For 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 author, whose background is in food writing and cultural research, tells the stories of Kargil’s people through the lens of what they eat. Written in collaboration with Roots Ladakh — a local responsible travel organisation founded by Muzammil Hussain and Tafazzul Hussain, with research and anthropological rigour supplied by Sneha Nair, whose “Notes on Research” section grounds the book’s methodology— 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.Stories from a Kargili Kitchen shows how food shapes culture. (Photo by special arrangement courtesy author Yash Saxena)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 great sarai of the Silk Route and prapu pastaThe book spans 28 chapters and a remarkable range: Buddhist Dard-Aryan communities in the Aryan valley brewing chhang openly between men and women; Yarkandi plov still made in one Kargili family whose ancestor ran the last great sarai of the Silk Route; prapu pasta prepared communally at 12-year life-cycle milestones that measure age by zodiac rather than calendar. Kargil, the book insists, is not one community but many, folded into one another over centuries of trade, migration and belief. The result is a portrait of a region that remains deeply unfamiliar to most Indians. Stories from a Kargili Kitchen is a window to Kargil and its residents beyond the infamous battleground. (Photo by special arrangement courtesy author Yash Saxena)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, at 14, was in a boarding school in Kargil town when he heard the first shells of the war tear through the night. His uncle, Qadri, walked two hours across a war-shadowed mountain path to find him. Twelve years later, Iliyas finally asked why. The old man’s shoulders sank, his eyes welled: ‘It was to protect you. To be together in these times.’ That exchange frames what follows: Midway through the conversation with Saxena, Iliyas excuses himself and returns with a thermos of the tea, warm and ready. The tea becomes a sign of continuity — life insisting on going on, even in the face of what nearly ended it.The butter tea is also a Silk Route object: half-fermented pu-erh brick tea that travelled from China and Tibet centuries before the British planted Assam. Saxena’s real argument, accumulated dish by dish, is that the Silk Route never ended, it became sedimented instead. Yarkandi plov, mok mok with relatives in Turkey and Mongolia, azoq sweetened with apricot juice in the shape of the twelve imams are the living residue of a world that nation-states and border wars tried, and largely failed, to erase.Story continues below this adFood as memory Women fetching fresh Oma (curd) in the morning; milk and milk products are public property in the village. (Photo by special arrangement courtesy author Yash Saxena)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 — a butter-rich biscuit, traditionally baked over coals, that keeps for up to two months in an airtight jar.Haji Akhone Mussa, a native of Thasgam village who in 2014 undertook the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, packed the way Kargilis have always packed for long journeys: gamphey and markhur. When his bus broke down in the Arabian desert, far from any town, he opened his provisions. Around him, fellow pilgrims from Lebanon, Kyrgyzstan, Indonesia and Sudan did the same. In that improvised communion, beneath stars that had guided Silk Route caravans for centuries, the biscuit kept someone alive and far from home.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.Apricot juice and bread shaped into an ibexA 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.Story continues below this adBodies 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.The book describes how Kargil’s own food has been made invisible by tourist expectations. Mainland visitors arrive wanting Kashmiri wazwan, or the thukpa and mok mok they associate with “Ladakhi” food, neither of which is native to Kargil. The consequence, Saxena says, is that locals begin to feel shame about their own cuisine. When tourists never ask for your food, you begin to question whether it is worth offering. That feedback loop — between outside expectation and internalised embarrassment — is one of the book’s most uncomfortable and persuasive arguments.Also Read | Kargil War: Why did Pakistan embark on such a reckless gamble?No annual birthdaysThe book’s surprises extend well beyond food. In its final chapter, Saxena documents a culture in Hunderman, a remote village, that measures age not by annual birthdays but by a Chinese-Mongolian twelve-year zodiac cycle, celebrating only when one’s birth animal returns. An elder advises a nephew not to wear spectacles during a year of transition; the nephew follows the advice, and decades later reads without glasses. Whether one believes the remedy is beside the point. The chapter illuminates a worldview so different from mainland assumptions about time, aging and medicine that it reframes everything that came before it.Stories 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.Story continues below this adThrough 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 just another evening, just another winter, just another way of keeping everyone alive.Stories from a Kargili Kitchen by Yash SaxenaPenguin Press272 pagesRs 999