Pritha Sen
Pritha Sen | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 17 March 1960 |
| Occupations |
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| Years active | 1991–present |
| Known for | Research into the cooking of undivided Bengal |
Pritha Sen (born 17 March 1960) is an Indian food historian and former journalist. She works on the cooking of undivided Bengal, the region split between India and East Pakistan at the 1947 Partition, and has revived dishes from it through pop-up meals and restaurant menus.[1][2] She was a journalist through the 1990s and then worked in the development sector. Her food work began in 2013.[1][3]
Early life
[edit]Sen's family came from Bikrampur, in what is now Bangladesh. Both her grandfathers were posted to Delhi before Partition and the family had been in north India for a generation by the time she was born.[4] Her father's government job moved him often, and Sen grew up in a series of railway colonies before her family settled in Kolkata, when she was a teenager.[4][5] She studied history,[1] and before she became a journalist she taught in a school.[2]
Journalism and development work
[edit]Sen joined Sunday, the Ananda Bazar Patrika Group's weekly, in Kolkata in the early 1990s. Vir Sanghvi was a colleague there.[6] In 1995 she was part of the team that launched Outlook under Vinod Mehta. Writing in the magazine in 2024, she called it the most exciting part of her career.[7]
She left journalism around 2000 to work in microfinance and development,[3] and joined Ashoka in Delhi. Madhukar Shukla's Social Entrepreneurship in India (2020) lists her among people associated with the organisation,[8] and she published a paper on its model in Futures in 2007.[9] The work took her into remote Indian villages, and Sen has said it was spending time in women's kitchens there that made her start paying attention to what people cooked and why.[3][2]
Food history
[edit]Sen has described working as a historian and a reporter at the same time, using colonial-era gazetteers, the papers of tea planters and forest officers, and the memories of people old enough to have eaten Bengali food before 1947.[1]
Her first public pop-up was at Gurgaon in 2014. She served Goalondo steamer curry, a thin chicken curry cooked on the river steamers that ran from Goalundo Ghat into eastern Bengal, where passengers coming up from Sealdah by train changed onto the boats. She spent about three years researching it, drawing on her own family's recollections and on the accounts of people who had travelled the route before the service ended.[1][2] Her pop-ups have since run in Kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Singapore. They usually open with a talk and slides before dining.[1]
In March 2015, Sen cooked in Kolkata with Manzilat Fatima, a great-great-granddaughter of Wajid Ali Shah, on a menu from the Awadh royal kitchen.[1] Later that year, Poonam Singh and Shilpa Sharma asked her to build the Bengali half of the menu at Mustard, their French-Bengali restaurant in Goa. A Mumbai branch followed.[10] The Goa chef, Prasanta Mandal, said the kitchen won a Times Good Food award after following Sen's advice.[1] She has also set up restaurants in Mumbai and Chennai and has consulted for ITC Hotels and Oberoi Hotels.[2]
In 2022, she rebuilt the menu at Yantra, an Indian restaurant in Singapore, with executive chef Pinaki Ray. It was her first role outside India.[3][11][12][13]
She contributed a chapter on the Goalondo curry, "A writer, a cook and a fowl curry", to The Great Padma, a collection on the Padma River edited by Kazi Khaleed Ashraf with a preface by Amitav Ghosh, published by ORO Editions and the Bengal Institute in 2023.[2][14] She has divided her time between Gurgaon, Kolkata, Goa and Mumbai,[4] and her food writing has appeared in Outlook, The Indian Express, The Telegraph and Whetstone.[15]
Reception
[edit]Writing in Two Bengals (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), Pinaki Dasgupta names Sen among those working to bring back recipes lost from East Bengal.[16] She is cited in Digest: A Journal of Foodways and Culture,[17] in a 2020 study of food and decolonisation in West Bengal in Alternation,[18] and in a 2025 article in Media Asia on Bengali food writing online.[19]
Vir Sanghvi has called Sen the best living authority on the history of Bengali cuisine.[6] Tatler Asia described her as one of India's leading food historians.[13] Hindustan Times profiled her in 2018 alongside Pushpesh Pant and Salma Husain.[5] Forbes India and Whetstone have quoted her on chhena and on the origins of rosogolla.[20][21][22]
Selected publications
[edit]- Sen, Pritha (June 2007). "Ashoka's big idea: Transforming the world through social entrepreneurship". Futures. 39 (5): 534–553. doi:10.1016/j.futures.2006.10.013.
- Sen, Pritha (2023). "A Writer, a Cook and a Fowl Curry". In Ashraf, Kazi Khaleed (ed.). The Great Padma: The Epic River That Made the Bengal Delta. Preface by Amitav Ghosh. San Francisco: ORO Editions. ISBN 978-1-957183-05-3.
