From the sultans' courts to everyday plates: the long journey of naan

South Asia's soft, puffed leavened naan was once served only at the courts of Muslim emperors. In a report on 3 January 2026, BBC Bangla drew on food historian Neha Vermani and chef Suvir Saran to trace how the bread travelled from the kitchens of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals to ordinary plates. As The Daily Star reported, butter garlic naan took first place as the world's best bread in the food website TasteAtlas's March 2025 rankings. It is made by spreading butter over very hot naan and scattering chopped garlic on top. According to the BBC, aloo naan, stuffed with potato mixed with spices and coriander, was also on the list of best breads.

Naan's origins are not entirely clear. Many food historians place them in ancient Persia, since nan is the generic Persian word for bread. Persians made it from flour and water, probably baked on hot stones. It reached the subcontinent with the sultans who ruled much of it from the 13th to the 16th century, along with West and Central Asian cooking traditions such as the tandoor.

The earliest mention of naan in the region comes from the Indo-Persian poet Amir Khusrau in the 1300s. Writing about court life under Alauddin Khilji and Muhammad bin Tughlaq, he describes two kinds: nan-e-tanuk, thin and soft, and nan-e-tanuri, thick and puffed, baked in the tandoor. In the Delhi Sultanate naan was eaten with meat dishes such as kebabs and minced meat.

To make the bread softer and puffier, royal cooks added yeast to the dough, then a rare ingredient. The elaborate, costly process made naan a luxury eaten mainly by royalty and the wealthy, and the custom held through the following three hundred years of Mughal rule. "There were special cooks for making naan, called nan bais," Neha Vermani, a historian of South Asia, told the BBC.

They experimented and gave their breads descriptive names: nan-e-warqi with thin, flaky layers, and nan-e-tangi, small enough to soak up gravy. Some breads were named after the kitchen that made them. Vermani explains that bakarkhani, a biscuit-textured flatbread, was made in the kitchen of Baqir Nazm Saini, a senior official at the courts of Jahangir and Shah Jahan, and takes its name from him.

In Bengal another story is told about the name: popular tradition links it to the love of Mirza Agha Baqer, a commander in the time of Siraj ud-Daulah, for a dancer named Khani Begum. Made with flour, semolina, sugar, ghee and poppy or nigella seeds, the hard-crusted bread is part of the culinary identity of Old Dhaka, where the first shop is said to have opened near Lalbagh Fort.

Under British rule naan remained largely a food of the rich, but British travellers carried it west, and in India it became part of a colonial cuisine served with meat and sauces of local spices. Over time, Vermani says, simpler techniques replaced the elaborate ones, and a plain version of naan reached ordinary people.

Today the dough is made from flour, yoghurt and yeast and left to rise. It is divided into rounds, pressed into shape by hand and slapped against the inner wall of a very hot tandoor, which can reach 480C. Once it puffs and browns it is taken out and brushed with butter or ghee.

In the 1990s and 2000s fine-dining restaurants in India and abroad began experimenting with naan. Chef Suvir Saran recalls adding spinach, a kind of cheese and mushrooms to naan at his New York restaurant to make it appeal to non-Indian diners. In Goa, he says, restaurants serve pork vindaloo naan and butter chicken naan, and in Hong Kong there is truffle cheese naan. "Naan is an extraordinary gift from India to the world," he says.

Food historians add that naan is not India's alone but part of other cuisines of South Asia and the Middle East. Versions of it are eaten from Pakistan and Afghanistan to Myanmar and in the Uyghur cooking of China.

Photo: Fatfoodie / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sources: BBC Bangla, The Daily Star, Wikipedia