10/17/2025
Rajasthani cuisine documented with kindness and pride.
“If any urban-looking person asks for local food, they’ll serve daal bati — as if that’s all we have.”
That was the sting in Dipali Khandelwal’s mind when she began asking questions.
Dipali, born and raised in Jaipur, always felt a deep bond with food. In her large joint family, every meal was a story — a fusion of flavors, generations, memories. Her grandfather inspected every dish with almost obsessive precision — where the dates had come from, how each spice danced on the tongue. She learned from him, and from every woman in the kitchen.
As she grew older and traveled across India curating cultural festivals, she started noticing something sad: in many places, the food people once ate with pride was vanishing. In Rajasthan, rural families began shunning their own dishes — choosing packaged or familiar “urban” foods. In one village near Bikaner, a mother told Dipali she stopped giving her son bajre ki roti (millet flatbread) because “if people see him eating that instead of a wheat chapati, they might make fun.”
Dipali knew that a meal is more than taste. It is identity. And yet, centuries of recipes — of foraged greens, of desert berries, of seasonal wisdom — were slipping into silence.
So she started “The Kindness Meal,” a mission rooted in generational sharing. She traveled deep into Rajasthan’s remote corners, knocking on doors, sitting in courtyard kitchens, listening. In Churu, she met 72-year-old Manju Kothari, who still remembered her mother’s recipe for gondh ke ladoo. Manju tried to teach Dipali, but admitted: “I cannot coax the same taste now.”
Together, they documented recipes, one by one — from ker shangri sabzi to ber-fruit chai. Dipali mapped nine cultural zones in Rajasthan, each with its own food identity. In the arid Marwar region, for example, people rely on foraged ingredients like pholga, ber, fogla. But when you tell “Rajasthani cuisine,” mainstream menus often stop at laal maas and daal bati.
Dipali also created pop-ups and travelling exhibitions. At these, people tasted foods they had only heard of. Many Rajasthani visitors themselves would say: “I’ve heard of this ingredient, but never seen it.” Through photos, audio stories, food displays, and art, she challenged people to remember, to care, to ask their mothers and grandmothers: “What did you eat when you were my age?”
She particularly focused on children. In “Food Culture Play Dates,” kids aged 7–14 are taught to act like tiny researchers: ask elders about recipes, write them down, collect stories. One child told how her father’s family used to drink jadi-ber chai (tea brewed from dried ber fruit) to help her grandmother sleep. When that memory emerged, the father wept — realizing it was lost.
A communications professional, Manohar Kabeer, encountered Dipali’s work through a short reel. He was born in Maharashtra, but his roots were Rajasthani. He remembered summers at his nani’s home: millets, sangri sabzi, mangodi, the sound of bilona churners. He felt suddenly grounded, reconnected.
Dipali often says, “Food is not just sustenance. It is identity.” Today, through her documentation, workshops, exhibitions and social media, she is bringing back voices of cuisine that were silenced by time and convenience.
And yet — when you visit her work, and someone tastes a forgotten raita or hears the story behind a desert berry dish — you see faces flush with shock, wonder, sometimes regret. People realize how much they have lost, how thin is the thread to their past.
In that moment, a spoon still on the plate can feel like history itself—and you suddenly understand: to forget food is to forget who we are.
