Pritha Sen

Pritha Sen (born 17 March 1960) is an Indian food historian, food writer, culinary consultant and former journalist. She works on the cooking of undivided Bengal, the region split between India and East Pakistan at the 1947 Partition, and has researched and revived dishes associated with it through pop-up meals and restaurant menus. She was a journalist through the 1990s and then worked in the development sector. Her public work on food history began in 2013.

Early life

Sen's family came from Bikrampur, in what is now Bangladesh. Both her grandfathers were posted to Delhi before Partition and the family had been in north India for a generation by the time she was born. Her father's government job moved him often, and Sen grew up in a series of railway colonies before her family settled in Kolkata, when she was a teenager. She studied history at Jadavpur University, After working as chief copy editor at Business Today,

She left journalism around 2000 to work in development, microfinance and poverty alleviation, Madhukar Shukla's Social Entrepreneurship in India (2020) lists her among people associated with the non-profit, and she published a paper on Ashoka's model in Futures in 2007, Transforming the world through social entrepreneurship. As an Ashoka consultant she also produced a series of case studies profiling Indian social entrepreneurs and the organisations they built — among them the anti-trafficking groups STOP and Odanadi Seva Trust, Arvind Kejriwal's early use of right to information law against administrative corruption in Delhi, and the Centre for Dialogue and Reconciliation's peace building work in Kashmir and other conflict-hit regions.

In 2007, Sen was appointed to the board of the microfinance institution Bandhan (later Bandhan Bank) and became a director of Plural India, a microfinance non-profit, in the same year. Her writing on microfinance included articles published in the magazine Small Change in 2005 (later cited in development-finance research). Sen co-founded Uttor, a publication aimed at microentrepreneurs, which won the UN Population Fund-supported Laadli Award for Gender Sensitivity in 2011. She also provided editorial assistance on Banking on self-help groups: Twenty years on (2012), a study by Ajay Tankha for ACCESS Development Services. Her work took her into remote Indian villages, and Sen has said it was spending time in women's kitchens there that made her start paying attention to what people cooked and why. She spent about three years researching it, drawing on her own family's recollections and on the accounts of people who had travelled the route before the service ended. Sen has emphasised the structured, course-by-course character of a traditional Bengali meal — bitter dishes first, building up to fish and meat and ending with a sweet — presenting it as a system grounded in Ayurvedic digestive principles rather than simply a serving order.

In March 2015, Sen cooked in Kolkata with Manzilat Fatima, a great-great-granddaughter of Wajid Ali Shah, on a menu from the Awadh royal kitchen. The Goa chef, Prasanta Mandal, said the kitchen won a Times Good Food award after following Sen's advice.

In 2022, Sen rebuilt the menu at Yantra, It was her first project outside India. Among her own compositions, Sen has singled out Banglar ghorowa thala, a platter of Bengali dips and small dishes modelled on the mezze format. She has divided her time between Gurgaon, Kolkata, Goa and Mumbai,

Her food writing has also addressed questions of culinary identity and heritage, with subjects including kasundi, a traditional Bengali mustard condiment; the hilsa fish; and the descent of the Anglo-Indian kedgeree from Bengali khichuri. She is cited in Digest: A Journal of Foodways and Culture, in a 2020 study of food and decolonisation in West Bengal in Alternation, and in a 2025 article in the journal Media Asia on Bengali food writing.

Vir Sanghvi has called Sen the best living authority on the history of Bengali cuisine.

Selected publications