How do we understand the knowledge required to make sweets? Ishita Dey’s book Sweet Excess discovers that it is an embodied knowledge, largely determined by caste- and class-realities.
There is a deeply political connotation attached to sweets in the vast ethno-linguistic region of Bengal. Mishti shops in the region feature in the news for party-stamped sandesh during assembly elections, the provenance of sweets become political talking points, and political conflict breaks out over who is permitted to prepare sweets for religious celebrations.
In Sweet Excess: Crafting Mishti in Bengal (2026), anthropologist Ishita Dey taps into the subterranean social and political life of sweets in Bengal, examining the food’s history, factors influencing its present-day preparation, and how it is an industry determined by caste, class, and religion. Ishita’s ethnographic field work takes her to sweet shops across West Bengal and Bangladesh, where she speaks to workers, managers, and the owners of legacy sweet shops to understand the diverse landscape of mishti preparation.
Insights from ‘karigars’ [1] and ‘ustads’ [2]—porous designations in the ambit of mishti preparation—engender a deeper understanding of the sensorial nature of mishti knowledge and work. While cooking the pak [3] for sandesh—a milk-based Bengali sweet made by kneading milk solids, often presented in compelling shapes such as leaves or conch shells—might appear seemingly straightforward, it requires intricate understanding of milk and sugar, how they transform under conditions of heat and pressure, and simple yet highly specialised tools, such as pata [4] or tadu [5].
Ustads involved in different parts of the mishti preparation process, including Kamal Aich, Md. Masud, Manoranjan Das, Sukumar Ghosh, and Md. Zakir Hussain, reveal that andaz, often imperfectly translated as a guesstimate, is actually deeply honed embodied skill. On the other hand Baby Ghosh, who works with milk in West Bengal’s Krishnanagar, contends with the gendered reality around her profession: while equally skilled, her work isn’t considered artisanal, and is determined by her gender and sub-caste.
Read this excerpt from the chapter ‘Navigating Work’ exploring the embodied knowledge—measured touch and trained eyes—that informs how a piece of mishti is made in Krishnanagar, West Bengal.
To Das, even though industrial table-top units have replaced the pata, in shops like K.C. Das Private Limited (or KCD, a now franchise sweet shop first established in West Bengal in 1946) the skill of pata-related work remains useful. As Amal Das, who works in the mechanised unit of KCD, told me, “The massaging of the pak before rolling out the sandesh is a must and is followed irrespective of the rolling base”. Similarly another worker reminded me, “In winter the pak can get sticky. . . if you have worked before on a pata, you would add milk and give it a nice massage before rolling out the sweets”.
Similarly most of the karigars recall how ustads and karigars had to be convinced to take a turn to stir the milk—one of the crucial steps while boiling the milk. Milk across sweetshops is boiled, reduced to different consistencies depending on the needs of the shop. Boiling-related work—be it boiling of milk, preparation of sugar syrup, cooked paste of sweets—requires a knowledge about controlling temperature. Usually ununer karigar, or one skilled at the oven, oversees this entire process of boiling-related work.
In Bangladesh, some sweetshops hire dedicated craftsmen for boiling-related work and some for preparation of dry sweets implying sandesh. Kamal Aich, who has worked in sweetshops across West Bengal and Bangladesh, tells me that the latter takes a lot of time and patience. “First, I need to prepare the cooked paste for sandesh. Kneading of chhana is the most basic step in this entire process.” I ask him if he has worked on chhana kneaded by machines. He says, “No”. But he is confident if this step is mechanised, one still needs to check the consistency of the chhana. “There is no substitute for our hands. Without our hands there is not a single use of a good tadu, or pata. And there is no good way of picking up skills than changing shops”. Saibal Kumar Modak, owner of a sweetshop clarifies this further, “See, many a times when someone comes to me for a job, my first question is how many days have you worked at the oven?”
