Vigna mungo (L.) Hepper, black gram or urad, domesticated in India from the wild V. mungo var. silvestris; not to be confused with its close relative V. radiata, the mung bean or green gram. Linnaeus described it as Phaseolus mungo, and the specific epithet echoes the Indian name of the mung bean, a small reminder of how long the two pulses have been confused
Black gram is one of the pulses India domesticated for itself. Its wild ancestor, Vigna mungo var. silvestris, is a climbing, hairy plant with dense flower heads and small seeds that still grows along the Western Ghats, in the Konkan, and in scattered populations across the hills of central and northern India. Dorian Fuller and Emma Harvey, in their review of the archaeobotany of Indian pulses, place the earliest finds of the crop in Gujarat and the northern Deccan, where those wild populations persist, and most recent work dates its domestication to between 3,500 and 4,500 years ago.
The early crop looked very like the wild plant. Fuller has shown that the first cultivated Indian pulses do not have larger seeds than their wild ancestors, and that seed enlargement, one of the clearest marks of a domesticated legume, arrived one to two thousand years after cultivation began, mainly in the late second millennium BCE and the Iron Age. His suggested explanation is the plough: seed sown deep into ploughed soil favours the larger seeds that can push a seedling up from depth. Whether black gram was domesticated once or independently in both Gujarat and the Deccan the evidence cannot yet settle, and the atlas marks a single origin in the northern Deccan, with Saurashtra as its earliest northern point.
There is only one cultivated black gram, and so only one origin on the map. Farmers grow landraces that differ in seed size, seed colour, and season, and the pulse is sold in several forms, whole with its black skin, split with the skin on, and split and skinned to its creamy white interior, but these are forms of a single domesticated plant rather than separate domestications. Its closest cultivated relative is the mung bean, V. radiata, domesticated in India at much the same time and often grown in the same fields; the two can be told apart at a glance by the colour of the seed coat and in the pot by texture, because black gram cooks to a silky, mucilaginous body that mung never has.
Black gram spread across the whole of South Asia, and for most of its history it went no further. By the later Vedic period it was one of the three commonest pulses of the Gangetic plain, māṣa, named beside mudga and masūra in the Yajurveda, and it went on to become a pulse of every region of the subcontinent: maash and maah in the Punjab, adad in Gujarat, udid in Maharashtra, mashkalai in Bengal, maas in Nepal, uddu in Karnataka, minumulu in Andhra, ulundu in the Tamil country, and undu in Sri Lanka.
Its great transformation happened in the south. Tamil and Kannada kitchens discovered that ground black gram holds air and gas better than any other pulse, and on that property they built the fermented batters of dosai and idli and the beaten batter of the vada. The earliest texts describe idli-like foods of black gram alone, and the rice and the overnight fermentation that define the modern idli came later, by a route that is still debated. North India used the same stretchy, air-holding quality in a different way, piping whipped black gram into hot ghee as imarti, and the whole subcontinent rolled it into papad.
Beyond South Asia, black gram travelled east early and lightly. Nair and colleagues note its arrival on the west coast of peninsular Thailand roughly 2,300 years ago, with the Indian trading contacts of that period, and in Thailand and Japan black gram is now grown and imported for bean sprouts, which keep better than mung sprouts. Myanmar has become the world's largest exporter of the pulse, nearly all of it sold to India. Myanmar is also a black gram country in its own kitchen, where the fritter mat pe kyaw is a teashop staple. Tamil migrants took thosai and vadai to Malaya and Singapore from the 1870s, and there they became breakfast for every community; Malaysia now lists tose among its cultural heritage. In the Gulf, Britain, and North America, black gram dishes have remained the food of Indian households and restaurants rather than of the wider kitchen.
India grows about seventy per cent of the world's black gram, some 2.7 million tonnes a year from about 4.4 million hectares, and eats more than it grows; Myanmar and Pakistan are the next largest producers, and Myanmar supplies nearly all of India's imports, more than 400,000 tonnes in the first half of the 2024–25 financial year alone. In coastal Andhra and elsewhere much of the crop is sown into rice fields after the harvest, where it grows through the dry season on residual moisture and returns nitrogen to the soil.
Black gram is valued in the kitchen for a property no other common pulse shares. Ground and hydrated, it forms a sticky, cohesive, mucilaginous paste that traps air when beaten and holds gas during fermentation. That is why it is indispensable to the batters of idli and dosa, why a medu vada or a Newari bara rises and a patty of any other pulse stays flat, and why papad dough can be rolled almost to transparency without tearing. The same property gives black gram dals their silky body, which cooks in Bengal and the Punjab either prize or temper with fennel and ginger.
