Mohan Lalit
lalitmohan13@gmail.com
My mother makes the nevda before anyone eats. Every meal, every day. The first serving goes to the gods-a small steel plate set before the mandir in the kitchen corner, steam still rising off the rajma. Only after the divine have had their portion does the rest of the family sit down. I grew up thinking this was how all Indian households operated. It isn’t. The word nevda is Dogri, derived from the Sanskrit naivedya, and in most of India it exists only as a temple formality. In Jammu, it is domestic law. The kitchen is not secular. The saloona must pass through the gods before it reaches your plate.
But here’s the thing about that rajma on the nevda plate: it isn’t ours.
The kidney bean-Phaseolus vulgaris-is a Central American crop. It was domesticated in what is now Mexico roughly seven thousand years ago. Spanish and Portuguese traders carried it across the Atlantic in the sixteenth century, and it arrived in India sometime in the seventeenth, probably through Goa. The tomato that goes into the rajma gravy is South American, brought by the same Portuguese ships. Indians resisted eating it for two hundred years, calling it vilayati baingan-the foreign eggplant. The chilli that gives the dish its heat is Mexican. Before it arrived, the fieriest thing in an Indian kitchen was black pepper and pippali. The potato that often accompanies the meal is Andean. Even the onion, if you trace it, likely came from Central Asia.
So when a Dogra family in Jammu sits down to a plate of rajma chawal-that most sacred, most identity-defining, most hamaara of meals-every single ingredient on the plate except the rice and the water arrived from another continent within the last four hundred years. The dish that makes us us is assembled entirely from foreign parts.
I started thinking about this after buying chenna murki from a sweet shop near the Raghunath Temple. Chenna murki is sold across Jammu as though it were native to the soil-temple prasad, wedding sweet, the thing your aunt brings when she visits from the city. But chenna murki is Odishan. It belongs to Puri and Bhubaneswar, to the Jagannath Temple tradition, where chhena-based sweets are part of the mahaprasad. Jammu’s indigenous sweets are ghee-based: patisa, the occasional kalari preparation, and various mithas made from khoya. Chenna-Indian cottage cheese worked into sweets-is a Bengali and Odishan art. It has no historical precedent in the hills of Duggar.
The same goes for milk cake, Jammu’s most famous export. It is essentially kalakand-a Rajasthani sweet from Alwar. How it became Jammu ka milk cake is a story of branding so effective that no one questions it anymore. Somewhere in the nineteenth century, a halwai from Rajasthan set up shop in Jammu-probably following the Dogra court’s Rajput connections-and his recipe became the city’s signature. Three generations later, we defend it as heritage.
To understand how this happened, you have to understand what the Dogra kingdom was. Maharaja Gulab Singh was not preserving an ancient civilization. He was building a new one. A Dogra Rajput who rose through the ranks of Ranjit Singh’s Sikh empire, he assembled his kingdom-from Jammu to Ladakh to Kashmir-through conquest and treaty. And like every ambitious state-builder, he needed a capital that looked the part. He needed temples that rivalled Varanasi. He needed scholars, priests, artisans, confectioners.
So he imported them. The Raghunath Temple, started in 1835 and completed by his successor Maharaja Ranbir Singh in 1860, was a deliberate act of pan-Indian religious assembly. Priests were brought from across the subcontinent. It is entirely possible-though I have not found hard documentary proof-that pandits from the Jagannath Temple in Puri were among them. The chenna murki that now sits in every Jammu sweet shop may be the surviving trace of that import: the Odishan confectioner who came with the priests, whose recipe outlasted the reason for his journey.
The Rajasthani halwais came through the Rajput kinship networks that Gulab Singh cultivated to legitimize his dynasty. The Kashmiri cooks came as subjects of the conquered valley. Jammu’s court cuisine was, from its very inception, a curated affair-not organic tradition but deliberate assembly. A startup nation’s food menu.
What, then, is actually Dogra? What was on the plate before the Portuguese ships and the Dogra court and the Columbian Exchange?
The answer is austere. Local rice varieties-red rice, the kind you still find in remote Kishtwar or Paddar. Black lentils. Urad dal. Sesame. Mustard. Barley. Wild greens-saag, the seasonal kind that grows without permission on hillsides. Dairy in every form: ghee, lassi, kalari-the Dogra cheese that is less a delicacy and more a technology for preserving milk in a place without refrigeration. Dried vegetables-hokh syun, sun-dried preparations that could survive a Himalayan winter. Fermented chutneys. Ambal. And, almost certainly, fish-dried and stored by river communities along the Tawi, the Chenab, the Ravi-a knowledge that has been almost entirely lost as urbanized Dogras sanskritized upward and decided that fish was beneath them.
This is peasant food. Preservation food. The cuisine of people who lived at the mercy of seasons in difficult terrain and needed every calorie to count through winter. It is not glamorous. No one is making Instagram reels about hokh syun. But it is ours in a way that rajma and milk cake can never be.
