October 2012, 8.00 am I hold the rusty handle of the ladies compartment door and wait for my turn to find a seat in the Sealdah Lalgola Passenger to reach Krishnanagar and see the functioning of a sweet shop. During my daily commute, my fellow ‘daily travellers’ – would jokingly advise me to board the Maitreyi Express and go to Opar/the other side, to see who makes better sweets, them or us. Some people used to ask me questions about my plan to go to Bangladesh to taste the sweets. Little did I know that I would encounter similar comments during my fieldwork in Bangladesh. As I look back, every time I went to a place near a land check post, my interlocutors would not miss the opportunity to point out Opar – the other side.
In this case, it was India, and it included an addendum ‘In India, you add less sweetener.’ do not you think?’ As I learned, degrees of sweetness were to characterize not only epar and oppar, but also rural, urban and, most importantly, the metropolitan centers of Kolkata and Dhaka. Two Bengali phrases – ‘Beshi Mishti’ and ‘Kom Mishti’ – were used to indicate the degree of sweetness across and within borders. ‘Beshi’, or more, and ‘kom’, or less, became taste qualifiers to indicate the quotient of flavor and sweetness as well as to mark ‘boundaries’ – ‘within’ and ‘transnational’. Creating identity, especially through food, is not unique to the India-Bangladesh border areas.
Boundary-drawing through sweets becomes more transparent through how sweetness is interpreted in relation to geography – in this case rural versus urban; India vs Bangladesh. As I entered Narendra Mishthan Bhandar in Shibganj market, located in Chapainwabganj district of Bangladesh, a worker handed me a plate of chomchom, a cylindrical-shaped sweet made from a mixture of chhena and sugar, boiled in sugar syrup and dressed with a coat of lot (a Bengali word for crushed khoya). The owner of the sweet shop said again, ‘Taste it and see.’ . . In India you are used to eating less sweets. There is more sweetness here…
As one of the workers lifted the soaked cylindrical shaped chenna onto a specially prepared wooden rack to extract the sugar syrup, his hands were filled with sticky syrup. He kept lifting the sweets from the sugar syrup again and again and taking out the extra syrup. The owner said, ‘You need the right amount of sugar syrup to store the ground khoya.’ He asked me about the texture of ChomChom: ‘Did you find it sweet?’ I nodded.
Sweetness is a subjective taste. During my growing years in a sweet-loving family, a man named Balram used to come to our quarters on specified days of the week. As soon as he would ring the bell, I would wait for my mother to bring tiffin boxes of different sizes to keep wet and dry sweets. Balram used to keep track of the sweets in a small diary with our apartment number. My mother used to wait for Danadar to fill her box. Danadar is one of the ‘sweetest’ sweets of Apar. Round in shape, the accumulation of sugar syrup creates an outer layer of sweet and moist sugar syrup that holds the chhena balls together.
When I began my fieldwork in Chandannagar in the Hooghly district of West Bengal in 2010, my mother peeked into my field diary and asked whether the watery Surajya was granivorous near Modak. In my obsession with the sweet shop’s homemade specialties – sandesh shaped like the kernel of the palmyra fruit – I failed to notice that on specified days, the sweet shop prepared granadar. I never got a chance to see how danadar is made, but when I learned that it was my mother’s favorite sweet, the owner Saibal Kumar Modak would always pack two pieces of danadar for me to take home. Whenever I would bother Shaila Bhor, the artisan in charge of sugar-syruped sweets at the watery Surjya Modak, she would remark, ‘What is there to see in granulation? Dip the rasgulla in the right amount of thick sugar syrup and your danadar is ready. Those were the early days of fieldwork in October 2012, also a busy time of year as it coincided with autumnal festivals such as Durga Puja and Jagadhatri Puja which are celebrated with equal pomp.
I stopped bothering Shaila Bhor and returned to recipe books in search of further details of Danadar. Bipradas Mukhopadhyay (1911) has described this sweet in three lines in his recipe book for cooking sweets, this description is almost a replica of Shaila Bhor. Mukhopadhyay writes, ‘Prepare Rasgulla and lift it with sugar syrup. After this, mix Rasgulla in thick syrup. ‘Once the sugar syrup has set and formed crystals your Granular is ready’ (1911:147). Sugar syrups have different consistencies which also shape the degree of sweetness. Later, when I used to watch Shaila Bhor preparing sugar syrup, I used to wait for her to do the final check by taking out a portion of the syrup and checking its elasticity.
One day, to demonstrate my knowledge, I asked him if it was ‘dui bondo tarare ros’ (sugar syrup that can stretch to two strings). He said, ‘You must have read it somewhere. It is a little thick and sweet. he was right. I came across different consistencies of sugar syrup in the work of Bipradas Mukhopadhyay. He has dedicated a section to the preparation of sugar syrup in the recipe book. He advises readers to be cautious about the ratio of sugar to water, but especially when the sugar starts boiling and a layer of foam appears. He suggests that it is important to add a small amount of water mixed with milk to this layer of foam to strain the sugar syrup. In workshops I have seen experienced and senior craftsmen rapidly skimming this foam with long paddles.
