Kalyana Murungai Vadai or Pankarapaan Beiri

Of the first three words of this post’s title–Kalyana, Murungai, and vadai–vadai is likely to be the most familiar, but also the least appropriate descriptor for this Madurai-famous street food snack which is really much more a wee poori than a vadai.

That last word, beiri or bhairi, is a better descriptor: it’s a fritter more properly than a vadai, but there’s no real translation into Tamil from Sourashtra–the word describes both language and the community that speaks it and claims this fritter as a specialty. “Bajji” and “bonda” both imply batter-dipping, and vadais are usually homogenous wholes. The beiri falls between, pooris connote meals and not snacks, so I suppose vadai it must be. A vadai made of pankara paanu or kalyana murungai leaves, about which more below, but first: what’s this community of people from peninsular Gujarat doing making interesting snacks in Madurai in the first place?

The route to Madurai

A sizeable Sourashtra community lives in the basins of the Kaveri and the Vaigai: Kumbakkonam and Madurai, mainly. Traditional, some say orthodox, endogamous, proud of their language, customs and most especially food, the community are referred to in Tamil as pattnūlkara, the erstwhile “clothiers and master craftsmen of the [Kathiawar] peninsula,” who speak “Pattunuli” or “Khatri” or just “Sourashtra,” a dialect which bears little to no resemblance to present-day Kathiawari for having assimilated Telugu, Canarese, and Tamil over centuries of migration.

There are a few theories of this community’s migration from the peninsular region known Sourashtra [“the land of a hundred countries”] in Gujarat to cities in the south. Each involves some persecution or loss of wealth and stature brought about by the Muslim invasions, starting in the 11th century with Mahmood of Ghazani’s infamous pillaging of Somnath. Each also notes the craft of the Sourashtras, their skill with silk and the manufacture of the finest garments. And each tracks a migratory path from present-day peninsular and southern Gujarat through the Gupta/Aulikara empires in Dashapura [present-day Mandsaur in Madhya Pradesh], then through Vijayanagara and the Tamil kingdoms further south. “Wherever there was a chiefdom or a viceroyalty, wherever there was likely to be a demand for fine robes and garments, wherever there [w]as the surety of royal patronage, they settled” [Rangachari, 1914: 138].

That there was a guild of silk weavers is indicated in the 437 CE Mandasor Inscription of the time of the Gupta emperor Kumaragupta [reigned 414-455 CE; son of the great Chandragupta Vikramaditya] and his Aulikara feudatory Bandhuvarman who ruled from Dasapura or western Malwa. Here in Dasapura was a “a guild following the trade of silk weaving [who] had settled down after migrating from Lata or southern Gujarat. Members of this guild in 437 CE built a temple of the Sun god,” “pale red like the mass of the rays of the moon just risen“–so art historian Vidya Dehejia contends it must have been built of bricks, and therefore perhaps required the renovation recorded in 473. Of the many described in inscriptions, the only surviving Aulikara structure is the Bhim ki Chauri or the marriage pavilion of Bheema on the Jaipur–Jabalpur National Highway 12, which perhaps provides “visual terms” by which to imagine the Silk Weavers’ shrine at Mandasor (Mankodi 2018: 312).

The 437 CE inscription offers more. Obula Subramanian, director of Madurai’s Sourashtra Sabha Museum and Library, offers that its early verses “give a word picture of Dasapura, its position in the world, its lakes and its edifices. Then follows a graphic description of the Guild and the different hobbies pursued by its different members … the pre-eminence of the silk cloth manufactured by them [and the] desire of the Guild to make some religious benefaction, having regard to the transitory nature of the world” [See the translations here].

From Dasapura, the community appears to have slowly migrated south. Deprived of royal patronage and stature following Muslim incursions, the community shifted first to Devagiri in the Vindhyas, then again further to Vijayanagara–“a period of unusual prosperity to them”–and once more to Madura–that last move owing both to the “close political relationship which … existed between Vijayanagara and the South Indian kingdoms” and to the destruction of Vijayanagara Empire by the Deccan sultans. They moved then and with finality in large numbers to “the basins of the Kaveri and the Vaigai” [Rangachari, 1914: 138-9].

