Food being prepared at the shahi bawarchikhana of Lucknow's Chhota Imambara. Photo: By special arrangement
The shahi bawarchikhana at the city's Chhota Imambara traces its history to Muhammad Ali Shah, the third king of Oudh, who is said to have set it up in the late 1930s. The kitchen is currently being restored by the Archaeological Survey of India, but old timers talk of the need for another conservation — that of its cooking methodology, which had given the bawarchikhana's food its unique taste.
There is a dish that would be cooked through the night at the ‘shahi bawarchikhana’ (royal kitchen) of Lucknow’s Chhota Imambara. Aloo ka salan. Small potatoes, fresh from the morning, slit and forked so the masala could find its way into every cut, liberally doused in ghee, set on the lowest possible flame and left there until the kitchen quietened down for the night and the first muezzin (the mosque official who gives the call for namaz) began to stir for fajr (the first prayer of the day).
By morning, the potato would have become something else. A fine web inside the flesh. A lightness you could not see from the outside.
Aloo ka salan, Taqi Abbas, the 28-year-old heritage and culture storyteller from Lucknow’s erstwhile Nawabi family of Sheesh Mahal, would later tell me, is a mourning dish. Never cooked on a happy day; only for grief, for nazar utarna (to rid one of the evil eye) and for the nine days of Muharram when Lucknow remembers Karbala (the battle in which Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Husayn Ibn Ali was martyred).
The kitchen also cooks it through Ramzan — the holy month preceding Id-ul-Fitr— because the Husainabad & Allied Trust that runs the kitchen has always existed to feed the city's poor or rich during this period. The only non-Muharram, non-Ramzan occasions when food would be distributed from the shahi bawarchikhana, historically, were during a shahi juloos (royal procession), or on important days of the Islamic calendar (specifically those of the Shia community) and charity distribution tied to specific spiritual events, but never as a daily community kitchen.
The Trust traces its history to 1839, when it is said to have been set up by Muhammad Ali Shah, the third king of Oudh, as custodian of the royal-era monuments and to “provide for the underprivileged”. The Chhota Imambara, which functions as a congregation hall, had been built by him a year before, in 1838. The shahi bawarchikhana is believed to have operated from inside the complex of the Chhota Imambara from around the same time, in the late 1830s, feeding both Muhammad Ali Shah’s household and the city's poor.
According to reports, Muhammad Ali Shah gave Rs 3.6 million to the British East India Company, on the condition that it would maintain the monuments built by the Awadh nawabs, while the shahi bawarchikhana would continue to run on the interest earned from the fund. After India became independent in 1947, the money was reportedly transferred to a local bank and continues to fund the kitchen's operations, though the Trust, say those in the know, is under the management of the office of the district magistrate of Lucknow.
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Even a century after it was set up, Lucknow waited through the year for its aloo ka salan.
"My grandfather was the secretary of the Husainabad Trust in the 1930s," says Rana Safvi, writer and historian. "As long as my grandmother was alive, we would get food during Muharram — delicious aloo salan and naan. It would come in earthen handis. Food went to all the wasiqadars [pensioners]. I still remember the taste."
Food from the royal kitchen being prepared for delivery. Photo: By special arrangement
The Archaeological Survey of India is now restoring the kitchen. According to reports, care is being taken to recreate the original look of the kitchen, from its lime-based mortar to the wall carvings. The work is expected to be completed by October.
The story is being told as one of unbroken continuity — a kitchen that has fed Lucknow for nearly two centuries and never quite stopped. That story is true. It is also incomplete.
Jamai Tola, Lucknow, was where Ali Hasan, 75, learned to bake in the early 1980s, under two ustads named Bulle and Ghani. They taught him the geometry of bread. They taught him that for a sheermal (a traditional flatbread) of the kind the shahi bawarchikhana expected, fifty kilos of milk went into ninety kilos of flour. He carries that ratio still, like his prayer mat. He says it without thinking.
