New Delhi: In the Lal family, it is a well-known fact that one of its members invented the commercial tandoor, paving the way for naans and tandoori chicken to make it on to takeout menus across the world. Establishing exactly who that member is, however, depends very much on who is telling the story.
In Naresh Lal’s version, it was his grandmother. “She was from Punjab, and she was used to domestic ovens made of mud,” Lal, the 45-year-old owner of a tandoor-manufacturing firm named Parshadi Lal and Sons Pvt. Ltd, says. “She started making her own tandoors by hand, and in the late 1970s, when a lot of hotels were coming up in Delhi in anticipation of the 1982 Asian Games, they began looking for tandoors for tandoori restaurants. So my grandfather took it up as a business, and here we are.”
Click here to watch video on how tandoor is made
Naresh Lal’s father’s cousin, Munnilal, narrates an alternative history. “Just after Partition, a number of Pakistani refugees came into Delhi, and they came to my grandfather, asking him to make a clay pot-like oven,” Munnilal says. “He made the first one for a hotel near Sadar Bazaar. My grandfather was of the kumhar caste—he worked with clay, making toys and little pots, and so on—and when the demand for the tandoor rose, he moved into that line.”
These divided views arise from a divided family. In 1998, after making tandoors together for nearly 20 years, after being the first to export the tandoor, and after fanning the business into a roaring trade, the Lals split. Naresh Lal started Parshadi Lal and Sons, naming the firm after his father; he diversified into other kitchen equipment in 2002, but he still calls the 1,500 clay tandoors he makes every year the core of his business. That same year, Munnilal renamed his business from Munnilal and Brothers to Munnilal (India) Pvt. Ltd, and he still sells only tandoors—at least 2,000 annually.
The basic techniques of tandoori cooking date as far back as the Indus Valley civilization, but until the 1960s, earthen ovens were custom-built by artisans in situ, either in homes or in a village’s communal bakery.
“Tandoori cooking started taking off in hotels only in the 1980s,” says J.P. Singh, executive chef at the Bukhara restaurant in Delhi’s ITC Maurya. “Bukhara got its tandoor in 1977, from Munnilal.”
The tandoori restaurant, as a concept, was made possible only once the commercial tandoor—portable, easy to manufacture, and therefore saleable—was developed, and Singh and other industry experts unanimously point to the Lals as the pioneers of the commercial tandoor. Even in a fairly well-populated trade, Singh estimates that the firms of Naresh Lal and Munnilal hold close to 50% of the market; Naresh Lal puts it closer to 75%, especially when exports are factored in.