Cajanus cajan (L.) Millsp., the pigeon pea, domesticated in eastern peninsular India from the wild C. cajanifolius
The pigeon pea is the pulse that India domesticated from a shrub of its own eastern forests. Its wild ancestor, Cajanus cajanifolius, grows at the interface of forest edge and open savanna in eastern peninsular India, and the archaeobotanical record places the crop's beginnings there. Charred seeds from the Neolithic villages of Gopalpur and Golbai Sasan in Odisha, dated to between about 3,400 and 3,000 years ago, are amongst the earliest finds, and there is evidence of cultivation in southern Odisha before about 1650 BCE. Within a few centuries the domesticate appears further west and south, at Sanganakallu in Karnataka and at Tuljapur Garhi in Maharashtra.
The plant is unlike the other pulses of the Indian kitchen. It is a woody shrub rather than a herb, living for several years if it is allowed to, rooting deeply enough to survive drought that kills shallower crops, and fixing nitrogen in the soil as it grows. Farmers in India and Africa sow it between rows of sorghum, millet, or maize, and it stands in the field long after the cereals are cut.
It has one domestication, and so one origin on this map. The crop is highly diverse in Africa, and an older view made Africa a second centre of origin, but the archaeobotanical record and genetic studies of the crop and its wild relatives both point to India. What kitchens distinguish are not separate crops but two ways of eating the same seed: dried and split as the toor, arhar, and lapena of India and Uganda, or picked green as the fresh gandules of the Caribbean, the guandú of Panama, and the mbaazi of the Swahili coast.
From its home in eastern India the pigeon pea spread across the whole subcontinent and became the everyday dal of the peninsula and the west. It is tur in Maharashtra, where varan bhaat opens a wedding feast; tuvar in Gujarat, whose sweet-sour dal fills the thali; togari in Karnataka, the pulse of bisi bele bath; kandi in the Telugu country, where pappu simply means this dal; thuvaram paruppu in the Tamil country, the body of sambar and rasam; and arhar on the Gangetic plain, where the tempered dal tadka of the roadside dhabas was born. In Odisha, where it began, dalma is cooked daily in the temple kitchens of Puri.
It travelled east and west by sea. Plant Resources of South-East Asia dates its spread into South-East Asia to the early centuries of the common era, and in the Western Visayas of the Philippines it is the kadyos of KBL, the purple-brothed soup of Iloilo. Westward it crossed to East Africa by the monsoon trade, where it is mbaazi, the breakfast of the Swahili coast, and it spread inland and across the continent: to northern Uganda, where the Acholi make dek ngor; to the Igbo country of south-eastern Nigeria, where it is cooked into the spicy porridge fio fio; and to the Kongo and Angolan coast. A widely repeated claim puts its seeds in Egyptian tombs of about 2200 BCE; no primary report of the find could be traced, and the claim is not mapped.
The Atlantic slave trade took it to the Americas, as ships' provisions as well as seed, and the names it carried there remember Africa: Congo pea, Angola pea, pois d'Angole, pwa kongo, Jamaica's gungo, and the gandul, guandú, and guandu of the Spanish and Portuguese Americas, traced to the Kikongo wandu. Barbados gave it its English name. It became the pea of three Christmases, in the arroz con gandules of Puerto Rico, the moro de guandules con coco of the Dominican Republic, and the arroz con guandú y coco of Panama; the carnival soup of Barranquilla; the quinchoncho of western Venezuela; the peas n' rice of the Bahamas; and the pelau of Trinidad.
In the nineteenth century indenture carried it back across the Indian Ocean in the other direction, and further. From 1879 the Indian labourers brought to Fiji's sugar plantations lived on rice and dhal, and the South Indian families among them made the coconut dhal of toor that the Pacific's palms made possible.
India grows more than seventy per cent of the world's pigeon peas and eats even more than it grows, importing the balance: Myanmar is the largest exporter, and Mozambique, Tanzania, and Malawi sell the great majority of their exports to India. Within India the great growing country is the dry Deccan, and three of its districts hold Geographical Indications for their dal: Navapur in Maharashtra (2016), Gulbarga in Karnataka (2019), and Tandur in Telangana (2022).
