A dosa in wheat country
My Urdu teacher is from Rajanpur, at the bottom of Punjab where the Koh-e-Sulaiman begins and, as he puts it, three provinces meet. On Friday morning, Pakistan time, he told me about a bread I could not picture. “We Saraiki people make dosa,” he said. “We have been making it for centuries. We have a name for it: chilla.”
Then the method. “Rice flour. Make it into a batter, thin as gravy. Spread it on the tawa with any bowl.” That is a dosa. Nobody rolls a chilla. In Delhi a cheela is a gram-flour pancake. His is rice, in a province that eats wheat. His mother makes it every winter and the family eats it with saag. In summer nobody touches it. He sent me a photograph of last winter’s, taken on the tawa.
“What a mixture Punjab is,” he said. “We sit eating a South Indian dosa with saag. Punjab’s authentic food with South India’s.” He does not know where it came from. He thinks there is some connection between South India and South Punjab, a Dravidian one and a roti one.
Is there a Dravidian residue in South Punjab, on the plate and on the tongue?
What Friday looks like