It is also a pulse of feasts and rites. Tamil families cook ulundu kali for a girl's first puberty ceremony, Newar households fry bara for Sithi Nakha, Sri Lankans soak undu walalu in palm treacle for the New Year, and North Indian weddings serve dal makhani. In the twentieth century it gave India one of its best-known stories of women's enterprise, when seven women on a Bombay rooftop founded the Lijjat papad cooperative in 1959 with eighty borrowed rupees.
Historical Journey of Black Gram
The Northern Deccan & the Western Ghats — c. 2000 BCE
The wild ancestor of black gram, Vigna mungo var. silvestris, still grows along the Western Ghats and across the hills of central India, a twining, hairy plant with small seeds, and it was from populations like these that the crop was drawn. Dorian Fuller and Emma Harvey, reviewing the archaeobotany of Indian pulses, place the earliest finds of black gram in Gujarat and the northern Deccan, where wild populations persist, and date its domestication to roughly 3,500 to 4,500 years ago. Fuller has also shown that the seeds of these first cultivated pulses were no bigger than wild ones: the enlargement that marks a fully domesticated legume came much later, during the late second millennium BCE and the Iron Age, and he has suggested that the plough supplied the pressure that selected for it.
The Deccan has kept the crop ever since, and Maharashtra is still one of India's leading growers. It has also kept one of the oldest ways of eating it. Papad, wafers of black gram dough rolled paper-thin and dried in the sun, appear as parpaṭa in Buddhist and Jain texts that K. T. Achaya dated to around the fifth century BCE, and in 1959 seven women on a Bombay rooftop turned them into the Lijjat cooperative.
Kathiawar & Gujarat — c. 1800 BCE
Gujarat has yielded some of the earliest black gram yet found, in the late Harappan settlements of Saurashtra, and it is one of the two areas Fuller and Harvey identify with the crop's beginnings. Whether black gram was brought under cultivation here and in the Deccan independently, or reached one from the other, the archaeological record cannot yet say, and the atlas marks a single origin with this as its earliest northern outpost.
Gujarati calls the pulse adad, and Gujarat has kept a particular fondness for it in winter. Adadiya pak, the sweet of Kathiawar and Kutch, is coarse black gram flour roasted slowly in ghee with fried edible gum, jaggery, dry ginger, and long-pepper root, pressed into a tray and eaten a square at a time through the cold months. It belongs to a wider Indian idea of warming winter foods, and it is one of the few places where black gram is the body of a sweet rather than of a dal or a batter.
Mathura & the Doab — c. 900 BCE
By the later Vedic period black gram was one of the everyday grains of the Gangetic plain. K. T. Achaya noted that the Yajurveda names māṣa, black gram, alongside mudga, the mung bean, and masūra, the lentil, and from then on those three are the pulses Sanskrit literature mentions most often. Those texts belong to the country of the Kurus and Panchalas, the Doab between the Ganges and the Yamuna. The Sanskrit word carried a second meaning: māṣa was also a small unit of weight, and the masha survived as a goldsmith's weight across India into modern times.
The Doab still eats black gram for breakfast. Bedmi puri, fried wheat breads filled or kneaded with coarsely ground urad, fennel, and coriander seed and eaten with a thin, sour potato curry, is the morning food of Mathura, Agra, and Old Delhi. Delhi and Uttar Pradesh both claim it, and the argument has not been settled; what is not disputed is that it belongs to this stretch of the plain.
Madurai & the Tamil Country — c. 100 CE
The Tamil south made black gram into something no other region had: the foundation of a batter. Ground with rice and left to ferment, ulundu gives the South Indian kitchen dosai and idli, and ground alone and beaten until it traps air, it gives the vadai. What black gram contributes is structure. Its mucilage and proteins hold the gas of fermentation or of beating in a way that no other pulse does, which is why a dosa batter made without it will not crisp and a vada made from another pulse will not rise. K. T. Achaya believed that dosai is referred to in Sangam literature of the early centuries CE, although how closely that dish resembled the thin, crisp modern one is uncertain.
Medu vada, the black gram doughnut, is eaten across the south, and ulundu kali, a dark pudding of whole black gram, palm jaggery, and gingelly oil, is made in Tirunelveli and Madurai for a girl's first puberty ceremony and for women after childbirth. From the Tamil coast the pulse and its batters crossed the Palk Strait to Sri Lanka.
