Scenes from India: East

The eastern Indian states are home to fruitful plains riddled with waterways. After monsoon season, fields are blanketed with mustard flowers, whose seeds yield pungent cooking oil; gardens burst with vegetables. Where the Ganges flows into the Bay of Bengal, freshwater fish and rice are at the foundation of the cuisine; farther south, hundreds of miles of coastline yield shrimp and other seafood. The people and urban scenes of east India are equally distinct; see all the scenes of the region here, as captured by SAVEUR photographers.
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Cooks at the kitchen at Jagganath Temple in Puri, Odisha.

Produce for sale at a market in Bhubaneshwar, Odisha.

Customers seek relief from the heat with caramel lassis at Lingeraj Lassi shop in Bhubaneshwar, Odisha.

A family in Vindhn, a village in Odisha.

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A home cook in Bhubaneshwar, Odisha uses a sil-batta, rolling the cylindrical batta grinding stone across the flat sil to crush garlic, chiles, and spices.

Shrimp for sale at a market in Bhubaneshwar, Odisha.

A dish of spiced fish cooked in banana leaves prepared by Mahua Maharana, a home cook in Bhubaneshwar, Odisha.

Book stall near Presidency College in Calcutta.

In Megha, a village in the southeastern part of Odisha state, farmers harvest green eggplant.

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A woman in Megha, Odisha.

A vendor crushes stalks to make sugar cane juice in Calcutta.

Pintu Roy, a sweets maker, makes peraki, crunchy turnovers stuffed with date palm sugar, in his village in West Bengal.

Pantua, cottage cheese–based sweets, are tossed into the air to help them brown evenly as they fry in oil.

Neighborhood children line up for savory snacks and mishti, Bengali milk-based sweets from Pintu Roy, a sweetsmaker in the village of Santiniketan, West Bengal.

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An elaborate thali at the Taj Bengal Hotel in Calcutta.

Fried snacks, or chaat, for sale in Calcutta.

A vendor in Pondicherry.

A waiter at the India Coffee House near Presidency College, Calcutta.