Old Delhi in the evening smells of charring fat and asafoetida. The low tang of coal smoke that settles over the narrow lanes surrounding the Jama Masjid does not lift until well past midnight, hovering over patient queues of patrons waiting for hot plates of seekh kebabs. For those standing in the crowd, it is simply dinner. Yet the smoke possesses a far longer memory than those standing within it.
Tracing its trajectory backward leads to the harsh, wind-swept steppes of Central Asia and the frugal campfires of horsemen who had no time for culinary nuance and cared even less for tropical humidity.
When Babur entered the subcontinent in 1526 to establish the Mughal Empire, he brought with him a soldier’s utilitarian diet. His memoirs record simple meals of lamb threaded onto skewers and roasted rapidly over open flame—sustenance engineered for an army moving across difficult terrain with limited time and zero infrastructure. Meat was rubbed with salt, cooked directly over wood, and consumed without ceremony. It was a practical, highly portable protein.
This preparation remained largely unchanged for decades; a marching army’s kitchen operates on entirely different logistical principles than that of a settled, prosperous empire, and the early Mughals had not yet put down permanent roots.
The fundamental transformation began under Akbar, whose long reign consolidated both territory and culture. The imperial kitchens expanded into vast, sophisticated operations employing cooks recruited from Persian, Central Asian, and indigenous Indian backgrounds. Working side-by-side, these artisans traded techniques with the same fluid efficiency that soldiers trade rations.
Copper vessels of marination lined up before dawn while spice grinders worked late into the night ahead of state banquets. Central Asian grilling methods met indigenous Indian spice cabinets rich in cumin, coriander, and ginger. When Portuguese traders introduced the chilli from the Americas, it integrated into North Indian cookery with startling velocity.
It had been an austere, plain preparation—meat, salt, and perhaps a dollop of yoghurt—but acquired an unprecedented layer of aromatic complexity and sharp heat that it could not have developed anywhere else in the world.
By the seventeenth century, under Jahangir and Shah Jahan, the kebab migrated decisively from the field to the court, transforming into a form of high aristocratic theatre. It became imperial fare, refined for an elite that dined on silver, ate unhurriedly, and demanded softness over rustic substance.
Apocryphal or not, the persistent legend that an aging Shah Jahan’s failing teeth forced his royal chefs to tenderize meat through prolonged marination and fine pounding reflects an undeniable historical reality: the Mughal kitchen was under relentless pressure to soften, refine, and adapt to the physical frailties and opulent whims of its royal patrons.
The logical extreme of this culinary refinement emerged not from Delhi directly, but from Awadh in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Nawabs of Lucknow, culturally Mughal long after their political allegiance to the central empire had waned, elevated the dish to hyper-sophistication.
The legendary galouti kebab—attributed to the one-armed chef Haji Murad Ali of Tunday Kababi, who reportedly used raw papaya and a secret cabinet of scores of spices to render meat into a smooth paste requiring no chewing—exemplifies this arc. The result was a dark, melt-in-the-mouth patty, faintly sweet with fried onions, that bore almost no physical or structural resemblance to its equestrian origins.
This evolution mirrored the broader institutional mechanics of the Mughal state itself. Persian remained the formal language of the chancery, yet Hindustani flourished in the bazaar. Imperial architecture seamlessly fused Persian domes and Central Asian arches with Rajput jharokhas. The royal kitchens operated under the exact same pragmatic eclecticism.
While the seekh kebab retained its original Central Asian shape—minced meat skewered over hot coals—its seasoning became unmistakably local. The shami kebab went even further, flattened and shallow-fried to a delicate crispness, resembling a European croquette far more than a nomad’s ration.
Geography and social dynamics dictated precisely where kebab culture took root. Imperial court culture was heavily carnivorous, whereas vast segments of the population the Mughals ruled were not, or at least did not consume meat in the same manner. Consequently, kebab traditions established themselves outside palace walls, flourishing notably around Sufi shrines.
The dense cluster of food stalls around Delhi’s Nizamuddin Dargah has fed pilgrims for centuries. Here, Mughal culinary influence spread not by imperial decree, but through the mundane necessity of feeding travelers who had journeyed far, creating a durable urban street-food ecosystem that outlasted the empire itself.
As central imperial authority fractured in the eighteenth century, the kebab devolved into rich regional variations. In Hyderabad, under the Nizams, cooks developed denser, sharper variants. In Bengal, far removed from the imperial center, local cooks incorporated mustard oil and riverine sensibilities, crafting dishes barely recognizable as relatives of Babur’s steppe fuel.
The thing now rests on a tin plate in Old Delhi tonight is not a static recipe preserved in amber, but a layered accretion of imperial patronage, migration, religious practice, and sheer culinary stubbornness.
The Mughals did not invent the kebab. Instead, they sustained a courtly apparatus sophisticated and wealthy enough, for long enough, that a crude military necessity was thoroughly domesticated…eventually becoming an indelible, smoky fixture of the South Asian landscape.
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Mahmud Newaz Joy is a freelance feature writer