Mysore & Karnataka — c. 920 CE
The oldest dated description of an idli-like food comes from Karnataka, and it is not quite the idli that is eaten today. Vaddaradhane, a Kannada Jain work by Shivakotiacharya of about 920 CE, mentions iddalige, which K. T. Achaya and later writers read as a preparation of black gram alone. The Manasollasa, the encyclopaedia compiled for the Western Chalukya king Someshvara III around 1130, describes iddarika in similar terms. Neither mentions rice, and neither describes fermentation.
When and where rice and fermentation entered the idli is an open question. Achaya suggested that the technique might have come from Indonesia, where steamed and fermented foods have a long history, but no Indonesian dish of the kind he pointed to has been securely traced, and the question remains unresolved. What is certain is the result: a batter of rice and black gram, fermented overnight and steamed in moulds, which is now the breakfast of Karnataka and the whole south. Kannada calls the pulse uddu.
Lahore, Peshawar & the North-West — c. 1000 CE
In the north-west black gram became maash in Urdu and maah in Punjabi, and it is the everyday dal of Pakistan and of the Punjab on both sides of the modern border. Pakistan is today the world's third-largest producer of the pulse, after India and Myanmar. Maash ki daal is split urad cooked just until tender, kept dry and separate, and finished with a tarka of ghee, garlic, cumin, and green chilli, and it is eaten with roti from Lahore to Peshawar.
The word needs care. Across Persia and Central Asia the same word, mash, names the mung bean, not black gram, so a single name changes its pulse somewhere between Afghanistan and the Punjab. The kitchens of this region also supplied one of black gram's most famous modern dishes. The Moti Mahal restaurant family traces its dal makhani and butter chicken to Kundan Lal Gujral's kitchen in Peshawar before 1947, and the refugees of Partition carried the Punjabi tandoor and its dals to Delhi.
Colombo & Sri Lanka — c. 1000 CE
Black gram crossed to Sri Lanka from the Tamil country, and it is used on both sides of the island's language line: Sinhala calls it undu and Tamil ulundu. The record does not say when it arrived, but the long contact across the Palk Strait makes an early crossing likely, and Sri Lankan Tamil households in Jaffna and the north-east make thosai and vadai much as the Tamil south does.
The Sinhala kitchen found its own use for the pulse. Undu walalu, rings of fermented black gram and rice-flour batter fried crisp and soaked in kithul treacle, the dark syrup of the kithul palm, are made for the Sinhala and Tamil New Year in April and set out with kavum, kokis, and milk rice. The treacle is what makes them Sri Lankan: the same fried black gram batter that North India soaks in sugar syrup as imarti takes on a smoky, caramel depth here from the palm.
Kolkata & West Bengal — c. 1200 CE
Bengal took black gram down the Ganges from the plain, and named it twice: mashkalai, from māṣa and kalai, pulse, and biuli, the name used in the kitchen. Biulir dal is the Bengali black gram dal, loose and slightly silky, flavoured with a paste of ground fennel seed and ginger and finished with asafoetida and dried chilli, made without onion or garlic, and eaten with rice and aloo posto, potatoes in poppy-seed paste.
It is especially the dal of ghoti households, the families of western Bengal, as distinct from the bangal families whose roots lie in the east, and in Kolkata the division between the two kitchens is still a matter of gentle rivalry. The dal also divides eaters in its own right, because black gram cooks to a faintly mucilaginous texture that some Bengalis prize and others avoid, and it is the fennel that carries it. East of the Padma, in the high Varendra country, black gram became a bread instead.
Vijayawada & the Krishna Delta — c. 1300 CE
Coastal Andhra is one of the great black gram districts of India, and it grows the pulse in a way that ties it closely to rice. After the monsoon paddy is harvested, farmers in the Krishna and Godavari deltas sow black gram into the fallow rice fields, where it grows through the dry season on the moisture left in the soil. Krishna district leads the state in the crop, and the practice has expanded since pulses became a national agricultural priority in the 2000s. Telugu calls the pulse minumulu.
The kitchen follows the field. The fermented rice and black gram batter of idli and dosa is the backbone of Andhra breakfast, and the batter that has gone a day too sour for a dosa becomes punugulu, small fried fritters seasoned with onion, green chilli, ginger, and cumin, and sold hot with peanut chutney as the evening snack of Vijayawada. The record does not date black gram's arrival in the delta, which the pulse must have reached early from the Deccan.
Kathmandu, Patan & Bhaktapur — c. 1400 CE
Black gram came up into the Nepali hills from the Gangetic plain, where Nepali calls it maas and, in its split, skin-on form, kalo dal, black dal. It is poured over rice in dal bhat alongside red lentil and mung, and in the Thakali cooking of Mustang a dal of black gram is finished with jimbu, the dried leaves of a high Himalayan wild onion.
