Ramayana & Parnasala
పర్ణశాల · a house of leaves, warm from inside
The house may change. Home travels with you.
An old word, a leaf-roofed idea, and a Telugu kitchen that refused to be left behind.
Parnasala is a food company from Hyderabad, built on sixty years of one family’s recipes. But the name is far older than us. It comes from the Ramayana — from the simple homes a family made for itself, again and again, on a fourteen-year road.
↓The word
What Parnasala means
Parṇaśālā is a Sanskrit word: parṇa, leaf; śālā, dwelling. A house of leaves — built quickly from what the forest gave, kept simply, warmed entirely by the people inside it. In the old texts the word also means a hermitage: a place where a life of few possessions was still a life of full dignity.
It is not a palace word. That is why we chose it.
The story behind the name
Parnasala and the Ramayana
When Rama, Sita and Lakshmana left Ayodhya, they left the most permanent home imaginable — a palace, a throne, a certainty. What followed was fourteen years of movement: forests, the hermitages of sages, and dwellings they raised with their own hands.
Two of those homes are described with love in the Valmiki Ramayana:
Chitrakuta
Lakshmana built a hut thatched with leaves — so well made that Rama’s joy at entering it is written into the text.
Panchavati
By the Godavari he built another — bamboo pillars, shami branches, a roof of kusha grass. A house the poet calls a feast to the eye.
We should be precise about what we claim: the epic does not call every dwelling of the exile a parnasala. The word names the kind of home they made — small, temporary, complete. And one more thread we hold close: on the Godavari in Telangana, near Bhadrachalam, tradition places that Panchavati leaf-hut at a village which carries the name to this day — Parnasala. The scripture doesn’t say it; generations of Telugu families do. Ours is one of them.
The idea we carry
The walls changed for fourteen years. What did not change travelled with them — family, shared work, daily rituals, hospitality, and food made and eaten together.
Parnasala is not one place. It is the idea that home can be made wherever life takes you.
Our family
Why we chose the name
The name was settled at our own dining table. Whenever the exile came up, our family kept circling the same thought: in those leaf-roofed homes, whatever the three of them ate must have been natural and simple — gathered fresh, made by their own hands, seasoned by nothing but care. Food the way a family makes it when there is nothing else to hide behind.
We would say it almost every time: that is the food we trust. And one day the sentence completed itself — that is what our Parnasala should serve. The same kind of eating: natural ingredients, family recipes, and the stories that come attached to them. It is why we began with podis.
Our kitchen has been running for sixty years across two generations, in one Telugu family. Our parents are its custodians — the podi recipes in our tins are theirs, unchanged. We are the second generation: Dr. Dheeraj Achutuni and Krishna Deepthi Achutuni, brother and sister, founders of Parnasala. Deepthi leads the recipes and the brand.
We make everything through our family company, Aanathi Industries, Hyderabad — a food manufacturer, not a nostalgia project: professional product development, food-safety compliance, quality control, packaging and distribution. The stories are old. The standards are not.
— Dheeraj & Deepthi, Hyderabad
Today
The modern Parnasala
Most families we know are living some version of the exile’s problem, in miniature. A move from the village to Hyderabad. From Hyderabad to Gurgaon or Bangalore. From India to another country entirely. A first apartment far from a grandmother’s kitchen. The address updates; something essential goes missing at dinner.
What people rebuild first, everywhere, is the table. A familiar smell from a small tin. A recipe made the way it was always made. One spoon over hot rice, and a room that was a house becomes, briefly, home. That is the entire business we are in.
Where we begin
Our first chapter: Telugu food
Parnasala begins with Telugu food because that is who we truthfully are. We don’t claim to represent all Telugu cooking — no one can. We represent one family’s version of it, kept honest for sixty years, starting with the six podis our kitchen actually runs on.
Podis came first for a simple reason: of everything in a Telugu kitchen, they travel best. They were made to be carried.
From one Telugu kitchen to the world
Our first home is Telugu.
Our vision is global.
We intend to build Parnasala into an Indian cultural food house — regional recipes, family traditions, festival collections and the stories that come with them, presented to the world with the care they deserve. Every future chapter keeps this first one’s rule: a specific origin, real research, and a genuine relationship between the story and the food.
Wherever you unpack next, the kitchen comes too.
References: Valmiki Ramayana — Ayodhya Kanda, sarga 56 (the leaf-thatched dwelling at Chitrakuta) and Aranya Kanda, sarga 15 (the dwelling at Panchavati), prose translations at valmikiramayan.net · parṇaśālā etymology and classical usage, wisdomlib.org · Parnasala village, Bhadradri Kothagudem district, Telangana — traditional identification. Interpretations of home, family and food on this page are Parnasala’s own reading, offered with respect.