On 12 June 2019, Kamal Aich recalled that he has been in the line of sweet-making for about 12 years. He worked as a helper in two sweetshops of Bongaon in West Bengal. Then he transitioned to learning sandesh in a sweetshop in Basirhat. In his fourth shop he acquired the designation of a karigar in West Bengal and changed three sweetshops before moving back to Bangladesh and finally joining a sweetshop in Natore as an ustaad.
At 29 years old, it took him eight sweetshops to achieve his dream at a monthly wage of Bangladeshi taka 15,000 because he could adapt himself. “Since we learn on the job it is important to know if you can sit continuously at the oven stirring something, have the patience to train on every aspect of the job and at the same time develop your own relationship with the tools”. Aich further went on to comment, “The challenging part about the sweet industry is that there is no standard recipe. Even if the same sweet is prepared across sweetshops there will be a slight difference in technique. How quickly you adapt to technique depends on your control over the tools at work, raw materials and also your physical dexterity”.
At 29 years old, it took him eight sweetshops to achieve his dream at a monthly wage of Bangladeshi taka 15,000 because he could adapt himself.
Telling me about the long hours of work and especially night shifts, he says that one needs a lot of physical strength, mental stamina and imagination. He adds, “The owner will come and give you a brief. It is up to you to make something. If you don’t have a grasp over things, you will be equipped to follow instructions and set methods, not create anything new”. I ask him, given the branding and standardisation, where is the scope of creating anything new? He chuckles and says, “Okay. I cannot give you trade secrets. But as a karigar/ustad, I should have the ability to create something new and others will follow. It can be as simple as having knowledge to fixing a problem to creating a new item”. Craftsmanship is not only about knowledge of tools, or creating new items, but it is also about repairing, fixing and giving it a final touch.
The nature of knowledge associated with the oven will be specific to each food industry and here, a ununer karigar/siddha [6] and bhaja karigar [7] is expected to know tasks such as boiling and cooking techniques specific to sweet-making. The skill to use an oven was the first step in sweet preparation—as it required knowledge about cooking temperature, cooking time, cooking process, etc. Most of the sweetshops underwent a transition from wood-fired ovens to the present-day stoves with regulators. Workers across shops recalled the difficulty in controlling the flame in wood-fired ovens as compared to the present-day stoves.
Workers pointed out, “It took time for the oven to be ready”. Md. Masud, Manoranjan Das and Sukumar Ghosh recalled that one had to know how to prepare and light the oven. Manoranjan Das, who worked with these ovens recalled, “Almost one and half kilograms of coal were used to light an oven. It took time for the oven to be ready and one had to keep an eye on the flame, the kadai. . . The floor used to be terribly hot, and you would not have been able to stand there and watch us making sweets, forget about taking out a piece of paper and writing” [pointing to the diary and pen].
Md. Masud was one of the few craftsmen who could rise up the ladder in the same sweetshop. Recounting the journey of a met [8] he said their first lessons are about proportions and ratios of sugar and milk for barfi. Then, slowly one gets to learn about consistencies of sugar syrup. He stated, “In our line of work, you have to learn by doing”. Yet no senior craftsman wants to leave their work unattended, so the met has to earn the confidence or wait for an opportunity to prove that he has trained his eyes and will be able to translate that learned vision into practice. A helper and/or met has to learn to see, observe and smell.
The first step of developing an andaz is training the eye to sense without touching. Md. Zakir Hussain recounts that andaz comes with experience. To Kamal Aich, andaz comes with an ability to see, and to translate that seeing into imagination. To Sukumar Ghosh, andaz is about repetition and practice. Andaz is used in multiple senses to communicate how a worker trains his vision. Andaz, as I propose to show, is one of the forms of ‘skilled visions’.
Recalling that her mother-in-law also lent a helping hand in sar preparation, she said she knew no other work that would have allowed her to handle her ‘daily work’ and ‘work as livelihood’.
According to Grasseni, ‘Skilled visions are embedded in multisensory practices where look is coordinated with skilled movement, with rapidly changing points of view, or with other senses, such as touch. They also have a political dimension that depends on the artefacts, hierarchies and modes of exposure to local knowledges’. Baby Ghosh tells me that it has taken years to train her vision in preparing the stiff layer of milk cream critical to two signature sweets of Krishnanagar—Sarpuriya and Sarbhaja.