If the community enlarged its language with Telugu and Canarese words during the Vijayanagara period, it was in Madura, under the patronage of Thirumalai Nayakar, it is said they were formally accorded Brahmin status. Challenged by locals for performing restricted rituals, the King is said to have tested their knowledge of the Vedas and Upanishads, and, finding them impressively knowledgeable, issued an edict that allowed them names like “Iyer” and “Iyengar.” This illustrious precedent, however, apparently did not prevent Sir Alexander Cardew as governor of Madras from calling them a “non-Brahman community” in 1917, while laying the foundation stone of the Sourashtra High School [Saunders 1927: 790]. They were designated as such for election purposes. Such controversies notwithstanding, the community continue to consider themselves Sourashtra Brahman. Some say they had simply assimilated locally by assuming local Brahmin names–a process no doubt facilitated by royal patronage and their consequently high social stature.

To this community, with this vast and complex history of migration and craft, belongs an impressive array of culinary innovations, each immediately recognizable as Tamil but always with some unique Sourashtra twist: ambad bhaat [sour rice, tamarind rice] has cut coconut pieces, tomato rice has a distinct cinnamon flavor, and serki bath [sweet rice, chakkarai pongal] is made with parutthi paal or cottonseed milk. “Its like Lord Krishna who had two mothers, one who gave birth and another who took care of him,” says one eloquent contributor to this forum, “He is son for both mothers not for only one. Likewise, I belong to Mother Sourahstra [sic] and Mother Tamil.”

What influences came and went in what directions? It’s impossible to tell. Perhaps there are just translations, so what we call susiyam becomes sukundo in Sourashtra. Did the idea behind Madurai famous parutthi paal as a throat-soothing, energy-giving drink come from this community’s serki bath or the other way around? We won’t ever really know–but the unique use of three different, almost hyper-local greens to make a rice fritter called the pankarapaan bhairi or beiri is widely recognized as a community special.

The route to fritters

The pankarapaan bhairi is one of those deep-fried snacks also billed as healthy because it combines three very nutritious, medicinally potent greens: kalyana murungai (or mullu murungai) leaves [Erythrina variegata], murungai leaves [Moringa oleifera], and thoothuvalai leaves [Solanum trilobatum]. The first gives the dish its name: pankarapaan or pankara paanu is kalyana murungai, the Indian coral tree, which grows wild and almost unnoticed in most regions, used in the hills amidst tea gardens as a column for climbing pepper, betel and yams because it grows that straight and that tall. Its flowers are a strikingly deep coral red, petals curled like calla lilies, and these give the tree some ornamental value, especially in places like Coonoor where nobody seemed to know it had any other value at all. That land bears the greater imprint of British botany and ornamental specimens, less of naattu vaidyam [country medicine], perhaps? Who knows.

Sidenote 1: Erythrina variegata is not to be confused with the palasha, kinshuka, Butea Monosperma, though the flowers might look similar.

I learned of the pankarapaan bhairi from a woman in Madurai who was talking to me about rice, native ingredients, and traditional preparations. She broke off a kalyana murungai branch to show me its thorns: the reason it’s also called mullu murungai, or the murungai with thorns. The cutting was mine to carry home and plant. A worthy activity because, she said, the leaves of this plant possess kalyana gunangal or mangala gunangal: auspicious qualities. They are placed alongside the arasanai paanais at weddings for the bride and groom to propitiate.

It was once that if a girl was born in a house, or a marriage was to occur, then a kalyana murungai tree was planted–in preparation for the adolescence of the girl child or the starting of a family: primarily leaves, but also flowers, bark all are used to keep uterine health, ward against PCOD, sort out menstrual irregularities and hormonal instabilities, improve fertility and lactation, roughly in that order. So also were newly-wed couples exhorted to plant a Kalyana Murungai maram so that the leaves from the tree, patted into little adais (with raw rice, bengal gram, sambar onions, and kalyana murungai leaves) or into vadais with lentils added, could nurture good health and family life, as it were.

This is its most significant use, but the greens also ensure bone health [by inhibiting calcium excretion], act as an antidote to chest colds–so the addition of other warming spices like pepper, sitthirathai (lesser galangal), athimadhuram (liquorice), and sukku (dry ginger) to the dough is common. With jeera and black pepper, the leaves can be ground into dosa batter, or a decoction prepared to reduce menstrual cramps.

The Madurai farmer spoke broadly like this of making vadais, adais, and even (an unfermented, custardy) koozh. I knew nothing of the Sourashtra origins of this vadai at the time and for a long while after, and I wonder now I hadn’t just found myself at the cross-roads of traditional knowledge and community innovation, seeing the one but not yet knowing the other.

A trio of medicinal greens

All these virtues of the Erythrina variegata, but it’s all only the “kalyana” half of the story. Mullu-murungai tells us the plant has thorns, and “murungai” acts in fact as a morphological descriptor for both this and the Indian drumstick tree which we now know commonly as “moringa.” Both greens are used in equal measure in the classic Sourashtra recipe for pankarapaan bhairi.

