This new video series explores India’s past through food

Indian History, Thali by Thali, an initiative of the Historically Tempered Collective, allows experts to talk about a number of things food touches on, including gender, class, caste and hierarchies

What were the people of Harappa possibly eating over four-and-a-half thousand years ago? Evidence suggests millets, garlic, ginger, brinjal, peas, lentils, bananas, grapes, mangoes, turmeric, walnuts, meat and fish, say archaeologists Supriya Varma and Jaya Menon in the first episode of a new video series titled Indian History, Thali by Thali.

The series, an initiative of the Historically Tempered Collective, is an attempt to “start a conversation about history with something as basic as what you are eating,” says Meera Iyer, convenor at INTACH Bengaluru chapter, who is part of the collective with historian Janaki Nair, author and educator Saisudha Acharya and educator Ajay Cadambi.

The 15-episode series, which was formally launched last week at Sabha BLR, closely examines how food shapes culture, hierarchies, religious rituals, and global trade, given that India is “this madhouse about food. It is so complex, hierarchised and divided, that one can talk endlessly about a large number of themes, just using food as the peg,” says Nair.

Ruins of the Harappan city, Dholavira | Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

The idea for this video series sparked around two years ago, after Iyer, Cadambi and Acharya attended a course that INTACH had organised with Janaki titled ‘Understanding Contemporary India’. “It was Ajay Cadambi who kicked off that conversation because he said we have so many interesting materials and resources for teaching American and European history, but we don’t have them in India. So, I said, let us make them,” recalls Nair. And turning to videos was an obvious choice because “we felt the video form was accessible,” says Cadambi.

The videos also seek to shift the discourse away from viewing India’s ancient history almost exclusively through the lens of a glorious ancient India, something Nair finds tiresome. “Both anti-colonial nationalism and current-day ethno-nationalism need history in particular ways, but we are not interested in nationalist discourses,” she says, pointing out that there are ways of thinking about the history of ordinary people in lively and interesting ways, which is history as an argument about the past.