Langar: Perhaps the Best Indian Food You’ll Ever Have

Posted by Mike Richard on February 25, 2008
Filed under: Food + Booze, India, Sidelines

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Langar, India

It might be the best Indian food you’ll ever have.

The langar is a staple of Sikh worship - and is absolutely free, to everyone. No creed, color, nationality, or even religion is turned away. You sit on the floor, in rows that may stretch as long as a football field, as volunteers dish out ample amounts of lentils, rice, and later even deserts. The langar is supposed to remind you that everyone is equal before God.

At one temple in Delhi, they serve 10,000 people in a single day. By necessity, the place is a factory of human hands: the pots are as large as oil drums and are stirred with shovels, and the dishwashing sinks look like deluxe bathtubs. And despite the scale, hygiene and cleanliness are actually strictly maintained.

Serving everybody equally was, and is, a revolutionary concept in caste-ridden India. But langars have long since expanded beyond India’s borders: most Sikh students in London don’t know how they’d live without them.

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This article was reprinted with permission of Cool Things In Random Places - a little refreshing randomness from around the globe.



Vagabondish editor, Mike Richard, lives in Rhode Island - a spit of land in the northeastern U.S. He is a professional web designer and travel junkie with an unhealthy addiction to backpacking, camping, hiking and seeing the world. He enjoys knit hats, small, declarative sentences and speaking in the third person.



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