A Bannuwal Chicken Recipe from Partition

Chef Vanshika Bhatia writes about Chicken Painda, a recipe that preserves family stories of grit, love, and survival through Partition.

My journey as a chef began with a desire to discover the roots of cuisine. I have always been fascinated by how dishes develop over generations, alongside the stories & cultures we build around food. I have travelled across the country seeking out regional cuisines and fast-disappearing culinary heritage; in essence, I have been mapping flavour. Like many, my love for food began at home.

Food has always been central to the home life of both my maternal & paternal families. The women of my family are maestros in the subtle arts of cooking, preserving, pickling, baking & roasting, while the men have always been celebrated for their deft hand with delicious meat dishes. I remember Nanaji’s mutton tinda curry, and Dadaji’s fish fry in mustard oil. Nani would makes squashes, jams and jellies every summer vacation. and dadi’s ‘muth,’ halwa and ‘lole’ would inevitably leave the cousins fighting among ourselves over who got the next piece.

The history of our cuisine is fascinating. Bannuwal food is a cuisine of survival, of loss and memory. It is the only connection our family, our larger community, has to a vanished world. As a chef, I felt I have a voice in keeping our heritage alive. I want to talk about ‘ghar ka khaana,’ something I never paid much attention to, or considered special in any way.

I spent the first 18 years of my life in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, as did my parents before me. But I was born a Bannuwal. Our family, our ‘Bannu Baradari,’ like so many other communities, was irrevocably scarred by Partition, exiled from the only world they had ever known. Bannu is a small town fortified behind high walls now located in Pakistan’s arid North- Western Frontier, sustained by the life-giving River Kherrum. In my childhood imagination, Bannu was a land of gunslinging cowboys, riding on horseback into the distance.

But to my grandfather, it was a reality of harsh privation under the ever-present threat of dacoit invasions. He recalls the sounding alarms as swarming dacoits came riding out across the hills, attempting to breach the city gates, kidnapping young girls, looting shops and creating chaos for Bannuwals. Yet, this was his life and his home, simple & untouched by the civilizational power plays that would so desperately affect my family during the years of Partition. Now in his 80s, my grandfather has lived the majority of his life in India. Our family fled their homeland, leaving everything – pictures, letters, possessions – in that distant town.

The Banuwal Hindus arrived in India empty handed, migrating to Kanpur, Faridabad, Dehradun and Vrindavan, and slowly began to rebuild their tight-knit community through marriage, alliances & business. And while my generation may not speak the same language as our grandparents, or share the same ideologies or experiences, it is the food of our ancestors that sustains us, our collective legacy living on in our recipes.

Nanaji was taught to read and write Urdu, Hindi and English. As a child, I visited Agra with him, amazed that he could read the engravings on tombstones of Fatehpur Sikri. I may never see or visit Bannu, but I have family who had to leave everything behind. My grandparents spoke the Bannuwali Language and even though I understand it, neither my parents’ generation nor I speak it well. I fear it will soon die out. It’s time I tell the story of the Bannuwals in the language I know best: food.

Painda
Meat was relished, but was also taboo – we weren’t allowed to cook it at home, so the menfolk ate it at work. This tradition continued to Kanpur. Dadaji use and his brothers worked together at a small mechanic garage. They would buy meat on their way to work, and set it to cook on a small stove in the workshop. It would be left to stew for hours, until lunch. Dadaji laughed remembering how half the pieces would disappear before lunchtime, as everyone came around for a taste. And while the brothers prepared a different dish every day, Chicken Painda is something he remembers most fondly from that time.

Painda is a fairly straightforward chicken curry, however, it is meant to be eaten as a community meal. A hardened whole-wheat roti known as doda is torn into pieces and laid out on a large thaali. Painda curry, redolent of dry spices, is then poured to cover the bread, that absorbs the fragrant gravy. Everyone sits around the thali and eats the Painda together. Nothing reflects the warmth and closeness of our tight-knit community better than this dish.

Chicken Painda embodies the spirit of my own restaurant, Together at 12th, and is a mainstay on our menu. When I eat this dish it always reminds me of my childhood where we would be given broken rotis with curry and ghee in a bowl. It was a regular favourite at home, and I believed it was merely a meal made easy for children. Little did I imagine its roots lay in those wonderful stories my grandparents told me, of a time before I was born.

BANNU RECIPE FOR CHICKEN PAINDA

Ingredients
2 kilo chicken curry cut, with bone
1 bay leaf
0.5 g cinnamon stick
4 g coriander seed
3 g fennel seeds
4 cloves
6 g cumin seeds
4 g black pepper corn
3 green cardamom
1 star anise
2 dry red chilli
60 ml mustard oil 60ml
450 g onion
60 g garlic
30 g tamarind (soaked in water)
1 green chilli
45 g tomato paste

Method
Dry roast all the spices on low flame in a heavy bottomed pan. Let them cool then blend into powder
Heat mustard oil in a wok, and add in the chicken
Brown the chicken properly on medium high flame. Allow the skin to caramelize.
Then add the sliced onion, garlic, green chilli. Fry some more.
Then add the spice blend, and as soon as you get a nice aroma, add the tomato paste, and stir constantly to coat the chicken well.
Add the tamarind water and more water to cover the chicken.
Cook on low flame till the chicken is completely cooked.

To Serve
Break some roti (chapati) in a big serving dish, pour the chicken gravy on top to soak the roti.
Sprinkle some fresh thickly cut onion, coriander leaves and lemon juice. Serve chicken pieces on the side.

Chef Vanshika Bhatia heads Together at 12th, at the Le Meridien Hotel in Gurugram. She also curates the @bannurevivalproject mapping Bannuwal traditions through food, stories, photos and videos.

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