Vada pav Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Vada pav is a Mumbai street snack: a spiced fried potato dumpling, the batata vada, tucked inside a soft white roll called pav. For this dish to appear at all, ingredients that had crossed the sea first had to come together. The potato at its centre and the chilli that gives it heat were both New World crops, arriving on the subcontinent only after Portuguese trade had established them there. The pav that holds it, too, is a white bread the Portuguese introduced. Only once all of these were at hand could today's vada pav take shape.

In its making, two crafts come together: frying and bread-baking. The batata vada is itself an older fried snack, but slipping it into a pav to make a single item you can carry in one hand is what makes vada pav its own thing.

What settled the character of this snack was where it was eaten. Vada pav spread as a street-stall food aimed at Mumbai's working people. For the cotton-mill workers of Girangaon in particular, and for those who commuted by train, its worth lay in being cheap, eaten with one hand, and easy to carry. A web of stalls across the city placed the snack right along the paths of the daily commute. It emerged between the 1960s and the mid-1970s, a snack that answered the working life of the city, rising from the streets of modern Mumbai.

One anecdote has long been told about how vada pav was born. Around 1966, the story goes, Ashok Vaidya, who ran a stall outside Dadar station in Mumbai, took the existing batata vada and tucked it into a pav. His son Narendra still keeps the stall going at the same station, and the family's account has been passed down with it, along with the story of how the snack spread among cotton-mill workers and rail commuters.

Follow the trail, though, and no independent record set down at the time turns up to fix the anecdote. The date of 1966, and Vaidya inventing it single-handed, rest heavily on later testimony; the earliest point that can be traced with any certainty is around 1971, when the snack is noted as selling for ten to fifteen paise. Pinning the invention on a single person is difficult too. Sudhakar Mhatre, who started a stall at about the same time as Vaidya, and the Vaze family, said to have sold it in the late 1960s from the window (khidki) of their home in Kalyan, are among several who lay claim to it, and Mhatre's dispute is on the record as well.

The anthropologist Harris Solomon's study (Metabolic Living, Duke University Press, 2016) describes vada pav not as one person's invention but as an urban food shaped as it spread through the Shiv Sena movement and through food companies. The claims to being first pull in different directions, but they all agree on this: the snack arose in the greater Mumbai area in the late 1960s, made for the working people of the city. The honest account today is not to shrink it to a single inventor, but to record it as a snack that the labouring culture of modern Mumbai brought up.