A Dosa Dossier

Ever since the masala dosa was voted as the 'national dish' in Outlook's year-end food survey, I have been contemplating a short piece on this much-travelled Mysorean delight. The Outlook survey simply announced its acceptability across borders, but did not tell us why, besides the Southerners, it was the toast of a Kashmiri, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati as well as of an Ashomiya palate. It is no small feat in a country where gastronomic variations can be tracked every 25 km, with the change in dialect, for an unassuming yet complicated roll like the dosa to triumph.

So what elements about the masala dosa possibly clinched the survey in its favour? Let me do some downright guessing: I wonder if the masala dosa would have worked if it did not have a mildly spiced potato filling inside it. For the rest of India, which is familiar with samosa as a snack, I think the aalu is a great reason for a gleeful acceptance of the dosa. The next good reason could be its golden hue and thin crust. Both of them are achieved on a seasoned thick pan. Would the masala dosa have clicked if it were not fried, although not as deep as the bajji? Does the dehusked blackgram (urad dal) that has transformed by shedding its black hold a raw delight when ground with rice to form a half-white batter? Anyway, since it has been accepted, let us move on without much speculation and focus on the intricacies of this dish that has quietly assigned itself royalty.

The masala dosa is a recent phenomenon. How recent is a matter of debate, but it was certainly an innovation on the humble, household dosa decades ago, when public eateries became a familiar idea in Bangalore and Mysore. It is important to distinguish between the masala dosa and the dosa. While the masala dosa is still a rarity in one's home, the simple dosa is ubiquitous. In fact, it has become a standby breakfast or an evening snack after refrigerators have helped arrest the ferment of the batter. While the potato filling is imperative for a dosa to be crowned as the masala variety, the ordinary dosa can go with hurriedly ground coconut and roasted gram chutney. Of course, for the eclectic there could be other accompaniments besides the chutney, like the sambar, egg curry, chicken or mutton gravy or even a stew. Chutney powder with ghee can also do as a quickie. Masala dosa is for a special occasion and a special outing, but the dosa, like idli, is everyday bread. The masala dosa is built on the dosa and is only an exotic adaptation in the market place.

For its pan-Indian popularity, it is important to imagine the dosa as one standardised recipe, but in its home, South Karnataka, it is distinct in each household. It varies from the hand of one woman to another. It surely varies from my mother to my wife. While my mother shied away from sharing her batter concoction, my wife says that her dosas turn out crispier because she adds a bit of sugar and sooji to the batter minutes before it hits the pan. Adding a handful of poha while preparing the batter can make dosas softer and a sprinkling of fenugreek can give it a distinct taste. I have always suspected that my favourite dosa joint in Bangalore, Vidyarthi Bhavan, adds a bit of red rice to give its dosas a mild pinkish interior and an extraordinary eating experience. What other things go into the making of the batter besides the known ingredients of rice and urad dal, is usually a closely-guarded chef's secret.

Over the decades the dosa has had several cousins, distant and no-so-distant ones. In the first ring there is kaali dosa (plain) and set dosa (a set of three thick dosas). In the second and subsequent rings there is the onion or tomato uttapam (spicing up of an aged batter with vegetables, onion and green chillies), menthya dosa (with fenugreek and curd), ade (made with a combination of Bengal gram dal, green gram dal, tur dal and urad dal), pesarattu (an Andhra variety made with green gram, rice, green chilies and ginger), ragi dosa (with millet), halasinakai dosa (a coastal variety made with jackfruit), aapam (rice and urad dal fermented with a dash of toddy) and neer dosa (a coastal variety made instantly with rice on a special pan, but without the urad dal).

Even when it comes to the filling, there have been infinite innovations. The potato filling has earned a global recognition, but you'll be surprised that one of the oldest Udupi restaurants in Bangalore's Balepet, Udupi Krishna Bhavan, offers dosa with sagu, a delectable vegetable curry for stuffing. In the nearby town of Chikkaballapur, they fancy stuffing their dosa with lemon rice. My father used to swear by this variety. Pesarattu has upma stuffing inside it. In Goa we have eaten noodle stuffed dosa spring rolls as well as the paneer-stuffed variety. The most exotic in this class of the dosa that proselytises it into an integrated non-vegetarian offering is the keema stuffed one. All this should make it astoundingly explicit that the dosa batter is the most magical of all culinary inventions in the world that allows maximum innovations. You change the stuffing or alter the accompaniment and it is adopted into a new culture and therefore a well-deserved 'national dish' in a nation that abounds with diversity. 

Any woman who is serious about her cooking and frugal with her kitchen expense in South Karnataka would know how to treat a fresh batter and a three-day old one or even the one that has lasted a week. There is nothing called a stale batter, which needs discarding. Nothing goes waste as long as the fermentation is controlled. I am not sure why the feminist hall of fame has not feted the dosa yet, for the batter with adequate technological support from a motorised grinding stone and a refrigerator has made life simpler for thousands of women. For a lot of people it has reduced cooking to easy pouring on the pan. The batter is also seen as something that rescues the man when the wife is away. In the last few years, the batter has also become available in super markets and that only would have facilitated its choice as the 'national dish'. 

Returning to the masala dosa, let me present to you ideas enfolded in a brilliant essay written by a renowned Kannada poet, playwright and composer, P T Narasimhachar. The essay written sometime in the late 1940s, when the masala dosa was just about getting popular in Bangalore and Mysore and small eateries were proliferating, speaks of how the masala dosa has become a marker of urbanisation, modernity and, to a degree, elitism. In fact, the essay takes a satirical view of the city dweller's anguish over a villager eating masala dosa. It begins by asking: "Can a city slicker bear the sight of a rural bumpkin eating a masala dosa in their hotels?" Then the essay goes on to list a perceived set of woes caused especially by the rural palate taking to the taste of the masala dosa. It asks if there is a connection between food shortage in the country and the farmer getting addicted to the taste of the masala dosa? If lands are being left uncultivated and barren because the villager has begun to take a bus to the city every now and then to taste the masala dosa? For the essayist the masala dosa is at the heart of an enveloping sense of catastrophe in the urban soul: 

"A Brahmin is a Brahmin because he chants the Gayatri mantra, a Muslim is a Muslim because of the kalma, a Lingayat is a Lingayat because he carries the Linga, the rituals of a Christian makes him a Christian, similarly a villager is a villager because he eats the humble ragi (millet) balls. Once he starts eating the masala dosa he is converted into a civilised person." 

In this sense the masala dosa is projected as an unsettling and revolutionary stuff.

At the next level, the essay speaks of the masala dosa as a shining symbol of cultural corruption, without giving up the mocking tone. 

"Our culture lives in its villages. It can't implant and explore itself in an urban setting. That is why the Westerners say that we are cultured but not civilised, because a citizen for a Westerner is civilised and not necessarily cultured. The city and our culture don't go together... Our kitchens are the foundations of our culture, they hold all the treasure. How can we ever compare a king's harem with a whore house? How can we compare a kitchen with a hotel?... We are corrupted, why do you too want to reach the same state? Our palates have gone stale and we need the masala to enliven it a bit. You face no such situation. You are simple and innocent. Keep your tastes pure and protect the rural environment and through it save our culture. We want the masala dosa to help us keep the distance between us, city dwellers and the rural folk." 

The essay later gets into other complex arguments, but this quick peek should help us understand what impact the masala dosa had when it arrived and what civilisational arguments it provoked and how eventually it surmounted the borders to become a unifying 'national dish'.