5 min readApr 26, 2026 11:54 AM ISTFor most Indians, the word Kargil evokes the memory of the 1999 Indo-Pak war — a landscape defined by conflict, broadcast through television screens in grainy, urgent footage. But for its natives, Kargil is home: a place of culture and memory that deserves to be understood on its own terms. Stories from a Kargili Kitchen by Yash Saxena is an honest attempt to look at Kargil beyond what lives in popular imagination.The 31-year-old author, a food researcher by profession, tells the stories of Kargil’s people through the lens of what they eat. Written in collaboration with Roots Ladakh — a local responsiAble travel organisation founded by Muzammil Hussain and Tafazzul Hussain, whose decade-long work of cultural preservation and community storytelling in the region shapes much of the book’s spine — the work is the result of a three-and-a-half-year journey through the district’s villages and kitchens. The Hussains write in their preface that they wanted to challenge the dominant image of Kargil as a war zone, and to reveal it instead as a cultural crossroads. This book is that attempt, made tangible.One may doubt the necessity of studying food choices to understand a culture and its people. But in this work, Saxena shows that food choices reflect history, politics and anthropo-demography — making them one of the most accessible and revealing ways to know a place. He uses both anthropological and intimate writing in his research. He discusses food — its recipes, sometimes its nutritional value, always its context — through the voices of people with memories to share and culture to preserve. Saxena listens, records and introduces each dish within its broader historical and geographical setting. The result is a portrait of a region that remains deeply unfamiliar to most Indians.Each dish is introduced through an anecdote. Gur Gur Cha — the salted butter tea that arrived in Kargil through the Silk Route centuries before the British introduced tea to the subcontinent — opens with a story from Mohammad Iliyas, who remembers leaving Kargil as a teenager when war broke out between India and Pakistan. Midway through the conversation, he excuses himself and returns with a thermos of the tea, warm and ready. In the book, that small gesture carries the weight of something much larger. The tea becomes a sign of continuity — life insisting on going on, even in the face of what nearly ended it.The book follows a clear pattern: food never appears in isolation. It is always embedded within memory and context, and Saxena is careful never to let a recipe become merely a recipe. The most affecting of these pairings is the chapter on markhur biscuit traditionally baked over coa and stays good for up to two months. Haji Akhone Mussa, a native of Thasgam village, who in 2014 undertook the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. He packed the way Kargilis have always packed: sattu and markhur, a food is introduced.Saxena does not romanticise Kargil, and that restraint is what gives the book its credibility. He records, with barely concealed unease, how government subsidies and expanding markets have gradually replaced indigenous grains like barley and buckwheat with imported rice and wheat.A drink made from dried apricots reflects centuries of knowledge about cooling the gut through a frozen winter. Bread shaped into an ibex at the news of a new birth carries the fingerprints of old belief. These are not quaint customs — they are functional, accumulated responses to an environment that demands precision. Their disappearance, the book suggests, is not merely cultural but biological. Bodies calibrated over generations to hardy, low-glycaemic mountain foods are now absorbing processed sugars and refined flour, and the resulting rise in gastrointestinal illness across the district is, in Saxena’s telling, the body registering what the culture already knew.Story continues below this adStories from a Kargili Kitchen asks readers to reconsider their understanding of places like Kargil, whose identities have often been reduced to a single defining event. Such places accumulate far richer histories than the moment that came to represent them, and they deserve to be known on their own terms. Through its recipes and stories, the book reminds us that culture survives in ordinary spaces — in kitchens, around hearths, in the quiet rituals of preparing a meal that nobody will remember as significant, because it was justanother evening, just another winter, just another way of keeping everyone alive. © The Indian Express Pvt LtdAdvertisementLoading Recommendations...