Rasgulla Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Rasgulla is a sweet of eastern India's Bengal region: chhena, a milk curdled with acid, rolled into balls and simmered soft in sugar syrup. Known for its springy, spongy bite, it came together in early modern to modern times, broadly the nineteenth century.

Milk and sugar are both old in India. What sits at the heart of this sweet is the working of milk—curdling it with acid to make chhena and shaping that into a confection. Indian milk sweets long relied on khoa, milk reduced by boiling. Rasgulla took form only when the practice of making acid-curdled milk the centerpiece of a sweet appeared in Bengal.

The method itself is plain: curdle the milk with acid, roll it into balls, and simmer them in sugar syrup. What raised it up were the tradition of the Bengali confectioners known as moira and, in time, the shop culture that grew in the cities. Artisans' hands and urban sweet shops carried this confection from a regional specialty to a widely known sweet.

That the present springy form was shaped in Bengal is treated in food history as a broadly settled view. Which region deserves the credit, on the other hand, remains a live dispute.

Rasgulla is claimed by two regions, each asserting itself as the birthplace. One is the West Bengal account. The Kolkata confectioner Nobin Chandra Das of Bagbazar is said to have devised the present spongy rasgulla in 1868, and in 2017 "Banglar Rosogolla" received a Geographical Indication tag for the traits of its variety. The other is the Odisha account, in which the sweet was born in Puri as khira mohana, developed into Pahala rasgulla, and was long offered to the goddess Lakshmi at the Jagannath Temple; here "Odisha Rasagola" received its GI tag in 2019 (sources: "Rasgulla" on Wikipedia; SpicyIP's legal account of the GI attribution dispute).

The claim attached to the Odisha account—that the sweet was offered at the temple from the twelfth century—wavers from two directions. First, it does not sit well with the history of the ingredients. According to the food historians K. T. Achaya and Chitra Banerji, India before the Portuguese influence—that is, before the seventeenth century—leaves no record of cheese or chhena. The milk sweets of the time were built on khoa. An account of rasgulla, made from chhena, being offered at a twelfth-century temple points to an era when that chhena did not yet exist (source: K. T. Achaya, Indian Food: A Historical Companion). Second, it does not agree with the temple's own records. The historians Haripada Bhowmik and Animikh Roy note that rasgulla is absent from the temple's early offering list (the chhappan bhog, the fifty-six offerings), and that chhena, curdled with acid, was regarded as spoiled milk—offering it to a deity would have been sacrilege (source: via "Rasgulla" on Wikipedia). Even the fifteenth-century textual mention treated as evidence of age draws suspicion of a later interpolation in the manuscript; a name appearing in a text is a separate matter from the existence of a current chhena sweet at that time.

Yet the Bengal account is not of one piece either. The common claim that Das was the 1868 inventor runs up against an earlier record. Pranab Ray's Banglar Khabar (1987) reports that Braja Moira was already selling rasgulla two years before Das, in 1866, at a shop near the Calcutta High Court. The food historian Michael Krondl too holds that, whatever its origin, rasgulla most likely predates Das (sources: Pranab Ray, Banglar Khabar; Michael Krondl, Sweet Invention: A History of Dessert). Who the first single maker was still wavers even within Bengal.

What is firm is the line that rasgulla as the present chhena sweet took shape in nineteenth-century Bengal. Who established the present springy form, and as which region's specialty it took root, are questions carried into the present alongside the two GI tags.