Food and the arts
A continent on a plate, Sound, screen & sport. 8 min read.
A continent on a plate
07 Food & regional cuisineRegional kitchens · Iconic dishes · Vegetarian by default · Tea, coffee, sweets
Eat Your Way Across India
Five hundred kilometres in India means an entirely different cuisine.
India is not one food culture but eight, and within each, dozens. The grain shifts (wheat in the north, rice in the south, millets in the east). The fat shifts (ghee, mustard oil, coconut, sesame). The spice shifts. The way of eating shifts. Below is a starting map.
The regional kitchens of India
Photo: Pexels, Pexels LicenseNorth Indian · Punjabi, Jain, Bania & Marwari kitchen
Wheat-led: rotis, naan, parathas. Hearty Punjabi dhabas, refined Jain, Bania and Marwari kitchens (often vegetarian, no onion or garlic), rich slow-cooked curries with cream, ghee, dried fruits and dry spices. Tandoor-grilled meats and what the world widely recognises as "Indian food".
Photo: Pexels, Pexels LicenseSouth Indian · the rice coast
Rice-led. Fermented batters (dosa, idli), coconut, curry leaf, mustard seed, tamarind. Lighter, brighter, faster cooking. The everyday breakfast that conquered the world. Filter coffee, an art form.
Photo: Pexels, Pexels LicenseEast Indian · the river kitchens
Bengali, Odia and Assamese cooking, mustard oil, freshwater fish, mustard paste, posto (poppy seed), rice, panch phoron (five-spice). And the world's best sweets: rosogolla, sandesh, mishti doi.
Photo: SwingingUvula, CC BY-SA 4.0West Indian · commerce on the coast
Three distinct traditions in one belt: Maharashtrian street food (Mumbai's vada-pav, pav-bhaji); Gujarati vegetarian thali (sweet, sour, savoury together); Goan Catholic fish-and-coconut (vindaloo, sorpotel, xacuti).
Twelve dishes to try in your first month
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Photo: Miansari66, Public domainIndia has the world's largest vegetarian population, an estimated quarter to a third of the country never eats meat. Many more eat vegetarian on certain days of the week. Restaurants always mark ● for veg and ● for non-veg on menus. Many homes and entire neighbourhoods (Jain-heritage areas of Mumbai, Gujarati colonies) are strictly vegetarian.
Jain dietary practice goes further still, no root vegetables (onion, garlic, potato), no eggs. A common consideration when hosting.
Beef, legally restricted or banned in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Delhi, UP, MP, Rajasthan, Haryana and others. Available in Kerala, Goa, the North-East, Karnataka, West Bengal. Always check.
Pork, not served in Muslim-owned restaurants or homes. Common in Goa, the North-East and Christian-majority pockets of Kerala.
Alcohol, mostly available but with state-by-state rules. Gujarat and Bihar are dry states. Most cities have "dry days" on major holidays (Gandhi Jayanti, Republic Day, Independence Day).
Sound, screen & sport
08 Arts, music & entertainmentBollywood & the regional cinemas · Classical music · Dance · Sport · Literature
Cinema, Music, Sport
A culture that sings, dances, plays cricket · in that order.
India produces more films, more music and watches more cricket than any other country on earth. Engaging with even one of these shortens the social distance enormously.
Cinema · not just Bollywood
India produces 1,800+ films a year across 20+ languages, among the highest film output of any country. "Bollywood" is one of nine major film industries; the south's films now routinely outsell their northern counterparts globally.
Hindi cinema · Mumbai
The world's most prolific film industry, song-and-dance, melodrama, family epics. Names everyone knows: Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, Salman Khan, Deepika Padukone, Alia Bhatt.
Telugu & Tamil · South India
Bigger-budget action spectacles. Baahubali, RRR, KGF, Pushpa were all South Indian films. Stars: Rajinikanth, Allu Arjun, Prabhas, Mahesh Babu.
