Tania Banerjee

The sweet fragrance of incense has set the scene. The ceremony has started. Pilgrims dressed in long white robes walk along the nave. Some of them have white headgears. They sit cross-legged on the floor, forming neat rows and columns. Near the altar, a few in shiny blue, yellow and red robes form an array. On the altar stands a huge globe. Painted on it is a human eye, complete with a curvy eyebrow—it is the divine eye. This is the Cao Dai Holy See, a temple in the city of Tây Ninh, 83 kilom...

An article in the December 2022 - January 2023 issue of Traveller's World Magazine. The article is on Neil Island of Andamans.

Vijay Chouhan, 51, ventures into the sea 10 days a month to catch fish. He is a fisherman from Bhimrana, a village in Devbhumi Dwarka district in Gujarat. The coast of the Arabian Sea is a mere 1.5 km from the village. "During my grandfather and father’s time, fish in the ocean was abundant. I’m not so lucky," he rues.
Fringing patchy natural coral reefs run from Okha in the north to Shivrajpur in the south, covering 12 sqkm in discontinuous fragments. Bhimrana lies somewhat in the middle. Th...

Was it the sound of water dropping from a drenched branch on a leaf? Or was it the fuzzy noise that soft drinks make when bottles are opened? I had crouched and lowered my torso to place my ears into the opening of an earthen vessel that was planted midway into the ground. To me, the sound felt like that of rainfall. I was at Fazenda Cazulo, a farm and distillery in Goa, trying hard to catch the sound of the live fermentation of cashew juice.
Cashew feni is a strong alcoholic beverage with a ...

A quest for Mihidana and Sitabhog
In the Indian city of Bardhaman in West Bengal, a culinary delight quietly draws a sweet-toothed crowd. They come in search of Bardhaman’s Mihidana and Bardhaman’s Sitabhog — sweets that originated in the region and have received Geographical Indication (G.I.) tag in the year 2017, validating their uniqueness. On September 2021, the sweet duo reached Bahrain and garnered international interest for the first time. The sweets originated during British rule in I...

On a damp winter evening in the Esplanade neighborhood of Kolkata, India, Shibaji Mahato, 55, heads to his local watering hole. He works in construction in a nearby building. Already at the bar is Bhaskar Das, a fruit and vegetable seller. Shibaji, Bhaskar and many others who throng this bar are all drinking Bangla, a colorless, odorless, flavorless and potent alcoholic beverage with a complicated role in Indian history and culture.
The word Bangla has several meanings, only some of which rel...

It’s 3 a.m. in Nimpith, a tiny town in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal. Sixty-one-year-old Chuno Mistry heads towards a row of wild date palm trees. Mistry is a shuli, or date palm tree tapper, and he carries earthen pots slung from a bamboo pole, known as a byank, on his shoulder. It’s about 46 degrees out and his lungi and full-sleeved shirt are hardly enough to keep him warm; goosebumps spring up along his exposed skin.
When he reaches the first tree, Mistry ties a rope around his ...

Although "adda" is a beloved pastime throughout Kolkata, the long, cerebral conversations that the city is famous for started to become an issue during Covid-19.

Few outside Bengal have been able to appreciate the delights of the "king of aroma." But thanks to a new generation of chefs, the citrus is slowly making its way into cuisines across India.

In Kolkata, my hometown, summer is infamous for its harsh sunshine. In the sweltering heat, my daily trips to the university were always punctuated by a pit stop at a food stall for a sweet lassi.

Nearly 500 years ago, the Portuguese popularized milk curdling in Bengal. Bengalis would add sweetness and create a rich delicacy.
Although it is the syrupy Banglar rasogolla that has won the coveted Geographical Indication (GI) tag — a marker that ensures a food product has a specific geographical origin — it is the ubiquitous sondesh whose versatility Bengalis have exploited for the past five centuries. In a typical sweetshop, sondesh occupies more than half the shelf space — though its his...