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A unique new festival in Dehradun celebrates food stories
Summary
The first edition of the Dehradun Food Literature Festival spotlights storytelling around culinary history, regional cuisines, ingredients, and evolution of dining out
From a very early age, I formed an image of Dehradun through the writings of Ruskin Bond, be it The Room on the Roof, Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra or Adventures of Rusty. Later, the writings of other prolific authors such as Stephen Alter created a vivid imagery of the valley and the surrounding mountains of Uttarakhand. During many visits to the city in the ensuing years, I would hungrily scout for landmarks that the writers had mentioned in their books. To me, literature and Dehradun have always been intertwined. It’s no wonder then that in recent years, annual literary gatherings have come up to celebrate this connection—take for instance, the Dehradun Literature Festival, which started in 2017 or the Crime Literature Festival, which has seen two editions in 2023 and 2024. The latest to join the bandwagon is the Dehradun Food Literature Festival, to be held on 22 March at Monsoon, a newly-launched regional Indian restaurant.
This genre-specific event is being hailed as the first such festival to celebrate storytelling in food. A collaboration between Shruti Gupta, founder of the eatery, and culinary chronicler—food consultant Rushina Munshaw-Ghildiyal, the debut edition aims to highlight conversations around history, regional cuisines, ingredients, and evolution of dining out, viewed through the prism of food writers, anthropologists, historians and food commentators. Some of the panelists include Rana Safvi, Sadaf Hussain, Ruth Dsouza Prabhu, Kalyan Karmakar, Nikhil Merchant, Anubhav Sapra and more.
There is a rather personal story underlying the festival—it marks the completion of 20 years in food writing for Munshaw-Ghildiyal, who has now made Dehradun her home. “I think food writing found me rather than the other way around. When I started out, there were only a handful of great food writers such as Vikram Doctor and Antoine Lewis. Now the genre has expanded—there are so many different ways in which stories around food can be told," she elaborates. The proliferation of diverse media, ranging from independent publications, digital platforms and social media have added new voices to this field. Content in different regional languages has added depth to the storytelling. It is to celebrate this diversity that Munshaw-Ghildiyal wanted to organise a food literature festival—and that too in a city such as Dehradun, which has long been a hub for learning and writing.
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She connected with Gupta while curating the Uttarakhand segment for the menu at Monsoon and realised that they were kindred spirits. “Both Shruti and her husband, Abhishek, are enthusiastic about food, and extremely knowledgeable. We felt that Monsoon, which celebrates regional flavours, would make for a lovely backdrop to culinary conversations," she adds.
At a time when Munshaw-Ghildiyal was mulling over a gathering around food writing, Gupta was also thinking of ways to build a community at Monsoon. “Dehradun is such an interesting place, with people settling here from different parts of the country," she says. Gupta herself hails from Kanpur and has spent a major chunk of her life in Delhi as a practicing lawyer. Her husband, Abhishek, on the other hand belongs to Dehradun. And now together they run restaurants in the city such as Coco Osteria, an Italian eatery, a modern craft cocktail bar and now Monsoon. “I have a friend—a geologist—who does food pop-ups to celebrate the flavours from back home in Assam. I wanted Monsoon to be a space where such like minded people could collaborate. When Rushina started working on the Uttarakhand menu for us, we got talking about doing community-building events. And that’s how this festival came about," she adds.
In the past month-and-a-half, the various ideas and conversations have coalesced to give the festival its present shape and form. People, who share the enthusiasm and ethos of the curators, have joined in along the way. One such person is Maanas Lal, secretary of the Doon Cultural and Literary Society and the curator of the Crime Literature Festival. Just like Gupta and Munshaw-Ghildiyal, he too has built a literature festival from scratch in Dehradun. Primarily a crime writer, Lal had the germ of an idea for the Crime Literature Festival at a bookshop, Book World, helmed by Siddhant Arora. “We discussed how a genre-specific lit fest might work better, and in the two editions that we have held since, the event has seen participation by the finest voices in crime writing in both cinema and literature," he says.
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When Gupta—a close friend—shared the idea for a food literature festival with him, Lal was all for it. “There is so much happening in the food writing space that it is the right time to be the first movers in the field. I am sure there will be other festivals in a similar vein in the future, but the first one always sets the tone," shares Lal, who is not only part of the organising committee of the Dehradun Food Literature Festival but is also moderating a panel discussion as well.
For participants such as Sadaf Hussain, chef and author of the book, Masala Mandi, the festival is interesting for bringing together “people who write about food, people who cook, and people who do both." He is part of a panel that discusses an ingredient-forward approach. “I belong to Jharkhand, and I have noticed the nature of the local vegetable markets change over the years. Seasonality has given way to ingredients, which are available all the year round. Should we approach a romantic approach towards ingredients or look at the need of the time when there are a lot more mouths to feed, and more produce is required? I am looking at both these perspectives," he says.
Another fascinating session is the opening one on the history of food featuring historian Rana Safvi and anthropologist Lokesh Ohri, who is based out of Dehradun. The latter is looking at how the nature of cooking practices changed over time, with the opening up of new routes and coming in of settlers from the plains. “Dehradun is an interesting place. Much before the Mohand pass opened up in the region, the city was connected to Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh via the Timli pass. So, there was an influence from that part of UP," elaborates Ohri. “Gradually Guru Ram Rai, a Sikh Udasin guru, came in from Delhi and settled down here. Mughal emperor Aurangzeb was impressed by him, and a certain Mughal influence came in."
While Safvi will be taking up the connection of the city with the Mughals, Ohri will be focusing more on the Pahadi influence—particularly of the Jaunsar Bawar region, which is a big part of the Doon valley. He will be highlighting the food preferences of the community from the region, which transitioned over time from being pastoralists to an agrarian society. “Goats and sheep have always been prized possessions of the Jaunsari people. One of the festivals, Maroj, which in common language is known as ‘bakron ka festival’, spotlights the way meat is marinated, preserved and cooked," explains Ohri. As per tradition, ribs of goats are sent out to families of girls, who have settled outside of the region after marriage. Since they are unable to come for the festival, food goes out from their homes to them. “I will also be talking about local grains such as the mandua, which were earlier a part of the diet but not so much now," he says.
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The festival, which is right now a day-long affair, hopes to scale up for the future editions. “I hope to see it connect, bring together divergent perspectives and evolving mediums and weave a wonderful new narrative around food in years to come," says Munshaw-Ghildiyal.