Malayalam · Bengali · Marathi · Kannada
Often the most artistically respected. Malayalam cinema is having a global moment; Bengali cinema gave us Satyajit Ray; Marathi cinema is quietly excellent.
OTT in India
Netflix, Amazon Prime, JioHotstar, Sony LIV, Zee5. Indian originals: Sacred Games, Family Man, Delhi Crime, Made in Heaven, Panchayat.
Classical music & dance
Two great parallel traditions with deep, centuries-old roots.
Photo: Pexels, Pexels LicenseSitar, sarod, tabla, bansuri (flute), sarangi, santoor. Built around ragas (melodic frameworks) and taals (rhythmic cycles), often improvised live for hours. Pandit Ravi Shankar, Ustad Zakir Hussain, Bismillah Khan, Hariprasad Chaurasia.
Photo: Pexels, Pexels LicenseVoice-led; veena, mridangam, ghatam, violin. More compositional, less improvisational. The Chennai December Music Season is among the world's largest classical music festivals, 1,500+ concerts over several weeks. M.S. Subbulakshmi, T.M. Krishna.
The eight classical dance forms
Each Indian classical dance is its own visual language, the costume, the makeup, the hand-gesture vocabulary (mudras) and the rhythm cycle differ entirely from one to the next.
Photo: Pexels, Pexels LicenseThe oldest of the eight. Sculptural poses, sharp rhythms, devotional themes. Crimson silk sari, gold jewellery, jasmine in the hair.
Photo: Pexels, Pexels LicenseStorytelling through pirouettes and intricate footwork. Mughal-court refinement, ankle bells (ghungroo), Hindu & Sufi narratives.
Photo: Pexels, Pexels LicenseThe signature tribhanga (three-bend) posture. Sensual, sculpted, temple-rooted. Silver jewellery on red-and-gold silk.
Photo: Augustus Binu / facebook, CC BY-SA 3.0Speedy footwork & dance-drama. The signature feat: dancing on the rim of a brass plate while balancing a pot of water on the head.
Gentle, devotional, Krishna-centric. Distinctive cylindrical kumil skirt and round-bell embroidered veil. No facial expression in the male form.
Photo: Pexels, Pexels LicenseLyrical, swaying movement. The "dance of the enchantress", always in cream-white with gold-bordered Kerala sari, jasmine in hair.
Photo: Pexels, Pexels LicenseThe vast green-faced makeup (pacha vesham) is unmistakable. Towering headgear, layered costumes, all-night dance-dramas of the Mahabharata.
Photo: Pexels, Pexels LicenseThe youngest of the eight, born in Assam's satras (Vaishnav monasteries). Narrative, devotional, only formally recognised as classical in 2000.
Sport · cricket is religion
India is consistently among the world's top-ranked sides in Test, ODI & T20 cricket, and won the 2024 T20 World Cup. The Indian Premier League (IPL), March to May each year, is the world's richest cricket league and the most-watched sporting event in India by a long margin.
The 2025 IPL on JioHotstar drew record online viewership, among the most-watched sporting streams anywhere (reach figures vary by source). Pick a city team and you'll have an instant conversation with every cab driver, colleague and security guard for two months.
Football is enormous in Kerala, Bengal, Goa and the North-East. The ISL (Indian Super League) draws strong crowds. Field hockey is long regarded as India's national sport (India has no officially declared national sport), with 8 Olympic gold medals, more than any other country in the sport.
Kabaddi (K-A-B-A-D-D-I), the indigenous wrestling-tag sport with ancient origins, is uniquely Indian. The Pro Kabaddi League is India's second-most watched televised league after the IPL, with 200M+ viewers per season.
India has world champions across all three. Chess in particular, D. Gukesh became the youngest ever World Chess Champion at 18 in December 2024, defeating China's Ding Liren to become India's second world champion after Viswanathan Anand. India now has 85+ chess Grandmasters (up from only a handful in 2000), among the largest pools in the world.
Badminton: P.V. Sindhu (Olympic medallist). Tennis: Sania Mirza, Leander Paes, Mahesh Bhupathi.
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