The now-common “English” moringa comes of course from the Tamil murungai [முருங்கை] via the botanical name Moringa olifera, the leaves and drumstick-like fruit [முருங்கைக்காய்/ Murungai-kai] of the Murungai tree having long been an integral part of Tamil cuisine. The word “murungai” itself, as I read from Prabha T’s very insightful posts on Quora, is etymologically muru [tender] + akam [inner] + kai [hand], or muru+angai [tender wrist-palm]: quite literally a description of the shape of the node from which drumstick fruits emerge, a wrist with several long, knobbly fingers–but tender, edible. The Kalyana murungai’s leguminous fruits hang similarly from the tree’s “wrists,” so the two hardy, invaluable native Indian plants bear a common family name.

Sidenote 2: Here is another reason why I refuse to Anglicise murungai to “moringa”—we lose such nuances of description and understanding and then ask if “moringa” indeed is etymologically Tamil. It’s a crying irony to adopt foreign tongues and then come to doubt the truths that have always been held in our own. English speakers or other Indian language speakers can learn to say the word “murungai” about as easily as they all now say “Chennai” for Madras or “Thiruvananthapuram” for Trivandrum.

Thoothuvalai is the last of the pankarapaan trio of greens, and proportionally the smallest. I’ve written much about thoothuvalai, the “messenger green” here and here so won’t repeat myself here.

Making Florescent Vadais

Whether you make pankarapaan bhairi with just kalyana murungai or with all three greens, the dough you produce will be an improbably fluorescent green.

Whether you turn all that fluorescence into a custardy porridge, or griddle-fry into adais or deep fry into vadais, is entirely up to you. Some ingenious sorts out there even turn the vadais into the puris for pani puris, which I say is just brilliant because they’re well close to the right texture and puff up willingly in hot oil [see my cavernous bitten half in the image down below?]. That way you can have guiltless medicinal “green” pani puris, too, never mind all that deep frying.

Whatever route you choose, the process is this. Soak parboiled rice, clean the kalyana murungai leaves taking care to remove their fibrous veins, which will not grind well or which will make the dough unpalatably stringy. If you’re using dry sithirathai [சித்தரத்தை], then soak that, too.

Clean also the murungai leaves by pulling them off their stalks. Thoothuvalai just needs rinsing.

Then drain the soaking rice and blend everything together into a fine paste with no additional water.

The moisture in the greens should suffice. If you need to add water here, you’ll need also to add rice flour to the dough to pull it together in a ball as in the images above and below. Nothing wrong with that, if you have to.

Add the spice powders. If you soaked a piece of sithirathai, then you’ll need to make sure you pound that well by hand before grinding or it won’t grind! You can skip all the other powders except this one, which gives these vadais their unique taste.

Now make small lime-sized balls of the dough and form these into small, thickish patties. Don’t make them too thin; they should be just smaller than the palm of your hand. You can use a wet cloth to get these ready or an oiled banana or other edible leaf–these are our traditional, eco-friendly methods. No question of non-biodegradable plastic!

Deep fry these patties in hot oil, just as you’d deep fry pooris.

They will sink to the bottom, but slowly start to rise. Use a slotted spoon to keep them immersed, coaxing them to puff. Once they’ve puffed and are floating—flip them to cook the other side.

And once they’re turning just slightly golden, you can lift them out and set them on paper towels to absorb any excess oil.

Arrange the warm vadais on a plate and sprinkle each with paruppu podi (the recipe is below). You can store any remaining podi for subsequent use (or substitute for your regular chutney podi or idli podi).

And enjoy the pankarapaan bhairis with an afternoon chai or coffee, knowing that these simple little snacks pack a nutritional punch and carry all the weight of a community’s history that stretches back to 5 CE without adding an equivalent weight to your stomach!

Citations

Mankodi, K.L.. 2015. “The Mandasor Silk Weavers’ Inscription of 437 CE and the Temples of the Aulikaras.” In Art, Icon and Architecture in South Asia: Essays in Honour of Dr. Devangana Desai. Eds. Anila Verghese and Anna L. Dallapiccola. New Delhi: Aryan Books International, Vol. II, pp. 305-16.

Rangachari, V. 1914. “History of the Naick Kingdom of Madura.” Indian Antiquary, XLIII (I9I4), I38-9

Saunders, Albert James. 1927. “The Sourashtra Community in Madura, South India.” American
Journal of Sociology 32(5), pp. 787–799.