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No one bothered to enquire where the rasgulla on the dessert plate came from as long as it was sweet and spongy. Thanks to a recent move by the Odisha government to ask for a Geographical Indication (GI) for the sweetmeat, the rasgulla (the word is a mix of ras, or juice, and gola, or ball) finds itself at the centre of a tug of war: West Bengal claims its southern neighbour wants to usurp what is Kolkata's gift to humankind.
Historical texts have been produced, arguments have been made, pride has been invoked - this is a fight nobody is likely to give up easily.
"There is a lot of misinformation going around. Our plan to go for a GI registration is not intended to stake claim as the inventor of the rasgulla. It is meant for promoting a particular type of rasgulla produced at a particular place in the state in the national and international market," says Panchanan Dash, secretary in the micro, small and medium enterprises department of the Odisha government and the chief architect of the move.
GI registration will be sought only for the rasogola produced at Pahala (a place between Cuttack and Bhubaneswar), not for the entire state, Dash adds. "The government plans to come up with a rasgulla cluster there, and the GI will give the produce a stronger brand equity."
It would be akin to the GI for Darjeeling Tea, points out B S Pani, an industry expert, which in no way claims that tea was discovered at Darjeeling and instead promotes a particular type and quality of tea in the international market.
Pahala has been famous as Odisha's rasgulla hub for more than half a century. There are about 70 sweetmeat outlets here with combined sales of over Rs 12 crore per annum. The rasogola produced here, brownish in colour due to hard baking compared to the white ones prevalent in Kolkata, are sold throughout the state.
But producers are unable to export because there is no packaging facility. The cluster development at Pahala aims to address such issues. "We have a three-way approach," Dash says, "The focus will be on quality testing, packaging and raw material procurement while setting up the cluster with funding from the state and the central governments."
Forget faraway Kolkata, the GI registration and cluster approach for Pahala rasgulla are taken with a pinch of salt by the sweet makers in other parts of Odisha too. "Let us see how it pans out," says Prashant Kar, the owner of Bikalanand Kar Sweets at Salepur, the largest rasgulla outlet in the state. Kar inherited the business from his father, who started making rasgullas 80 years back and popularised the brand throughout the state.
Kar is a rasgulla evangelist of sorts: he has opened an Industrial Training Centre to train youths in rasgulla making, the first initiative of its kind in the country. All told, Odisha's rasgulla industry is around Rs 100 crore in size.
Meanwhile, the rasgulla warriors of Odisha have girded their loins for a prolonged battle. Taking a cue from the state government's move, some enthusiasts have gone a step further to call for observation of Rasgulla Day coinciding with the Car Ride (Rath Yatra) of the three revered deities of Puri to the Jagannath Temple.
According to Laxmidhar Pujapanda, the spokesperson of Jagannath Temple Administration, the rasgulla has its roots in Odisha as it is offered as bhog to goddess Laxmi on the re-entry of the Lords into the Puri temple after the Car Festival, a tradition continuing since the temple was built in 12th Century. But it was earlier known as khiramohan (a creamy dessert) before taking its new avatar as rasgulla.
Puri temple scholar Sarat Chandra Mahapatra claims that several temple scriptures, which are over 300 years old, provide the evidence of rasgulla being offered at rituals in Puri. Wikipedia notes that "it is possible that the Bengali visitors to Puri might have carried the recipe for rasgulla back to Bengal in the 19th century". The web-based encyclopedia quotes Bengali culinary historian Pritha Sen to say that in the mid-18th century, many Odiya cooks were employed in Bengali homes who introduced rasgulla along with many other Odiya dishes there.
The narrative in Kolkata is somewhat different. In a humble corner of north Kolkata's (then Calcutta) Bagbazar, Nobin Chandra Das set up a sweetshop in 1866. Determined that he would not peddle run-of-the-mill sweets, he wanted to invent a sweet that would solely be his creation.
The city's native foodies too wanted something different from the regular sweets that were made those days of lentils and Sondesh. The young and the old, the retired and the unemployed, everybody egged Das to come up with a new dessert.
Das tried to boil chhaina (highly condensed milk) balls in sugar syrup, but they would just disintegrate. After sustained effort, he was able to master the art of holding the balls together, and thus was born rasgulla. His customers loved it.
In spite of well-wishers advising him to patent his creation, Das taught the intricacies of the art to various sweetmeat makers because he believed that his creation would become famous only if it was available across the country.
Das's invention became a huge success among Bengalis. Legend has it that Pashupati Bhattacharya, a famous medical practitioner of Bagbazar, used to carry Das's rasgulla whenever he visited Rabindranath Tagore. Once, the shop had run out of stock when Bhattacharya arrived. As a result, he had to purchase the sweet from a nearby shop. Tagore felt the difference at once and asked the doctor to bring rasgulla from Das's shop only.
In the 150 or so years after Das boiled the first rasgulla, his shop, now called K C Das, also makes three types of seasonal rasgulla: orange rasgulla, mango rasgulla and the famous jaggery rasgulla. "We also have experimented with the traditional rasgulla by giving it slight twist. It is called the Kesar Rajbhog. It is bigger in size and also less spongy than the original white one. It has a filling of pistachio and cardamom and khowa," says Dhiman Das, executive director, K C Das.
There is a huge demand for rasgullas made in Kolkata within India as well as outside, but none of the makers has the capacity to produce such large quantities, says Ramjee Chaurasia, partner at Ganguram & Sons and president of Pashchim Bongo Mishtanna Byabshaiee Samiti. "There is a huge demand in West Asia and only K C Das and Haldirams from the city export rasgulla to these countries," he informs.
Being a traditional industry till now, there is an absence of proper statistical figures. But to give an idea to how big the industry is in the city, Das points out that K C Das alone manufactures 30,000 pieces approximately for just the capital. "Roughly, that would come to Rs 10 crore only in Kolkata," he says. Then there are other big names in the city such as Balaram Mullick and Radharaman Mullick, Ganguram, Bancharam, Chittaranjan Mishtanna Bhandar, Hindustan Sweets, Nalin Chandra Das & Sons among others, who together contribute to the rasgulla industry in the city. In short, the sweetmeat industry is a huge one.
Obviously, the city is upset at Odisha's move to obtain a GI. The rasgulla is an intrinsic part of Bengali culture, which magnifies the heartburn.
How much the sweet has captivated popular Bengali culture has been best exemplified by Satyajit Ray in his Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, where one of the boons granted to the lead protagonists was that they could eat anything that they wished to - naturally, there would be a plate full of rasgulla among other delicacies.
In Narayan Gangopadhyay's Charmurti, Tenida and his gang of friends were travelling by train and they happened to carry a pot full of rasogolla. But in the darkness of the night, the entire pot of rasgulla was wiped off by Tenida alone.
Syed Mujtaba Ali's short story, Rosogolla, narrates the protagonist Jhanuda's experience at the custom house for carrying a tin of rasgulla for his friend's daughter in London. The custom's officer asks him to open the sealed tin. The author goes on to narrate how "a tin of vacuum packed sweets" captivates everybody present in the custom house, including the French, German, Spanish and Italians.
With so much tradition invested in it, Kolkata is unlikely to blink anytime soon.
