Sweets from the Indian subcontinent are the confectionery and desserts of the world.If tomorrow ,India has to choose a national sweet dish, the most likely contender should be the Rasagulla.
Rasagulla is an Indian syrupy dessert popular in the Indian subcontinent . It is made up of ball-shaped dumplings of chhena (an Indian cottage cheese) and semolina dough, cooked in light syrup made from sugar(chashni). This is done until the syrup permeates the dumplings.
From the bypaths of Kolkata and the temples of Puri to the powerful corridors of Rashtrapati Bhawan, Rasogollla remains one of India’s preffered succulent inventions. The Bengalis stake their claim on it. The Odias believe it’s their invention.
History tracks down the origin of Rasagulla to Puri in Odisha, where this 700-year-old sweet dish was part of a ritual,known as Khira mohana due to its almost white appearance back in the 11th century, it was customary to offer this chenna sweet dish to Goddess Mahalakshmi as prasad, especially on the last day of the Rath Yatra, also called Niladri Vijay.According to mythology, Lord Jagannath, an avatar of Vishnu, to appease Lakshmi, his accompaniment on returning from Gundicha temple after a nine-day vacation (Rath Yatra) had offered her rasagulla as a gift to urge entry into his home. Since then, it’s a ritual that’s followed annually.
The spongy white rasagulla is believed to have been originated in present-day West Bengal in 1868 by a Kolkata-based confectioner named Nobin Chandra Das. Das started making rasagulla by processing the mixture of chhena and semolina in boiling sugar syrup in contrast to the mixture sans semolina in the original rasagulla in his sweet shop located at Sutanuti (present-day Baghbazar). His descendants claim that his recipe was an original, but according to another theory, he modified the traditional Odisha rasagulla recipe to produce this less perishable variant.
A year after West Bengal walked away with geographical indication (GI) tag recognition for rasagulla, the Odisha government reopened the battle for ownership of the delicacy and won the rights over ‘Odisha rasagulla’.The bitter war over the rasagulla appears to have ended in a draw—the geographical indicator (GI) was granted to Odisha On 29th July 2019 for the ‘Odisha rasagulla’, less than two years after West Bengal won its own GI tag for the delectable eastern sweet.
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