Indupalli: A village whose cooks have made their presence felt all over the world

Vijayawada: Ninety per cent of the population of the village Indupalli in Krishna district has a single profession — cooking.

About 100 years ago, Chowdary Babu, a famous barrister in Machilipatnam and Vijayawada, lived in Indupalli.

His family used to travel a lot, making it difficult to have home-cooked food all the time.
Chowdary’s wife thus selected Vaddanapu Koteswara Rao, a boy who was a domestic help in the house, and instructed him in the art of cooking.

When Koteswara Rao grew up, he was appointed as a peon in the local school. His art of cooking got publicity when he helped a teacher in his daughter’s wedding.

From then, all the teachers demanded his services.

Indupalli and the surrounding villages of Nandamuru, Manikonda and Chikinala soon got a taste of his dishes and in no time he was the most sought after cook in the area.

Over the years, celebrities and politicians like Rajiv Gandhi, Buta Singh, Jalagam Vengala Rao, Anjaiah, etc. heard about his prowess.

Koteswara Rao later became the personal cook for NTR and Sobhan Babu on outdoor shootings and toured almost the entire country with them. Koteswara Rao passed on his culinary skills to 110 masons from all castes and religions in the village during his lifetime.

The second generation of cooks from the village trained another 20 each.

Over the years, some of the Indupalli cooks have settled in Vijayawada, Hyderabad, Visakhapatnam, Chennai, Bellary, Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi.

They are the chief chefs of conclaves like TANA (Telugu Association of North America) meetings, Telugu Desam’s Mahanadu, the Congress and the Communist parties’ plenary meetings.

They prepare food for guests numbering anywhere from 1,000 to 1 lakh and guarantee satisfaction of all.

M. Bhaskara Rao, a disciple of Koteswara Rao said, “We started working with him for half a rupee. We were just teenagers then. He taught us how to select ingredients, how to balance the salt and mirchi powder. With the art he has bestowed upon us, we are now leading a decent life.”

After the first generation of Koteswara Rao’s disciples spread over the region, Indupalli changed a lot.

There are no huts in the village. Everyone has bought two-three acres of land and earns an average of Rs 5,00,000 a year.

Some of the cooks even have children settled in the US, Canada and Australia.

The fourth generation of cooks from the village has even taught in multi-cuisine restaurants abroad. Arepalli Vasantha Rao is one of them. He was in Libya for one year.

“We have Indians everywhere. To satisfy their taste buds, the companies employing us. I worked on a contract in a production house and taught them,” he said.

Wielding the ladle with flair are the cooks from Indupalli.

There is a saying that once we taste the food made by Indupalli cooks, we can easily identify it the second time. The cook may be different, but the taste is the same.

What could be the special ingredients they possess to work the magic? Bhaskara Rao says, “The devotion and dedication towards work is the special ingredient in our pockets. We are satisfied with what we get, and have no greed to take another order and being busy on the same day. We are all booked for events nearly six months before the day. On December 7, it is the marriage of the son of minister Pattipati Pulla Rao. His aides booked someone from the village for it. Recently, a man close to Mr Alapati Rajendra Prasad contacted us for booking on the same day, December 7, for the marriage of the MLA’s d-ughter. We had to regret we couldn’t accommodate him. We turned down the order from minister Kamineni Srinivas for his daughter’s marriage on December 17. We couldn’t agree as we had already accepted another order.”

The integrity and goodness possibly is the special ingredient of cooks from Indupalli.

The 500 cooks and helpers of Indupalli are busy on almost all the auspicious dates on the calendar.

Another cook said that due to increasing demand for the Indupalli cooks, some persons are impersonating them.

He added, “We caught a guy in Hyderabad last month. He pleaded guilty and begged for forgiveness. We beat him up and warned him not to damage the reputation of cooks from our village because no one else knows our distinctive style of cooking.”

Due to the increased de-mand and travel expenses, Indupalli cooks prefer to live in cities like Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai and Delhi, with a considerable population of Telugu-speaking people.

To ensure they share and spend some quality time together, the villagers devised a tradition of reunion.

Fourteen years ago, the cooks in the village founded a trust and constructed a Saibaba temple whose anniversary falls on January 29.

All villagers settled outside are expected to visit their village on that day. The first year, 4,000 members, including family members, gathered in Indupalli.

This year, about 20,000 people visited the village. In 2015, a similar number of people are expected.

Mr Vasantha Rao said, “Villagers living anywhere in the country come home for that single event. We arrange VIP level meals and round the clock cultural programmes through the day and night. All houses in the village will be full of relatives and family members.”

Mr Bhaskara Rao, a board member of the temple said, “We have scheduled the event to January 18 this year, as the January 28 and January 29 are full of auspicious muhurtams after a long time. We don’t want to deprive them of their earnings. For January 18, we are making preparations for 20,000 members at a cost of '14 lakh.  All the cooks in the village prepare dishes on the day and we serve them at four locations in the village for the convenience of the people.”