The traditional food of India is a family of regional cuisines built on the same base: a cereal staple (wheat breads such as chapati in the north and west, rice in the south and east) eaten with dal (spiced lentils), vegetable dishes, pickles and yoghurt, often served together on a round platter called a thali. Each region has signature dishes: tandoor-baked breads, dal and butter chicken in Punjab and Delhi; dosa, idli and sambar in the south; fish in mustard oil and milk sweets such as rasgulla in Bengal; the many-bowled Gujarati thali; and Goa's vinegar-sharp pork vindaloo in the west. Spices are the common thread, from native black pepper, turmeric and cardamom to the chilli brought by the Portuguese in the 16th century. Vegetarianism is unusually widespread: in a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, 39 percent of Indians said they were vegetarian.
The food writer Madhur Jaffrey has noted that India, larger than Europe without Russia, has state cuisines as different as those of European countries. Taking the regions one at a time makes the pattern clearer.
Punjab and the North: Wheat, Tandoor and Butter Chicken
Across the northern plains, from Punjab through Haryana and Delhi to Uttar Pradesh, the everyday meal is wheat bread, usually chapatis, with dal and a vegetable such as cauliflower, and for some households a meat curry. Wheat and barley reached the Indus Valley around 7000 BCE, and peanut oil is a common cooking fat in the north and west.
Punjab's contribution is the tandoor, a bell-shaped clay oven fired with charcoal or wood that can reach 480 °C. The word comes into Hindustani from Persian tanūr and ultimately from an Akkadian word meaning "mud fire". Chicken roasted in tandoor-like ovens is documented in the Harappan civilisation as early as 3000 BCE. Naan and roti are slapped onto the hot inner wall to bake, and marinated meat is roasted on skewers inside. Basmati rice is grown mainly in Punjab, Haryana and neighbouring regions, and its earliest known mention is in Heer Ranjha, the epic the Punjabi poet Waris Shah composed in 1766.
Butter chicken (murgh makhani) is a modern Punjabi classic. It is associated with the Moti Mahal restaurant in Daryaganj, Old Delhi, opened by Kundan Lal Gujral and Kundan Lal Jaggi, Punjabi Hindu refugees from Peshawar after Partition, who popularised it in the 1950s by simmering leftover tandoori chicken in a tomato gravy rich with butter. The families of the two founders now dispute who invented it, and in 2024 Gujral's grandson argued that it was first made in Peshawar before 1947. The international fame of tandoori dishes owes a lot to Punjabi restaurateurs at home and abroad.
Further north, Kashmir's wazwan banquet is a long sequence of goat, lamb and chicken dishes, among them rogan josh, and slow-cooking under a dough-sealed lid, known as dum pukht, is an Indo-Persian technique found across the north.
The South on Rice and Coconut: Dosa, Sambar and Sadya
South of the Deccan the staple is rice, coconut is everywhere, curry leaves and tamarind flavour the pot, and steaming is a favourite technique. Coconut oil dominates in Kerala, and sesame (gingelly) oil is common across the region. Karnataka is the partial exception, where rice shares the plate with wheat and finger millet (ragi).
The best-known southern dish is the dosa, a thin pancake made from a fermented batter of ground rice and black gram (urad dal). Food historian K. T. Achaya found references suggesting dosa was eaten in the ancient Tamil country around the first century CE; a recipe appears in the Manasollasa, a 12th-century Sanskrit encyclopedia compiled by Someshvara III, who ruled from present-day Karnataka. The softer, thicker Tamil dosa and the thin, crisp Karnataka style are both common. Dosa spread north through Udupi restaurants, which reached Mumbai in the 1930s.
Dosa almost always comes with sambar, a stew of pigeon peas (toor dal), vegetables and tamarind. Its origin is murky. Achaya dates the earliest clear reference to a 1648 Kannada text describing huli, a sour vegetable-and-dal curry, while a popular legend credits the Thanjavur Maratha court under Shahuji I (reigned 1684–1712) and names the dish after Sambhaji. Idli, steamed cakes of a similar fermented rice-and-lentil batter, is the other staple; in Chennai idli and sambar is as much a street food as a home meal.
The south's great feast is Kerala's sadya, a vegetarian meal served on a banana leaf for the festivals of Onam and Vishu and for weddings. A typical sadya has 24 to 28 dishes in a single course. Karnataka's traditional bisi bele bhath is simpler: rice, lentils and vegetables cooked together with spice.