He worked inside the royal kitchen for twenty-five years. Now he keeps a shop a few minutes from the gate.
"Back in our days, we used to make these designs [khatdaar and paandaar — the lined and leaf-shaped patterns pressed into sheermal before it met the fire]," he says. "Now nobody wants to learn. They want a quick fix."
According to those The Federal spoke to, it was around eight to ten years back that the Husainabad Trust outsourced the running of the kitchen to contractors, while continuing to manage the overall complex.
Hasan says he left the kitchen around the same time. "The flavour, the historical and imperial knowledge about the food, may not continue," he opines, adding that people from the langar sometimes come to buy sheermal at his shop and carry it back.
Neha Parveen, founder of the social community group Andaaz-e-Lucknow, remembers a different kind of kitchen that is disappearing in the houses around the Imambara. "In one corner of our home, we had a mitti ka chulha [clay oven]," she says. "There was no worry about smoke, no worry about the house getting dirty, because it was an open courtyard."
The shahi bawarchikhana is also an open kitchen. That is not incidental. The cooking it was built for — the salan that takes the entire night to get ready — resulting in wood smoke for hours, and this cannot live indoors. The city changes. The aangan — courtyard — goes. The chulha goes. The relished rotis, made by one beloved pair of hands, pass into memory.
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Inside the kitchen at the Chhota Imambara, the menu has held, say those in the know.
According to Abbas, the Chhota Imambara coordinates with another shahi bawarchikhana at Shah Najaf Imambara (built by Nawab Ghazi-ud-Din Haider in 1816–17), dividing the work of feeding Lucknow through the nine days of Muharram and the month of Ramzan.
“Nine days of niyaz [devotional act of offering food or charity]," Taqi explains, "five of khamiri roti and aloo ka salan, four of khamiri roti and daal. Open to anyone who comes. A handi still goes to the shahi family, five baqarkhani and ten rotis inside it. Twenty to twenty-five lakh rupees a year, to feed a city."
What is changing, Abbas adds, is the patience the food was written for. The salan that used to take a night now takes whatever a contractor can give it. "No more patience left. Time and money are the factors."
The Federal has reached the office of the district magistrate, Lucknow, for details on the kitchen’s present operation. The Federal has also reached The Husainabad Trust for comments. The article will be updated if a response is received.
Restoration would return the walls of the kitchen to its former glory. But the patience with which the food was once cooked is another matter. Photo: By special arrangement
Mujtaba Hussain, who served on the Husainabad Trust between 1988 and 1993, also talks of "a time when the Trust used to be elected". "A budget came up annually, the trustees voted on it, and it went to the cooks. The Trust is no longer elected. The chain that once ran from the cooks to the trustees to the food has gone administrative," he claims.
Akanksha Mukerji, a Lucknow home cook and writer, says the harder thing plainly. "Many are unable to pass it on, because fewer karigars, or even their own children, want to take on such labour-intensive work." Earlier, people continued because the purpose of the work mattered more than the earnings. "That shift is very evident today." What is being preserved, she says, is the visible heritage. What is struggling to survive is the deeper understanding — why was it done, how, for whom, by whom, what it took from a person to keep such a kitchen running.
The ASI can return the building to the 1830s. It can match the mortar and copy the carvings. What it cannot do is bring back the man who knew, without thinking, that the spices enter the potato through the skin and that you must wait until morning for it to be ready.
Still, Abbas has a small suggestion. “Some of the old utensils, the earthen pots, should be put on display, so visitors could see what once came out of this kitchen,” he says.
It is a fair suggestion. It is also a quiet kind of grief. Museums are often built around things that have survived their makers. The walls of the shahi bawarchikhana return to how they looked in the Nawabi era. But the more difficult conversation would be of what lives in the memory of the cooks who knew how long a salan must wait and how the kitchen learns patience. Buildings can be repaired. Traditions survive only if someone still chooses to practice them.
