ABSTRACT
Food provides stories of migration and entangled histories of displaced or even repatriated communities. I argue that food has the capacity to tell the history and the present of a community. Kashmir as a region has been a place where different communities have settled and created a cosmopolitan space. The idea of cosmopolitanism gets performed in the everyday lives of food. Using food as a lens, I examine the cosmopolitan history of the Khache (loosely translated as Tibetan Muslim) community. While the state categorizes Khache in different ways, such as refugees and outsiders, these labels tell us little about their everyday lives. This chapter moves away from the state-given categories to examine how this movement from Kashmir to Tibet and then back to Kashmir has shaped the lives of Khache people. I elaborate on the intersectional identities of the community through a focus on food. The food helps us remember certain memories of a place, people, and even landscape, and it is this food that sometimes reminds us of home, as it did to me when I entered the Lhasa Restaurant during my fieldwork. In this chapter, I present an alternate perspective of what being a Kashmiri might look like, through the lens of the Tibetan Muslims and their foods.
