Writer | Sharanya Deepak

Sharanya is a writer and editor from and currently in New Delhi, India. She writes about food, language, the commodification of culture and is currently writing more essays. Her work has been published in Orion, Eater, Vittles, Popula, Atlas Obscura, Wasafiri, Longreads, Roads and Kingdoms, FiftyTwo, The Believer and The Baffler among others.

She is an editor at Vittles Magazine, and also an editor at Mangal Media, a collective of writers and artists from outside Western Europe and North America. In October 2020, she won the Wasafiri new writing Prize for her essay "Seamless". In 2022-23, she was a fellow at One World Media, and South Asia Speaks. She is currently working on a book of essays.

Featured Writing

Dear Neighbour

Fifty Two, December 2022

"But in recent years, the topic of Pakistan, always touchy in many Hindu households, has become touchier still. For the Indian state, Pakistan is, among other things, a permanent enemy, and to be “Pakistani” is an attribute that is used to designate people and communities, almost always Muslims, as outsiders. Today, many of the BJP’s supporters have also claimed popular authority to dictate the terms of exile—Go to Pakistan!—to those they consider adversaries."

Indian Biscuits: 1947-2022

Vittles, May 2022

"The appeal was that, unlike most traditional luxuries – like sweets made from ghee and sugar, which were gatekept by dominant-caste communities – capitalist goods did not discriminate on traditional grounds; they could exist and be purchased by people across caste, class and gender. Little Hearts promised an aspirational culture, but they also promised liberation – eating a packet of them made for free-footed emancipation from any parental and societal rules, even if fleeting."

Seamless

Wasafiri Magazine, March 2021

"Everywhere I went, I witnessed women who had stolen themselves away from their bodies to be able to preserve a part of themselves; I saw how they stored themselves in dreams, in art, in their children, in large cooked meals, in faith and poetry and errands they conducted in the memory of those that came before them. I have seen women step outside their bodies and escape wounds that trigger trauma, I have seen them sweep over instances where desire and danger existed in the same moment, and are remembered in the same breath. Who do our bodies belong to? Are they are own? And if they are not, how do we fight anything that is to come?"

India's Beef with Beef

The Baffler, March 2023

"As Indian vegetarianism gains mass appeal by way of the Western diaspora, its presence in India continues to be used to deny people adequate nutrition and to enact violence on the citizens that Modi’s government is attempting to exclude. While in the past decade there have been stories of resistance to the state and the ruling elite’s imposition of vegetarianism, tales of grief and mourning crowd the conversations surrounding Indian food."