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The Roti Collective, a collaborative research initiative started by SIS professor Mariam Durrani, explores the history and narratives of the flatbread known as roti through community events, a podcast, and a website. Through this initiative, Durrani, her students, and community partners aim to show how roti is more than just food; It is also part of a broader cultural framework that helps us understand gender, identity, and heritage. To learn more, we asked Durrani some questions about her inspiration for the Roti Collective, the events and impact of the initiative, and her favorite way to eat roti.

What is roti and what areas of the globe is it most commonly eaten (both now and historically)?

Roti, an unleavened flatbread, originated with ancient peoples of the Indus River Valley on the Indian subcontinent. Known by many names, including chapati and parotta, roti and the practice of roti-making has traveled the globe to become a culinary mainstay across many foodways in the 鈥淕lobal South.鈥� The ancestral food traditions of South Asia first traveled across Indian Ocean trade routes beginning as early as the third century B.C. Later, from the 1830s to 1917, the British brought approximately two million indentured people from colonial India to British colonies elsewhere in Asia, the Americas, and Africa, often with no possibility to return. Today, roti and its many varieties connect cuisines and peoples across South and Southeast Asia, in East and South Africa, in the Caribbean, and their respective diasporas.

Given roti鈥檚 continued prominence in food cultures across the world, my research focuses on how we can bring these narratives together to show what is and is not shared across the ways roti is made, eaten, and discussed today.

What inspired you to create the Roti Collective?

I grew up in a Pakistani diaspora family where I observed roti-making as an organizing tradition of my home culture but one that remained a gender-exclusive space for girls, mothers, and aunties. During family trips to Pakistan, I noticed how it was common to buy roti from the neighborhood tandoors (or communal ovens) and restaurants where men made the roti. Some women made roti at home or employed cooks, both men and women. My curiosity about roti emerged through observations across different contexts where roti was part of everyday life. Many years later during my dissertation fieldwork with college students in Lahore and NYC, I observed how they all shared memes and jokes about roti, particularly using it as a metaphor to talk about sexist norms at home and across society. These intersections, reflections, and discourses served as an entry point to how roti is more than a food but also part of a broader cultural framework to understand gender, identity, and heritage.

In 2021, I created an undergraduate research group with students to study roti and roti-making together, and over the next few years, this work developed into the Roti Collective as a collaborative research initiative that included community events, a podcast, and a website to share our research and projects. For example, we organized a roti-making demonstration and panel at Philadelphia鈥檚 Asian Arts Initiative, a community center for Asian arts and culture. In 2024, we held a similar roti-making event at DC鈥檚 worker-owned bookstore, Bol.

My favorite moment from our community events is when, as part of the demonstration and as the rotis are being made, audience members are invited to tear off a bite of the piping-hot rotis, reminding me of when I鈥檇 sneak in a bite as a child while my mom made fresh rotis. As the project develops, I love seeing how the work continues to grow through collaborative public conversations, including both in-person events and online platforms.

What types of events and projects does the Roti Collective carry out, and how does it work with community partners?

The Roti Collective exists as a series of collaborative public and academic research projects and events where we study roti and roti-making as a global food culture and history that connects people across South and West Asia, East Africa, across the Caribbean, and their diasporas everywhere else. Through our research projects and community events, we explore and think with roti as a practice that connects multiple histories of heritage, colonialism, migration and displacement, gender and patriarchy. What we鈥檝e found is that people get very excited about the way we study roti through roti-making as a living archive. Roti means many different things to different people, and that is why our work begins with a 鈥渂oth/and鈥� approach. Our projects and events study roti as a form of care, roti-making as a craft and cultural legacy, and finally roti-making as a community-based practice steeped in history with much to teach us.

What are your hopes for the Roti Collective and its impact?

My hopes for the Roti Collective are to continue working with students and communities to continue mapping roti鈥檚 planetary foodways and generate more expansive and capacious global histories that highlight global cultural circulations and global community traditions. We invite you to follow our project and join our study of what we call 鈥渞oti-based knowledges.鈥� Drawing on feminist scholarship, the Roti Collective shares our research on roti that centers both complex histories of colonialism, indenture, migration and displacement, and also legacies of survivance, craft, and creativity into a people-centered approach to gastrodiplomacy.

What is your favorite dish to eat with roti? Do you have a favorite recipe to share?

Making a basic roti requires only two ingredients鈥攁tta (refined wheat flour) and water鈥攂ut the flavor and form can be improved upon with a little salt and some ghee (clarified butter). In Pakistan, roti is often made with flour and water. In contrast, Guyanese roti is made with not only flour and water, but also salt, baking powder, and ghee. In Kenya and Uganda, the food is known as chapati and is made thicker than Pakistani rotis and not as flaky as Guyanese rotis. Despite these differences, roti鈥檚 springy pliability is one reason it is so beloved. Somehow roti provides just enough structure for a scoop of a delicious daal or curry and just enough softness for the perfect, melt-in-your-mouth bite. I love roti in all its forms, but my favorite remains my mom鈥檚 roti with chicken karhai.