The busiest shopping street in Kozhikode has two names. In Malayalam it is Mittai Theruvu, sweet street. In English it is Sweet Meat Street, universally shortened to SM Street, and the explanation you will be given for that name — by guides, by blogs, by a good many published articles — is that the dark halwa sold along it looked so much like slabs of meat that the British called it sweet meat. It is a lovely story and it is almost certainly backwards.
Sweetmeat is just an English word
A sweetmeat is confectionery. It has meant confectionery in English since long before any European reached this coast, and the reason is that meat in older English meant food in general rather than flesh specifically — the same sense that survives in "meat and drink" and in the nutmeat of a walnut. A sweetmeat is a sweet food. That is the whole etymology, and it required nobody to look at a tray of halwa and think of mutton.
So the English name is not a joke, a mistranslation or a colonial mishearing. It is a straight, slightly old-fashioned translation of Mittai Theruvu — sweet street, rendered as sweetmeat street by people for whom sweetmeat was the ordinary word for what was being sold. The romantic version has the causation exactly reversed: the halwa did not name the word, the word named the street.
- A colonial-era place name explained by a vivid visual mix-up is worth checking against a dictionary first.
- If the "mistake" is a real word with an older meaning, the mistake is usually the modern reader’s, not the original namer’s.
- Ask what the local name is. Here it is Mittai Theruvu — sweet street — and the English is a plain translation of it.
- A good folk etymology survives because it is more fun. That is not evidence, but it is the reason you keep meeting it.
The halwa itself, which needs no myth
Kozhikodan halwa is its own thing: dense, glossy, heavily ghee-laden, cut in slabs from a tray and sold by weight in a wall of colours — black, red, orange, white, and a coconut version and a wheat version. The black is the classic. It keeps well, which is precisely why it became the thing people carried home and why it built a street, and it is one of the few Indian sweets that genuinely improves for being solid enough to slice.
The trade behind it is a migration story. Sweet-making families from Gujarat settled here under the Zamorins and set up shops, and a Parsi commercial presence preceded them. A port that had been receiving foreign merchants since the thirteenth century absorbed another two communities and ended up with a signature sweet that is not quite like anything else in Kerala. That is the actual history, and it is more interesting than the meat.
What the street is now
It is not a food street and it would be a mistake to arrive expecting one. SM Street is the city’s main pedestrianised shopping run — cloth, gold, books, bags, luggage, toys, phone cases — with the halwa shops as one strand among many, concentrated at the Mittai Theruvu end. It is around half a kilometre, it is busiest in the evening, and it is genuinely pedestrian, which in an Indian city centre is worth something on its own.
Buying halwa is straightforward and slightly adversarial in a friendly way: you will be handed pieces to taste, from several trays, and you are expected to taste them. Buy by weight, say which colours you want, and be aware that the very famous shops are not automatically the best ones — the same is true of the biryani a few streets away.
The last thing worth saying is that this street is why the city’s literary designation is not as surprising as it sounds. A place with a five-hundred-year-old commercial street, a bookshop trade along it and a habit of absorbing whoever turns up was always going to end up with something to read.