Bengal and the East: Mustard Oil, Hilsa and Rasgulla
In West Bengal rice is again the staple, but the protein is fish, and the defining flavour is mustard, used as oil, as fried seeds and as a sharp paste. Freshwater fish are preferred: carp such as rohu, the oily hilsa (ilish), and bhetki, the local name for barramundi. A whole-spice mix of five seeds, panch phoron, is tempered in hot oil to start many dishes. Not all Bengali food is fish-based, though: the Vaishnavite tradition of Bengal is strictly vegetarian and avoids even onions. Next door in Bihar the classic meal is litti chokha, wheat dough balls stuffed with roasted gram flour (sattu) and served with mashed spiced vegetables.
Bengal's other speciality is sweets made from fresh cheese (chhena). Sandesh is a pressed, sweetened chhena confection. The spongy rasgulla (rosogolla) is usually credited to the Kolkata confectioner Nobin Chandra Das in 1868, although food historians cite earlier makers, and the sweet's origin is disputed with Odisha, where it is offered at the Jagannath Temple in Puri. Each state now holds protection for its own version: West Bengal received a geographical indication for "Banglar rosogolla" in 2017 and Odisha one for "Odisha rasagola" in 2019.
Gujarat's Thali and Goa's Vindaloo
The western coast holds two very different traditions side by side. In Gujarat, where Jainism has shaped the diet, most food is vegetarian despite a long coastline. A Gujarati thali brings everything at once: rotli (thin wheat bread), dal or curry, rice and shaak (vegetable dishes), a pulse dish, a farsaan snack such as dhokla, and a sweet such as mohanthal or jalebi. Many dishes balance sweet, salty and spicy in the same mouthful. Surat's speciality undhiyu is a mixed-vegetable dish named from the Gujarati word for "upside-down", because it was traditionally cooked in earthen pots buried in the ground and fired from above. In neighbouring Maharashtra the thali is served with sweets such as shrikhand, a strained-yoghurt pudding, alongside the main dishes, and millet breads of sorghum (jowar) and pearl millet (bajra) are common across the west.
Goa, a Portuguese territory from 1510 until 1961 and capital of Portugal's Estado da Índia from 1530, cooks with pork, vinegar and heat. Vindaloo takes its name from the Portuguese carne de vinha d'alhos, meat in garlic and wine. Goan cooks made it with pork marinated in vinegar and garlic, swapping palm vinegar for the wine and adding spices; the historian Lizzie Collingham notes that the Portuguese in Goa liked their food very hot, with up to 20 chillies in a recipe. Pork sorpotel is another Goan-Portuguese staple. In the 19th century vindaloo passed into Anglo-Indian cooking and later became a fixture of British curry houses.
Malabar Pepper, Vasco da Gama and the 16th-Century Chilli
India's spices are older than any of its regional cuisines. Turmeric, cardamom, black pepper and mustard were being harvested by 3000 BCE. Black pepper is native to South or Southeast Asia, perhaps including the Malabar Coast, and wild vines still grow in the Western Ghats; the coast of present-day Kerala became its most important source. The lost port of Muziris traded pepper with the Roman Empire, Egypt and Mesopotamia, and a Sangam-era Tamil poem describes Yavana (Greek) ships arriving with gold and leaving with pepper, past sacks of it heaped on the riverbank.
That trade drew Vasco da Gama, who sailed round the Cape of Good Hope and reached Calicut on the Malabar Coast in 1498. The Portuguese came for pepper, but they also brought something new. Chilli, native to the Americas, was introduced to India by the Portuguese in the 16th century through trading posts such as Goa, and spread inland through local trade. Today chilli is a key source of heat in many Indian curries, used alongside the native black pepper. Tomato, potato, sweet potato and peanut arrived through the same exchange, and the British introduced cauliflower in 1822. A dish as Indian-seeming as a potato and cauliflower curry depends on all of these imports.
Pew's 2021 Survey: Where India Eats Vegetarian
In 2021 the Pew Research Center surveyed nearly 30,000 Indians and found that 39 percent identified as vegetarian. The share varies sharply by religion: 92 percent of Jains, 59 percent of Sikhs, 44 percent of Hindus, 25 percent of Buddhists, 10 percent of Christians and 8 percent of Muslims. Among Hindus it also differs widely by region, in a pattern that matches the map of cuisines above.
A 2018 government survey released by the Registrar General of India shows the same gradient by state: Rajasthan (74.9 percent vegetarian), Haryana (69.25) and Punjab (66.75) at the top, Gujarat at 60.95, and West Bengal (1.4) and Telangana (1.3) at the bottom. Self-reported figures may overstate the true share. A 2018 study in Economic and Political Weekly by Balmurli Natrajan and Suraj Jacob argued that social pressure leads people to under-report meat-eating and put the real figure closer to 20 percent.
Climate explains much of the rest of the map: wheat suits the dry north-west, rice and coconut the monsoon-soaked south and east, as described in our guide to India's climate. The physical regions behind it are set out in India's geography, and the pepper trade that first brought the Portuguese is traced along the old spice routes.