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“The Song of Food” brings to light a relationship that exists between the soundscape and the foodscape of a geographical location. The research studies the rhymes or songs that are sung by food-selling hawkers in North Indian markets. The article establishes that the relevance of these songs is definitely beyond the transaction of buying, selling, and consuming food, and discovers the socio-economic and socio-cultural dimension that reflects from these songs. The findings reveal that how nativity, geography, and economic status are inherently adopted while composing these songs. Oblivious to the fact that how they have added another sense to food, beyond taste, vision and smell, the sense of sound, these hawkers have introduced social intimacy to a simple buying and selling process. The article talks about few such food products and their selling calls from Hindi- and Punjabi-speaking regions of North India.

The paper acknowledges the remarkable contribution of cookbooks which have always played an instrumental role in researching the history of any community. However, it brings to light the fact that there are several reasons like migration, small size of the community or the nomadic lifestyles when the culinary regime of the community could not be documented. In such cases, the everyday food choices of an ethnic community can lead us to tracing its origin and journey. The paper, thus, argues that in situations where there is paucity of literature documenting the culinary system or foodways, culinary identity of the community can become an effective method to trace the history of the community. The same is proved with the help of a case study of the Thattai Bhatia community. Thattai Bhatia is a small diaspora largely settled in the Persian Gulf, originally migrated from Rajasthan in India and later from Thatta in Sindh, Pakistan. The research reveals the reasons behind their distinct foodways such as abstinence from consuming liquor, meat, garlic and onion in particular, despite their intermingling with different ethnicities due to migration. The paper draws evidences from their regular foodways and traverses backwards to trace their origins, their history and the reasons that have shaped their contemporary food choices. With limited availability of literature, the author had to depend on the information provided during interviews by some of the community members about their food practices. All the findings are substantiated with references from the historical literature available.

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