The sweet legacy of Murshidabad

Get a taste of a unique culinary heritage shaped by migration and royalty in this Bengal town

- Rituparna Roy

My forefathers typically ate a breakfast of seven mithais and a big glass of badam milk. The assortment of sweets was never repeated in the same week," says Lipika Dudhoria about her family’s rich halwai tradition. She belongs to the seventh generation of Rai Bahadur Singh Budh Sing Dudhoria, an affluent textile merchant, who migrated from the Shekhawati region in Rajasthan in the 1700s to settle on the banks of the Hooghly in Murshidabad, West Bengal.

Those were prosperous times, as the first nawab of Bengal, Murshid Quli Khan, had shifted his capital here, transforming the region into a bustling economic hub.