Jain Vada Pav

A Jain vada pav starts at the pot, with green raw bananas boiled in their skins until a knife slides in and the peel splits. Peeled and grated or mashed while still hot, the flesh is pale, dense and faintly sweet, and it fills the spot that boiled potato holds in a Mumbai vada. Published Jain recipes season it with mustard seed, curry leaf, turmeric, chopped green chili and lemon juice, then bind it with a little gram flour. The banana suits the rule for a simple reason: it grows on a plant that survives the harvest. The seasoned mash is rolled into balls, dipped in besan batter, fried, and tucked into a split pav.

The rule behind that substitution comes from ahimsa, the Jain principle of avoiding harm to living things. Pulling a potato, onion, garlic bulb, carrot, radish or knob of fresh ginger kills the whole plant and disturbs the soil life around it, and Jain tradition classes many such roots as anantkay, bodies shared by an uncountable number of living beings. Lists of forbidden roots vary by household and by how strictly an ascetic order or family keeps them, but potato, onion and garlic appear on nearly all of them. Savor has to be rebuilt from other sources. Asafoetida, a resin that smells sulfurous and sizzles for a second in the hot oil before the mustard seeds go in, supplies the allium note. Dry ginger powder, which many Jain cooks accept where fresh ginger is excluded, adds bite, though the strictest kitchens draw that line differently.

Banana asks more of the cook at the fryer than potato does. Under-boiled, it stays chalky and astringent; boiled too long and mashed wet, it turns gluey, and the ball splits in the oil and spits. Cooks who want a softer center grate the banana instead of pressing it, and lemon juice and chopped green chili go in generously because the mash carries little seasoning of its own. The batter hits the oil with a hard hiss, the kitchen fills with the sweet, starchy smell of frying banana, and the shell turns from pale yellow to gold and starts to rattle against the skimmer. Bitten warm, the crust cracks and the center gives way, steaming, slightly sweeter and denser than a potato vada, with the lemon sharp at the back of it.

The chutneys take over the work that garlic does in the standard version. The dry one is a coarse red powder of roasted peanut, sesame, dried coconut and red chili, gritty between the teeth, with a toasted-nut smell that rises when the pav is smeared with it. The wet one is coriander, green chili and lemon ground together. A salted, deep-fried green chili often rides alongside, blistered and split. The pav itself is griddled cut-side down in butter or oil until the inside face turns crisp. Many observant Jains do not eat after sunset, so this is a snack for daylight hours, eaten warm in the late afternoon rather than carried home cold.

On a Mumbai menu the word Jain in front of a dish name works as an instruction to the kitchen, and the same raw banana turns up across the pav family. Published recipes for Jain pav bhaji use it, one describing it as tasting like cooked potato, and Jain dabeli is a listed dish too. The fritter is where the swap is hardest to disguise, since the banana has to hold a round shape in hot oil with only a spoonful of gram flour to bind it, and a batter that coats in one pass keeps the ball closed.

Where the Jain version sits in the record

Most accounts give the vada pav itself to Ashok Vaidya and his 1966 stall by Dadar station, set up to feed Girangaon's mill workers, though other stalls of the same era also claim it. The Jain build appears in that history only as a later adaptation, made for the Jain customers a city of Mumbai's size has always had at its stalls and tables.

No record names who first fried a raw-banana vada and slid it into a pav, or in which year. What survives is the recipe itself: Jain vada pav is written up by Indian cooks and recipe sites as a standard variation, with raw banana as the usual base and chili and lemon juice as the main seasoning.

A Pew Research Center survey published in June 2021 found 67 percent of Indian Jains saying they abstain from root vegetables, so the rule that shapes this vada is kept by most of the community and left unkept by the rest.