Hey chickpea, where are you from?

We've just begun harvesting a small batch of desi chana - the small, darker variety. Not Kabuli chana, that's the larger variety. It's light-coloured.

The harvested stalks will be dried, and then threshed to extract the chana or chickpea. Till then, let's dwell on those names - Desi and Kabuli. In these times when nationalism is sort of commodified, chana has an interesting story to tell.

It's a crop that humans are said to have discovered about 10,000 years ago, somewhere around southern Turkey. And over the next few thousand years, it was domesticated in that region - Turkey, Iran and around.

About 6,000 years ago it was then being grown around the Mediterranean, and found its way to the subcontinent towards the later half of the Indus valley civilization. Since then we've taken to it dearly.

India is now the largest producer of chickpea. In that sense, desi or country chana feels right. But it's good to keep in mind that things that we associate so closely with our culture and motherland can have roots from outside too.

Kabuli chana has a similar tale. It's mostly grown in the Mediterranean, North Africa and South America, but when it was introduced to India in the 18th century, it was believed to have come from Afghanistan. And so this variety - light-coloured, bigger and smoother - became Kabuli chana to us.

Historically, food travelled slow. It had no Internet to ride on back then. But wherever it travelled, it found new homes and new avatars. Hummus in west Asia, chole in India and so much more.

Oh, aren't we thankful for those regional forms that the same food, the same ingredient takes?