We are a group of writers, bloggers, researchers, story-tellers, home-cooks, photographers, and entrepreneurs, united by a common love of our diverse regional Indian cuisines and cooking practices. We are also a group of rice enthusiasts, with many curiosities about India’s astonishingly diverse array of regional rice varieties, cuisines, and rice cultures. What do we really know about the rices we consume? Is rice just a blank palette on which we dollop other tastes—or is it a flavor and a value and a set of unique properties unto itself that we have forgotten to truly appreciate?
We approach rice, each in our own ways, via texts and poems and folksongs, via research papers and formal written materials, via conversations with farmers, conservators, development workers, healers, family members, other cooks like ourselves, in the field or along the way to the field; via temples and weddings and feasts and fasts and all the other traditions that collectively constitute the “rice cultures” of India. Our approaches are as varied as the rice varieties we investigate. You can read more about Shalikuta’s methodology on our “About The Project” page.
Together, we currently represent seven states of India: Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Gujarat, Odisha, Jharkhand, and West Bengal. Others who have come and gone from this project have contributed materials from Coorg, Assam, and Andhra Pradesh. Our hope is to establish and grow the project such that membership in the collective is reflective of all the major rice-growing regions of India.
Deepa S. Reddy
A cultural anthropologist by habit and profession with the University of Houston-Clear Lake, I’m fascinated by the mirror that food holds up to how we function as individuals and as societies. I’m deeply committed to bringing anthropological lenses to everyday conversations about food, to the study of native plant species and ethnobotanical aspects of cultural traditions, and the recovery and decolonization of our food systems. Shalikuta is my dream of gathering all the bits and pieces of our traditional knowledge (TK) to foster greater appreciation of the cultural ecologies of rice, and to bring greater biodiversity to our plates.
SHEETAL BHATT
I am a development professional by training and have worked extensively with some of the most marginalized communities of Gujarat. In 2015, I embarked upon the journey to document Gujarati foodways, including Gujarat’s micro cuisines, fading culinary practices and heirloom seeds. One of the fascinating findings of this journey has been the lesser-known varieties of Gujarat’s heritage rices protected and nurtured by the small farmers living at the margins.
Sweta Biswal
I am a culinary/cultural researcher and IT professional employed with ByteIQ Analytics. I am an advocate for documenting/ preserving folk stories and the inherent wisdom embedded in them. And since food, including rice, is best studied from a cultural perspective, it forms a major area of my research.
VIJhay ganesh
I became a wellness cook after the stresses of losing my father and stepping up to manage his palm oil business. Changing my lifestyle and my food has filled me with vitality and helped me notice how we are moving towards convenience without including our local wisdom on food. I also observed farmers cooperatives selling the finest quality ingredients (especially rice) and how we are fast losing the knowledge on how to cook with them and extract the best of what they can offer. I learnt cooking from traditional healers to restore our knowledge and run “Maiyam PastFood,” a consultancy company, where I reinstate these perspectives on food via sensorial experiences.
Pratiba bhat
I’m a food writer, food photographer and an engineer. From the past decade, I have been writing and portraying the beautiful, rich cuisines of Tulunadu and Konkan regions on my blog. Rice has been a mainstay on my plate for years together and the love for rice is so much, that I cannot imagine a day of mine going without that moreish rice morsel.
sayantani mahapatra
I am a trained designer running a handloom and handicraft business predominantly with women artisans of Bengal. Cooking is my love language and being a firm believer of the ancient wisdom of our foremothers I decided to chronicle Bengal’s rare recipes, vanishing food practices and folk stories through my blog. Rice in Bengal is not only a food grain but our prized cultural resource. It has shaped our history, our society, our culture, our festivities, our economy and also had laid a foundation for our spirituality. Rice for me is a sacred grain and its’s my biggest passion project to research into the almost forgotten world of heritage rice and to stand by the people who have protected and nurtured it so far.
jyoti shukla
I am an Indian heritage enthusiast and researcher with an educational background in History and Heritage management. I have worked on social projects with refugees in Germany, led system reform projects in Haryana, and engaged with crafts communities in Ahmedabad, Kutch [Gujarat] and Sonipat [Haryana]. I enjoy writing about living heritage focusing on India’s traditional food, and crafts and am particularly interested in understanding food and its connection to ecological systems. Rice has been an integral part of my home-cooking in Jharkhand and cultural life.
Materials on this website (written and visual) have also been contributed by others who are no longer part of the collective, notably: Parishruti Hazarika, Radhika Penagonda, Anjali Ganapathy, and Aparna Balasubramanian.
If you’d like to help us out, whether it’s by telling us about a rice you love or that you found in some far flung corner–or in some other capacity, do check out our WAYS YOU CAN HELP page.
