When Was Butter Chicken Created?

The genesis of India's most-loved dish may go to canny cooks in the Mughal era, notes Sandeep Goyal.

The delicious butter chicken -- one of India's best-known, best-liked and most-favoured dishes globally -- has suddenly become highly contentious, with two Delhi-based restaurant chains battling it out in court over claims to its origins and bragging rights.

The lawsuit has been brought about by the Gujral family who own Moti Mahal, a famed Delhi restaurant that has over the years hosted the Shah of Iran, US President Richard Nixon, Jacqueline Kennedy, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the king of Nepal, Soviet leaders Alexei Kosygin and Nikolai Bulganin, and Pakistan Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, besides others.

Moti Mahal was also the favourite of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. So, Moti Mahal has enough pedigree to lay claim to.

The court petition on butter chicken states that the restaurant's founder, Kundan Lal Gujral, created the curry in the 1930s at his Gora Bazaar restaurant in Peshawar before he moved to Delhi in 1947 and started Moti Mahal at Daryaganj.

In a 2,752-page court filing, the Gujrals have sued rival chain Daryaganj (owned by the descendants of Kundan Lal Jaggi), accusing it of falsely claiming to have invented the butter chicken dish (as well as dal makhani -- a popular black lentil dish that is also laden with butter and cream).

The two Kundans (Gujral and Jaggi) were apparently partners when the Daryaganj- based eatery was initially established in 1947.

The Jaggis have a faded, hand-written partnership document registered in 1949 to back their claim. But the interpretation of 'partners' differs.

Rupa Gujral, the daughter of Kundan Lal Gujral, and her son Monish Gujral, have sought that the owners of Daryaganj be ordered to stop claiming that they invented the two dishes (butter chicken and dal makhani), and be restrained from making the claim that Gujral was merely the face of the restaurant responsible for 'front-end management' while Jaggi was the chef who came up with the recipes. The Gujral family is seeking Rs 2 crore in damages.

But was butter chicken really invented by either of the two Kundans, as is being claimed?

I remember a story told to me in the late 1980s by Major S S H Rehman, then general manager of the Welcomgroup Maurya Sheraton, when I was working with him on the launch of the Dum Pukht restaurant.

Major Rehman is quite an authority on food. According to him, the origins of butter chicken go back to the Mughal era.

In those days, individual travel was a rarity. Travellers would move across the Gangetic plain in kafilas (convoys or caravans) for both security and convenience.

They would mostly travel by day and camp at deras by night, eating at serais (inns).

The frequency or the time of arrival of the kafilas could, however, never be predicted or known beforehand.

Serai owners also could not wait for a kafila to arrive at their doorstep before starting to cook, as travellers would invariably be tired and hungry when they arrived.

So as a pre-preparation, the cooks at the serais would cook the chicken curry and keep it in near readiness to serve. But then no one knew when the next kafila would arrive. And the chicken, given the heat of North India, would start to dry up.

Worse, both the chicken and the curry from the previous day ran the risk of turning rancid.

To disguise the taste of the fast-deteriorating chicken and to mask the growing sourness of the gravy, the cooks would add dollops of cream and butter (and tomatoes) to the chicken as an antidote to the summer heat.

That was how the dish of butter chicken really came about.

Kundan Lal Gujral and Kundan Lal Jaggi at best recreated the formula of the original butter chicken.

I doubt if either of them was really the inventor of the dish. But that is really for the courts to decide, though I believe Major Rehman's narration has a stronger ring of truth.

Made with tandoor-cooked chicken pieces mixed in a tomato gravy with dollops of cream and butter, butter chicken was ranked 43rd in a list of the world's best dishes by TasteAtlas -- as rated by nearly 400,000 users. It was the second-ranked Indian food after butter garlic naan bread.

The butter chicken case was first heard by the Delhi high ]court in mid-January and the next hearing is scheduled for May.

Methinks, though, that butter chicken belongs neither to Moti Mahal nor to Daryaganj.

It was an old Mughlai recipe rehashed by Gujral and Jaggi. There is no real case of intellectual property infringement.

Disclaimer: These are Sandeep Goyal's personal views.

Feature Presentation: Rajesh Alva/Rediff.com