Dive into Sindhi cooking with a recipe for fried fish

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Fish is the most common and recurring symbol in the Indus valley seals, which were used for trade purposes. Many of these seals have also been found at other contemporaneous sites in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Iran.

The occurrence of fish on these seals is probably because dried fish was one of their chief export items. These exports, including shark fin and maw to China, continued until the time of the British. We call the bounty of the Indus, as ‘fruits of the sea’ or samdh ja mewa since the Indus is referred to as the sea not a river.

Through the ages, almost every traveller or historian has made a reference to the abundance of fish in Sindh’s markets, especially the pallah (hilsa/shad in English, and is related to the herring) has an exalted status in Sindhi cuisine – it’s not just a fish or meat, it’s a pallah or a unique being. It’s the mount of our patron saint Uderolal or Jhulelal, and the God of water, Varuna, whose temple and shrine are both adjacent to each other, and can be found in the village of Uderolal near Nasarpur, Sindh. The pallah is treated as meat in Sindhi cooking, because of its oily texture, and so is never cooked with garlic or much oil.

It can be substituted with salmon or sea trout, or shad – if you live in the USA. Besides pallah, our other favourite fish is also a gift of the Indus, which is referred to as rohita in the Charaka Samhita and recommended because of its ease of digestion and high nutritive value. In Sindhi, we call it Sindhi macchi (fish of Sindh) or by its other name, dumbro.