Introduction: Forgotten Food Histories of South Asia

Heritage food is a boom industry in India and Pakistan today. Five-star hotels and fashionable restaurants tout menus replete with “lost recipes” and “gastronomic traditions,” while colonial-era eateries – Karim’s in Delhi being one of the most famous – turn their history into franchise. Food festivals, too, from Lahore to Chennai bring historic flavors to a general public hungry for dishes with provenance. For those wanting to bring home “centuries old food traditions,” bookstores stock a colorful array of cookbooks selling South Asian cuisine through the prism of kitchen stories or a royal banquet. To make or complement those recipes, handy online providers and trendy grocers alike market heirloom food products: from Sempulam Sustainable Solutions’ “traditional organic rice” to Bengalaru-based Loafer & Co’s “local grain, global bread” made with “ancient” grains. Since the runaway success of “Raja, Rasoi aur Anya Kahaniyaan” (“Kings, Kitchens and Other Stories”) – heading for Season 5 in 2023 – Netflix has capitalized on this interest in “culinary traditions” to keep viewers hanging on for “more like this.” Vloggers and bloggers from Instagram to TikTok enrich their #foodporn with a spoonful of Wikihistory to win over subscribers and rack up the “likes.” Yet, as journalist Sourish Bhattacharyya noted way back in 2015, much of the hype around India’s “lost recipes” and “heritage cuisine” is little more than “a lot of chatter.” “We need historians,” he concluded, if practitioners aim to do more than “scratch the surface.” Bringing historians into partnership with practitioners – including heritage activists, writers, street vendors, performers, chefs and farmers – was at the core of the broader project out of which this special issue on “Forgotten Food Histories of South Asia” has emerged. In 2019, scholars and culinary experts from the United Kingdom, India, and Canada came together to frame an original program of publicly engaged research and global knowledge mobilization under the title: “Forgotten Food: Culinary Memory, Local Heritage and Lost Agricultural Varieties in India.” This project successfully obtained funding from the Global Challenges Research Fund through the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom (2019–2023). The nature of that funding required the building of “fair and equitable partnerships” with the aim of using academic research to “improve lives and opportunity” in line with the United Nations’ sustainable development goals. The team of food studies scholars, with close links to public history and community groups, believed that fostering an awareness of historic recipes and culinary heritage could tangibly contribute to social cohesion and the mediating of difference, especially at a time of heightened communal tensions and violence in India. A key question for the Forgotten Food research project was how and why assumed fixities in contemporary South Asia – as captured in nationalist and communal discourses especially – had evolved or varied historically in terms of dietary norms and culinary issues. Why did certain flavors, foodways and eating practices from South Asia GLOBAL FOOD HISTORY 2023, VOL. 9, NO. 2, 95–106 https://doi.org/10.1080/20549547.2023.2215161