A bittersweet archive: The history of sohan halwa

My maternal and paternal families migrated to Delhi from Multan during the Partition of India and Pakistan. Growing up, I was surrounded by living witnesses to that rupture: my grandfather’s maternal grandmother, who passed away in 1995; my paternal great-grandfather; my maternal great-grandmother; and their acquaintances and friends.

They often recalled their journey on overcrowded trains to refugee colonies in Delhi and Haryana, including the loss of a sibling – a story my father’s maternal aunt mentioned in passing several times, without wanting to delve into further details.

Though physically displaced, fragments and memories of Multan travelled with them. One being the language – Multani, or Sariki as it is more commonly called today – which was actively spoken at home until my paternal great-grandfather, Lala Ji, passed away in 2007. And the other, a sweetmeat called sohan halwa, the spelling more commonly used today. However, I will refer to it as halwa-i sūhan or sūhan halwa for the reason that will become apparent shortly.

A quick Google search will tell you that Multan, alongside Sufis and pottery, remains synonymous with sūhan halwa. Members of the Multani community displaced during Partition established many sweet shops across North India, including in Faridabad, where my grandparents eventually settled; in Gurgaon, now Gurugram, the city my parents moved to for work and where I grew up; and in Delhi.

My family often frequented these shops, especially the then-modest OM Sweets in Gurgaon, to procure our fix of sūhan halwa. Some of these establishments made little else, as if preserving – in sugar, ghee, and wheat – memories and a sense of loss.

A discovery

Imagine my amazement when in 2014 I found this piece of my family’s lived and consumed history staring at me from cookbooks that informed my PhD research and subsequent postdoctoral projects on Mughal food practices. Persian language Mughal cookbooks extant from the Shah Jahan’s reign onwards and those composed at the 18th and 19th century courts of Awadh, Bengal, Rampur and other regional kingdoms record multiple recipes for this brittle and crisp sweetmeat, rendered as halwa-i sūhan and at times as halwa-i sūhān.

This delicacy is a sensorial journey, with its very name imbued with tactile, visual and aural resonance. The terms sūhan and sūhān, meaning a whetstone or file used to smooth wood, conjure the halwa’s gritty fine-grained texture, its glimmering appearance, and the crackling, raspy crunch that shatters in the mouth, releasing a symphony of sweetness laced with hints of aromatics, nuts, and spices.

Different variants of sūhan halwa, such as the khass or special and the flaky papdi types, recorded in Mughal cookbooks and the later 18th and 19th century culinary manuals that borrowed from them, were made using germinated wheat flour, refined flour, starch, ghee, honey, sugar, musk, rose petals, pinenuts, pistachios, almonds, chironjee and spices like nutmeg, mace, long tailed as well as the round black pepper and cinnamon.

Today, simpler brittle (kadak) and flaky (papadi) variants – often made without expensive aromatics and spices – are sold across India, alongside its cousin, a softer, fudge-like version known as dodha. While using similar ingredients, dhoda employs a slightly different technique that stops short of the brittle stage, producing instead a chewy, dense texture.

The evidence marshalled above makes it abundantly clear that contrary to a popular narrative traceable to the 19th century – and canonised in John T Platt’s Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English Dictionary, first published in 1884 – this sweetmeat is not named after the imagined, mythical Sohan Lal halwai. Nor was it invented in a sweet shop in Old Delhi in 1790, during the reign of the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II, despite what Wikipedia would have you believe. Sweet makers in the elite kitchens of Delhi, Lahore, Multan, Lucknow, Rampur, Bengal, and Bihar had been feeding this almost toffee-like mithai to connoisseurs at least since the seventeenth century.

Then where does the origin of sūhan halwa lie, and how did it become part of Multan’s identity? Borrowing from historian Finbarr Barry Flood’s approach to art and material history, a more nuanced way of investigating culinary history lies in tracing routes rather than roots. It is not always possible to pinpoint a single place or moment of invention for a food dish; recipes continually evolve as they pass through different hands and adapt to new ecological and regional contexts.

The story of sūhan halwa is enmeshed in the broader processes, networks of exchange, and histories of mobile communities that shaped early modern Asia. This period, stretching from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, was marked by intensified and sustained movement of people and ideas across South, West, and Central Asia, giving rise to a shared culinary heritage. Many dishes – including early forms of biryani and certain varieties of pulao and kebabs – travelled to Hindustan from the Iranian plateau during this period via different circuits and with different agents. Sūhan halwa too followed a similar trajectory, albeit with a specific connection to Multan.

