After this historical exploration, Sediyapu returns to 20th century coastal Karnataka — specifically to Mangalore. Here, he finds a popular sweet dish prepared by the Gauda Saraswat Brahmin community. Its name is Iṇḍri and pronounced as such. It is prepared exactly like Idli using the same utensil and its appearance too, fully matches the Idli.

The conclusion of Sediyapu’s extensive investigations into Idli is this: how the word iṇḍra was transformed into Idli: “The sound inḍri is phonetically closer to iṇḍra than it is to inḍari. Thus, it is plausible that the original phonetic form of the dish prepared in this manner was inḍri. The original phonetic form of the current Kannada word, Idli was iḍḍali. Because the compound sound, ḍri does not lend itself well in the Kannada language, the whole word, inḍri became a tadbhava as iḍḍali. Over time, the additional ḍ sound was dropped in common usage. This is how we got the current form, iḍli, spelled as Idli."

This brings us to the story of the Idli’s initial popularity in the Tamil-speaking regions on the anvil of the 20th century. How or why did this particular dish which had lain in obscurity for centuries suddenly acquire such acclaim, and........

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