Janai and Beldanga (Hooghli and Murshidabad districts), Moa of Jayanagar (24 Pargana district).”

As Sinha examines the history of each in turn one fact stands out: nearly all the better known sweets come from towns with good rail connections. The sitabhog and mihidana of Barddhaman, for example, are specifically mentioned as having received their initial fame after they were served to a high ranking rail official by the station master of Barddhaman station. It’s easy to how travelers started picking up sweets from the towns they visited, as gifts to take home.

This increased the consumer base for the sweetmakers, and gave them an incentive to specialise in making the sweetmeat that was branded for their town. This geographical branding wasn’t static. Once a sweetmeat was well established, it started breaking free of its location as the sons of the original sweetmakers started migrating to different cities (but they were still careful to emphasise their origins to establish their credentials in making that sweet).

Sinha notes that after the division of the provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa in 1912 a greater variety of sweetmeats starts being found in the border towns of the states. Sites of pilgrimage or fairs were another place where sweetmakers could migrate (as they still do, for example, Mumbai’s annual Mt.Mary festival sees sweetmakers from Goa coming up to sell their sweets to the pilgrims).

And inevitably, as Calcutta developed as a metropolis, sweetmakers started flocking there: Param Chandra Nag, the father of Bhim Nag, came from Janai in Hooghly district and Dwarik Ghosh from Nijabalia in Howrah. Another factor in Calcutta was the patronage extended by the rich aristocrats of the city, who were always looking for new things with which to impress their friends. Ganguram, for example, famous for its mishti dhoi, developed under the patronage of Raja Kamalprasad Mukherji, who gave them the land for theirfirst shop.

The competition of the city pushed the sweetmakers into developing new products and the patronage system encouraged them to name them after celebrities.

Today the great sweet-shops of Kolkata have grown conservative, too established and conscious of their status as repositories of Bengali sweet traditions to indulge in such gimmicks. (They also all make the same varieties, but Kolkata’s connoisseurs still prefer certain sweets from certain shops). *The Economic Times *asked Mr.Sanjib Sen, director of Sen Mahashoy, one of the well known shops, if he would consider making a Mamata Sandesh or a Buddha Sandesh, and he almost choked. “Nor that I have heard of such names and neither will I ever make sweets by this name,” he said vehemently.

Such gimmicks are usually resorted to by the more marginal moiras - for example those who came out with Sourav Sandesh, a product for which unfortunately there aren’t likely to be many takers these days.

The problem is also that nearly every other product has leaped on the celebrity branding pioneered by the sweetmakers. When Shahrukh Khan is pitching nearly every product category there’s no longer much value in bringing out a Shahrukh sandesh (and he might come asking for fees). Some sweetmakers have tried to capture a brand through technology, like K C Daswith its canned rossogullas, or sheer brute force of publicity and distribution, as Coimbatore’s Sri Krishna Sweets has done with Mysore Pak, even trying to rename it ‘SKS Mysurpa’ to reinforce its exclusive rights.

Not everyone has such money and muscle power and if you’re reluctant to play the expansion game, it’s not a bad option to use wit as Fountain Dry Fruit’s Mewawalla has done. Mewawalla isn’t such a small player - he’s got into agreements with the Apna Bazaar chain of stores for them to stock his products. He sends truckloads to other cities such as Bangalore where the Nilgiri’s stores stock his sweets. Sweet Branding: IMF pedas, scam-free jalebis break mould


Vikram Doctor
MUMBAI: During Diwali every second shop in Mumbai’s downtown financial district seems to be selling sweets. But only one has IMF pedas. Fountain Dry Fruit Stores stands at the corner opposite the High Court and HongKong Bank with Dalal Street at its back. And piled high on a tray and prominently labeled are the cream-brown piles of IMF pedas.

Are they named because they’re made with tariff-free milk imported from New Zealand? Or does over-consumption require a Structural Adjustment Programe to your pants, perhaps even necessitating an austerity programme?

Neither. “IMF stands for Its My Favourite peda,” laughs Narendra Mewawalla, the shop’s owner and son of the man who set it up in 1922. Mewawalla is fond of giving his mithais innovative names, which he says come to him late at night.

Befitting his location near the stock exchange he has a Scam-free Jalebi (no false colouring, only pure saffron) while those afraid of legislative action can console themselves with his JPC pedas (Just Peace and Confidence, with a whole almond, pista and cashew inside).

Mewawalla doesn’t limit himself to India either. Since the Iraq invasion he’s been selling a round cashew-paste call called an American Bomb. He’s happy to note these have been popular with some policemen, who sometimes come to his shop to ask for half a kilo of bombs!

After the Kargil war he had a special Kargil package, not on offer at the moments thanks to the Diwali rush. On a more romantic note a heart-shaped mithai is titled Khatha Rahe Mera Dil.

Mewawalla says he’s not sure how much funky names help sales, but they certainly help him stand out in a crowded market.

Mewawalla’s names might sound unusual, but he stands in a long tradition of mithai makers who all used unusual ways to sell their products. In their early days the moiras, professional sweetmakers of Bengal, used to dedicate their sweets to eminent personalities or customers. Bhim Nag, one of the most famous, named a variety of sandesh called ashu bhog for Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee, famous advocate, historian and vice chancellor of the Universityof
Calcutta. He named another Nehru Sandesh, not for Jawaharlal, but for his father, the famous advocate Motilal Nehru, when he visited Calcutta in 1927-28.

The sweetmakers were careful to recognise the British as well. There are records of a Lord Rippon sandesh, but the only one of these celebrity sweetmeats to survive till today is the Ledikeni, essentially a rossogulla fried in ghee.

