Nankhatai To Karachi: The History Of Indian Biscuits

The story of modern Indian biscuit can be traced back to the arrival of Mughals and Persians in India. It continued with the Dutch, Danes and French, reached its zenith during the British Raj, and continues to unfold to this day.

In Old Delhi's crowded Sitaram Bazaar, a small, dilapidated shop makes rusks every evening. No sooner than the scalding hot aluminium trays are pulled out of greasy tall ovens, locals start trickling in — everyone wants a batch of the oven fresh rusks for their evening tea. In the morning they come back for fayn, a layered puff pastry that opens up like a fan, and in the afternoon for coconut cookies. In the adjacent lane of Chawri Bazaar, one finds a nankhatai cart. Standing in the shadows of Jama Masjid’s marble and sandstone dome, it is manned by a silver bearded gentleman. The genial man spends most of his hours moulding buttery dough into small disks and placing them neatly on round cast iron trays. The trays are then stacked on smouldering coal and moved at regular intervals to ensure even heat distribution. A fresh batch takes less than ten minutes to get baked. That it takes less than five to disappear is another story.

The Indian love for biscuits is legendary. Be it the ghee-laden atta cookies made across Punjab, fluffy kharis sold in Mumbai, crumbly nankhatai found in Old Delhi, buttery Shrewsberry of Pune, or the nutty Karachi biscuit of Hyderabad, every city has its favourite biscuit and every Indian needs one of these to dunk in their tea. But have we ever stopped to wonder where did the biscuit, so deeply intertwined with our culture today, actually come from?

Where Did India’s Biscuits Come From?

While the concept of factory made biscuits is fairly new in India — it started little over a century ago with companies like Britannia and Parle — the tradition of handmade biscuits baked in coal fired oven goes back centuries. The first evidence of the modern day biscuit can be traced to the 16th century with the arrival of the Mughals. As an invading tribe they had to travel for months and having a dry, nutritious snack served their armies well. Records tell us that this snack was actually a twice-baked bread devoid of any moisture. High in calorific value and good to taste, it kept well for months and fulfilled their fat, sugar, and carbohydrate requirements. Today this snack, which indirectly aided foundation of the Mughal Empire in India, is known as the humble rusk. Khari, the layered flaky biscuit, also called fayn, is said to have come with the butter loving Persian-Iranians who also made a similar journey and carried baked goods with them. The nankhatai came with the Dutch in their ships, and Shrewsberry, the iconic British biscuit, came with, well, the British.

“It is hard to pin-point when and how the love for biscuits started in India, but the Parsis can be considered the custodians of Indian biscuits,” Anahita Dhondhy, Chef and Partner, SodaBottle Openerwala, Gurgaon, says while narrating her community’s contribution in bringing the thriving biscuit culture to Mumbai and Gujarat. In her quest to unravel dying Parsi recipes, Anahita has come across the oldest and most obscure Parsi bakeries across western India. Among them is also one of the first Indian bakeries, Dotivala Bakery in Surat, attributed with the creation of ubiquitous nankhatai. The western port city, incidentally, is also credited with the creation of another popular biscuit, the Surti Batasa. The crumbly, buttery, savoury batasa, says Anahita, enjoys a place of privilege in Parsi households and is intrinsic to the culinary traditions of not only Surat, but also Mumbai, home to a large Parsi population.

The Parsis brought Surti batasa to Mumbai and the Muslims took nankhatai to Sindh, Punjab, and Delhi. A shortbread that was a chance-discovery by local bakers was altered to add ghee for texture, cardamom for flavour and nuts to garnish. It also gave birth to many similar cookies or biscuits that were, and still are, made in local bakeries throughout northern and central India.

“In Bhopal you have a unique finger like biscuit called aflatoon which could be an offshoot of the nankhatai,” says Ruchi Shrivastava, food researcher, writer, director, and a typical Bhopali in love with her food. “The biscuit is a mix of all possible things and seems like the handiwork of a bored local baker. Since people had no name for it, they called it aflatoon, a common word used in Bhopal for things that are abnormal.” Home to a significant immigrant population, Bhopal is also known for some of the oldest and largest rusks. “Until the partition, you got only Bhopali tea and Toss for breakfast. This Toss was actually a large rusk made with suji, maida and milk powder in Muslim bakeries of the old Bhopal.” Like many other places, says Ruchi, Toss in Bhopal became the lifeline of the working class and continues to be the go-to meal in the old city.

The story of Indian biscuits cannot however be told without a mention of the British contribution. They longest ruling colonials brought with them their favourite biscuits and also taught Indians to bake. Ovens as we understand it today, were unheard of until then, became common and small bakeries started mushrooming in British towns; since the recipes often used eggs, the bakers were inevitably Muslims or Parsis. “When we were younger, we would take our own flour, sugar and ghee to the local bakers who would make biscuits with it for a small fee,” my mother, who spent her youth in and around the colonial towns of Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, tells me when I talk to her about the biscuits of the newly independent India. “Sometimes flavoured with cumin, sometimes with fennel, they were made in large coal fired ovens and were much like the atta biscuits of today.” It is evident that slowly yet surely the very British biscuit had become a staple in these towns.

A Country-Wide Variation of Biscuits

If the north made their biscuit with ghee, and the west couldn’t get enough of butter, in the southern states, biscuits were localised with addition of eggs, coconut and cashews. In Kerala, little biscuits made with egg, sugar and flour called mutta biscuit emerged as local favourites while in Tamil Nadu the macaroons transformed into light, fluffy biscuits that looked and tasted more like meringue. Since most people would not eat egg here, many bakeries replaced it with cashew powder — cashew grew locally and was much loved in this part of the country. Tuticorin, or Thoothukudi, the city known for its salt flats and pearl farming, still makes the finest macaroons in all of India.

Even as the country adapted British and Dutch recipes for biscuit, the east preferred to adopt a flaky and sweet French pastry. “The most popular biscuit in Calcutta is projapati, a version of the palmier that came to Bengal with the French,” informs Anindya Basu, a Calcutta based food photographer and blogger. “We Calcuttans loved it so much that we named it after our favourite butterfly and started selling it in tea shops. In Calcutta you cannot have tea without projapati.” There were other biscuits too of course, informs Basu, but nothing was loved like projapati. Flaky, buttery, and sweet, it suited the delicate Bengali palate just right and went perfectly with their fragrant Bengali cha.

From an Elite to a Regular Snack

Just like teashops, the bakeries that made these biscuits played a significant role in democratisation of the once elite snack. Hidden in obscure lanes, present in small towns, and standing strong for centuries, they brought the biscuit to the common man. Paris Bakery of Mumbai, Kayani of Pune, Ellora of Dehradun, Karachi and Nimrah of Hyderabad; Burma of Lucknow, Howrah of Jamshedpur, Frontier of Delhi, Cochin of Calicut, Albert of Bangalore… the list of iconic bakeries that make these biscuits even today goes on and on as does the love for their biscuits. “I look for local bakeries everywhere I go,” says Ruchi, who travels to the remotest parts of the country for her shoots and almost always finds an old bakery, “from Leh to Kaza, Mahabaleshwar to Dehradun, Bhopal to Lucknow, these bakeries have come to define cities for me. They almost always also have a local variant of the good old biscuit too.” With ingredients like barley, oats, jowar, atta, ghee, jaggery, jeera, ajwain, masala and many, many others these bakeries, just like us Indians, have made the biscuit truly our own.

Anubhuti Krishna is a writer based in New Delhi. Passionate about travelling and eating, she finds ways to combine the two. Her work has been featured in major dailies and monthlies. She hopes someday it will find home in a book.

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