References
[edit]- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Nevatia, Shreevatsa (7 October 2016). "Reviving heritage cuisine". Man's World India. Retrieved 30 July 2026.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 Dsouza, Krystelle (5 May 2026). Arora, Khushi (ed.). "At 66, she is travelling across rural Indian kitchens to revive forgotten Bengali ingredients". The Better India. Retrieved 30 July 2026.
- 1 2 3 4 David, Samantha (18 December 2022). "Meet the food historian who is reinventing 'lost' Indian cuisines". Her World. Singapore: SPH Media Limited. Retrieved 30 July 2026.
- 1 2 3 Sen, Pritha (16 January 2018). "The partitioning of food". Hard News. Hard News Media Pvt Ltd. Archived from the original on 28 February 2018. Retrieved 30 July 2026.
- 1 2 "When food historians meet, eat and talk". Brunch. Hindustan Times. 14 October 2018. Retrieved 30 July 2026.
- 1 2 Sanghvi, Vir (10 July 2021). "We are in the middle of a chilli boom". virsanghvi.com. Retrieved 30 July 2026.
- ↑ Sen, Pritha (4 August 2024). "Yesterday once more". Outlook. Outlook Publishing India Pvt Ltd. Retrieved 30 July 2026.
- ↑ Shukla, Madhukar (2020). Social Entrepreneurship in India: Quarter Idealism and a Pound of Pragmatism. New Delhi: SAGE Publications India (published 29 January 2021). doi:10.4135/9789353885892. ISBN 978-93-5388-237-2.
- ↑ Sen, Pritha (June 2007). Kapoor, Rakesh (ed.). "Ashoka's big idea: Transforming the world through social entrepreneurship". Futures. Transformative Initiatives. 39 (5): 534–553. doi:10.1016/j.futures.2006.10.013. ISSN 0016-3287.
- ↑ "Pritha Sen weaves stories through Bengali dishes". Get Bengal. P&M Communications. 27 October 2018. Archived from the original on 24 October 2020. Retrieved 30 July 2026.
- ↑ Teo, Rachelle (6 September 2022). "The new Yantra restaurant comes with a refined menu designed by food revivalist Pritha Sen". Robb Report. Singapore: Robb Report Media LLC. Retrieved 30 July 2026.
- ↑ Tan, Dawson (11 August 2022). "Yantra reopens with refreshed Indian fare and stunning new interiors". Time Out Singapore. Time Out Group Plc. Retrieved 30 July 2026.
- 1 2 Goh, Amanda (10 August 2022). "New restaurant alert: newly reopened Yantra's menu is an ode to comforting Indian heritage fare". Tatler Asia. Tatler Asia Limited. Retrieved 30 July 2026.
- ↑ Sen, Pritha (2023). "A Writer, a Cook and a Fowl Curry". In Ashraf, Kazi Khaleed (ed.). The Great Padma: The Epic River That Made the Bengal Delta. Preface by Amitav Ghosh. San Francisco: ORO Editions. ISBN 978-1-957183-05-3.
- ↑ Sen, Pritha (13 December 2015). "For the love of food: A grave danger stalks the Kasundi". The Indian Express. The Indian Express Group. Retrieved 30 July 2026.
- ↑ Dasgupta, Pinaki (2023). "Defining Bengali cuisine: The culinary difference between West Bengal and Bangladesh". In Banik, Arindam; Barai, Munim Kumar (eds.). Two Bengals. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 331–366. doi:10.1007/978-981-99-2185-0_11. ISBN 978-981-99-2184-3.
- ↑ Rana, Navreet Kaur (2022). "The perpetual quest for 'authenticity' in Indian cuisine: An answer through history and folklore". Digest: A Journal of Foodways and Culture. 9 (1): 25–54. Retrieved 30 July 2026.
- ↑ Dey, Sayan; Maart, Rozena (2020). "Decolonisation and food: The burden of colonial gastronomy – stories from West Bengal". Alternation Special Edition. 33: 290–329.
- ↑ Mahapatra, Antara Singha; Manjusha, C. B.; Das, Arnab (2025). "From hilsa to hashtag: Culinary culture in contemporary Bengali digital media". Media Asia. 53 (3): 907–913. doi:10.1080/01296612.2025.2585036.
- ↑ Chanda, Kathakali (28 April 2018). "Reinventing the rosogolla". Forbes India. Retrieved 30 July 2026.
- ↑ Sankari, Rathina (6 November 2020). "Rossogolla: The sweet that left India divided". Whetstone. Retrieved 30 July 2026.
- ↑ Ghosh, Agnee (7 October 2021). "Much ado about dessert". Whetstone. Retrieved 30 July 2026.