Upma Period COrigin theory CVerified

Upma is a South Indian dish in which mustard seeds and urad dal are first sizzled in oil to release their aroma—the tempering known as tarka—and coarse grain or flour is then added and cooked with liquid until done. It is eaten at home for breakfast and as tiffin, the light meals of the day. The name is said to join the Tamil words uppu, salt, and mā, flour.

The version seen most often today is made with coarsely ground wheat, known as rava or semolina, but upma is also made with rice flour. Both wheat and rice have long been available in South Asia.

The story most often told about rava upma begins in the Second World War. When Rangoon was occupied in 1942, shipments of rice from Burma stopped; India had been drawing fifteen percent of its rice imports from Burma. In 1943 famine struck Bengal. Amid this shortage, the account goes, the British authorities pressed wheat semolina on households in place of rice, and rava upma was born. Colonial discussion had already set wheat above rice as a grain: McCay's nutritional research of 1912 is one example.

But the second edition of a Tamil cookbook by T.K. Ramachandra Rau, the Hindu Pakasastra, printed in Madras with a preface dated August 1900, sets out four kinds of upma. There is a "sada," or plain, upma of aged-rice flour and grated coconut. There is an upma of coarse wheat (rava), toasted until sand-coloured in oil tempered with mustard seeds, urad dal, chillies and curry leaves, then cooked in sour buttermilk. And there are two more made in an iron pan called a vanali, one of rice flour and one of wheat rava. Of the wheat upma, the book adds that it can be made without toasting the rava, but toasting is best, and that it is very good eaten while still a little warm. Upma of wheat rava was already in a household cookbook more than forty years before the war.

That leaves no room for the claim that rava upma was born in the war. Whether the wartime shortage later helped it spread, and whether the British authorities promoted semolina through cookery classes or the like, has not yet been established from contemporary records.

Which came first, then, rice or wheat? That the rice-flour version is the one called "plain" suggests rice was the everyday base at the time. But with a wheat version printed right beside it, the book cannot tell us that rice came first and wheat was added later. The first edition appeared in 1891, but whether it already included upma is not known. What can be said is that by 1900 at the latest, upma was being made in South India from both rice flour and wheat rava. What came before that remains unknown.