Rushina Munshaw-Ghildiyal shares the process of mapping chutneys across India for her recent book, how they are born out of geography and practicality as much as for flavour, and why despite their ubiquity, chutneys are often sidelined in formal culinary conversations.
Chutney appears on tables across India in countless forms, yet it has rarely received sustained attention in print. In Chutney: A Compendium of Stories and Recipes, (2025), published by A Perfect Bite Consulting, food chronicler Rushina Munshaw-Ghildiyal traces the many meanings of chutney across regions. Drawing from over 230 recipes, 40 essays, and contributions from more than 120 individuals across the country, the book documents chutney beyond a singular condiment.
Why do you think something as ubiquitous as chutney has remained peripheral in formal culinary conversations compared to main dishes?
Chutneys are so everyday. The reason just a small fraction of the vast regional repertoire of chutneys that lives in Indian home kitchens has been [formally] documented is largely because of two reasons.
Chutneys have been homogenised and stereotyped in professional formats (restaurant menus often reduce chutney to green coriander-mint or brown sweet tamarind).
Chutney is such a fluid concept—Indian home kitchens create new variations on the go, everyday using what’s at hand—that imagining a typical Indian cook stopping to write down a recipe in the frenzy of daily meal preparation is quite difficult.
What was the process of putting the book together like? Were you working with oral histories or written archives, or both?
It was both, but oral histories carried more weight. Like many aspects of Indian cuisines, most of the knowledge around chutney lives in memory. I had an ambitious vision for this book, and wanted to map the chutneys of India, beyond just recipes.
This book is a collaborative effort that involved a core team, including Soumya Arjun and my husband, Chandra Shekhar Ghildiyal, backed by a group of contributors and dedicated volunteer chroniclers. A large part of the book has been built through conversations with people. We learnt about the uniqueness of Kashmiri chetins (chutneys) from Marryam H. Reshii and Chef Nalini Sadhu; discovered kahudi and Assamese chutneys through Kashmiri Nath and Geetika Saikia; and explored roselle, phutkal, and other Jharkhandi varieties with Dr. Manisha Oraon.
In fact, some of my favourite memories came from the chapter titled Chutney Traveled, which involved calling friends and family across the globe. I learned about Kenyan Maru chutney from Anjali Mediratta and South African chutneys from Lance Littlefield. Then there was Arran Sivarajah, who helped me understand more about Sri Lankan chutneys via a three-way conversation from London with his friends’ mothers back in Sri Lanka. Shanti Petiwala, for instance, writes of using ridge gourd peels to create a texture-rich, earthy Ghosale Gojju.
There’s a remarkable focus on ingredients in the book, in a way that acknowledges factors such as geography and ecology. How did this alter your understanding of chutney?
In India, virtually anything can—and is—made into chutney! This means we have chutneys crafted from an array of components: roots, stems, leaves, flowers, fruits, seeds, vegetables, fish, and meat, both cultivated and foraged, and even vegetable scraps and peels. And very often, these chutneys are born out of practicality as much as for flavour.
In the high Himalayan altitudes, sesame, bhang (hemp), and bhangjeera (perilla) chutneys not only add flavour but supplement winter diets with essential nutrients. Along the coasts, coconut chutneys naturally developed where coconut was abundant. In [more humid regions like] the plains of Bengal, pungent, fermented kasundi counterpoints the heat. Similarly, in Andhra Pradesh, ingredients like gongura (sorrel leaves) and tamarind contrast with fiery chillies to alleviate heat and provide nourishment in the harsh summer. In the Northeast, [where preservation is a central practice, owing to the region’s climate], traditionally fermented ingredients like akhuni from Nagaland and ngari (fermented fish) from Manipur and gundruk (fermented mustard leaves) from Sikkim are pounded into intensely savoury, umami-rich chutneys.
As a culinary chronicler, how did you navigate documenting so many diverse recipes, from communities outside your own? Were there any challenges?
I aimed to go beyond the best known chutneys, trying to get at least 2-4 recipes for every region. When we began work on the book our archive had 400 chutney recipes. These had been collected over the years through my Indian Food Observance Day (IFOD) celebrations, which was an attempt to calenderise specific days to seasonal Indian culinary concepts.
