Dishes

Chapda chutneyचापड़ा / चटनीNon-vegetarianCondiment

Red weaver ants and their brood pounded raw with garlic, salt and green chilli. Sharply sour and faintly citrus, eaten by the fingertip with rice. Sold by the leaf-cup in the weekly haats through the hot months, and dried and ground for the rest of the year.

Where to try: Any weekly haat between March and June; Tokapal and Darbha are the reliable ones.

AmatVegetarianMain

A thin sour stew of seasonal vegetable or wild green, soured with tamarind or fermented bamboo liquor and thickened with a spoon of rice flour. The default midday dish of the plateau, and the one most often cooked in quantity for a feast.

Bans ki sabzi and bamboo pickleकरीलVegetarianMain

Monsoon bamboo shoot, shaved and cooked fresh with garlic and chilli, or fermented into a pickle sour enough to season a whole pot of curry. Both belong to the first six weeks of the rains.

Chapda-stuffed leaf roastNon-vegetarianMain

Ant brood, salt and pounded chilli wrapped in sal leaf and buried in hearth embers. The wrapping cooks and seasons at once, and the parcel is opened at the plate.

PejपेजVegetarianEveryday

The starchy water drained from boiled rice, drunk fresh as a cooling gruel or left to sour in a clay pot. More Bastar households drink their rice than eat it dry during the working season.

Mahua laddu and mahua rotiVegetarianEveryday

Dried mahua flowers steamed or roasted and worked with sal or chironji kernel into a dense sweet cake, or ground into flour and cooked as a thick roti. Sugar-sweet without any sugar in it — the flower is about half fermentable sugar by dry weight.

Chironji seed preparationsVegetarianIngredient

The kernel of Buchanania lanzan, cracked from a hard stone, eaten raw, roasted into chutney with chilli, or used as the fat and body in a sweet. It is the plateau's highest-value forest product by weight.

Rugra and boda mushroomsVegetarianMain

Wild puffball-type mushrooms that fruit in sal root zones after the first thunderstorms and cannot be cultivated. Cooked plainly with garlic and a little oil, and priced in the haat above meat in a good week.

Kodo and kutki bhaatVegetarianMain

Coarse millet boiled like rice and eaten with amat or chutney. The upland staple where paddy will not grow, and the crop the penda plots of Abujhmarh are actually sown to.

Dubki kadhi and bore baasiVegetarianEveryday

Gram-flour dumplings in a thin buttermilk gravy, and cooked rice left overnight in water and eaten cold in the morning with onion and chilli. Both come up from the Chhattisgarh plains and are strongest in the market towns rather than the forest villages.

Faraa and muthiyaVegetarianSnack

Steamed rice-flour rolls and dumplings, tempered with mustard seed and curry leaf. Chhattisgarhi in origin, now standard in every Jagdalpur tea shop.

Chousela and angakar rotiVegetarianSnack

A fried rice-flour disc and a thick rice cake baked on a leaf over embers — the two breads that stand in for wheat on a plateau that does not grow it.

Kosra and urad bafauriVegetarianSnack

A steamed lentil dumpling, boiled rather than fried, eaten with chutney at haats and at fairs.

Forest fowl and pig, hearth-roastedNon-vegetarianMain

Meat at a Bastar meal is occasional and tied to a sacrifice or a fair, not to a weekday. It is cut small, salted, and either boiled thin with turmeric and chilli or roasted in leaf on the embers. Kadaknath — the black-meat fowl kept across this belt — is eaten here, though its geographical indication belongs to Jhabua in Madhya Pradesh, not to Bastar.

Tikhur sharbatVegetarianDrink

Starch washed out of the tikhur rhizome, dried into flakes and set with water and jaggery into a cooling summer jelly-drink. A May and June item, sold at bus stands.

Chapra ladoo and khurmaVegetarianDessert

Fair sweets — jaggery-and-rice-flour discs and fried semolina fingers made in bulk for Madai and Dussehra, sold from the same stalls year after year.