As she invites me into her workspace and starts preparing sar [9], she tells me, “You will see much of my work is keeping a watch on the milk. I know when the milk cream will settle down and how I should lift the sar, but first the milk cream has to settle”. The first layer of sar was the finest and a good sweetshop owner will settle only for the first layer of sar. It took 40 to 45 minutes to lift the soft creamy layer, and another four hours to dry it, after which it was ready to use. These crisp discs of cream last for seven days without refrigeration. On sunny days, it took a day for Baby to finish an order of 70 to 80 sar discs. Sar prepared from the first layer was priced at INR 15 followed by the second layer at INR 14 and the third layer at INR 13. Depending on the price of the milk, the prices of the sar could be fixed.
When I asked Baby what she thought about her kaj [10], she replied, “I like my kaj. I wonder if I will be able to pass it on to my son’s wife”. When I asked her if her son was interested in the business, she said, “Time will tell”.
As Baby lifted the second layer of sar and we spread it out to dry, Robi Ghosh (her husband) told her that she should have her lunch. Baby told me that after having lunch she found it difficult to sit on her knees and work. She said, “It is difficult work,” and recalls with pride what her father-in-law had told her. She emphasised, “Who would have thought that you can convert the froth (fena) that settles on milk into a product with a shelf life and it could be a base material for Krishnanagar’s two sought-after sweets—Sarbhaja and Sarpuriya? My father-in-law used to say that it is difficult kaj but still this is not considered shilpa”.
Baby Ghosh and her father-in-law want their work to be considered as shilpa—an art. For Baby, despite having learned from her father-in-law, “this is women’s work,” and she looked forward to passing on her acquired skills to her daughter-in-law. Recalling that her mother-in-law also lent a helping hand in sar preparation, she said she knew no other work that would have allowed her to handle her ‘daily work’ and ‘work as livelihood’. Sar preparation, as Baby Ghosh and Robi Ghosh acknowledge, is a product of gendered division of labour. Robi Ghosh gets up in the morning and collects milk from neighbouring villages. He affirms that without quality milk one cannot make quality sar. When I ask him how he differentiates quality milk from inferior milk, he says, “I have trained my eye. You do know I am a Ghosh, right? As a Ghosh, if I do not know how to ascertain good quality milk, who will?”
The narrative of Baby and Robi Ghosh reveals how gender and caste intersect in their reading of ‘genealogy of skills’. Robi’s pride in being a Ghosh is a testament to caste-based occupational ties, and how the sameness of these ties is perceived as a downplaying of skill — of the everyday task of collecting milk. Baby Ghosh and Robi Ghosh’s narrative shows how gender and caste intersect in their articulations about skilled visions.
Glossary:
[1] Karigars: Artisans
[2] Ustads: Master craftsmen
[3] Pak: The substance that forms when chhana is boiled with a sweetening agent. This is then kneaded and rolled out to make sandesh
[4] Pata: A flat wooden board on which chhana, or curdled milk solids used to make sweets, are kneaded and portioned
[5] Tadu: A long wooden handle with a flat bottom used to cook chhana
[6] Siddha karigar: A karigar specialised in sugar syrup-based items
[7] Bhaja karigar: A karigar specialised in fried sweet items
[8] Met: A helper
[9] Sar: The layer of cream that settles on top of milk when it is boiled or heated
[10] Kaj: Work in Bengali
This is an excerpt from ‘Sweet Excess: Crafting Mishti in Bengal’ (2026) by Ishita Dey, published by Routledge. Excerpted with permission from the author and publisher.
Ishita Dey is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, South Asian University, Delhi. Her research interests include food, labour, and senses. She is an editorial board member of the journal Society and Culture in South Asia (Sage) and Gastronomica (University of California Press). Her writing has been published in Oxford Compendium to Sugar and Sweets and journals such as Contributions to Indian Sociology, South Atlantic Quarterly, The Sense and Society, and Gastronomica.
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