Food History as a New Trend in Indian Historical Research: A Historiographical Analysis

Food is undoubtedly a wonderful way to get inside a culture. Food has always been a barometer of mankind's social standing and aspirations. Food and eating practices have huge prospect of being used by historians to define socio-economic, cultural, even political developments of any area in any era. This paper explores how food history has appeared as a new trend in historical research various countries including India, how food history has become enmeshed with other disciplines like Anthropology, Nutrition, Sociology, Medical Science, how issues of identity and self-fashioning of any particular class, caste, or community are getting entangled with food practices and how Indian scholars are getting more involved with food history since the late twentieth century. In short, this paper aims at depicting the brief history of food history writing in India.