Pritha Sen

Pritha Sen
Born	(1960-03-17) 17 March 1960 (age 66)
Education	Jadavpur University
Occupations	Food historian Food writer Culinary consultant Journalist
Years active	1991–present
Known for	Research into the cooking of undivided Bengal

Pritha Sen (born 17 March 1960) is an Indian food historian, food writer, culinary consultant 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 researched and revived dishes associated with it through pop-up meals and restaurant menus.^[1][2][3] She was a journalist through the 1990s and then worked in the development sector. Her public work on food history began in 2013.^[1][4]

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.^[5] 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.^[5][6] She studied history at Jadavpur University,^[1] and before she became a journalist she taught in a school.^[2]

Sen joined Sunday, the Ananda Bazar Patrika Group's weekly, in Kolkata in the early 1990s. Vir Sanghvi was a colleague there, and she became its senior sub-editor.^[7][8] After working as chief copy editor at Business Today,^[8] she was part of the team that launched Outlook under Vinod Mehta in 1995. Writing in the magazine in 2024, she called her time as its special correspondent the most exciting part of her career.^[9]

She left journalism around 2000 to work in development, microfinance and poverty alleviation,^[3] joining Ashoka in Delhi in 2001 where she was its media strategist.^[4][10][11] Madhukar Shukla's Social Entrepreneurship in India (2020) lists her among people associated with the non-profit,^[12] and she published a paper on Ashoka's model in Futures in 2007, Transforming the world through social entrepreneurship.^[13] As an Ashoka consultant she also produced a series of case studies profiling Indian social entrepreneurs and the organisations they built — among them the anti-trafficking groups STOP and Odanadi Seva Trust,^[14][15] Arvind Kejriwal's early use of right to information law against administrative corruption in Delhi,^[16] and the Centre for Dialogue and Reconciliation's peace building work in Kashmir and other conflict-hit regions.^[17]

In 2007, Sen was appointed to the board of the microfinance institution Bandhan (later Bandhan Bank)^[18] and became a director of Plural India, a microfinance non-profit, in the same year.^[19] Her writing on microfinance included articles published in the magazine Small Change in 2005 (later cited in development-finance research).^[20] Sen co-founded Uttor, a publication aimed at microentrepreneurs, which won the UN Population Fund-supported Laadli Award for Gender Sensitivity in 2011. She also provided editorial assistance on Banking on self-help groups: Twenty years on (2012), a study by Ajay Tankha for ACCESS Development Services.^[21] Her 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.^[4][2]

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] She has used archival sources alongside oral histories, including memories of food traditions preserved by people with knowledge of pre-Partition Bengal.^[1] Describing herself as "a deconstructor of food", rather than a cook,^[2] she has argued that recipes considered "lost" can often be reconstructed through historical research, memories and regional knowledge.^[3] Her fieldwork has included cooking with local ingredients in the places she visits; for example in Diezephe, Nagaland she prepared local rohu fish using ingredients from a Naga kitchen.^[2]

Her first public pop-up was held in Gurgaon in 2014. She served Goalondo steamer curry, a thin fowl (or 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 boats.^[22] 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] Sen has traced her interest in the dish to childhood, watching an uncle prepare it while her maternal grandfather recalled the Padma River in East Bengal.^[2] Among those she interviewed was a former railwayman, Tulsi Prasad Lahiri, who recalled the rice shacks that stood at the ghat where steamer passengers disembarked.^[2]

Sen's pop-ups have run in Kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Singapore, and usually open with a talk and slides before dining.^[1] For example, in January 2024 she curated The High Table, a Kolkata pop-up of recipes from Bengal's zamindari kitchens.^[23] Sen has emphasised the structured, course-by-course character of a traditional Bengali meal — bitter dishes first, building up to fish and meat and ending with a sweet — presenting it as a system grounded in Ayurvedic digestive principles rather than simply a serving order.^[24]

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.^[25] The Goa chef, Prasanta Mandal, said the kitchen won a Times Good Food award after following Sen's advice.^[1] Mustard was later ranked as 28th in a Condé Nast Traveller India list of the 50 best restaurants in India in 2019.^[26]

In 2022, Sen rebuilt the menu at Yantra,^[4] an Indian restaurant in Singapore, with executive chef Pinaki Ray.^[27][28] It was her first project outside India.^[29][30] Among her own compositions, Sen has singled out Banglar ghorowa thala, a platter of Bengali dips and small dishes modelled on the mezze format.^[2] She has also set up restaurants in Mumbai and Chennai and has consulted for ITC Hotels and Oberoi Hotels.^[2]

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][31] She has divided her time between Gurgaon, Kolkata, Goa and Mumbai,^[5] and her food writing has appeared in Outlook, The Indian Express, The Telegraph, The Hindu Business Line, Mint and Whetstone.^[32][33]

Her food writing has also addressed questions of culinary identity and heritage, with subjects including kasundi, a traditional Bengali mustard condiment;^[32] choi, a near-vanished spice of the pepper family once used across eastern Bengal;^[33] alu posto, a poppy seed potato dish she has linked to the colonial opium trade;^[34] the hilsa fish;^[35] and the descent of the Anglo-Indian kedgeree from Bengali khichuri.^[1]

Writing in Two Bengals (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), Pinaki Dasgupta names Sen among those working to bring back recipes lost from East Bengal.^[36] She is cited in Digest: A Journal of Foodways and Culture,^[37] in a 2020 study of food and decolonisation in West Bengal in Alternation,^[38] and in a 2025 article in the journal Media Asia on Bengali food writing.^[39]

Vir Sanghvi has called Sen the best living authority on the history of Bengali cuisine.^[7] Tatler Asia described her as one of India's leading food historians.^[28] Hindustan Times profiled her in 2018 alongside Pushpesh Pant and Salma Husain.^[6] Forbes India and Whetstone have quoted her on chhena and on the origins of rosogolla.^[40][41][42]

• 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.

• Cooking with Pritha Sen on YouTube – Bong Eats
• Sunday Adda with Pritha Sen on YouTube – Bong Eats
• Food is our identity featuring Pritha Sen on YouTube – Chaepani
• Pritha Sen: Grassroots Bengal on YouTube – Ripples Café
• Pritha Sen talks about the lost varieties of food in Bengal on YouTube – Bengal Store
• Pritha Sen: The former journalist working to bring back the golden age of Bengali cuisine on YouTube – Finely Chopped