Biryani fit for a nawab

Think Hyderabadi biryani and you would think about either a mutton biryani or a chicken biryani. But biryani, a gourmand’s delight born in adversity, has another cousin called Kalyani Biryani.

As fragrant, as tempting and just as addictive but at one-third the cost. Step inside one of the restaurants selling it with an unobtrusive sign and you will get a heapful of helping with chunks of meat that is dark, tensile and juicy. It is the food of choice for wrestlers, body builders and other people without bulging wallets.

The birthplace of this enigmatically appropriate euphemism for beef biryani is small bylane in Shah-Ali-Banda. There, you will find Kalyani Nawab-ki-Devdi. You can easily pass it by unless you chance upon the centerpiece of arresting colourful tiles, roosting pigeons, delicate stucco work, grazing goats and a filigree-worked marble grave, surrounded by smaller less-ostentatious graves. How the artisans baked the red-clay tiles and coated them with indigo, green, yellow and other bright colours remains a mystery.

But this is the birthplace of Kalyani Biryani. Though the Devdi appears like an eyesore it wasn’t always like this. The anecdotal history about how the biryani got cooked is a story of courtly intrigue, Nawabi pelf, exigency and the Hyderabadi-make-do spirit.

The Nawabs of Kalyani had massive estates near the fort of Kalyan (part of Bidar in Karnataka) from the time they became qiledars (fort keeper). One of them Ghazanfur Jang known as Mohana Mian married Sahibzadi Kamal-un-Nissa Begum, the second daughter of Asaf Jah-III, on Dec 16, 1802. He worked on the devdi and his descendents added to the magic. If the people living in his estates had any work in Hyderabad, the capital of Nizam’s province, they would stay in the devdi where they would be served food twice a day.

The tradition continued under the Nawab Gazafar-ud-Dowlah and Nawab Mehdi Hussain. But times change, traditions change and during Mehdi Hussain’s time as fortunes and estates dwindled after Operation Polo, someone in the dastarkhwan tweaked a recipe to create Kalyani Biryani without the knowledge of Nawabsahab. “Then the devdi was parceled out for Rs 5 a gaz (a yard). You can see what is here now,” says Syed Shah Md Qadri who was born in Kalyani but had his upbringing in the devdi pointing out the unplanned structures that have overrun the place.

As you walk out of the devdi, you can’t help think that the bard was wrong when he wrote:

“The evil that men do lives after them;

The good is oft interrèd with their bones.”

SERISH NANISETTI