A Two-dayInternational Conference 

Plates of Memory, Palates of Change: Memory, Identity, Community, and Millennial Transformations

28–29 March 2026

Call For Papers

To think about food is to think about the social, cultural, and political life of a nation. In India, culinary practices constitute one of the most extensive yet least formally archived repositories of memory. They survive in the gestures of everyday cooking, in ritualised festive preparations, in regional vocabularies of taste, in community prohibitions and allowances, and in the sensory habits passed from one kitchen to another. Food, as Arjun Appadurai reminds us in his writings on gastro-politics, is a field where power, hierarchy, and desire converge. Sidney Mintz’s work on food as both a commodity and a cultural text foregrounds the global entanglements of taste, labour, and economy. Scholars like Krishnendu Ray, Utsa Ray, and Parama Roy have illuminated the Indian kitchen as a site where modernity, aspiration, class, and memory interact in delicate and often contradictory ways.

Culinary traditions in India exemplify Pierre Nora’s notion of sites of memory (lieux de mémoire), because they hold in their textures and techniques the lived pasts of communities — even when those pasts are threatened by displacement, urban erasure, or cultural homogenisation. Recipes act as genealogies; utensils and ingredients carry stories of migration; and food habits inscribe the intimate formations of caste, religion, and gender that constitute the social matrix of the subcontinent. A family’s festival dish, a community’s refusal of certain foods, a street vendor’s inherited technique , each becomes a fragment of cultural heritage that exceeds its material form.

At the same time, the idea of food as heritage has gained scholarly and institutional prominence worldwide. UNESCO’s recognition of culinary traditions as intangible cultural heritage has prompted renewed attention to how recipes, techniques, and foodways are transmitted or lost across generations. Cookbooks, oral histories, kitchen tools, street food routes, and sensory practices all function as archives that preserve the textures of cultural life that formal historical records often overlook. In a country as vast and heterogeneous as India, to study food as heritage is to examine memory in motion: how communities remember themselves through taste, how they negotiate identity in the face of migration or marginalisation, and how they adapt in response to economic change, digital culture, and generational aspiration.

Heritage itself is never static. Laurajane Smith and other heritage theorists have argued that heritage is not merely an object or tradition but a discourse; A process of continuously interpreting and negotiating cultural value. Culinary heritage, in this sense, is shaped as much by contemporary anxieties and aspirations as by the weight of the past. What a community chooses to preserve, modify, display, commodify, or hide tells us as much about present social conditions as about historical memory.

In the contemporary moment, these negotiations have become particularly intense. Millennial and Gen Z aesthetics shaped by globalised wellness cultures, digital self-fashioning, influencer-mediated desire, and the rapid circulation of images have profoundly altered the social life of food. A dish’s value now often lies not only in its taste or history, but in its “shareability,” its aesthetic coherence on Instagram, its alignment with diet cultures, or its novelty within a crowded digital marketplace. Visuality, often described as a “new sensorium,” has transformed food into a performance of identity, both personal and collective.

Simultaneously, the infrastructures of food consumption have shifted dramatically. Cloud kitchens, food delivery apps, algorithmic recommendations, and new entrepreneurial networks have recast culinary practices as data-driven, platform-mediated, and subject to the precarities of gig labour. These transformations occur alongside more traditional political terrains: the use of food to police religious boundaries, regulate caste hierarchies, enforce nationalist sentiment, or articulate regional pride. Debates over “purity,” vegetarianism, halal certification, fasting practices, and festival foods have all intensified in recent years, revealing how food becomes a proxy for broader ideological conflicts.

Caste, perhaps more than any other axis, shapes India’s culinary imagination. The politics of commensality, kitchen segregation, the policing of touch, the coding of “pure” and “polluted” foods, and Dalit rearticulations of culinary identity underscore how food is implicated in everyday forms of violence and resistance. Gender performs an equally constitutive role: the kitchen is still a site of feminised labour, but also of creative authorship, entrepreneurship, and assertion. Women’s culinary knowledge forms a vast unacknowledged archive, maintained through repetition, labour, and care, yet often unrecorded in formal histories. Queer and alternative food spaces similarly challenge the heteronormative and patriarchal assumptions that have long governed culinary discourse.

Migration whether forced, economic, or aspirational continues to reshape India’s food geographies. Partition kitchens, refugee foodways, roadside dhabas run by migrant workers, the cuisines of border regions, and diasporic reinterpretations of taste reveal food as a resilient technology of adaptation and survival. At the same time, environmental crises have foregrounded the ecological stakes of eating: unsustainable agricultural practices, food waste, water scarcity, climate change, and the fragility of supply chains complicate the sensory pleasure of eating with questions of planetary ethics.

Against this complex backdrop, the present conference seeks to create a platform in which scholars, practitioners, students, writers, and public intellectuals may reflect on the multiplicity of meanings attached to food in India today. We are interested in work that is grounded in rigorous research yet sensitive to the affective, sensory, and lived dimensions of culinary life.

We encourage papers that explore food as archive, as metaphor, as performance, as memory, as identity, as livelihood, as conflict, and as aspiration. Above all, we hope to foreground food as heritage: a fragile, dynamic, and constantly evolving cultural inheritance that requires thoughtful documentation, critical interpretation, and responsible stewardship.

Indicative Themes

(These themes are suggestive; papers addressing related questions are equally welcome.)

• Food, Memory, Heritage: culinary practices as archives; recipes as carriers of intergenerational knowledge; theories of intangible heritage; regional and community food histories.

• Caste and Cuisine: regimes of purity and pollution; caste-coded kitchens; Dalit food narratives; food refusal and resistance as political acts.

• Religion, Ritual, and Festival: food and sacred rhythms; syncretic traditions; fasting and feasting; conflicts around dietary taboos.

• Gender and Culinary Labour: domestic labour, women as custodians of heritage, masculinities in kitchens, queer and alternative food spaces.

• Migration, Diaspora, and Displacement: kitchens of migration; refugee food traditions; food memories as survival practices; borderland cuisines.

• Marginality and Precarity: street vendors and urban regulation; informal economies; hunger, access, and structural inequality.

• Aesthetic and Visual Cultures of Food: influencer economies; visual consumption; food in literature, cinema, advertising; the politics of representation.

• Millennial and Digital Food Cultures: cloud kitchens, algorithmic taste, delivery platforms, hybrid cuisines, wellness culture, vegan/eco-conscious movements.

• Sustainability and Food Ethics: environmental precarities, agricultural heritage, food waste, slow food philosophies, climate anxieties.

• Culinary Tourism and Policy: branding of regional cuisines; cultural rights; state interventions; heritage preservation and its contradictions.

Submission Guidelines

Abstracts of around 300 words, accompanied by a 100-word biographical note, should be emailed to: heritagemeetsmodernity@gmail.com

Deadline for abstract submission:15 January 2026
Notification of acceptance:25th January 2026
Conference dates:28–29 March 2026
Venue:Aliah University, Park Circus Campus, Kolkata

Selected papers will be considered for publication in an edited volume or peer-reviewed collection stemming from the conference.

Registration Fees (Upon Selection)

For Indian Participants:

• Faculty: ₹2000

• Researchers / PhD Scholars: ₹1000

• Students (PG/UG): ₹700

For International Participants:

• Faculty: €25

• Researchers / PhD Scholars: €15

• Students (PG/UG): €10

Further details regarding payment, final programme, keynote speakers, and logistical arrangements will be communicated to accepted participants.