The Story of Sattu and How So-Called Peasant Foods Become Mainstreamed

 Text and photos by Shirin Mehrotra

Litti filled with sattu are served with chokha.

As an undergrad, I had to travel from my hometown in eastern Uttar Pradesh (UP) to my hostel in Rajasthan, a trip that required me to take an overnight train journey followed by a few hours ride in a state transport bus. My mother would pack two meals for me, one for the night in the train and one for the morning after. The second meal often consisted of parathas with a filling of sattu—flour made with roasted Bengal gram. The ghee smeared flatbreads stuffed with this wonder powder was the only dish that could survive the prickly summer heat. I’d often eat the parathas with a smattering of pickle on the bus and, at times, for dinner, just to feel the comfort of homemade food for a bit longer, and also because the parathas lasted that long.

 What is sattu and how is it different from Bengal gram flour or besan? A question everyone has had to answer at some point, if they’re from the Uttar Pradesh subregion of Purvanchal where sattu is most commonly consumed. Sattu, like besan, is made with Bengal gram, but what marks a significant difference between the two is the method.

 For sattu, Bengal gram is first soaked in water and dried under the sun; it’s then roasted using a traditional technique called bhoojna, where a cast-iron wok is placed on a wood-fired chulha (stove), the wok is partially filled with sand and Bengal gram is roasted in it. The sand ensures even distribution of heat and takes out all the moisture from the legume, while keeping its nutrients intact. The roasted gram is then milled along with the husk. This cooking process imparts an earthy taste and aroma to the final product, and also ensures it lasts longer.

 Traditionally, sattu has been the food of the farmers and working class in Bihar, and it was often a meal on its own. Neeraj Barnwal, who’s from Ranchi, tells me that his grandfather, a farmer, would carry a doughy ball of sattu to the fields to eat it for lunch. For Barnwal the memories of sattu are associated with traveling to his village during summers.

 “We’d take a bus, and I remember many roadside stalls on the way selling sattu mixed with water, salt, lime juice and some chopped onions thrown in,” he tells me over the phone. During scorching summers, this beverage form of sattu, also known as sattu ka sherbet, is the most popular coolant in Bihar and UP.

 Sattu’s ability to survive the harshest of temperatures helped Delhi-based Mahek Anand to find a solution for the migrants in Delhi who had to leave when a sudden countrywide lockdown was announced to prevent the spread of Covid-19. When the daily wage workers and poor migrants, with no source of livelihood, started walking back to their hometowns in UP and Bihar, a bunch of citizens came together to provide food for them. Anand realized that cooked food would get spoiled faster leading to food wastage; this gave her the idea of Sattu Setu, an initiative under which she created meal packs of 300gms sattu, water bottle, lime, sugar and salt and distributed them among the migrant families heading back home in the trains that were specially being run for them.

 “My younger sister, who is a biotechnologist, and I wanted to do something for the children of the migrant families and realized that sattu was the right ingredient that would provide instant nutrition and would sustain them,” Anand says.

 In the hindsight, Anand’s initiative sounds like the most natural solution to the problems of the hungry migrants, something that could’ve been implemented nationwide if not for the politics associated with it. Sattu has been an integral part of Bihar’s caste and class politics.

 “It was always the food of the lower- and middle-class and castes, and was never eaten by the rich. It was a cheap substitute for rice and stayed in the body for longer,” says chef Manish Mehrotra, chef-owner of Indian Accent in Delhi.

Litti is cooked on a goitha.

When Lalu Prasad Yadav became the chief minister of Bihar in 1990, he asserted his position as the leader of the working class by asking to replace the baskets of dry fruits at his official residence with sattu. In a state where the lower castes had lived on the margins of economic development, having a leader who publicly shunned the elitism of the forward castes was a big moment. Earlier this year, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi ate litti chokha at a Delhi fair, it was seen as a political statement in the run-up towards the recently concluded elections in Bihar.

These balls of dough are stuffed with sattu and roasted on goitha (dried cow dung used as fuel, also called kanda or upla), eaten with chokha (smoked mashed brinjal mixed with raw onions, tomatoes, chilies, salt, lime juice and raw mustard oil). Once the food of the working class, litti chokha now finds a place of pride on the restaurant menus in Delhi and Mumbai. 

In response, Lalu Prasad Yadav’s son Tej Pratap Yadav hosted a sattu party in Bihar. Food, as Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik write in Food and Culture, “is a central pawn in political strategies,” and in Bihar’s history, sattu has often been used as a political tool.

The consumption of sattu in Bihar and UP can be traced back to five centuries ago. In his Indian Food Tradition: A Historical Companion, K.T. Achaya writes about a 16th century text that lists sattu as foods of the Indo-Gangetic Plain. However, Bengal gram or chana, as it is commonly known in India, finds a mention before that in Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta’s texts. Bengal gram also has a Sanskrit name, chanaka, which indicates that it’s been cultivated in India longer than other countries in the world.

Colleen Taylor Sen, in her book Feasts and Fasts: A History of Food in India, says that chana (the Hindi name for Bengal gram, or chickpea) came to the Indus Valley from Western Asia in the fourth millennium BCE. She also mentions the consumption of chickpea flour during Indus Valley civilization, so it can be assumed that sattu was known to us thousands of years ago.

Sen further mentions that in the Vedic period, barley was pulverized to make a powder called saktu, a forerunner of sattu. This barley powder, which is made using the same procedure as sattu, is a popular ingredient in the Himalayan region and is known as tsampa in Tibet. In Ladakh, it’s known as ngamphey and is used to make crumbly bread called paba.

