A unique new festival in Dehradun celebrates food stories

The first edition of the Dehradun Food Literature Festival spotlights storytelling around food

- Avantika Bhuyan

From a very early age, I formed an image of Dehradun through the writings of Ruskin Bond, be it The Room on the Roof, Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra or Adventures of Rusty. Later, the writings of other prolific authors such as Stephen Alter created a vivid imagery of the valley and the surrounding mountains of Uttarakhand. During many visits to the city in the ensuing years, I would hungrily scout for landmarks that the writers had mentioned in their books. To me, literature and Dehradun have always been intertwined. It's no wonder then that in recent years, annual literary gatherings have come up to celebrate this connection—take for instance, the Dehradun Literature Festival, which started in 2017 or the Crime Literature Festival, which has seen two editions in 2023 and 2024. The latest to join the bandwagon is the Dehradun Food Literature Festival, to be held on 22 March at Monsoon, a newly-launched regional Indian restaurant.

This genre-specific event is being hailed as the first such festival to celebrate storytelling in food. A collaboration between Shruti Gupta, founder of the eatery, and culinary chronicler—food consultant Rushina Munshaw-Ghildiyal, the debut edition aims to highlight conversations around history, regional cuisines, ingredients, and evolution of dining out, viewed through the prism of food writers, anthropologists, historians and food commentators. Some of the panelists include Rana Safvi, Sadaf Hussain, Ruth Dsouza Prabhu, Kalyan Karmakar, Nikhil Merchant, Anubhav Sapra, and more.