In the field it is a crop of smallholders and poor soils. Deep-rooted, drought-tolerant, and nitrogen-fixing, it is intercropped with sorghum, millet, and maize across the semi-arid tropics of Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, and it leaves the ground richer than it found it.
In the kitchen it is eaten in two forms. Dried, husked, and split, it is the everyday dal of peninsular and western India and the lapena of northern Uganda. Picked green, it is a fresh vegetable, sold in pods in Indian winter markets and frozen or tinned across the Caribbean, where green gandules and guandú are a Christmas food.
Historical Journey of Pigeon Pea
Golbai Sasan & Coastal Odisha — c. 1700 BCE
The pigeon pea was domesticated in eastern India from a shrub of its own forest margins. Its wild ancestor, Cajanus cajanifolius, grows at the edge of the forests and open savanna of eastern peninsular India, and the earliest archaeobotanical evidence for the crop comes from this coast. Charred seeds from the Neolithic villages of Gopalpur and Golbai Sasan in Odisha date to between about 3,400 and 3,000 years ago, and there are signs of its cultivation in southern Odisha earlier still, before about 1650 BCE.
Odisha still eats it every day. Dalma, split pigeon peas cooked with raw banana, pumpkin, aubergine, and yam and finished with pancha phutana, the five-seed tempering of the Odia kitchen, is cooked in stacked earthen pots over wood fires in the kitchens of the Jagannath temple at Puri and shared there as part of the mahaprasad, the sanctified food eaten by devotees of every caste; it is made without onion, garlic, or tomato. A tradition credits the dish to the Savara, the forest people said to have been the first worshippers of Jagannath. The story cannot be dated, but it suits the pulse of a forest shrub.
Kalaburagi, Mysore & Karnataka — c. 1400 BCE
Within a few centuries the domesticated pigeon pea had spread west across the peninsula. It appears in the Late Neolithic levels of Sanganakallu, near Ballari in Karnataka, about 3,400 years ago, amongst the crops of the Southern Neolithic farmers, and Karnataka has grown it ever since. Its dry northern districts are now among the great pigeon pea country of India, and Gulbarga Tur Dal, from Kalaburagi, the old Gulbarga, received a Geographical Indication in 2019.
In Kannada the pulse is togari, and split it is togari bele, the bele of the Mysore kitchen's bisi bele bath, 'hot dal rice', in which rice and pigeon peas are cooked together with vegetables, tamarind, and a freshly roasted spice powder into a single dish that is eaten hot with ghee.
Pune, Vidarbha & Maharashtra — c. 1400 BCE
The pigeon pea reached the Chalcolithic farmers of the northern Deccan at about the same time. It is amongst the crops recovered from Tuljapur Garhi, a village site in the Amravati district of Vidarbha, dating from the middle of the second millennium BCE, and Maharashtra remains one of the pulse's great growing states: Navapur Tur Dal, from the Nandurbar district, received a Geographical Indication in 2016.
The Marathi word is tur, and its plainest dish is its most honoured. Varan is split pigeon peas cooked soft with turmeric and a pinch of asafoetida and seasoned with little else; poured over rice with ghee and lemon as varan bhaat, it is the first course of a Maharashtrian wedding feast and a food offered to the gods at festivals, served in the same meal as amti, its spiced and soured counterpart.
Thanjavur & the Tamil Country — c. 100 CE
The record does not say when the pigeon pea reached the Tamil south, and the date on this point is a placement, but it became the pulse on which the Tamil meal is built. Thuvaram paruppu, split pigeon peas, is the body of sambar, cooked with tamarind, vegetables, and a roasted spice powder and poured over rice at the start of the meal, and the thin, peppery broth of rasam that follows is made on the same pulse.
Sambar has a famous origin story, and it should be told as a story. It is said that at the court of the Maratha rulers of Thanjavur a cook, lacking the kokum for a Maharashtrian amti, soured the dal with tamarind instead and named the result for the visiting Sambhaji, son of Shivaji. The tale is repeated everywhere and documented nowhere, and tamarind-soured dals may well be older in the Tamil country than any Maratha visit. What it does record accurately is that Thanjavur was ruled by a Maratha dynasty from the 1670s, and that its kitchens joined the traditions of the Deccan to those of the Tamil south.
