Dhokla Period BOrigin theory BVerified

The batter for dhokla is made from besan (chickpea flour) and left to ferment. Chickpeas are a crop grown in South Asia since remote antiquity, a long-established local ingredient, and there was never any difficulty in finding them. The fermentation works air into the batter, and steaming it yields a fine-grained, airy piece. This method, fermenting the batter and then steaming it, is the central technique that makes dhokla what it is.

This steamed cake is deeply rooted in the vegetarian traditions of Gujarat's Jain and Vaishnava communities. Within a food culture that avoids meat, a light dish built on a pulse found favor at the family table and with tea, and spread from there.

When it comes to where dhokla belongs, the name of South India often comes up. The steaming method, and a plump appearance reminiscent of idli, lead more than a few web articles to present it that way.

But the written record points to Gujarat in western India. The food historian K. T. Achaya, surveying the foods that appear in Jain literature in Sanskrit, writes that many of them clearly originate from Gujarat. Among them is dukkia, made from pulses, which he says was first mentioned in 1066 and is the well-known steamed dhokla of today. Achaya also shows dhokla among the foods listed in the Varanaka Samuchaya, a Gujarati work from around 1520. A primary source or scholarly account supporting a South Indian origin is, for now, nowhere to be found.

It is likely the form of a steamed cake, and its outward closeness to idli, that invite the mistaken attribution. But going by Achaya's account, the origins of this dish, which turns up in a Jain text nearly a thousand years old and is named again in a sixteenth-century Gujarati work, lie in western India.