India's very first attempt to digitise indigenous communities' food culture, foodways & heritage
A community digital humanities archive preserving the endangered food culture and culinary heritage of West Bengal's indigenous communities — Santal, Toto, Rajbangshi, Mech, Lodha, Rabha, Garo, and beyond.
🌐 Live Website: https://mappingmemorymappingmeals.github.io/mappingmemoryproject/
🗺 Interactive Archive Map: https://mappingmemorymappingmeals.github.io/IIST/map.html
Mapping Memory, Mapping Meals is India's first community digital humanities project dedicated exclusively to preserving the endangered food culture and culinary heritage of West Bengal's indigenous communities. The project was conceived and executed during a summer research internship at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST), Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala.
- 97 geocoded food entries
- 7+ indigenous communities documented
- 10 districts covered across West Bengal
- 154 recipe videos in the Tribe Family Cooking dataset
- Multi-layer data architecture capturing everything from ecology to sacred offerings to deep historical origins
| Role | Name |
|---|---|
| Project Director & Principal Researcher | Simanta Nandi — IIT (ISM) Dhanbad / IIST Thiruvananthapuram |
| Project Supervisor | Dr. Gigy J. Alex — Associate Professor, Dept. of HSS, IIST |
We are always looking for cookbooks, family and community recipes, food memories, and oral traditions. Contribute to the archive →
📍 Accepted — Academic Conference & World Folklore Day Celebration 2026, Centre for Folk Culture Studies (CFCS), University of Hyderabad — "Researching and Reactivating Folklore: Tradition in a Changing World" — August 20–23, 2026
This archive follows the Endings Project five-component framework for long-term digital preservation: static-web architecture, flat open-standard data formats, version control, distributed archiving, and zero server-side dependencies.
This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).
Data Shield notice: Corporate AI systems are prohibited from scraping this archive's indigenous knowledge for training Large Language Models without community consent. See robots.txt and the License & Ethics page for details.
📧 mappingmemory.contact@gmail.com
| @mappingmemory.contact | |
| X (Twitter) | @MappingMemory |
| Mapping Memory | |
| Company Page | |
| Bluesky | @mappingmemory.bsky.social |
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© 2026 Mapping Memory, Mapping Meals. Designed & managed by Simanta Nandi.