Idli, Indonesia and India: The 1000-year mystery behind a breakfast favourite

Somewhere in a news article, you may have read about the origin of the idli and its long association not with India, but with Indonesia. The moment such a claim is mentioned, it often raises eyebrows. So, what is the story of Idli? Let's explore it with this article.

Every dish served on your plate carries a story. Some stories are preserved in family kitchens, some travel through generations by word of mouth, while others survive in inscriptions, manuscripts and forgotten texts. The story of dosa has its chroniclers. The story of vada has its place in regional memory. Sambhar has its own competing legends.

Across India, hundreds of dishes carry histories that are often as layered as the cultures that produced them.

Then comes a claim that has puzzled food historians for decades. It concerns the idli.

For most Indians, from North to South, idli is a healthy breakfast option and hardly needs an introduction. It arrives on breakfast tables and is consumed as a snack in the afternoon and late evening.

It appears in railway stations, neighbourhood eateries, family gatherings and fine-dining restaurants alike. Paired with chutney and sambhar, it is among the country's most recognisable foods. Like many others, I had always assumed that the idli belonged entirely to the culinary traditions of South India.

Then came a claim that challenged that assumption.

The argument suggested that the origins of the idli may have been linked to Indonesia and that the dish, or at least the technique behind it, may have reached Indian shores through interactions between South India and Southeast Asia nearly a thousand years ago.

At first glance, the theory seemed difficult to reconcile with what many of us have grown up believing. Could one of India's most familiar foods really have arrived from elsewhere?

Untangling that question means revisiting more than a thousand years of literary records, culinary histories and scholarly debate.

THE CHOLA CONNECTION

To understand the discussion, one must first return to a period when South India was deeply connected with the wider world, specifically the East.

Between the 8th and 12th centuries, South India's powerful Chola dynasty expanded its military influence, which later developed into trade and cultural links across the Indian Ocean.

Merchants, monks, diplomats and travellers moved between the Indian subcontinent and regions of Southeast Asia.

The famous Chola naval expeditions, including the campaign against the Srivijaya Empire in 1025 CE, are among the best-known examples of these interactions.

It is within this larger backdrop of maritime exchange that some historians have attempted to trace the origins of the idli with the arrival of royal chefs on the Indian shores.

Among the most influential voices was the late food historian KT Achaya. In his 1994 work, Indian Food: A Historical Companion, Achaya proposed that a fermented and steamed food resembling the idli may have entered India through cultural contact with Indonesia sometime between the 8th and 12th centuries.

His theory rested largely on the idea that fermentation techniques associated with rice-based cakes were already present in Southeast Asia and may have influenced culinary developments in southern India.

Years after the book by KT Achaya was published, investigative food journalists such as Janaki Lenin and linguistic researchers went to Indonesia to look for this supposed precursor.

They found that the word "Kedli" does not appear in Indonesian languages, dialects, or historical dictionaries. There is also no historical record, recipe, or evidence of an ancient Indonesian dish called "Kedli."

WHAT THE RECORDS SAY

The one big argument that often emerges as the primary piece of evidence for establishing idli as Indonesian is the fermentation process, which is said to have originated in the East.

Fermentation transforms a simple batter into a soft, airy and easily digestible food. It is the process that gives the modern idli its distinctive texture.

Fermentation, too, was hardly unfamiliar to ancient India. The claim that it first originated in the East loses some of its force when viewed alongside Ayurvedic literature, which contains detailed discussions of fermented preparations such as dahi, kanji, asavas and arishtas.

Long before the earliest references to idli, Indian texts and medical treatises described fermented foods and beverages.

Yet, as researchers continued to examine historical records, questions emerged regarding the evidence behind the Indonesian connection.

One of the central issues involved a supposed Indonesian precursor referred to as "Kedli". Subsequent investigations by food writers and linguistic researchers found no clear evidence of such a term in Indonesian historical records, dictionaries or culinary traditions.

Critics argued that the linguistic foundation of the theory remained weak and that no documented recipe or historical reference had been found to establish the existence of a dish by that name.

At the same time, Indian literary sources were revealing a much older and more detailed story of their own.

The earliest known reference to a dish resembling the idli appears not in Southeast Asian records but in Kannada literature. In 920 CE, the Jain scholar Shivakotiacharya authored the Vaddaradhane, a classical Kannada text that mentions a food known as "Iddalige". The reference predates the Chola expedition to Srivijaya by more than a century and indicates that a form of the dish was already known within the Indian subcontinent.

THE EVOLUTION OF IDLI

The story becomes clearer a century later.

In 1025 CE, the Kannada encyclopaedic work Lokopakara, attributed to Chavundaraya II, provides one of the earliest descriptions of how such cakes were prepared.

The text describes soaking black gram in buttermilk, grinding it into a fine paste and mixing it with curd before cooking. Notably, rice does not appear in this early recipe.

This is an important detail because the modern idli, familiar across India today, is made using a fermented mixture of rice and urad dal.

The earliest versions seem to have relied primarily on black gram rather than the rice-lentil combination now considered standard.

Further evidence appears in the 12th century.

Around 1130 CE, the Western Chalukya ruler Someshvara III compiled Manasollasa, a vast Sanskrit encyclopaedia covering administration, arts, sciences and food. Among its extensive culinary descriptions is a preparation known as "Iddarika", which closely resembles earlier references to lentil-based steamed cakes.

Taken together, these texts suggest that foods resembling the idli were already established within southern India centuries ago and were evolving through regional culinary traditions.

A THOUSAND-YEAR JOURNEY

The debate, however, does not end with the name of the dish. Some scholars have argued that while India may have had early forms of idli, key techniques such as steaming and fermentation could have arrived through foreign influence.

Historical evidence again presents a more complicated picture.

The claim that ancient India lacked steaming technology is often linked to observations made by the Chinese traveller Xuanzang during the 7th century.

Yet cooking traditions across the subcontinent long employed methods that relied on steam. Food could be cooked using cloth-covered pots, baskets placed above boiling water, bamboo steamers and earthen vessels.

Even today, traditional varieties such as the Kanchipuram idli continue to be prepared using methods rooted in these older practices.

What emerges from the historical record is not the story of a dish appearing suddenly from a single source. Instead, it is the story of gradual evolution.

The earliest idli-like preparations seem to have been lentil-based cakes known by names such as Iddalige and Iddarika. Over centuries, ingredients changed, techniques improved and regional preferences shaped the dish further.

Rice was incorporated. Fermentation methods were refined. Steaming practices became standardised. What began as a simple preparation eventually evolved into the soft rice-and-lentil cakes recognised across the world today.

Food histories are rarely straightforward. They often reflect centuries of migration, trade, adaptation and local innovation.

The idli is no exception. Its exact journey may continue to be debated by historians and food scholars, but the literary evidence leaves little doubt that forms of the dish existed in southern India long before many popular theories suggest.

The next time an idli arrives on a plate, it is worth remembering that it is more than a breakfast item.

It is a culinary record of a thousand years of experimentation, adaptation and continuity. Long before it became a staple in homes, restaurants and railway stations, it was already finding its place in the pages of India's earliest texts.

- Ends