Varanasi & the Gangetic Plain — c. 300 CE
North of the Vindhyas the pigeon pea is arhar. Sanskrit texts know the pulse as āḍhakī and tuvarī, but when it reached the Gangetic plain is not recorded, and the date on this point is a placement. What is certain is how thoroughly the plain adopted it. Arhar dal, cooked with turmeric and finished with a tempering of cumin, garlic, and dried chilli or with ghee and asafoetida, is the everyday dal of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, eaten with rice and with roti, and the roadside dhabas of the north made the tempered version, dal tadka, one of the best-known dishes of Indian cooking.
This plain also sent the pulse furthest. Most of the indentured labourers who sailed from Calcutta to Fiji, Mauritius, Trinidad, and British Guiana in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and they took the daily dal with them.
Ahmedabad & Gujarat — c. 600 CE
Gujarat's word is tuvar, and its dal is unlike any other in India. The tuvar dal of the everyday Gujarati thali is thin, silky, and deliberately sweet and sour, jaggery balanced against kokum or lemon, tempered with mustard seeds, cloves, and curry leaves, and poured over rice beside the flatbreads and vegetables of the meal. Simmer diamonds of spiced wheat dough in the same dal and it becomes dal dhokli, the one-pot meal of Gujarati and Rajasthani homes; stew the coarse Indian dill of the winter markets with it and it becomes suva ni bhaji. When the pulse reached Gujarat is not recorded, and the date here is a placement.
Gujarat was also where the pigeon pea put to sea. The merchants and dhows of its ports traded across the western Indian Ocean for many centuries, and that sea road is the likeliest by which the pulse reached the coast of East Africa.
Hyderabad, Andhra & Telangana — c. 800 CE
In Telugu the pigeon pea is kandi, and dal is simply pappu, because on most Telugu tables the dal is made from this pulse. Kandi pappu is cooked every day with tomato, spinach, sorrel, raw mango, or bottle gourd, mashed smooth, tempered with mustard seeds, garlic, and curry leaves, and eaten over rice with ghee, often beside a spoonful of avakaya mango pickle. The Deccan plateau grows it on a large scale, and Tandur Redgram, from the Vikarabad district of Telangana, received a Geographical Indication in 2022. The date of this point is a placement: the record does not say when the pulse arrived.
Iloilo & the Western Visayas — c. 1000 CE
The pigeon pea travelled east from India as well as west. The survey Plant Resources of South-East Asia dates its spread into the region to the early centuries of the common era, and it is grown across the Philippine islands as kadyos or kadios; when it reached the Visayas is not recorded, and the date here is a placement.
The Hiligaynon-speaking Ilonggos of Iloilo and the Western Visayas made it the heart of their best-loved soup. KBL, for kadyos, baboy, kag langka ('pigeon peas, pork, and jackfruit'), simmers the peas with pork and unripe jackfruit and sours the broth with batwan, the fruit of Garcinia binucao, a tree almost confined to the Western Visayas; the dark kadyos turn the broth a faint purple. Ilonggos away from home miss it more than any other dish, because batwan and the right kadyos are hard to find elsewhere.
Mombasa, Zanzibar & the Swahili Coast — c. 1000 CE
The pigeon pea reached Africa across the Indian Ocean, and when is not known. A claim that its seeds were found in Egyptian tombs of about 2200 BCE is widely repeated, but no primary report of the find could be traced for this entry, and the monsoon trade between western India and the East African coast is the likelier road; the date on this point is a placement. Africa became a second home for the crop, which is now remarkably diverse there, and Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, and Mozambique are amongst its leading growers.
On the Swahili coast it is mbaazi, and it is breakfast. Mbaazi wa nazi, pigeon peas simmered in coconut milk with onion, garlic, turmeric, and green chilli, is eaten in the mornings in Mombasa's Old Town and along the coast with mahamri, the cardamom-scented fried breads made for tearing and dipping.
