Who invented butter chicken? Spicy legal drama erupts in India with Moti Mahal, Daryaganj restaurants’ rival claims

Over the past few months, both sides have presented their arguments to the court, with the next hearing set for May.

Moti Mahal owners the Gujral family say it was restaurant co-founder Kundan Lal Gujral who invented the dish.

They are pursuing 20 million rupees (US$240,000) in damages for copyright infringement and unfair competition – further claiming that the Daryaganj chain copied Moti Mahal’s website layout and the ambience of its restaurants.

The Gujrals also accuse Daryaganj of falsely claiming credit for the invention of a second dish, a lentil stew called dal makhani, which the family says was the brainchild of Kundan Lal Gujral.

For their part, the people behind Daryaganj insist it was Moti Mahal’s other co-founder, Kundan Lal Jaggi, who invented both dishes back in 1947.

Jaggi’s grandson Raghav Jaggi has been using the strapline “by the inventors of butter chicken and dal makhani” to market the restaurant since it opened in 2019.

“Here begins the challenge of going back in history and trying to prove who created what,” Indian archaeologist and culinary anthropologist Kurush Dalal told This Week in Asia. “This is going to be the biggest issue for both parties.”

There are some details that the descendants of Gujral and Jaggi agree on, according to interviews conducted with restaurant managers and family members by This Week in Asia.

Both also agree that Gujral and Jaggi fled to Delhi, where they later opened the original Moti Mahal eatery alongside a third business partner.

But this is where the rival families’ stories start to deviate.

Monish Gujral, now managing director of Moti Mahal, told the Delhi court that his grandfather Kundan Lal Gujral created the dish after pondering what he should do with the leftover