The Langar

The langar is the community kitchen of the Sikh gurdwara, and its roots lie in the Punjab of the Gurus, in the teaching that all people stand equal before God and should therefore eat together. The practice is bound to the founding of Sikhism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and to the Gurus who made the shared meal a duty of the faith. Its home is the gurdwara, and its most celebrated expression is the kitchen of the Golden Temple at Amritsar, though every gurdwara, from village to city and from Punjab to the diaspora, keeps a langar of its own.

The defining principle of the langar is that everyone eats the same food, in the same place, at the same level. Guests sit in rows on the floor, the pangat, with no distinction of caste, creed, rank or wealth, and the meal is served to them by volunteers. The food is vegetarian, so that any person of any faith or dietary custom may sit down without hesitation, and it is offered freely, with no price and no expectation of payment. This is a table in which the order of seating itself is the teaching. The cooking is the plain, generous food of the Punjab, made in very large quantities. The meal turns on dal, most often whole black lentils or split chana dal, cooked slowly until soft and finished with a simple tempering, together with a vegetable dish, rice or roti, and often a kheer of rice and milk. Kalra, whose Prashad takes its title from the blessed food distributed in the gurdwara, writes of this cooking as the work of devoted hands rather than of professional kitchens, and the dishes are designed to feed multitudes without losing their character. The bread is the flatbread of the Punjab, rolled and cooked in great numbers on large griddles. The work of the langar is done by seva, selfless service. Volunteers of every background chop vegetables, knead dough, cook, serve and wash the vessels, and in doing so share in the act of feeding. Cooking in such quantities calls for large cauldrons, and the pace and organisation of the kitchen are part of its discipline. Those who eat are expected to take what they will finish, and to leave the space ready for the next row to sit. Beside the langar stands prashad, the sweet offering of whole wheat flour, ghee and sugar, often called karah prashad, which is given to all who visit the gurdwara. Kalra's book gathers recipes from the Indian masters of the kitchen and keeps this tradition of blessed food in view. Together the langar and the prashad make the gurdwara a place where feeding and worship are a single act. In the wider story of the Indian table, the langar stands apart from the wedding feast and the festival meal because no host invites and no guest is chosen. Its seating, its vegetarian food and its labour shared among all are the whole of its meaning, and it has travelled with the Sikh community wherever it has settled, so that the same meal is offered on the floor of a gurdwara in Amritsar and in cities abroad.

The taste of the langar is that of the Punjabi home kitchen at scale: dal simmered long and slowly, finished with a tempering of cumin in ghee, and a vegetable dish lightly spiced. Practice differs from one gurdwara to another, and many kitchens leave out onion and garlic in keeping with a satvik custom, so that the seasoning rests on ginger, cumin and the ghee itself. The meal is eaten warm from a steel plate with roti or rice, and is closed by a spoonful of sweet kheer or of karah prashad, in which wheat, ghee and sugar are cooked together until fragrant.