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A picture that I took at Jugal’s in 2010


 

Didu, my maternal grandmother, made pantuas in Delhi when we came to India to visit family. I refused to eat them at first and once I did, I finished them all and didu had to make another lot only for me.

My thakurda (paternal grandfather) would visit us every Sunday with a large thonga (paper bag made with used newspaper) of jilipi after we moved into India. Chubby little me would finish them all.

I listened in awe to stories of how my father had made rasgullas for the British guests during my annaprashan in Canterbury.

We moved to my maternal grandparents house after my father passed away. Shingara (samosa) from the local mishtir dokan were bought  every evening for my baby brother and me. I would get the potato filling from my brother’s shingara as he was too young to be able to handle masala and chillies.

Under my dadu’s insistence my mom bought an apartment of our own. He felt that we would grow up feeling independent this way. There were two sweet shops where we lived. Mom preferred the one on our side of the road. Roshogolla, bonde or shingara would be bought to have with muri (rice crisp) or sandwiched in bread. As I grew older my mother would send me to the shop at night to buy freshly made hot lyangcha.

College happened and with that I got exposed to College Street, Bowbazar, Central Avenue. And the shada doi and kochuri at Putiram. The mishti doi of Bheem Nag.

I went off to Mumbai to work. There was very little Bengali food around me. Or sweets. Save the pantua in the thala at the New Bengal Lodge.

I was excited to see a Bengali sweet shop with the name written in Bengali at Kanpur when I had gone there on fieldwork. I don’t remember if I bought anything.

A visit to the ISKCON temple at Juhu with my mother helped me discover reasonably priced Bengali sweets suck as roshogolla, kamala bhog etc

These were much better compared to the leathery syrup based sweets sold in the ‘Bengali’ section of Mumbai sweet shops. The most popular of which would be rasgullas and something called malai chomchom which had never graced any Bengali sweet shop.

We got to know of an elderly man named Lallan Mishra who would get basic Bengali sweets from somewhere and sell them to Bengalis in Bandra at a low cost. We  became one of his customers but finally had to ask him to stop coming as he would land up and insist that we buy sweets even when we did not want any

The only Bengali sweet shop in Mumbai was Sweet Bengali in Mahim. I was excited when they set up a counter at Chowringhee Square, a roll shop which had recently opened in Bandra.

The roll shop shut down but a proper Sweet Bengal outlet opened in Bandra. My fellow Bengalis complain that the sweets are too expensive and no match to what one gets in Calcutta. Well this is Mumbai and not Kolkata and Sweet Bengal works for me.

With advancing came age came weight consciousness and pre-diabetes and shunning the world of mishti.

Barring when we returned with loads of mishti for friends from Kolkata in Feb 2021 only to realise that we had Covid. The question of giving the sweets did not arise. I didn’t want these to go waste, or so I told myself, and ate them all. And it was a lot!

This year we bought kheer kodom from Sweet Bengal (not a brand plug) and distributed it among our neighbours, none of whom are Bengali. They told us that they loved these, at times stopping us at the lobby to tell us this..

Oh, and I named the cat which gave birth to little Nimki as Mishti Debi as she has the regality of Suchitra Debi. Which means that you have a bunch of non-Bengalis using the word Mishti.

 

A picture that I took in 2019. I take better pictures now
but have not taken any of mishti recently

 

 

This would be my answer had the question, ‘tell us about your mishti memories’, been asked to me and not to a fellow panelist at the recently held Jugal Mishti Literary Festival in Kolkata’s Town Hall. The first ever literary festival centred around mishti. It was organised by Lahana Ghosh who belongs to the family that runs the Jugals sweet shop.

Being held in Kolkata, the city of ‘intellectuals,’ most of talks centres around ‘weighty issues’ such as capitalism, casteism, feminism, literary influences, lost recipes, around mishti. The sessions were held largely in Bengali, making it difficult for a non-Bengali audience to comprehend. Still, the effort was creditable with the organisers displaying the enthusiasm and efficiency levels of those organising a college festival.

I was slotted in a couple of sessions around what in journalism is referred to as ‘puff’ pieces and which, to be honest, is my bear. One on foodgasm with my friend Indrajit Lahiri with no moderator to guide our conversation. The other was ‘mishti memories’ with my friends Rukshana Kapadia and Doma Wang. This, thankfully, had a moderator.

One of the issues that come up in both is how mishti can be popularised outside of Bengal and the role which can be played by Instagrammers, private enterprise and the government.

One can safely say that of all Bengali food items, mishti is possibly the only one known across India and available too, even if in a bastardised form. Which gives it a strong platform to start from to spread the reach of mishti.  There is a need to go against the usual Bengali tendency to complicate thing and instead demystify the world of mishti. For segment sweets into shondesh, rosh bhora and doi and then promote these. Awareness is useless without distribution. The big mishri retails brands of Kolkata to move out of their comfort zone and take mishti to the rest of the country.

The mishti literary festival organised by Jugal on their 100th anniversary is a fabulous example of private enterprise to promote mishti. A creditable start which hopefully they will improve on and take ahead.

It is a bit too much expect the government to promote the world of mishtis. Any government, be it saffron or white and blue, surely has more pressing matters to address.

I strongly feel that all of us in social media can play a big role in the promotion of the world of mishti. The reach of social media goes beyond boundaries. A counter arguments offered is that mishti is boring and that it is far easier to make cheesecakes look sexy on Instagram than a jolbhora shondesh.

I don’t buy this argument. If we have the same confidence and pride about our food as say the Japanese have about their’s, then there is no reason why mishti can’t rock the gram. Look at how popular everyday thali pictures are on Instagram. Who would thought a few years back that the simple thali would hold its own against and even beat the pastas, pizzas, burgers and salads of the world in terms of likes and engagement?

Like everything else in life, it comes down to ones mindset. Is it defeatist or confident? Something tells me that this story can have a sweet ending.

Link to the article I’d written on Jugal in 2010

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