Mukhopadhyay believes that to get the thick consistency of the sugar syrup, it has to be boiled for a long time and more importantly, the sugar syrup has to be filtered repeatedly to get the desired consistency. The consistency of sugar syrup can be felt through sight and touch. He writes that the stability of hot sugar syrup can be judged by the number of stars formed when it falls from a height. He concluded that depending on one’s skill, it could go up to five strings. Workers in West Bengal and Bangladesh have constantly reminded me that it is important to prepare sugar syrup. I found the preparation of sugar syrup for Natore’s Kanchagola to be the most delicate and quick in Bangladesh. A worker takes out a portion of the sugar from the sack and pours it into a cooking pot that has just been placed on high heat and quickly adds water, stirring rapidly with a long paddle. Once the sugar starts bubbling, he replaces the paddle and takes a long spatula to stir it thoroughly, removes the spatula, adds the chenna mixture and stirs in the sugar syrup, then removes from the heat.
Chhena absorbs the sugar syrup and the Kanchgola mixture is ready. The time between adding the chenna to the syrup and removing it from the flame is important. As he mixes the chenna and sugar syrup, he notices that this syrup is thinner than the one I saw in Chapainwabganj to prepare Chamchom. He is right. At Shibganj market in Chapainawabganj, a worker told me that his job was to prepare sugar syrup. For chomchom, the sugar syrup is thicker and denser than that of rasgulla. ‘It’s sweeter’, he says.
How do workers adjust and adapt to the varying degrees of sweetness in these two geographic areas? Does this mean that each shop has its own recipes? Yes and no, says Sukumar Ghosh of Chandannagar’s Jalbhara Surjya Modak. He tells me again and again that it is important to develop the sense of estimation through touch, smell and sight. Apart from the texture of the sweets, each sweet shop shows its uniqueness by its level of sweetness. Sukumar Ghosh in Chandannagar, West Bengal, finds the ratio of sugar to water high; It’s also about quality products. While sweet shops use refined sugar, there are different grades of refined sugar in the wholesale refined sugar market. To cut costs, some sweet shops resort to a cheaper variety of sugar with slightly coarser grains than others who choose the right proportion of sugar.
‘Everyone can make rasgulla,’ I was told at an outsourced factory outlet of KC Das Pvt Ltd in Bengaluru. The factory had employees from Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. When I returned and told this to Birendranath Das, head of the KC Das outlet in Bengaluru, he reminded me, ‘Machines, standardization do not arise from scratch. Human civilization has converted the work of its hands into machines. In a mechanized unit, you need to control the temperature and know the proportional portions of sugar and water. But if everything can be replaced by machines, then why do we use tadu, a long wooden ladle with a flat bottom, to cook gram and sugar or jaggery?’ Das took me to the quality control laboratory and showed that standardization of sugar syrup would not be possible without quality water, which meant testing the coliform bacteria in the water.
In the scientific world of KC Das Pvt Ltd, quality sugar syrup was all about the supply chain of water to sugar. Sugar is also the key to preservation, be it the crystallized layer of wrapper that surrounds a soft moist ball of chhena and sugar mixture called monohora from Janai in Hooghly district of West Bengal, to the famous chomchom of Shibganj in Chapainwabganj and Rajshahi division in Bangladesh and the synonymous postokodom of Murshidabad in West Bengal where tiny poppy seeds are coated in sugar syrup and form the outer covering. Sweet.
The name Postocodom comes from codom (barflower/Neolamarcia cadamba), a fragrant seasonal flower associated with the monsoon in western Ben Gall and Bangladesh. Round in shape, the innermost layer is a smaller version of rasgulla followed by a layer of dried milk paste and finally wrapped in crystallized poppy seeds. Poppy seeds are a luxurious item and many sweet shops have started using the sugar globules synonymous with homeopathic medicine as an outer covering. Some sweet shops offer another version of this sweet called Ksheerkodom. True to its name, instead of poppy seeds/sugar grains, thin strips of ksheer are pasted onto the creamy thick paste of desi-aged khoya, which holds the small ball of rasgulla inside.
Shaped exactly like bur flowers, the three sweets – Postokodom, Roskodom and Kshirkodom – represent the best of the two types of sweet making traditions among commercial sweet shops, which revolve around the work involved in boiling (preparing sugar syrup, cooking chhena balls in syrup, boiling and thickening the milk, etc.) and the ability to finalize this layered sweet without any mechanized intervention. On various occasions, when I asked artisans and sweet shop owners how they maintain consistency of sweetness as well as taste, I was repeatedly told that chhana is a versatile ingredient.
According to two senior artisans whom I interviewed in two different geographical areas, the success of Bengal’s experiments with sweeteners and sweeteners was due to the moist and mild taste of chhena. According to one of them, ‘You can make a delicious dish from this milk by-product and you can also add sugar, jaggery and chocolate syrup.’
(Excerpted with permission from Sweet Axis: Crafting Mishti in Bengal, by Ishita De, published by Routledge; 2026)
