rajma

The kidney bean, Phaseolus vulgaris, has no Sanskrit ancestry. It was domesticated in Mexico and the Andes roughly eight thousand years ago and arrived on the Indian subcontinent in Portuguese trading ships around 1550, landing first in Goa. When North Indian cooks encountered the large dark-red bean, they named it after a pulse they already knew from Sanskrit texts: rājamāṣa, the royal bean. The older name migrated to the new legume with no recorded ceremony or debate.