From Akbar’s reign onwards, Multan was one of the largest Mughal subas (provinces), encompassing much of pre-Partition southern Punjab as well as parts of the Balochistan region. It bordered several other Mughal subas: Lahore and Kabul to the north, Thatta to the south, and Ajmer and Delhi to the east. To its west lay Qandahar, a region that remained a persistent point of contention between the Mughals and the Safavids, with the latter largely exercising effective control over this area and, beyond it, the remaining territories of the Safavid Iranian Empire.

In addition to being a major Sufi centre and province for the minting of Mughal coins, Multan was an important hub of agricultural production, textile manufacture, and tile-making, as noted by the historian Scott C Levi. Inhabited by both Muslim and Hindu merchants, Multan functioned as a significant entrepôt and transregional trade centre, occupying a crucial position along the overland caravan routes linking South Asia with Western, Northern, and Central Asia.

Early modern merchants, Sufi saints, and physicians from the Iranian plateau travelled through and spent considerable time in Multan on their journey to find suitable patrons in Mughal emperors and other courtly elite, imprinting their food habits and culinary techniques on the region’s inhabitants. The networks of knowledge and material exchanges mediated by these mobile communities, especially the Hindustan-bound Iranian Sufis and physicians who passed via Multan can be credited with sūhan halwa becoming a part of the South Asian culinary repertoire.

Halwa was an important edible commodity for both these groups. For the Sufis, the ritual of offering halwa marked a new disciple’s initiation into their silsila or brotherhood. Physicians regarded halwa as nourishing aliment because sweetness was the most balanced flavour profile according to the Yunani medical system – a detail I have explored in an academic journal article on Mughal culinary knowledge. These spiritual and medical reasons combined with the firm consistency of sūhan halwa that made it well suited for carrying over long distances, explain how and why this sweetmeat travelled from the Iranian plateau, found a home in Multan, and entered Mughal cookbooks and elite kitchens.

Texts produced in India attests to the belief in sūhan halwa’s curative properties. A 17th-century Mughal recipe for the sūhan halwa follows up with the advice that eating a pau (about 250 grams) of sūhan halwa every day was beneficial for health, as it alleviated “wind” – one of the natural element that according of the Yunani and Ayurveda make up the human body. These medical systems link excess of wind in the body to flatulence, indigestion, lethargy and an imbalanced temperament.

Faith in the medicinal powers of sūhan halwa was so widespread that the famous 19th-century poet Mirza Ghalib’s sister-in-law packed some for his journey back to Delhi from Rampur, which he undertook while suffering from constipation. We also encounter examples that illuminate the enduring association of sūhan halwa with ascetic figures and mystics. It features as a nourishing delicacy in the story of a dervish in Bagh o Bahar or the Tale of Four Dervishes, a work often incorrectly attributed to the celebrated 13th-14th-century Sufi poet Amir Khusrau but actually written in 1801 by Mir Amman Dehlvi.

It is also mentioned in the 19th-century Urdu and English translations, produced in India, of the 10th-century Arabic work on metaphysics, Rasaʾil Ikhwan al-Safaʾ (Epistles of the Brethren of Purity) composed in Iraq. In the 1801 Urdu translation, which served as the source for the 1869 English version, sūhan halwa replaces the generic mention of halwa in the original text as a delicacy available to those who live a refined life, in contrast to animals that devour rinds and stones.

While these legacies of Sūhan halwa faded away with time, it continued to garner popularity and patrons. Among its famous patrons were the first prime minister of India and his father. In 1926, Motilal Nehru sent sūhan halwa to his son Jawhar Lal Nehru in Delhi from Chheoki, near Allahabad (now Prayagraj).

I have often contemplated putting together these archival traces that tell the story of sūhan halwa – a sweet that binds early modern exchange networks, the Mughal culinary legacy, Partition, and the resilience of the displaced Multani community. Yet I hesitated. Sūhan halwa evokes not only delight but also absence; it carries the quiet weight of loss. It brings back memories of a bygone time when my great-grandfather, a playful prankster, would scare a young me with his dentures.

What finally nudged me to confront grief and put these words to paper were old family photographs my father recently shared – images that, like the halwa itself, collapse distance and time, letting the past and present meet in a single, bittersweet moment.

Neha Vermani is an Honorary Fellow in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at Durham University. She is a historian of early modern South Asia, and her research focuses on the intersections of food practices, material culture, and scientific and ethical discourses on the body, the senses, and the natural world.