The year is 1857 when in India Lord Canning was the last viceroy from the Company Bahadur. Lord Canning was fond of lending his name to structures, roads, jails etc. He decided, against some advice, to build a new port other than Calcutta in the Bengal tide country. The port, named Port Canning, was completed and was destroyed within 5 years by a tidal storm, as was predicted by an expert. It was around this time a sweet maker in Calcutta created a new sweet which was black/dark red balls soaked in syrup. He named his new product Lady Canning. It had nothing in common with the Lady as she was white, thin and tall. But the name stuck and the sweet was a runaway success. Soon people in their haste started calling it ledijeny. [source: Amitav Ghosh, “THE HUNGRY TIDE”
{My extrapolation): Ledijeny when it arrived in Lucknow became ledijamin, ledujamin then golujamin and finally gulabjamun. The port Lord Canning is now a town called Canning, not Gulabcomun.
