Similar flatbreads can be found across ancient and medieval worlds, including in Arab cooking texts from the 13th century. The first-known images of wheat-based savories appeared in a stunningly illustrated 15th-century cookbook called Ni‘matnama, or “Book of Delights,” written for the Malwa Sultanate on the Indian subcontinent. In a 16th-century Ain-i-Akbari report on Mughal Emperor Akbar’s government, an author refers to roti explicitly, explaining that the dish made with flour, milk, ghee, and salt “tastes very well, when served hot.” (Based on our extensive research and experience, this is still true.)
The ancestral food traditions of South Asia first traveled across Indian Oceanic trade routes beginning as early as the third century B.C. Later, from the 1830s to 1917, the British brought approximately 2 million indentured people from colonial India to British colonies elsewhere in Asia, the Americas, and Africa, often with no possibility to return.
Indentured people were forced to work as plantation and industrial laborers. Like enslaved Africans, whose labor was exploited by the British Empire, indentured laborers endured immense hardships and devastating losses. They also found ways to survive, create community, and make new homes, with new ways of cooking, eating, and caring.
ROTI’S PRESENTS
These legacies and adaptations are reflected in the many varieties of roti that exist today throughout the roti-eating diaspora—drawing widely from seasonal and locally available ingredients, traditions, and preferences.
Kale roti, for example, is a regional delicacy from Bangladesh that contains black gram beans (mashkalai) and other flours, and is eaten with mashed dishes made of chili, eggplant, tomato, or spiced beef. Using ingredients such as melted butter and cake flour changes the flatbread’s texture into the soft and spongy South African butter roti. In South Asia, Kenya, and Uganda, the flatbread goes by “chapati,” from the Urdu-Hindi root word “chapat” (slap), referring to the slapping technique used to flatten dough balls into thin, round discs before cooked on a tawa, or hot griddle. In Guyana, the name “clap roti” similarly points to a clapping technique for fashioning a flaky, tender roti—perfect for picking up steaming hot goat curry. In the Indian province of Gujarat, there is an extra-thin roti called a rotli. In Malaysia, the word “roti” can refer to many types of leavened and unleavened breads, including the famous roti canai, enjoyed as a circular, crunchy, flaky bread. And in various places, people have created versions to accommodate dietary restrictions and preferences, including vegan roti.
While reckoning with painful histories of colonial racism and its continued legacies across former British colonies, people incorporated roti into their local foodways and national traditions. In Trinidad, for example, over decades and after national independence, people across the country created popular specialties involving roti that have now become known in North America as “Caribbean” or “West Indian” roti. In the acclaimed documentary Dal Puri Diaspora, Richard Fung traces the long journey of Indo-Caribbean roti from “home fire to street stall to restaurant chain,” showing how the flatbread transformed as it moved from India to Trinidad to Toronto.
One variety of Trinidadian roti that exemplifies these cultural crossings is called by the playful name “buss up shut” after the dish’s resemblance in texture and appearance to a torn, or busted-up, shirt. In recent years, social media has provided an important space for many roti enthusiasts to share their culture and history through how-to videos for making buss up shut with dablas, or long, narrow wooden or metal spatulas that turn and break up the roti into soft folds while cooked on the tawa.
