World Refugee Day 2026: How refugees transformed Bengali food
The story of Bengali food is often told through rivers, fish and fertile soil. Less often it is told through railway platforms, refugee colonies and
The story of Bengali food is often told through rivers, fish and fertile soil. Less often it is told through railway platforms, refugee colonies and the ingenuity of people who arrived with almost nothing, except memory. When millions were displaced during the Partition of 1947, those crossing from East Bengal into West Bengal did not carry heirloom utensils or sacks of treasured ingredients. Most travelled light because they had no choice. What endured was something far harder to confiscate: a culinary memory bank accumulated over generations. The food they cooked in their new homes became a record of loss, adaptation and survival. “People came with very little. What they carried was memory and a legacy of food,” says food researcher Amrita Bhattacharya who, along with her husband, academic Amit Sen, runs Handpicked by Amrita a farm-to-table supper club from their home in Shantiniketan’s Bolpur. These food legacies have changed Bengali kitchens. Across refugee settlements that sprang up around Kolkata and elsewhere in the State, cooking became an exercise in survival. Families had to feed children despite limited resources and uncertain incomes. Out of those constraints emerged a culinary philosophy that modern food culture would later celebrate as sustainable and zero-waste. Vegetable peels found their way into elaborate preparations. The stems of spinach became one dish while the leaves became another. Pumpkin yielded multiple recipes from a single vegetable. Even the water left behind after preparing chhana (curdled milk) was consumed. Rice starch, known as fyan, was tempered with spices and served as a nourishing broth to children.
“What we now call zero-waste cooking was often the ingenuity of people trying to feed a family with very little. They were not thinking in terms of sustainability. They were operating with very little and used creativity to survive,” says Amrita. Many of these preparations have since become so integrated into Bengali food culture that their origins are easily overlooked. Yet they emerged from a moment when thousands of families were rebuilding their lives from scratch. Popular narratives often reduce East Bengali culinary heritage to a handful of ingredients, particularly dried fish or shutki. Amrita believes that such assumptions oversimplify a much broader history. The deeper influence lies in a style of cooking defined by restraint. Amrita traces this sensibility through her own family history. Her grandparents, who came from the Pabna-Rajshahi region in Bangladesh, cooked fresh fish with remarkable minimalism. Fish was rarely fried. Instead, it was simmered gently with turmeric, salt, green chillies and a light tempering. Prawns were often boiled and eaten with rice. Delicate river fish appeared in thin broths that allowed the flavour of the fish itself to dominate. The approach stands in contrast to many contemporary Bengali kitchens, where richer gravies and heavier seasoning have become commonplace. Bengal and the Andamans Following Partition, thousands of Bangladeshi refugees were resettled in the Andaman Islands. Among them were many Namasudra families whose agricultural and fishing skills made them suitable candidates for life in an unfamiliar frontier landscape. There they encountered a radically different environment. Communities accustomed to freshwater fish suddenly had to adapt to seafood.
The BriefWire