• ✦ Build the first multi-layer digital humanities archive of West Bengal tribal foodways
• ✦ Preserve endangered culinary knowledge through community-authored documentation
• ✦ Integrate WebGIS, deep mapping, and multi-layer ethnographic data
• ✦ Establish long-term digital sustainability through the Endings Project framework
• ✦ Protect Indigenous data sovereignty with non-extractive AI guardrails
• ✦ Democratise access through open-access, multilingual, screen-reader-compatible design

Over the years, Joseph Rozario has grown as both a chef and a person. He joined a 5-star property — the Renaissance Conventional Centre and Hotel in Mumbai, a prestigious JW Marriott property — where his skills were consistently appreciated by senior chefs. Polishing his culinary expertise at the highest level, Joseph then served as Executive Chef at Hotel Sinclairs, Siliguri, a 3-star property, making him the youngest Executive Chef in North Bengal at the time.

He then found solace in teaching the art of cooking to young people at Modi Public School, a joint-venture culinary arts programme for children. Joseph became a partnership member with Inspiria Knowledge Campus for a Culinary Certification Course for adults, and — recognising his responsibility toward society — associated himself with an NGO in Damdim where he teaches culinary arts to underprivileged children. He endorses the tea brand Riddhi Siddhi Green Tea and has appeared in television commercials for various brands.

We are deeply grateful to Chef Joseph Rozario for his extraordinary generosity in responding to our call for help in this — the first initiative of its kind in India — devoted to indigenous food cultural heritage preservation.

His monograph Untouched North Bengal: Cook Book (Darpan Publication, 2015) is the only published comprehensive record of North Bengal's tribal communities' cookbooks and culinary cultures, representing three years of dedicated field research. Through OCR extraction, we recovered 10 exclusive recipes from this rare text — including the Mech Dibouli Bidot pork pulao, the Toto Yashai Nayako leaf-parcel fish, and the Rajbangshi Bhapa steam cake — all of which appear nowhere else in the formal culinary record.

Chef Rozario generously provided a hardcopy of his book at no cost and has expressed willingness to permanently donate it to the IIST Library upon completion of the study. Without him, the North Bengal indigenous culinary layer of this archive would not exist.