And yet-and this is where it gets interesting-what the Dogra palate did to everything it borrowed is genuinely distinctive. Consider the yakhni. Kashmiri yakhni is a subtle, yogurt-based preparation, aromatic and restrained. When it crossed the Pir Panjal and entered Dogra kitchens, it turned violently sour. Dogra yakhni is the same dish made by a different civilization-a people who instinctively crank the tartness to a level that would make a Kashmiri cook wince. Khatta meat with anardana is the same story: a wazwan dish translated through a Dogra tongue, and the translation changed everything.
That sourness-ambal, anardana, imli, raw mango-is probably the most authentically ancient taste marker Dogra food possesses. It predates every import. The fermentation and preservation techniques that produce sour flavours are the DNA of hill cooking, born from the need to make food last. When Dogras got hold of Kashmiri wazwan, they didn’t just adopt it. They soured it. They made it survive the way their ancestors made everything survive.
There is a peculiar arrangement in Dogra homes regarding meat. Almost every male eats non-vegetarian food-enthusiastically, frequently-but mostly outside the home. The kitchen remains shuddh, pure. Meat is street food, restaurant food, someone-else’s-kitchen food. And yet, the same family will offer a goat to Kaali Maa during Navratri, and that sacrificial animal will be cooked with full ritual sanctity and served as dhaam-the ceremonial feast-inside the home, blessed, distributed, eaten with reverence.
So meat is not impure. It is contextually sacred or profane, depending on who authorized the killing. The goddess makes it holy. The tandoor wallah on the street makes it indulgent. This is a moral architecture around food that is far more sophisticated than any simple vegetarian-nonvegetarian binary. The Himachali dhaam, which many claim as Himachali, is equally Dogra-the same hill cuisine, the same sacred feast tradition, artificially divided by a modern state boundary drawn in 1966.
And then there are the beautiful crossings that defeat every communal narrative about food. Kahwa-the saffron and almond tea from Kashmir-is Muslim in origin and Dogra Hindu by adoption. It sits in every Dogra home as the post-dinner ritual, served in small cups with crushed almonds floating on top, as natural and unquestioned as the nevda itself. And morning halwa-puri-the Sunday indulgence that defines Dogra Hindu households-is eaten with equal enthusiasm by Jammu’s Muslim families. Food does not respect the borders that politics draws. It never has. In Jammu, the evidence is on the breakfast table every Sunday morning.
When I was growing up, if my brother or I refused to bathe, my mother would call us mlechha. We thought it was a Dogri slang for dirty. It isn’t. It is a three-thousand-year-old Sanskrit word meaning foreigner, barbarian-someone outside the Vedic ritual order, someone who doesn’t follow proper conduct. My mother was using a term from the Rig Vedic period to insult two boys who wouldn’t take a morning bath in a house in Jammu in the 1990s. The word had survived three millennia of migrations, invasions, kingdoms, and partitions, and its job that morning was to get us into the bathroom.
That is Jammu in miniature. Ancient words carrying modern errands. Foreign ingredients in sacred rituals. Odishan sweets in Dogra temples. Rajasthani recipes in Jammu shops. Kashmiri dishes soured beyond recognition. Spanish beans offered to Hindu gods on steel plates every morning before the family eats.
The Italians claim the tomato as the soul of their cuisine. It arrived there on the same Portuguese ships that brought it to India. The Americans claim apple pie, though the apple is Central Asian. The British claim tea, which is Chinese. Every culture on earth has performed this magic trick-taking foreign ingredients, running them through a local grammar of spice and technique and memory, and producing something that feels primordial. The Dogras are no different. They are just less aware of the trick.
But here is the thing I keep coming back to. Culture is not about who invented the raw materials. It is about the specific combination. Jazz uses European instruments and African rhythms, and it is still American. Dogra food uses Mexican chillies and Kashmiri recipes and Rajasthani sweets, and the dish that emerges-the rajma cooked with your mother’s spice ratios, soured just so, served with red rice from the hills, offered first as nevda to the gods in a kitchen in Jammu-that syntax is ours. Nobody in Mexico or Spain or Puri eats it this way. Nobody else calls their unbathed children mlechha. Nobody else sours the yakhni until it makes a Kashmiri weep.
Aaj ke saloona chaade da. Set aside today’s curry. Look at what’s in it. You will find Spain and Mexico and Portugal and Rajasthan and Odisha and Kashmir, all of it simmered together in a vessel that was made in Jammu, seasoned by hands that learned from hands that learned from hands, offered to gods who arrived on the backs of imported priests, eaten by people who call themselves Dogra and whose children don’t know what the word means anymore.
The saloona was never just food. It was nevda first. And nevda, if you think about it, is the most honest act in the Dogra kitchen-the admission, made daily and without irony, that none of this is really ours. It all belongs to someone else. We just get to eat what the gods leave behind.
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