Danbauk Period COrigin theory CVerified

Danbauk is rice scented with ghee, cooked together with chicken and spices. Rice, the heart of the dish, is a local crop that has been grown across Southeast Asia for thousands of years, and chicken has long been part of Myanmar's kitchens. Ghee is another matter. Before British rule, the Burmese, like their Southeast Asian neighbors, are said to have rarely eaten dairy products.

Into this kitchen came the biryani cooking of the Indian subcontinent, in which spices and other ingredients are cooked into the rice. The name points to where it came from: danbauk is said to derive from the Persian Dumpuhkt. The word is old enough to appear in records from the reign of the emperor Akbar, around 1590, but the dish recorded there under that name was a meat dish made without rice.

Those who carried it are said to have been people who moved from the subcontinent during the colonial period. Burma was absorbed into British India in stages: Arakan and Tenasserim in 1826, Lower Burma in 1852, and the whole country in 1886. Over that span, about a million people from the subcontinent came to settle. In the port city of Rangoon, the Indian population grew from about sixteen thousand (16 percent of the city) in 1872 to over sixty-six thousand (about 44 percent) in 1881. Biryani came to be sold in the shops of Indians and Burmese Muslims, and the Burmese are said to have created their own versions made with pork spare ribs or lobster. Today danbauk is eaten as a dish for celebrations and as the signature dish of Muslim eating houses.

Follow the name danbauk back far enough and it leads to India at the end of the sixteenth century. Hobson-Jobson (1886), the dictionary of Anglo-Indian words, points to a recipe for a dish called Dampukht in the Ain-i-Akbari, from the reign of Akbar around 1590. The ingredients are meat, ghee, onions, ginger, pepper and cardamom; there is no rice. The dictionary explains the word as meaning "air-cooked," that is, baked, and cites English travel accounts from 1673 and 1689 that use dumpoke for dishes of baked meat or fowl in India. The name is certainly old, but that is the age of a word. It does not show that a way of cooking spices into rice existed at the time, nor that the dish arose early in Myanmar.

The stronger view of how it reached Myanmar is that people from the subcontinent brought it during the colonial period. Khin Maung Saw writes that the biryani and pilau of Burma (danbauk htamin) were introduced by people from the subcontinent, and that the name comes from the Persian Dumpuhkt. As British rule advanced in stages, in 1826, 1852 and 1886, about a million people from the subcontinent came to settle. The rise in Rangoon's Indian population from 16 percent of the city in 1872 to about 44 percent in 1881 is also recorded in B. R. Pearn's A History of Rangoon (1939). These figures, though, describe the movement of people, not the dish itself.

There is also a view that it arrived before British rule: that Indian Muslim traders and settlers who lived on the Burmese coast through the trade of the Bay of Bengal could have passed on biryani-style cooking by around the eighteenth century. This view, however, has no source behind it. Khin Maung Saw takes the opposite position. Pointing out, among other things, that no Indian dishes are mentioned in Burmese literature, he argues that Indian influence on Burmese cooking began only after the British annexation, while acknowledging that the Mons of the coast had contact with people from the subcontinent from a very early date.

Danbauk is thought to have taken root as a dish of Myanmar during the colonial period, when the flow of people from the subcontinent grew large. The year it was first cooked in Burma can only be told as a range, drawn from that movement of people.