At 72, Manju Kothari still fondly remembers her mother’s recipe for gondh ke ladoo. Gondh, a natural edible gum, is mixed with jaggery, flour and ghee to make this quintessentially Rajasthani winter sweet. “I make them, too,” Manju shares, “I learnt it from my mother. But the taste that she or my mother-in-law could bring out of these recipes, I can’t do the same.”
Manju, a native of Churu, Rajasthan, now calls Surat, Gujarat home. Despite her humble demeanour, her family recognises her as a culinary treasure trove. Her recipes, rooted in centuries-old traditions, are a testament to her cultural heritage. However, as time marches on, these age-old recipes risk fading into oblivion.
The changing dynamics of family structures and the increasing influence of modern food culture threaten to erode the rich tapestry of traditional Rajasthani cuisine. Local ingredients and time-honoured cooking techniques are gradually disappearing, leaving a void in the culinary landscape.
Founded by Dipali Khandelwal, a native of Jaipur, ‘The Kindness Meal’ seeks to preserve and revive these forgotten dishes by focusing on generational sharing. Dipali’s own journey with food is deeply rooted in her childhood, growing up in a large, joint family where food was a central part of their lives. “As far as I can remember, I was very fond of cooking, very fond of creating my own recipes,” Dipali tells The Better India.
“I grew up with a big family, so there was all this conversation, sharing and experimentation with food,” she says. With a grandfather who was particular about the quality of every single dish he made, down to the location of where the dates should come from, Dipali’s childhood was greatly informed by the food culture she saw around herself.
Dipali spent countless hours with Manju, listening to stories of the food she grew up with in Rajasthan. Manju shared the many recipes she had learned from her elders, explaining how she continues to make them today. These conversations gave Dipali invaluable insights into her field of research, with Manju becoming one of her greatest inspirations in her journey to preserve these forgotten dishes.
Why local dishes are disappearing in Rajasthan
For the past seven years, Dipali has been working in the field of art and cultural festival curation across the country. As this involves a lot of travelling and connecting with people at the grassroots, she ended up noticing a growing trend.
While urban areas were succumbing to the convenience of packaged and processed foods, rural communities were witnessing the erosion of their culinary traditions. “I once spoke to a woman who lived in the outskirts of Bikaner. She said she doesn’t feed her son bajre ki roti (flatbread made out of pearl millets) because he will eventually move to the city and if people see him eating that instead of a wheat chapati, they might make fun of him,” she shares.
As Western influences increasingly permeate local cultures, traditional food habits are facing a decline. A sense of cultural inferiority often leads rural and tribal people to shy away from their traditional cuisine, making them reluctant to share or record their recipes.
Recalling an experience working with a weaving cluster in Rajasthan, she says, “We used to have our meals at different homes each day. However, one particularly hot summer day, I developed a headache and lost my appetite. I declined the aloo chole puri that was prepared for me and instead requested the same chaas and roti that her son was eating.” Chaas roti or simply buttermilk and chapati is often made during the summers when it gets too hot to cook on an open fire mud stove. The dish is simple, made with leftover dried chapati bites crushed into a bowl of cold buttermilk with onions, mint, green chillies and salt. It is a naturally cooling recipe that protects from the strong gusts of loo.
“But she said it in front of her son that it’s not something I would like because it is the food of dehati’s (a derogatory term for villagers). I think that’s one incident, I can never take out of my head,” Dipali says.
“If any urban-looking person asks them for local food, they’ll end up making daal bati (Lentil and wheat bread balls), thinking that’s all we have the taste for,” she reflects. The pressure to conform to urban food preferences and the commercialisation of local food culture was evident. But the irony, as Dipali found, was that these people were sitting on a treasure trove of unique, locally grown, and indigenous foods — foods that were on the verge of being lost forever.
Initially, Dipali’s journey began as a personal quest to understand her roots. This led her to embark on in-depth research, exploring the remote corners of Rajasthan. She meticulously documented local eating habits, indigenous ingredients, their seasonal availability, storage techniques, and the diverse recipes they inspired.
She broadly identifies nine cultural zones in Rajasthan on the basis of geography, the agricultural features, and language. Due to its location, Marwar, or the desert region of Rajasthan, has always depended on forged ingredients instead of greens. Ingredients like pholga or fogla (Cooling food), ber (Rajasthani Plum), ker shangri (Caper berry) are commonly consumed. Most of the Rajasthani food served around the country like laal maas (Red Meat Curry), daal bati, ker shangri ki sabzi (Caper berry curry) all come from these regions. But what about the rest of it?
