The Dessert & The City
Skies. Blue!
Vada Pav. Mumbai!
Halwa. Tirunelveli!
Tirunelveli (or Nellai), a hot and vibrant city near the southernmost tip of mainland India is famous for this delicious sweet made of wheat, sugar and tons of ghee. Halwa has grown synonymous with Nellai over the course of time but the question that puzzled me was –
“Why Tirunelveli”
In my quest to find answers, I hit upon several interesting stories but there are 2 that captivated my imagination the most . This is a 2-piece text montage about the relationship between a dessert and a city.
Water Matters – The Tamirabarani Connection
Nellaiites take great pride in the Tamirabarani (தாமிரபரணி) river that the city thrives on. It lends itself as the primary source of water for irrigation, power generation, drinking water, et al throughout the year. I’ve seen water levels rise and dip but am yet to see the river dry.
Tamirai-parani gets its name from the tamil word Tamirai which means Copper and these traces of Copper lend a unique taste to the river’s water – A taste that eventually finds its way as one of the key constituents into Nellai’s platters and of course our Halwa. Several cities across the length and breadth of India have attempted to replicate the taste of Tirunelveli’s Halwa but have failed because Tirunelveli has something that no other city will ever have – The Tamirabarani river.
Does this make the Halwa uniquely South Indian? Actually, the Tirunelveli Halwa was first made by Rajput cooks (supposedly a Jegan Singh) who were working in southern India at the time for the local royalties. Invented and first made by North Indians in South India – The Tirunelveli Halwa is a true culmination of North Indian and South Indian flavours. Read more at https://www.thehindu.com/features/magazine/in-search-of-tirunelveli-halwa/article4418778.ece
The Dark Horse – Irittu Kadai Halwa
The claimants to the title of the “Founding Fathers of the Tirunelveli Halwa” are one Lakshmi Vilas Sweets located next to the Nellai railway station. This along with Shanthi sweets are unmissable if you ever find yourself in Tirunelveli (even in a dream). The name and fame of Lakshmi Vilas and Shanthi sweets resulted in hundreds (or thousands?) of namesakes cropping up in the remotest corners of the Tirunelveli district with hopes of replicating the financial success of these shops. Whether they were able to replicate the taste and quality is questionable but needless to say, the locals caught the con and paid heed (and money) only to the original Halwa masters. Tourists may still fall trap but a Google search should insulate them as well.
But I digress. The subject of this snippet is a nameless shop, with hardly any lighting, thriving in a rather dilapidated structure that looks like it has been teleported from the 50s, crammed between bigger clones of Shanthi sweets. The shop is referred to by the shady sounding – Irittu Kadai (Dark Shop) because the shop opens only in the evening at 5 when the sun prepares to set and closes at 7 or when stocks run out whichever is sooner. It is the latter more often than not.
Notice how the shop literally looks like an old paper mart with no decor or any lighting. The shop invests exactly Rs. ZERO on marketing and flourishes on the word-of-mouth. But for the 2 hours when the shop is open, the queues can go as long as a kilometer if not more. Here is a video that I captured on one such day. I had reached the shop 5 minutes before time and this is what awaited me.
The shop opened much after the first Halwa was made in the early 1900s but quickly captured the taste buds of the locals. It has a distinct crispiness that separates it from the Halwa at Lakshmi Vilas. People are crazy in love with this shop and the 2 hours in the evening resemble a typical Tatkal scramble at the railway station.
The Irittu Kadai halwa is a paradigm example of the Shakespearean quote –
“What’s in a name? That which we call by any other name would smell as sweet.”
All this while the nearby Shanti sweets namesakes don’t have a single fly nor a crow. (Ee-kaka as is famously quoted in Tamil lingo). While I wasn’t particularly blown away by the taste at the Iritu Kadai and prefer the Lakshmi Vilas variant, the legacy and the mystery surrounding the shop captured my imagination and led me to this rabbit hole of the Tirunelveli Halwa!