In the Kathmandu Valley, the country of the Newar cities that were the three Malla kingdoms of Kathmandu, Patan, and Bhaktapur, black gram became a festival food. Bara, in Newari wo, is a patty of hand-beaten black gram paste fried on a griddle, sometimes with an egg cracked over it. On Sithi Nakha, the early-summer day on which Newar communities clean their wells, stone water spouts, and ponds before the monsoon, households cook bara and chatamari and offer them to the god Kumar. The record does not say how old the dish is.
Rajshahi & Varendra — c. 1500 CE
North of the Padma, the high, dry red-soil country of Varendra, the Barind Tract of north-western Bangladesh, grows black gram where the lower delta grows rice, and there the pulse is eaten as bread. Kalai ruti, the flatbread of Chapai Nawabganj and Rajshahi, is made mostly from mashkalai flour with some rice flour, slapped out between wet palms because the dough has too little gluten to roll, and baked on a clay griddle over a wood fire. It is eaten hot with a bharta of crushed chillies, raw onion, and mustard oil, and often with a beef or duck curry.
For most of its history kalai ruti was a village food of the north-west. In the past decade or so stalls selling it have opened in Dhaka and other Bangladeshi cities, and a bread that was once simply what Rajshahi ate has become a regional speciality known across the country.
Mandalay & Upper Burma — 19th century CE
The record does not say when black gram reached Burma, or by which road. Burma's long contacts with Bengal overland and with the Indian coasts across the Bay of Bengal make either possible. In Burmese it is mat pe, and today Myanmar grows more of it than any country except India, most of it in the lowland regions of Bago and Ayeyarwady; since the late 1980s the crop has been grown largely for export, and the greater part of the harvest is sold to India.
It is a Burmese food as well as a Burmese commodity. Black gram goes into soups, pastes, noodles, and sprouts, and above all into mat pe kyaw, the black gram fritter, which Burmese call Mandalay baya kyaw to distinguish it from the yellow split pea fritter of Yangon. Soaked black gram is ground to a coarse paste with onion, garlic, and chilli and fried in small crisp rounds, and it is eaten at the teashop at breakfast or in the afternoon with a sour-sweet tamarind dip, like the other a-kyaw fritters of the Burmese table.
Kuala Lumpur, Penang & Singapore — 1870s CE
Black gram went to the Malay Peninsula with the Tamils. Tamil-speaking traders, boatmen, and dockworkers had long come and gone through the ports of Penang and Singapore, but from the 1870s the movement became mass migration. The recruitment of Indian labour for the Straits Settlements was legalised in 1872 and regulated by the Indian Immigration Ordinance of 1884, and workers came in great numbers for the sugar and then the rubber estates of the peninsula. Because recruitment was permitted only from the Madras Presidency, nine in every ten were Tamil-speaking, most of them from Tanjore, Trichinopoly, and North Arcot, and they brought the batter kitchen of the Tamil country with them.
What began as migrants' food became everyone's breakfast. Thosai, as Malaysians and Singaporeans spell the dosai, and vadai are sold at Indian restaurants and at the Indian Muslim mamak shops found in every Malaysian town, and they are eaten by Malay, Chinese, and Indian customers alike. Malaysia's National Department for Culture and Arts lists tose in its mapping of the nation's cultural heritage, and in Singapore, where Tamil is one of the four official languages, thosai is sold from hawker stalls across the island.
Daryaganj & Delhi — 1947 CE
Partition sent hundreds of thousands of Punjabi refugees to Delhi in 1947, and with them came the tandoor and the dals of the north-west. In Daryaganj, the Moti Mahal restaurant opened that year, and from its kitchen came dal makhani: whole black gram and a little kidney bean, simmered for hours, sometimes overnight on the embers of the tandoor, and enriched with tomato, butter, and cream. Who invented it is disputed. Moti Mahal credits its founder Kundan Lal Gujral; the Jaggi family, owners of a restaurant called Daryaganj, credit his partner Kundan Lal Jaggi; and the dispute reached the Delhi High Court in 2024 without being settled. What is not disputed is the place and the period.
Delhi's sweet-makers have a much older black gram tradition. Imarti, whipped black gram batter piped into hot ghee as a flower of looped coils and soaked in saffron syrup, is sold across North India and Pakistan and, as jangiri, across the south. Its link to the Mughal court and to the emperor Jahangir is widely repeated and has never been documented.