We struggled with definitions, beginning with the question ‘What is a chutney?’ For instance, in Tanushri’s essay on Bangali Kasundi, we learned about the specific rituals and cultural context that traditionally surrounded kasundi making in Bengali homes. Then there was the fundamental question: Is this an ingredient or a condiment? Does it sit in the chutneyverse? With kasundi, we concluded that it may have begun as an ingredient but today is a chutney.
As I write in the book, “So how can this multifaceted diversity, that makes India flagrantly refuse to be confined to a single narrative, possibly be codified?” And do we even want to? The cliché is true: Our food does change every 100 kilometres.
Did you encounter any chutneys that have travelled through regions or diasporas, and changed along the way?
Many! It is important to note that the colonial powers globalised and popularised the term ‘chutney’ worldwide, sparking a western reinterpretation that turned a fresh side dish into a cooked, vinegary, shelf-stable jammy condiment. Long before this, however, as Indians moved across the globe—whether by choice or through forced indentured labour—they carried their recipes.
One particularly fascinating example comes from the Mascarene and Seychellois Islands (Mauritius, Réunion, and Seychelles), where Indian chutneys went through a process of Creolisation. Popular recipes reflect Indian favourites with Creolised names—Satini Pomdamur (from the romantic French ‘pomme d’amour’ or tomato), Satini Kotomili (coriander), Satini Koko (coconut), Satini Brinzel (eggplant), Satini Pistache (peanut), Satini Mangue Vert (green mango), and Satini Chevrette (shrimp).
In Mauritius, Kutcha Mangue is a tangy relish-like condiment, whose lineage goes back to the Bihari Koocha still made in India. Likely carried to Mauritius by indentured labourers from Bihar, it has evolved into variants like Kutcha Pomme (apple) and Kutcha Chauchau (chayote squash) over time.
Through your work on the Godrej Food Trends Report, you engage with large-scale patterns in how India eats. Did working at that scale influence how you approach something as local as a chutney?
Absolutely. Working at that scale forced me to ask tougher questions: What is being lost to industrialisation? What is being reinvented for a modern palate? Who are the true custodians of this knowledge? As you travel across India, the transformation chutneys undergo—not just in terms of ingredients, but also in their reflection of the landscape and the communities that created them—offers insights into local consumption and palate preferences. For example, Ladakh has sparse vegetation and thus has limited chutneys, whereas regions like the Northeast proliferate with them. Even quantities differ across states: Delhi uses chutneys in smaller quantities while Tamil Nadu eats a bowlful of them. Some of this might be obvious, but when seen together, the chutney bowl serves as a sociological microcosm that reflects the shifting culinary roadmap of the country.
Conversely, did this book reveal what a trends-based approach might miss about Indian food?
Actually, now that you ask, it did. While the trends report tracks the massive commercial success of packaged condiments, the process of writing this book revealed that these products are often the antithesis of what a chutney should be. Take dhaniya chutney which is made fresh in most homes. Many brands have packaged it today, but a true coriander chutney is defined by its volatile oils—that bright herbaceousness that begins to fade the moment the leaves are crushed. To make that ‘shelf-stable’ for a supermarket, you have to kill that vitality with stabilisers and acidity regulators. So, we aren’t buying dhaniya chutney, we are buying a ghost of one. While trends highlight ‘convenience’, it leads to homogenisation often at the cost of character. Working on the book and the report led me to conclude that we should rely on home chefs or small businesses selling home-made chutneys.
Personally, what’s your favourite chutney?
Nani’s Til Tamatar Chutney. I will never forget the day I wrote this recipe down because it was the last time we met before my grandmother-in-law passed on. It was a cold winter afternoon, and we were chatting over a cup of tea, when she started telling me the recipe. I had forgotten about the hastily scribbled note till years later. So resonant is it with the family that when I made it, my husband grabbed a few rotis, sat down on the kitchen floor and ate the whole lot! It is a favourite with many of her grandchildren, and I make it for them all the time.
One of the things that brings me the greatest happiness is knowing that, through this book, these recipes will live on, and rather than just being someone’s nani’s, chachi’s or mother’s recipes, they will do so with the names of their makers attached.
Ishani Banerjee (@ishaaanniii) is a chef with a love for cinema, literature, and storytelling through food. At The Locavore, she delves into indigenous food systems and documents recipes from across India.
Instead of technical fixes such as factory fortification—the proposed solution for this crisis—I wanted to bring the attention back to a root question: What are we doing to our rich food diversity, our seeds?
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