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lexical item

bunny chow

also: bunny, bunny-chow

Sourced4 citations
South African Indian Englisheveryday

A takeaway meal of curry packed into a hollowed-out half or quarter loaf of bread, eaten with the hands and no plate. Named by its filling: mutton bunny, chicken bunny, beans bunny. Originated in Durban and now eaten across South Africa. Definition adapted from Mesthrie's dictionary entry.

Where it comes from

No one person coined this.

It comes from Durban Indian restaurateurs of the Grey Street district. The record credits the speech community and the earliest citation that proves it, because South African Indian English was made by a community over time and not in a moment anyone wrote down.

1972precise to the year

The earliest verified attestation is a 1972 shop window notice in Durban recorded by the DSAE. That is the price tag on an already-established dish, not its beginning: Mesthrie states outright that the date of origin is unclear, and the community accounts he collects point back to the Grey Street restaurants of the mid-twentieth century. Everything before 1972 is oral and undated. The etymology is likewise unsettled, and no winner is picked here. Mesthrie hedges it as 'probably' from the merchant-caste banya, and at least three incompatible community accounts sit inside his entry: Mayat's bania-chow derivation, the Varma letter that Mesthrie explicitly marks unsubstantiated, and a claim that the dish began at Patel's Vegetarian Restaurant in Grey Street. Hajratwala's Leaving India separately names a restaurateur, Ganda, as creator of the beans bunny specifically, not of the dish generally. No named coiner is entered.

What changed on the way out

The dish is now general South African food, well outside the community that made it, and Mesthrie labels the word widespread in South African English. The merchant-caste etymology has become invisible to most people who use the word: bunny is widely misread as rabbit, to the point that Mesthrie records a Durban informant whose nephew's bunny chow takeaway in Santa Barbara was shut down by animal-rights activists who assumed it sold rabbit meat.

In use

Recorded means somebody said it and it was written down. Constructed means it was written here to show the shape of the word, and is an illustration rather than evidence.

The evidence

Community voices first, then the sources closest to the community. Press and dictionary citations are evidence about a word’s spread, not its origin.

  1. community explanationcommunity voice

    G. Varma, letter to the Daily News, 16 January 1984. Provenance is a three-step chain: Varma to Branford's Dictionary of SAE to Mesthrie, who flags it as unsubstantiated. Nobody in the chain saw the original letter; DSAE carries it independently

    G. Varma

    “In those days all Gujarati Hindu businessmen were called 'Banias'”

  2. community explanationcommunity voice

    Zuleikha Mayat, Indian Delights, p. 297, the Durban Women's Cultural Group cookbook, quoted in Mesthrie's entry

    Zuleikha Mayat

    “Bania chow was destined to become bunny chow.”

  3. scholarshipcommunity voice

    Rajend Mesthrie, A Dictionary of South African Indian English (UCT Press 2010; open-access edition 2022, CC BY 4.0), entry bunny-chow. Mesthrie is from KwaZulu-Natal and writes on his own variety

    Rajend Mesthrie

    “Bunny chow originated in Durban, though it is unclear exactly when.”

  4. dictionary

    bunny chow, Dictionary of South African English (Rhodes University); earliest citation a 1972 shop window notice in Durban

    “Bunny chow 20 cents”

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