Ibn Batuta writes about this barley flour in the travelogue of his trip to Mecca. In The Odyssey of Ibn Battuta: Uncommon Tales of a Medieval Adventurer, David Waines describes an incident where the Moroccan traveler passed through a sandy pass called Sawiq. It’s believed that while passing through this area, Prophet Muhammad and his companions realized that they weren’t carrying any food. The Prophet gathered some sand and offered it to his fellow travelers who discovered that the sand had turned into a kind of gruel called sawiq. The pass later became the place where pilgrims would stop to eat the sawiq they brought with them. Waines further describes sawiq as flour made with wheat or barley, which is soaked overnight, drained and washed, toasted, ground fine, sifted and stored to be eaten later.

“It was, therefore, a very convenient form of nourishment for travelers to carry with them,” he writes. “When required, the toasted, ground flour was reconstituted with water, and sugar was added to taste; in other versions, sawiq flour could be moistened with either clarified butter or sheep’s tail fat.” In Purvanchal too, in its most basic form, sattu is eaten mixed with a little water and ghee.

The history of sattu cannot be traced back to one single origin, and while it’s a possibility that it might be a predecessor of barley saktu, sawiq or tsampa, sattu is always associated with Bengal gram in the kitchens of Bihar and eastern UP. Apart from being eaten on its own or as a beverage, sattu’s nationwide claim to fame is through the Purvanchali litti chokha. Dolly Singh, a media professional who ran a Bihari food pop-up in Mumbai, tells me about a local flatbread bhabhri which is stuffed with sattu and cooked on a griddle with ghee or oil. She also mentions a chokha made with sattu, raw onions, and a little mustard oil from the mango pickle; at my home, this is the recipe for the sattu filling for litti. The oil from mango pickle is the magic ingredient that elevates the taste of sattu.

While commonly known as a Bihari or Purvanchali staple, the consumption of sattu is not limited to these regions only. Food writer Rituparna Roy, of West Bengal, tells me about a seller who passes by her house every morning selling jober chatu (barley sattu), which is typically had like a sherbet or a sweet dish called pithe, where sattu or chatu is cooked with milk and palm jaggery.  

“The sattu or chattua in Odisha is not pure roasted Bengal gram,” says food blogger Sweta Biswal. “It is a mix of gram, chivda [flaked rice), some nuts and possibly some millet. There is no set formula.”

 Sattu is versatile, nutritious, filling and cheap, and yet it has been absent from the foodscape of Mumbai—a city where I spent a little over 15 years—despite having a considerably high Bihari population. The regular grocery stores would not stock sattu, and I had to often make do with quickly grinding a bowl of roasted Bengal gram to make litti.

 In Bangalore, Barnwal tells me, packets of sattu would be available in the local grocery stores and there were even a few food carts selling litti chokha.

 “It all boils down to the class of people who bring their food with them”, says Barnwal and I find myself nodding in agreement.

 When, in the 1990s, due to the slow economic growth in their state, Biharis started migrating to other cities. A big chunk of population moved to Mumbai, the majority of them working class. This was also the time when Shiv Sena, a right wing Hindu nationalist party, was at the peak of its nativist movement in Mumbai. The founder and then head of the party, Bal Thackeray, targeted Biharis, associating them with disease and violence, and accusing them of taking the jobs of the natives. As immigrants took up jobs as taxi/auto rickshaw drivers and daily wage workers, they feared constant threat of violence from the Shiv Sainiks (the workers of the Shiv Sena party).

 Krishnendu Ray points out in his essay Dreams of Pakistani Grill and Vada Pao in Manhattan, “taste hierarchies exist” and “culture irrevocably marks class.” The food that the Bihari migrants brought with them became the food of the working class Biharis—not good enough to become a part of Mumbai’s versatile street-food culture and certainly not good enough to be put on the restaurant menus. While these very migrants whipped out the popular Bombay sandwich, omelette pao and pani puri as street food vendors, their own food was either confined to their homes or the obscure roadside stalls that catered specifically to the working class Biharis. In Bangalore, on the other hand, a different class of immigrants was pouring in from these two states to take up jobs in the IT industry. The young professionals brought along their sattu and litti chokha, and the city quickly adapted to cater to their needs.

 Both Mumbai and Delhi, the two Indian cities constantly playing tug of war to be the food capital of the country, woke up to the wonders of sattu only a few years ago when food pop-ups (Singh’s in Mumbai) and restaurants (Indian Accent and Pot Belly in Delhi) started putting sattu-based recipes on their menus. Recently, during the nationwide lockdown, sattu acquired a celebrity status when Bollywood actors Shilpa Shetty and Ayushmann Khurrana shared recipes on their YouTube and Instagram pages respectively, calling “sattu shake” their favorite protein drink. Instagrammers followed suit sharing their own recipes using a hashtag. It has now joined the ilk of superfoods like millet and moringa, and it can be seen on the shelves of gourmet stores packed in brown paper bag with a high price tag, an image distanced from the sattu that Purvanchalis have known.

 “When I was younger, my parents had a specific miller who they bought sattu from,” says Barnwal. In Bihar and most of eastern UP, that’s still the case. While buying packaged sattu isn’t a new practice—my family has been purchasing locally branded sattu for over a decade now—the idea of seeing it as a gourmet product makes me wonder what identity does food hold when it’s so far removed from the people who consume it.

 Sattu may have become an Instagram trend lately, but it still remains the cheapest source of nutrition for many.