From Bengal’s Farms To The World’s Tables: The Story of Amar Khamar

A lunch in the Sundarbans changed the way Sujoy Chatterjee thought about rice. At a farmer’s home, he was served four different varieties at the same meal, including Kanakchur, a grain he had never encountered before and would later associate with the khoi used in Joynagar’s famous moa. What stayed with him was not just the food, but the diversity represented by those four bowls of rice.

Around a decade later, that encounter informed the work of Amar Khamar, the agricultural enterprise and Kolkata restaurant Chatterjee co-founded with Sarah Gekeler. Today, the organisation works with farming communities to preserve indigenous varieties while creating a market for them, bringing ingredients that remain largely unknown outside their regions into urban India’s kitchens and dining rooms.

Chatterjee had been travelling through the Sundarbans to understand agriculture when he met a group of farmers and was invited to eat at one of their homes. The four varieties of rice served at lunch marked a revelation. He returned to the farmers to see the paddy and was struck by the diversity being cultivated. That experience became part of the thinking behind Amar Khamar: agricultural diversity cannot survive simply by being documented or stored as seed. It needs to remain part of everyday consumption.

“All we tried is that the customers and the guests know what they eat and call it in its own name, and thereby they recognise the beauty in this diversity,” Chatterjee says.

The scale of that diversity becomes clearer in the numbers. Amar Khamar currently has more than 50 indigenous rice varieties on its shelves, while farmers associated with the organisation have preserved more than 200 varieties. Chatterjee points to a much larger historical loss: around 5,500 rice varieties existed in Bengal in the 1960s. For Amar Khamar, preservation therefore means creating a reason to keep these varieties in cultivation. The question is not only whether a seed survives, but whether there is enough demand for the farmer to plant it again.

That philosophy extends to the restaurant, where the menu begins with the agricultural calendar rather than a fixed roster of dishes.

“We decide our menu by first understanding the season and identifying which ingredients will be at their peak within our network of farming communities as well as the local markets in the city,” Chatterjee says.

A menu may focus on a particular ecoregion or bring attention to vegetables and other ingredients that have fallen out of regular use. Rice is treated with similar specificity: rather than functioning as a generic accompaniment, a particular variety is selected according to its characteristics, the knowledge of the farmers who grow it and the dish it is intended to accompany.

This also means accepting the unpredictability of agriculture. Some varieties perform better in particular years, and Chatterjee tells us that, “we are often dependent on the farmer-nature relation due to erratic climatic patterns.”

For Chatterjee, one of the problems with Bengal’s agricultural heritage is that its diversity can be obscured by generic categories. Rice, in particular, can be reduced to something as broad as “white steamed rice”, obscuring the differences between varieties and the places and communities associated with them.

Even Gobindobhog, perhaps Bengal’s most recognisable fragrant rice, is not where Amar Khamar places its emphasis. “When we speak of our rice varieties at Amar Khamar, we always speak of Bengal’s famed Gobindobhog the least,” Chatterjee says, pointing instead towards the wide, lesser-known fragrant varieties that receive far less attention.

The restaurant is one way of making these grains visible, but Amar Khamar’s reach extends beyond its own dining room. The organisation sells ingredients to individual consumers as well as restaurants across India, and some customers call specifically looking for particular rice varieties. 

For Chatterjee, this behaviour matters because it connects recognition with cultivation. “Every time someone eats at our restaurant, likes an ingredient and wants to take it home, we have made a small progress,” he says. The objective is not simply to turn obscure ingredients into fashionable restaurant products. It is to create sustained demand for them, giving farmers an economic reason to continue growing varieties that might otherwise be displaced by more commercially dominant crops.

Keeping Farmers At The Centre

There is, however, a tension in introducing heirloom ingredients into premium urban dining. As traditional foods gain new value in cities, the communities that have historically grown and consumed them can risk being separated from the food cultures now celebrating them.

Amar Khamar’s model is built around keeping farmers involved in that process. The organisation has spent close to a decade working with farming communities and organisations across West Bengal on nature-friendly cultivation, quality control and increasing the availability of seeds. The seed itself remains with the farmer. “It is their asset, which they can use for their own consumption as well as for selling the surplus,” Chatterjee says.

Fair pricing is another part of the equation. If demand for indigenous varieties increases, farmers can produce more without having to replace agricultural diversity with commercially dominant crops. “Effectively, it is the same thing — income through agriculture, but this time through biodiverse, nature-friendly produce,” Chatterjee says.

The relationship between producer and diner is also made more direct through Amar Khamar’s ‘family table’ events, where farmers have cooked alongside the restaurant team. One recent example involved Aparna, one of Amar Khamar’s foundational farmers, preparing a weekend menu centred on the highly seasonal Chiti Kankra from the Sundarbans.

Her daughter, Rekha, who grew up around Amar Khamar and now works as a chef in its kitchen, joined her. The occasion brought together two generations of a farming family and the restaurant team around an ingredient tied to a particular landscape and season. For Chatterjee, such encounters are part of keeping food traditions active rather than treating them as objects of preservation. “Every tradition, unless it is regularly practised, cannot be preserved,” he says.

Rice may have been the starting point, but Amar Khamar’s work now encompasses pulses, spices, jaggery, honey, ghee and other regional products. Its audience has expanded too, from individual consumers and diaspora Bengalis to restaurants across India. That wider network allows ingredients from Bengal’s farms to travel beyond the communities where they are traditionally known. A chef elsewhere in the country can encounter a rice variety or regional ingredient through Amar Khamar, introduce it to diners and potentially create another market for the farmer who produces it.

“We would be very happy to see that if primary producers are more and more recognised and have a bigger role, that there is more exploration of Bengal’s natural produce, their diversity and richness and that through the hands of great chefs, they reach new heights.

The journey that began with four bowls of rice in a Sundarbans home has grown into a broader attempt to connect cultivation with consumption. At Amar Khamar, the restaurant is one link in that chain: the meal introduces the ingredient, the ingredient points back to its producer, and demand can return to the field. As Chatterjee puts it, “For agricultural diversity to endure, preservation cannot stop at keeping a seed alive. It also has to leave farmers with a reason to plant it, consumers with a reason to seek it out and food cultures with enough space to keep using it.”