“The sweet continues to be made, sold and eaten by Bengali’s and Odia’s alike — and local variants similarly flourish in other states in India.”
The Interstate relations in India have been famously fraught over dams, river rights and smuggling, not comestibles. And except for the matter of some 22 ‘border’ villages, links between West Bengal and Odisha have been predominantly sweet, especially with lakhs of tourists from the former thronging the latter’s Jagannath temple at Puri. So, it is unfortunate that the two states appear to be suddenly at loggerheads over the provenance of the iconic rosogolla, prompted by the Odisha government’s application for a Geographical indicator tag for the ‘pahala rasagulla’.
That the sweet continues to be made, sold and eaten by Bengali’s and Odia’s alike — and local variants similarly flourish in other states in India — hinged on the fact that though both sides have been sparring intermittently over origins for years, using history, religious ritual records (or lack thereof) and popular perception to buttress their arguments, they had stopped short of claiming exclusive rights.
Even though Odisha has upped the ante, hopefully, West Bengal’s feisty chief minister will not take as proprietorial a stand on this as she has over sharing Teesta waters. Perhaps an entente along the lines of the eventual Land Boundary Agreement with Bangladesh can be worked out instead between the two states — over a Rosogollas or two, naturally.
Prasanta Patnaik