Bengaluru, September 19, 2025 – Instagram’s newest history-meets-food channel, Ancient Indian Cooking (@ancientindiancookingtales), has become one of the fastest-growing Indian cultural handles on the platform. In less than 15 days, the channel has crossed more than 12,000 followers and racked up close to 2 million views. Several reels have crossed 200,000 views, with the most-watched one clocking 800,000 (and well on its way to a million) rare traction for a new entrant in the crowded food-content space.
What sets the channel apart is its focus on storytelling. Instead of modern recipes, Ancient Indian Cooking mines, Sanskrit plays, religious literature, Buddhist travelogues, folktales, and classical texts to uncover quirky yet relatable stories about what people ate, how they celebrated, and the food rituals that shaped daily life. Posts connect these insights to present-day habits, showing how cultural memory around food continues to resonate.
Audiences are responding well beyond India. A sizeable portion of followers come from the US, Canada, UK, and UAE, highlighting the global appetite for India’s culinary heritage when told in fresh, engaging formats.
The creator of the channel, a communications professional and a history graduate who wishes to remain anonymous, said:
“The objective is not just to talk about recipes, but to highlight the cultural aspects of food as reflected in our oldest literature and oral traditions. Food is everywhere, not just on the table but in rituals, in jokes, in the way respect was shown. What strikes me is the continuity. A Sangam poet describing a wedding feast, or a sutra on how to welcome a guest, could easily be mistaken for something we’d say today. The details are different, but the instincts are the same, generosity, abundance, pride in feeding others. Even the humor is timeless: someone in a play complaining of a hangover or overindulgence is no different from us. That is what makes these stories worth telling; they make the past less distant, and they remind us that food habits are often the most enduring parts of culture.”
With a steep growth curve and high-quality engagement, Ancient Indian Cooking is fast positioning itself as one of the most distinctive new voices in the Indian creator ecosystem, particularly on cultural themes.