Luanda & the Kongo Coast — c. 1600 CE
How the pigeon pea crossed Africa to the Atlantic coast is not recorded. It was growing in West-Central Africa by the era of the Atlantic slave trade, and in the Congo it became one of the crops of maala, the farming system in which it is sown on land cleared and burned. The Atlantic world named it after this coast. In English it was the Congo pea and the Angola pea, in French pois d'Angole, and in Haitian Creole pwa kongo; Jamaica's gungo is a worn-down form of Congo; and the Spanish gandul and guandú, the Portuguese guandu, and the Surinamese wandoe are traced to wandu, its name in Kikongo, or to oanda in Kimbundu. Those names are the best record of the road. The pulse crossed the Atlantic as food as well as seed: Judith Carney and Richard Rosomoff show that slavers stocked their ships with African provisions, pigeon peas among them, in the belief that captives survived the voyage better on food they knew, and what was not eaten became planting stock in the provision grounds of the Caribbean and the Spanish Main. No named pigeon pea dish of the Kongo or Angolan coast is documented today, and this point marks the road rather than a kitchen; the dish of the Atlantic coast of Africa is fio fio, further north in Igboland.
Enugu, Nsukka & Igboland — c. 1600 CE
In the Igbo country of south-eastern Nigeria the pigeon pea is a food with a dish of its own. Around Enugu and Nsukka the dried peas are boiled for hours until soft and cooked with cocoyam or yam, red palm oil, hot pepper, crayfish, and sliced ugba, the fermented oil bean, into fio fio, also called agbugbu and, in Nsukka, ayaraya ji: a thick, spicy porridge eaten on its own or with yam. When the pulse reached the region, and by which road across Africa, is not recorded, and the date here is a placement.
The coast below, the Bight of Biafra, was one of the great departure points of the Atlantic slave trade. Most of the people shipped from it were Igbo, and the English Caribbean drew heavily on it: from the mid-seventeenth century it was one of the principal sources of the captives landed in Barbados, and about a third of all those taken from the Bight went to Jamaica. Slavers stocked their ships with African foods, pigeon peas among them, in the belief that captives survived the voyage better on food they knew, and the pulse of Igbo fio fio is the pigeon pea of Barbados and the gungo pea of Jamaica.
Santo Domingo, Port-au-Prince & Hispaniola — 17th century CE
Hispaniola grows pigeon peas on both sides of its border, and both Haiti and the Dominican Republic are significant producers. In Haiti they are pwa kongo, the Congo pea, a name that records the road by which they came. In the Dominican Republic they are guandules, cooked with rice and sofrito in one pot as moro de guandules; on the Samaná peninsula, where coconut palms line the shore, the rice is cooked in coconut milk as moro de guandules con coco, and that version is now a Christmas dish across the country, served beside roast pork at Nochebuena. The record does not date the pulse's arrival; the date here is a placement in the early plantation era.
Bridgetown & Barbados — Late 17th century CE
Barbados gave the plant its English name. The usual explanation is that on the island the seed was fed to pigeons, and pigeon pea became the name by which the English-speaking Caribbean knew it. Barbados was the first great sugar colony of the English Atlantic, and its plantations depended on the labour of enslaved Africans in very large numbers. From the mid-seventeenth century the Bight of Biafra was one of the island's principal sources of captives, and some 44 per cent of the Africans landed on Barbados between 1751 and 1775 had been shipped from that coast, most of them Igbo. From Barbados and the other English islands the pulse became a crop of the whole English Caribbean, the gungo pea of Jamaica, the pigeon peas of the Bahamas, and the peas of Trinidad's pelau.
Barranquilla & the Colombian Caribbean — 18th century CE
On Colombia's Caribbean coast the pigeon pea is guandú or guandul, a pulse of the coast rather than the Andean interior. Cartagena was one of the principal slave ports of the Spanish Main, and the pulse took root in the Afro-Colombian and costeño kitchens of Bolívar and the Atlántico; when it arrived is not recorded, and the date here is a placement.
Its great dish belongs to Barranquilla. Sancocho de guandú, pigeon peas simmered with salted beef, pork ribs, yuca, yam, and plantain and seasoned with a guiso of garlic, onion, spring onion, tomato, and achiote, is eaten across the Atlántico department and above all during the Carnival of Barranquilla, when it is the soup of the season, served with coconut rice and bollo de yuca.
