Every now and then, alongside debates about one national song or one election, a row breaks out on social media about whether India should have a national food just as it has a national animal.
Usually, it ends up as a food fight between the biryani bloc and the khichdi khandaan. But after reading Sudha G. Tilak’s new book, Chutney Chronicles, I think it should really be the chutney. As Tilak writes: “Chutneys function as flavour maps as well. Coconut traces the coasts, tamarind anchors the south, garlic and chillies blaze through the north, while the east leans into fruity tangs.”
There are many kinds of biryanis and khichdis, but it’s ultimately about rice (and lentils). Chutneys, however, come in endless variety — borage leaves, neem flowers, roselle flowers. Everything can be chutney-fied, from mango blossoms to tart green mangoes to sweet ripe ones. The eco-conscious can be happy with a zero-waste mandarin orange peel chutney. The vegans have a bonanza of choices. And though not in the book, the die-hard non-vegetarian can be happy with a piquant chicken pachadi or a Mangalorean dried shrimp chutney. What other dish is so accommodating?
You can truly map the subcontinent in a way almost no other dish can — from Kashmiri walnut chutney in the north, fermented soybean chutney from the hills of Nagaland to dungri ni onion chutney from Gujarat, all the way down to classic Kerala-style chammanthi or coconut chutney.
‘Pickling of time’
Chutneys reflect the currents of history. The red ant chutney and the madhuca (mahua flower) chutney remind us of the tribes in India’s forests and the foods they foraged there while an Anglo-Indian green apple chutney carries echoes of the British Raj. The first official records of a chutney apparently date to Shah Jahan’s hakim.
And anytime is a good time for a chutney — breakfast chutneys with your idlis and tea time chutneys with your pakodas, along with chutneys for lunch and dinner. This is the all-time unity-in-diversity poster dish.
But where are the chutney maps of India, the way we have mango maps and biryani maps?
The chutney remains banished to the margins of the plate despite being such an ambassador of the breadth and depth of Indian cuisine. These “taste-bud openers”, as Nobel laureate Abhijit V. Banerjee calls the chutney in his foreword to Tilak’s book, reflect the “true complexity” of Indian cuisine, “which comes from being able to build meals out of so many different tastes and textures”. In fact, the most potent argument in favour of the chutney is that it does not make a khichdi of that diversity of tastes and textures in the name of unity.
Salman Rushdie coined the term “chutnification” in his groundbreaking 1981 novel Midnight’s Children where he marvelled that the six hundred million eggs that gave birth to the population of India could fit inside a single, standard-sized pickle-jar, while the six hundred million spermatozoa would fit on a single spoon. “Every pickle-jar (you will forgive me if I become florid for a moment) contains, therefore, the most exalted of possibilities: the feasibility of the chutnification of history; the grand hope of the pickling of time!”
Something for every taste
In an essay in the California Review of Books, Brian Tanguay refers to the Past Present Future podcast, where host David Runciman situates Midnight’s Children alongside books such as The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) as one of our great political novels. Runciman is particularly interested in this idea of chutnification, writes Tanguay: “The process of blending many disparate ingredients into a palatable paste — as a way to think about the complex, messy and painstaking process of building a democracy, of bringing its baying voices and competing interests, feuds and schisms, grievances and hatreds, into coherent form.”
Perhaps at one time, the United States with its notion of the melting pot, kind of subscribed to that idea though a melting pot creates more of a stew than a chutney. But Donald Trump’s America has resolutely moved away from that notion, putting out a more sliced white bread vision of who America is and who it belongs to. Trump is not alone in this. In many nations, election after election has seen the rise of political parties that view migration as a threat to local culture. They want stronger borders to keep the outsiders at bay.
Perhaps the old melting pot is now losing its efficacy as a symbol in such a world. Maybe what we need instead is the chutney, which can be sour or spicy or sweet or tangy, basically something for every taste. It exists on the margins of our plates, but somehow assimilates into the mainstream with ease like a model minority. And the chutnification of history does not flatten out its diversity.
Best of all, there is no one chutney to bind them all.
The writer is the author of Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal.
Published – September 17, 2026 04:14 pm IST
