This book outlines the variety of cuisines, food materials and dishes that collectively form “Indian Food”. It draws upon a range of sources—literature, archeology, epigraphic records, anthropology, philology, botanical and genetical studies—to trace the history of Indian food: classification, customs, rituals and beliefs, including the etymology of food terms. It shows how our wonderful Indian cuisine, with all its regional variants, is the outcome of food plants brought into India from numerous directions over thousands of years. And of a social ethic in which cleanliness was indeed next to godliness.