Sipping kari kanji at the beach  

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This month, Sumaiya Mustafa tells us the story of this unique dish from her hometown Kayalpatnam—say hello to Kari Kanji. It is a spicy porridge made with rice, moong dal, cuts of meat and home-ground curry masalas—practically biryani in liquid form! 

Written by: Sumaiya Mustafa is a writer and researcher from Tamil Nadu. Her interests lie in culinary semiotics, society, and culture. Her writings have appeared in The Hindu, The Caravan, Brown History, and The Locavore among others. She is currently working on the translation of a Tamil novel called ‘Korkai’ into English. She is also the grantee of Food Matters Grant 2024 by the Serendipity Arts Foundation.

The sun turned its knob to full that evening and the beach in Kayalpatnam, a small town in Tamil Nadu’s Thoothukudi district, also my home, is filled with sunlight. People sit in puddles all over the widely spread golden sands of the shore. Most can be seen sipping plastic cups of a yellow-hued savoury drink. It’s neither soup nor porridge. It is piping hot Kari Kanji, a drink that beats heat with heat. Kari in Kari Kanji stands for meat in Tamil. The other meaning of kari is anything that is cooked, while the literal translation of kari is “to char”. Kanji stands for any rice- and lentil-based semi-solid gruel in Tamil. Sometimes it is a fermented pap.

Here, on the beach, it is unfermented and consumed fresh and starchy. Amidst the relentless splash of the waves on the turquoise-blue Bay of Bengal, hot air emanates from the seaside. Young boys clad in veshtis play football, wearing jerseys named after global football names. Middle-aged men with a fez or skull cap sit with other middle-aged men getting chatty while women with dark veils chat amongst themselves or run behind the kids. These are the locals of this seaside town. While their presence is sporadic, the beach is a fulcrum of recreation for young and old, and for families and friends from the neighbouring villages and towns. Everyone who comes here rarely goes back home without sipping kari kanji.

Kari Kanji is an amalgamation of rice, moong dal, cuts of meat (for the most part this is beef, typically served at commercial eateries and among seaside vendors), and home-ground curry masala—usually made with red chillies, coriander seeds, cumin, and fennel. Fistfuls of coriander and mint leaves also go in. Creamy coconut milk also makes its way in via the abundance of coconut trees in Kayalpatnam’s landscape. To make Kari Kanji, all these ingredients are boiled in a cauldron until the rice and lentils bloom. 

If you stop to read through the ingredients in a Kari Kanji, it’s easy for you to believe and imagine that it tastes like a liquified Biriyani. The grainy mouthfeel of the gruel together with the awakening olfactory delights like coriander and mint leaves with the smell of cardamom, cloves, and cinnamon create an experience that is of sipping Biriyani.

Traditionally, Kari Kanji was hand-blended with a wooden kitchen implement called the mathu. But in recent years, the mathu has been abandoned and has been traded in for electric hand blenders. The denizens of Kayalpatnam are the most pragmatic thanks to their long-standing disposition as a maritime trading community. They have been in constant touch with global culinary techniques, thanks to expats living in almost every corner of the town. Indeed, the townspeople (including my family), call an electric hand-blender “kanji kadaira machine”, meaning the “machine that blends kanji” despite being used for a variety of reasons in the kitchen.

What breathes life into Kari Kanji’s array of ingredients are pandan leaves. Locals call it rambe elai and love tempering practically every dish with it. This Southeast Asian aromatic herb is a widely unknown culinary secret throughout Tamil Nadu. Kayalpatnam’s geographical position—as an Indian Ocean littoral, as an important trading post in the mediaeval period in between the maritime silk route and the spice route, and as a haven of seafaring Tamil Muslim traders – has kept the town exposed to culinary influences from other ports and trading posts. The monsoon winds favoured the globalisation of Indian seaside towns much before the 20th-century globalisation of mainland India and its free markets.

Kayalpatnam was an erstwhile trading post on the Indian Ocean trading routes in mediaeval times. In the 13th century, the town was in its heyday, with (actual) horse trading from Basra to Batavia, and beyond. In this predominantly Muslim town of Tamil speakers, a few influential traders were part of the mediaeval merchant guilds of South India, such as Anjuvannam and Ainooruvar. 

The traders in these communities were constantly on the move, their trade needed them to be itinerant. The women they took as wives did not move in with them. The wives stayed in their maternal homes. Their husbands visited them whenever the routes of the trade brought them home. This was a common and convenient social arrangement among trading groups with partial Arab descent in coastal parts of South and South East Asia. This system of living, known as matrilocality, weakened during colonial and post-colonial times when family-based businesses verged on obscurity. Strangely enough, Kayalpatnam still closely guards this social arrangement.

For me, a millennial who grew up in Kayalpatnam, Kari Kanji on the beach is a story of substance. I say this because, until the late 1990s, this beach was not considered to be a place for women. Men did go to the beach, but it was not a site of placemaking for them either. They had masjids and neighbourhood sports societies. The beach was mainly meant for boats, fishing nets, and fisherfolk.

When families started arriving there for recreation, it slowly became a place to hang out, to gather, and make merry. For a while, in the late 90s, roasted peanuts and water packets were all we could get our hands on on the beach.

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