San Juan & Puerto Rico — 18th century CE
In Puerto Rico the pigeon pea is gandul, and its dish is the national one. Arroz con gandules, rice cooked in one pot with pigeon peas, sofrito, pork, and olives and coloured with annatto, is eaten all year and above all at Christmas, when it is served beside roast pork and pasteles. The pulse came to the island with the enslaved Africans of its plantations; when is not recorded, and the date here is a placement.
Lara, Falcón & Western Venezuela — 18th century CE
Venezuela has its own name for the pigeon pea, quinchoncho, and its own region for it: the centre-west and north-west, the states of Lara, Falcón, and Yaracuy and the Andean state of Trujillo. There the dried peas are cooked into thick soups with plantain, pumpkin, and roots, coloured with onoto, the Venezuelan name for annatto; in Falcón sopa de quinchoncho is eaten with peeled arepas and goat's cheese, and in Yaracuy the peas even go into the Christmas hallacas. The record does not say when the pulse reached Venezuela, and the date here is a placement.
Nassau & the Bahamas — 1780s CE
The Bahamian plate is built on pigeon peas. Peas n' rice, pigeon peas and rice cooked together with salt pork, onion, thyme, and tomato until the grains turn russet, is served with cracked conch, fried fish, and every Sunday dinner. The islands' plantation era was brief but decisive: after the American Revolution, Loyalists arrived in the 1780s with the people they enslaved and transformed the population of the Bahamas, and the pulse, long established across the English Caribbean, became the islands' everyday pea. The date follows that settlement; the record does not say exactly when the pulse arrived.
Port of Spain & Trinidad — 1797 CE
Trinidad passed to Britain in 1797, and the pigeon pea is at the centre of its cooking. Its great dish is pelau: chicken caramelised in burnt sugar, then cooked down in one pot with rice, pigeon peas, and coconut milk and a green seasoning of thyme, chadon beni, and Scotch bonnet, the Sunday and beach-lime dish of Trinidad and Tobago, whose rice-and-meat method looks back to the pilaus the island's many peoples brought with them. The date follows the British capture of the island; pigeon peas may well have arrived earlier, with the French planters and enslaved Africans of the late Spanish period.
Colón, Panama City & the Isthmus — c. 1800 CE
In Panama the pigeon pea is guandú, and there is no Christmas without it. The plant takes some 250 days to bear, so a crop sown in April is ready in December, and arroz con guandú is on nearly every table from Nochebuena to New Year beside ham and roast pork; on the Caribbean coast around Colón the rice is cooked in coconut milk with culantro as arroz con guandú y coco. How the pulse reached the isthmus is not recorded. Panama was governed with the Colombian coast as part of New Granada, and its Afro-Panamanian communities descend both from the enslaved Africans of the colonial era and from the Antillean workers who came to build the railway and the canal; the date here is a placement.
Gulu & Acholiland — 19th century CE
In northern Uganda the pigeon pea is lapena, and the Acholi, Lango, and West Nile peoples have made it the base of a sauce that is a meal in itself. For dek ngor, the dried peas are soaked, sun-dried, split on a grinding stone, and winnowed of their husks, then boiled until they collapse into a thick cream enriched with odii, a paste of roasted sesame or groundnuts, and eaten with millet bread, sweet potatoes, or cassava. It is expected at the great occasions of Acholi life: weddings, graduations, and the naming of a newborn child.
When and by which route the pulse reached the interior is not recorded. The date on this point is a placement, and the road drawn from the Swahili coast follows the trade that joined the coast to the lakes in the nineteenth century.
Viti Levu & Indo-Fijian Fiji — 1879 CE
On 14 May 1879 the Leonidas arrived off Levuka with the first Indian indentured labourers for Fiji's sugar plantations. By 1916 some 60,000 had followed, recruited at first through Calcutta from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and, from 1903, through Madras from the south as well, and their rations on the voyage and on the estates were rice and dhal. Dhal remains the centre of the Indo-Fijian table. Households cook red lentils, pigeon peas, and urad, alone or mixed, and the South Indian families of the later girmit brought a dhal of their own: split pigeon peas cooked in coconut milk and tempered with mustard seeds, curry leaves, and dried chilli, the Indo-Fijian coconut dhal that the Pacific's coconut palms made possible.
