Today, the shop, run by the third and fourth generation, is also famous for its other fried Sindhi delights, including rice kachrees (crisps made of rice flour), phoolpatasha (dried lotus seeds), varis (sundried lentil cake) and kheecha (papade made of rice).Īnother famous papad store born from the struggles of Partition is Jaidev Bherumal Parwani's store Deepak's - The Sindhi Shop in Bhavani Peth, Pune. Passari, too, started selling ready-made papads a few years later.
So, more and more people started outsourcing it than making it at home," says Aggarwal. "It is a very tedious and time-consuming process. However, papad-making became just another tradition we lost along the way. So, we started off by selling the supplies such as the dough mix, papad khar (a type of baking soda used to make papads), hing and jeera," says Kishore D Maniyal, the grandson of Passari. "Once people started settling down, everyone made it at home. In those days, the store did not sell ready papads, but it had supplies to make them. In 1948, he set up a shop in Chira Bazar in Mumbai's Girgaum before he moved to Khar. The late Ochiram Passari owned an Ayurvedic and kirana shop in Shikarpur, Sindh (present-day Pakistan). My 81-year-old grandmother, who also spent her summers making papad when she migrated to India, swears by the store for her supplies. My bag is filled with 5-6kg of it, either bought from Ulhasnagar or a lady who makes them in Jodhpur," says Ajwani.īack in Mumbai, Ochiram Passari's twin shops Shree Vishnu Stores and Shree Shankar Stores in Khar became the closest connection people had to the land they were uprooted from. We crush it over our khichdi and pair it with spicy chutney. We eat it at all times and with almost anything. The Sindhi diaspora reserves kilos of space in their bags for papad from on their visits to the country. The two cities on the outskirts of Mumbai have now become hubs of the multi-million dollar Sindhi papad-making business. Thousands of Sindhi refugees set up their homes in the military barracks of Ulhasnagar and Kalyan, among other parts of India. Sundri Parchani, who holds a PhD in Sindhi linguistics.įrom tiny door-to-door businesses, the papad industry started metamorphosing into a behemoth between the 1980s and 90s. It had to be followed by water, so you don't get a cough from the papad in your throat," said Dr. Since Sindh was very hot, everyone who came over was served papad before a glass of water. My grandfather who was an Ayurveda hakim would tell me that papad-because it is high in salt-would help replenish the sodium lost in your body after perspiring. "There was nothing like biscuits in Sindh, so every time someone came over, we served papad with water. "After Partition, many enterprising women who had suddenly lost all their wealth started making papad and pickles and selling it to better off Sindhis who were sufficiently settled, but not enough to make their own," says Saaz Aggarwal, author of the book Sindh: Stories from a Vanished Homeland. Women and children got together in their courtyards, rolling the dough into wafer-thin sheets, and then laid it out to dry. Sindh's dry scorching heat made for the perfect ground to make papad. The hand-made ones are also thicker than your standard industry variety," says Sapna Ajwani, who runs the supper club SindhiGusto in London. There are many industry-made papads that use only urad and call their papads Sindhi, but they taste nothing like they're supposed to. Papads made either from pure urad turn out too flat and cracker-crisp. What also makes it sticky is that it's not parch dried in the sun. "The uniqueness lies in the use of a mix of urad (husked black beans), which lends the crunchiness, and moong dal (green gram), which gives it its chewiness, and dill seeds, coarse black pepper and hing. It fluffs up like a roti when cooked on a flame, sports waves and dents, and tiny little bubbles with occasional specs of black when it's too charred. You know it's Sindhi when it sticks to your teeth. Savoury and piquant with hints of dill and pepper-the perfect papad crumbles in your mouth like a wafer, but as you munch, it softens lending it a slightly gummy texture.