It was named after Lady Canning, wife of Viceroy Lord Canning, with different reasons given for why: it was for her birthday; it was in response to a challenge from her; it was to commemorate a feast thrown by a local worthy for the Viceroy. Whatever the reason, Ledikenis, golden-brown and lusciously floating in syrup can be consumed to this day in Bengali sweetshops.

Bhim Nag and the other moiras of his time were ready to indulge in such gimmicks because they were selling a new concept. The sweets they were selling, based on channa or split milk, were a relatively recent innovation.
As Chitrita Banerji notes in The Hour of the Goddess, her study of the roots of Bengali food, there are no references to channa in Bengali and Sanskrit texts till the 17 th century.

Milk was consumed in many ways — whole, curds, boiled down to khoa, with creamy layers skimmed off as rabri — but never split. Her contention is that the practice was introduced by the Portuguese who do have a tradition of splitting milk for cheese, and who started establishing settlements in Bengal from the 17th onwards.

Mr Banerji argues that this status as an imported, faintly suspect, practice was why the making of channa based sweets was never taken up in Bengali houses. These stuck to the traditional reduced milk desserts like payesh, while channa based sweets, starting with sandesh, and then other varieties like rossogulla and rasmalai, were left to professional sweetmakers. This fitted into a tradition of the making and wide distribution of sweetmeats that make them arguably among the first branded products in India.

Sweetmeats are more solid that desserts, and are made from long lasting ingredients like ghee, sugar, dried fruits and khoa. This made them easy to transport and store, helping their dissemination as products. Their status as brands probably came from their link to the most basic ‘brands’ in Indian culture — the gods and temples where they were worshipped. Today the Tirupati ladoo is one of the most recognised and valuable branded products in India, but there are other sweets which originated as temple prasad.

These were made by professional sweet sellers, who branched off by themselves as more avenues opened for their sales. Anil Kishore Sinha’s *Anthropology of Sweetmeats*, a rather idiosyncratic scholarly survey of the sweetmeats of Bengal and Bihar, gives an indication how this might have happened.

His study is localised, but it’s easy to see how the process could have happened across India. Sinha starts by noting that sweets were usually linked to particular towns and districts, for example in Bengal: “Jal Bhara Sandesh of Chandannagar (Hooghli district),Kacha gulla of Ranaghat (Nadia district), Kheer pantoa of Raghunathganj (Murshidabad district), Lengcha of Shaktigarh (Barddhaman district), Malpua of Jiaganj (Murshidabad district), Manohara of Janai and Beldanga (Hooghli and Murshidabad districts), Moa of Jayanagar (24 Pargana district).”

As Sinha examines the history of each in turn one fact stands out: nearly all the better known sweets come from towns with good rail connections. The sitabhog and mihidana of Barddhaman, for example, are specifically mentioned as having received their initial fame after they were served to a high ranking rail official by the station master of Barddhaman station. It’s easy to how travelers started picking up sweets from the towns they visited, as gifts to take home.

This increased the consumer base for the sweetmakers, and gave them an incentive to specialise in making the sweetmeat that was branded for their town. This geographical branding wasn’t static. Once a sweetmeat was well established, it started breaking free of its location as the sons of the original sweetmakers started migrating to different cities (but they were still careful to emphasise their origins to establish their credentials in making that sweet).

Sinha notes that after the division of the provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa in 1912 a greater variety of sweetmeats starts being found in the border towns of the states. Sites of pilgrimage or fairs were another place where sweetmakers could migrate (as they still do, for example, Mumbai’s annual Mt.Mary festival sees sweetmakers from Goa coming up to sell their sweets to the pilgrims).

And inevitably, as Calcutta developed as a metropolis, sweetmakers started flocking there: Param Chandra Nag, the father of Bhim Nag, came from Janai in Hooghly district and Dwarik Ghosh from Nijabalia in Howrah. Another factor in Calcutta was the patronage extended by the rich aristocrats of the city, who were always looking for new things with which to impress their friends. Ganguram, for example, famous for its mishti dhoi, developed under the patronage of Raja Kamalprasad Mukherji, who gave them the land for theirfirst shop.

The competition of the city pushed the sweetmakers into developing new products and the patronage system encouraged them to name them after celebrities.

Today the great sweet-shops of Kolkata have grown conservative, too established and conscious of their status as repositories of Bengali sweet traditions to indulge in such gimmicks. (They also all make the same varieties, but Kolkata’s connoisseurs still prefer certain sweets from certain shops). *The Economic Times *asked Mr.Sanjib Sen, director of Sen Mahashoy, one of the well known shops, if he would consider making a Mamata Sandesh or a Buddha Sandesh, and he almost choked. “Nor that I have heard of such names and neither will I ever make sweets by this name,” he said vehemently.

Such gimmicks are usually resorted to by the more marginal moiras - for example those who came out with Sourav Sandesh, a product for which unfortunately there aren’t likely to be many takers these days.

The problem is also that nearly every other product has leaped on the celebrity branding pioneered by the sweetmakers. When Shahrukh Khan is pitching nearly every product category there’s no longer much value in bringing out a Shahrukh sandesh (and he might come asking for fees). Some sweetmakers have tried to capture a brand through technology, like K C Daswith its canned rossogullas, or sheer brute force of publicity and distribution, as Coimbatore’s Sri Krishna Sweets has done with Mysore Pak, even trying to rename it ‘SKS Mysurpa’ to reinforce its exclusive rights.

Not everyone has such money and muscle power and if you’re reluctant to play the expansion game, it’s not a bad option to use wit as Fountain Dry Fruit’s Mewawalla has done. Mewawalla isn’t such a small player - he’s got into agreements with the Apna Bazaar chain of stores for them to stock his products. He sends truckloads to other cities such as Bangalore where the Nilgiri’s stores stock his sweets.