Monohara

Monohara is the name of a sweet product and village Janai in the district of Hooghly; now in West Bengal is famous for that. Village Janai is a very old place and had a reach tradition socially and culturally. The name of the village flourished during the colonial era of the East India Company mainly due to the Jamindar families like Mukherjee family and other notable families. The adjacent village of Janai is Baksha and it was also a very famous village of Bengal once upon a time the important families was Choudhuri family. Mitra family. Singhi family etc. Famous literary personality of Bengali literature and culture was Kali Prasanna Singha who originated from Baksha. Sri Sachindra Nath Chaudhuri from the Choudhuri family became the Finance Minister of the Government of India during the Prime Minister ship of Sri Lal Bahadur Shastri. 

All the aforesaid names and the personalities had lost in the dusk of history and time today's young generations of Hooghly district perhaps dose not know any detail about the contribution of those eminent personalities of there soil but one thing history itself failed to digest and it still remain as a myth is Monohara of Janai.

Monohara is a sweet product prepared from milk and sugar and the shape can be best describe as a golf ball coated with sugar coating. Now days I saw many people eating the whole thing at a time but that is not the real way to taste Monohara the sugar coating is given on the round sandesh for the purpose of preserving the fragrance of the sweet product. The final garnishing is made with rose petals which are kept on the top of the sweet product.

Previously the Jamindars use to taste the sweet product in a an uncharacteristic way they first used to broke the outer coating of the sweet by a slight touch of the ring finger and just like the petal of a flower; the sugar coated outer surface was opened and the actual sweet product was taken out from inside and was delicious in taste it was so delicious that its name still survived in the memories of sweet loving Bengali people even after few hundreds year of its first innovation.

Bengal is famous for sweet preparations and sweet dish serving for many hundred of years the people who ever visited Kolkata or any part of West Bengal rarely had not take taste of the delicacy of the Bengali Sweet products.

But sorry to say one thing this age old tradition is gradually loosing its originality due to transfusion with cross culture of the adjacent states of India now days a famous sweet product PANTUA is known as GULAB JAMUN but both are not the same thing the typical north Indian Gulab Jamun a sweet dish had dashed out our cute Pantua; my daughter also says; I want to eat Gulab Jamun ! I understand;  I alone is helpless to stop this trend of globalization at best I can pass a deep breath.