Walking The Durand Line
1893. The British Empire was in it’s gaudy pomp and brimming with fin de siècle bravado. Missionary zeal, Flashman-esque bluster and a license to plunder were just some of the unsavoury tenets of the imperial age as it reached it’s zenith in South Asia. Painting the world pink, one country at a time.
In that year, Mortimer Durand, a British diplomat, drafted a ham-fisted demarcation line between Afghanistan and British India in an attempt to create a buffer between the two posturing power players in the region. The Durand Line cooled tensions in ‘The Great Game’ between Tsar Alexander and the British Raj, put the seal on two Anglo-Afghan wars but tragically marked an end to the hopes of creating Pashtunistan, an independent state for the Pashtun people. Something that remains an open sore to this day. This lost landlocked country has sat at the crossroads of history, where it’s repelled countless marauding forces over the ages, from the Persians to the Mughuls and more recently the USSR and US-led coalition. It is a graveyard of empires. With the Khyber Pass and Silk Road on it’s doorstep, this amalgam of tribal regions, has seen never-ending cycles of prosperity and destruction - pivoting between monarchy, theocracy and democracy for centuries.
Despite war and invasion, Pashto emerged as the lingua franca in Afghanistan and the Pashtun people fought their way out of the region’s colonial mire. Their martial abilities matched only by their culinary prowess. Lying at the heart of the Eurasian landmass, the de-facto state of Pashtunistan is perfectly encapsulated in it’s dishes - sweetness from Persia, tandoor mastery from the Punjab and gentle spicing from Northern India. It is instantly recognisable yet tantalisingly unfamiliar.
5000 miles away in south-west London, Hamid Jan opened Namak Mandi in 2010 to sate the appetites and homesick hankerings of his fellow Afghans. The restaurant is named after the ancient salt market in Peshawar, the largest city on the Afghan/Pakistan border. The open-air market diversified into spices, grains and dried fruits, as salt depreciated in value - attracting a host of restaurants and static stalls that still specialise in breaking down lamb and goat carcasses to fulfil orders for tikkas, skewers, and karahis cooked by a butcher/chef a few feet away. Echoes of this have travelled to it’s namesake in London.
However, this incarnation lies at the Tooting Bec end of a trunk road to Surrey, where restaurants from South Asia abound. Serving dishes almost exclusively from the states of Punjab and Kashmir, reflecting the large diaspora that migrated to the U.K from those regions after the Partition of India in 1947. They significantly outnumber the Pashtun diaspora from the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, so Namak Mandi is something of a first in the area. Expanding London’s culinary gene-pool with the addition of Afghan and Peshwari specialties that dovetail with the wider family of northern Indian and Pakistani dishes that are so familiar in the capital and beyond.
Before being ushered upstairs to our ‘kota’, a curtained booth laid out with bolsters on the floor, we start making a mental list from the limited menu posted above the extraction fans. The stand-out from the pleasingly titled ‘Thrill on the grill’ section of starters is the Chapli kebab - a street food favourite in Peshawar. This flat patty of mutton derives it’s name from the Pashto word for sandal ‘chappal’, with it’s elongated roundish shape referencing the sole of the traditional shoe. Nevertheless it’s slightly unbecoming charred leathery appearance is misleading. The external crunch achieved after being deep-fried, more fun in the fat than thrill on the grill, is made even more satisfying with the addition of lemon juice, crushed coriander seeds and flecks of chilli.
Assa Ariyoshi ©
Charsi Karahi is another ‘Durand dish’, as it shares culinary DNA with Northern Pakistan and Afghanistan. Curiously, it translates as the ‘drug addict’ curry, whether that refers to the region’s history of dabbling in the opium poppy trade or the fact that the dish is incredibly more-ish is unknown. Either way, the chicken and lamb versions, cooked to order, are served on the bone and harbour a rich, brooding, smokey tomato flavour with a welcome sweet aftertaste. The rendered fat from the wobbly bits of the lamb add further depth without the need for a heavy hand with the spices.
Kabuli Palaw is the national dish - a rice pilaf dressed with grated carrot and plump raisins reveals a slow-cooked lamb shank within that shows zero resistance to the fork. It’s a bit heavy going and after a handful of bites the addition of sauce borrowed from the Charsi dish and a trickle of blended raita sends it soaring, This makeshift nihari is mopped up with the super-sized Afghani naan that hangs awkwardly on it’s stand like a doughy Dali clock.
As naan fatigue kicks in and our stomachs reach their elastic limit, the feast on the floor is cleared and the remnants boxed for our lunch tomorrow. Hospitality and warmth radiates from the restaurant staff and the offer of pudding and tea on the house is snapped up. Kheer, a chilled rice pudding boiled in the creamiest of milks until Gold Top yellow is a deeply satisfying cardiologists’ nightmare. Qawah tea is served in a battered enamel teapot and provides a heady, restorative, cardamom-infused digestive. The presence of jaggery sugar, made from the golden sap of the date palm, completes the culinary teleportation to another realm, before reality barges through the kota’s curtain with the arrival of the card machine.
As we rest our bloated bodies on the bolsters, we’re told that, on request, Hamid can prepare Sajji - a whole lamb slow-roasted over coals and stuffed with rice that could feed 20 or half a beast for a smaller feast. We nod politely. It is without doubt one of the most generous and certainly the lambiest restaurant in town. With trays of lamb chops, mutton kebabs, lamb tikka and lamb palaw constantly floating out of the kitchen - there is no silence on the lamb front. This is a clattering cacophony of lamb dishes. Indeed, if the neighbouring takeaway purports to be a Chicken Cottage then this is a Lamb Palace.
Heading south down Upper Tooting Road, passing a string of Indian jewellers and sweet shops away from the Balham border. Here, the lesser-spotted Sloane Ranger still roams and a surfeit of Simons from Surrey can still be seen buttoning their sleeveless puffa jackets as they step out from behind their plantation shuttered living rooms and into the wintry gloom. Looking down Edwardian avenues and passed the resurgent 1930s indoor market where a dusting of Dalstonites, priced out of their natural habitat, squeeze into compact bars and micro restaurants serving ramen under compulsory Edison bulbs.
Ending at a Charles Holden masterpiece, Tooting Broadway Underground station, where Wolfie, the self-appointed leader of the Tooting Popular Front, demanded ‘Freedom for Tooting’ in the 1970s television series ‘Citizen Smith’. His demand may’ve been comic, but a reoccurring cri de coeur for statehood still reverberates in the Pashtun jirgas that continue to grapple with the arbitrary nature of the Durand Line. As the remaining grains of sand trickle through the hourglass of 2023, it marks a year since the bloodstained transfer of power in Kabul and 45 years since civil war came to dominate life in Afghanistan. Here’s hoping that the coming years bring long-distance solace for Hamid and his fellow emigres as their country navigates the latest setback on the path to lasting peace, prosperity and the promise of Pashtunistan.
Namak Mandi: 25 Upper Tooting Road, Tooting Bec, London SW17 7TS