For example, the Bagad region which comprises Hunumangarh and Ganganagar, is also known as the Punjab of Rajasthan, because of its lush and fertile lands. Their eating habits are very different from Marwar. The Chambal river flows in the Mewar region, and because of the availability of fresh water, they have a lot of dishes that include fish. But because it does not fit into the homogenous idea of Rajasthan, all this is often excluded.
Through her curated dining experiences and pop-up events, Dipali brings out these underrated aspects of Rajasthani cuisine. She introduces these dishes to a wider audience and helps them develop a deeper connection to the food they’re enjoying by giving them a thorough understanding of its origins and cultural significance.
Encouraging children to document their family recipes
One of the core principles of ‘The Kindness Meal’ is generational sharing, where older generations pass down their knowledge of food and recipes to younger people. This is crucial in a time when traditional recipes are being lost due to the changing dynamics of family structures and lifestyles.
They organise ‘Food Culture Play Dates’ for children aged between seven and 14, which aims to teach children about the importance of food in their cultural heritage. “We train the kids to be ethnographic and document their family recipes,” Dipali explains. “It also creates this sense of wonder — what was the food, and where is it coming from? And makes you want to know more.” The children are encouraged to speak to their family members about the food they ate growing up and the stories around it.
Dipali recalls a heartwarming tale from one of their sessions, where a child shared her father’s family’s tradition of drinking “jadi ber ki chai”, a tea made from the dried fruit of the ber tree, to help her grandmother with insomnia. The child’s father was incredibly moved by the memory, as he realised how important this family ritual had been, and how it had slipped away when the family moved to Jaipur.
Sanjana Sarkar, 38, who works with the French Embassy and serves as the director of Alliance Française, Jaipur, describes herself as someone who “lives to eat”. During one of the Food Culture Play Dates, children from various schools, diverse in terms of financial backgrounds, came together. “On the first day, we noticed that when asked about what type of food they like, they all had a common preference for processed and packaged foods,” she recalls; “But the next day, when they came with their stories about ber ki chai (Rajasthani plum tea) and lehsun ki kheer (Garlic rice pudding), the curiosity was palpable.”
At the end of the two day workshop, they made a binder with all the traditional recipes shared by the children. “The binder is kept in our library here, and we’ve archived those recipes to do our part in preserving this rich food heritage,” she says.
“We want to encourage children to enjoy their own home, community, or state’s food and champion it before it all begins to look and taste the same.” By documenting and sharing these recipes, ‘The Kindness Meal’ is helping future generations not lose touch with their culinary heritage.
Helping people connect to their roots
Manohar Kabeer (32), a communications professional, found out about ‘The Kindness Meal’ when a friend shared a reel of theirs. “I felt as though I was the beneficiary of what she was trying to do,” he shares. A Rajasthani who grew up in Maharashtra, Manohar was taken back to summers in his nani’s (grandmother) house. “There would be a lot of dishes made with bajra (pearl millets), I especially remember the rabdi (a thickened, sweetened milk dish). Then there were foraged foods like mangodi (a variation of the mung bean), and sangri (desert bean) that would be used to make sabzi,” he says.
Manohar’s parents moved to Maharashtra in the 1990s, but his trips back were marked by the food they ate. His nana (grandfather) owned buffaloes and camels. “I even remember waking up to the sound of the bilona (a wooden churner which was used to churn curd into fermented makkhan or butter). We were very greedy about it, so we’d eat as much as possible in those two months,” he fondly recalls. After moving out and living alone, he started ordering Rajasthani food online, and often chose gatte ki sabzi (Gram flour dumpling curry), although he admits that his mother doesn’t consider it “proper food”.
“Every state in our country is actually a country in itself. So, you cannot label it as just Rajasthani food or Gujarati food. Every community, culture, geography, changes every few kilometres and we need to start speaking about these micro cuisines sooner than later,” Dipali says.
Apart from research and documentation, and bringing eyes to Rajasthani food via her informative Instagram videos, Dipali also curates pop-up traveling museums, which are filled with tangible things from across Rajasthan. There are ingredients and foods that people are free to taste along with other components such as photo essays, audio stories, artworks. “Even Rajasthani people come and tell us that they have heard about these ingredients but it’s the first time seeing them,” she shares.
“The whole creation is made of multiple components, keeping in mind that if I’m taking it to, let’s say, Meghalaya, it should make the viewer think not just about my culture but also of their own. I want this to be a touch point where somebody interacts with it, they go back home and call their mother, asking about an ingredient or for a recipe. Something they used to have as a child and they don’t make it anymore,” she says.
As Dipali says, “Food is not just a matter of entertainment or sustenance. It’s also an identity.” And through her work, she is ensuring that the rich culinary traditions of Rajasthan — and beyond — are preserved for generations to come.
Edited by Arunava Banerjee, All images courtesy Dipali Khandelwal
