For culinary revivalist Chef Vikas Seth, Holi is all about one sweet indulgence: palakari. A classic variant of the gujiya, this traditional sweet was once a festival staple in the royal palace of Patiala and is made by stuffing the crescent-shaped whole wheat pastry with mawa, deep frying it and then soaking it in sweet syrup made with jaggery or sugar from where it got its light sweetness.
Recalls Chef Seth of the Holi staple, “the beauty of palakari wasn’t just the melt-in-the-mouth texture, but how it was served to you. The fried palakari was dipped in this warm, delicate sugar syrup à la minute with a few holes punched on the puffed-up pastry so that the cardamom-scented mawa gets that extra sweetness.” In fact, continues the seasoned chef, “one of the charms of Holi was munching on these warm moon-shaped sweets. It was the best way to start the week-long festival of colours.” What made palakari, a version that mused many versions of gujiya today in the North, such a fascinating sweet wasn’t just its addictiveness, composition and palate play but also the fact that, says culinary historian Dr Ashish Chopra, “palakari, along with the Chandela Rajput’s favourite chandrakala (which is shaped like a full moon) are the two classic variants that give credence to the popular foodlore of the first gujiya created back in the 13th century where it was made by sun-drying a whole wheat pastry stuffed with jaggery-honey filling.”
Though the making of both palakari and chandrakala is hugely different — while the former has pure mawa, the latter is a gourmet version with khoya, dry fruits, mawa and saffron — these, adds Dr Chopra, “became instrumental in not just popularising gujiya as a sweet indulgence but also as part of Holi.” The two versions say the experts, “demonstrated not only the ease of making the sweet with local ingredients but also how to make it more luxuriant. The result, gujiya travelled and how. By the
turn of the 16th century, most parts of medieval India either had their own version of the sweet or were in the process of creating their own with a local name. While it was called gujiya in UP, which had the unsoaked, Baklava-crisp dry casing, the Western version changed the filling to have desiccated coconut and semolina and called it karanji, and those in the East called theirs pedakiya and in Southern India, the version created with dal, jaggery and coconut became karjikai. The most lavish dry fruit filling version was of course from Gujarat, and was called ghughra.
This brings us to the question of not only how gujiya travelled pan-India but also how did it connect with Holi, a festival that back in the day was celebrated as Holaka, one of the few ancient spring festivals which involved bonfires on a full moon day followed by a sprinkling of coloured water on each other the next day. Also called Holi of Bonfires, the festival originally was a royal ritual that according to Atharva Veda, “comprised burning of heaps of wood and/or cakes of cow-dung on
the full-moon night of Phalguna month. It was believed that bonfires help cleanse the body of all negative energies, and hence was a ritual that was followed religiously by kings in ancient India. It was somewhere at the end of the period that Holaka, till then a Holi of bonfires, transformed into Holaka, which according to Kama Sutra, became the festival of colours and was celebrated after Suvasantaka, the festival of Kamadeva in spring. In fact, the play Ratnavali, which was commissioned by King Harshavardhana of Thaneswar in the 7th century, became the first written work that mentioned the celebration of Holaka around the time.
Holaka or Holi’s popularity as a festival pan-India initially was because of both the informality as well as the wellness aspect of it. Holi fell around the time of seasonal change which adversely affected the body that was high on Kapha Dosha. The outcome was that people felt sluggish and low. That’s when a festival that involved a natural weaning of negative energy and an infectious aura of gaiety became the perfect solution. Interestingly, it was these very elements that attracted the new rulers of the medieval period, especially those who ruled Delhi including the Mughals, who found the “informal” nature one of the best ways to gain acceptability. In the harem, of course, the festival was like a “fresh lease of freedom as the queens, princesses and prince were allowed to mingle minus the parda.” Jahangir, Shah Jahan, and later Bhahadur Shah Zafar are said to have mingled with their subjects freely on the occasion and found the festival extremely “endearing” and gave it the same importance as Eid. It was a tradition that the emperor had adopted from the Vijayanagara Kingdom where the king was known to celebrate the festival of colours with his subjects while the royal kitchens distributed cooling drinks and sweets.
Enchantingly, while Holi was enticing the new rulers around the medieval time, gujiya, a sweet that historians believe originated around the “cow-belt” of Bundelkhand had already made it to the celebratory meal of temples known for their Holi celebrations, especially of the Sri Radha Raman temple in Vrindavan and those in Orchha. Incidentally, says culinary archivist Chef Nimish Bhatia, “it was part marriage alliance and part of the celebration that they saw in the temples that created the celebration tradition of the royal palace (read: the court and the royal harem). And given that most initial alliances — marriage or otherwise — occurred between the new rulers and the Rajputs, gujiya, a sweet that could be created to pander to any palate, became popular.”
Of course, adds Dr Chopra and Chef Bhatia, “with those who came from Iran, gujiya’s close proximity to Baklava and Iranian Qottab, part of Nowroz celebration, too could have played to the crescent sweet’s advantage.” Eventually though, adds Chef Seth, “it was that typical balmy taste and that feeling of calm that washes over the sweet that made gujiya or palakari, an inseparable part of Holi. So much so that today, even with a whole panoply of sweets, the moon/crescent-shaped pastry is undoubtedly the first choice.”