This Roti Is Not Fashion. It’s Our Life: Renuka Bai

Her name is Renuka Bai. She’s perched on a wooden bandi (cart), where she prepares jowar rotis, round and warm. The cart is old. Its wheels are rusty. The roof is covered with plastic sheets and wooden sticks. For her, though, it’s not just a cart. It’s her home.

“This fire is from my mother. From my grandmother. This roti is not fashion. It’s our life,” she says, patting the dough with both hands.

She uses only three ingredients: jowar flour, salt, and water. There is no packet, no menu. Nothing else but her hands, and a memory that never goes away.

“People do eat for taste,” she says then, her voice steady. “But there’s more than just taste in our roti. It’s truth.”

Her hands are strong. They have carried firewood, boiled pots, worked on farms. Now they press, flip, and lift each roti carefully. There is no rolling pin. She forms the dough with her fingers, feeling it jump to life on the hot iron pan.

A warm, soft aloo roti is cracked like the land her people have walked for generations. If Whole Foods has done well, she feeds them groundnut chilli powder. The roti is wrapped in old Hindi newspapers. There are no fancy boxes. No social media ads. Only truth in taste.

Her clientele is largely made up of auto drivers, construction workers, and students from the hostels nearby and the occasional stranger who stops by, lured in by the warmth. One bite and they come back for more than the food for her fire.

“These rotis are not for money only,” she says. “They are the voice of my people. We are Lambadas. We came from the forests. We lost land. We lost names. But we never lost our food.”

Renuka is a Lambada, a member of a tribe that has passed culture through forests, droughts, displacement, and centuries of silence. Many Lambadas used to be forest nomads. Now, they have spread across Telangana and Andhra, struggling to preserve their original lifestyle.

“Jowar is eaten by people now because doctors say it’s healthy. We want to do it because it’s trendy and it’s hip to be vegan,” she says, “but we’ve been eating it for centuries for survival, not for the trend point.”

Renuka does not aspire to open a restaurant. She longs for something more profound.

“I don’t want a big hotel. I want this bandi to turn into some kind of a museum. That way people will show up and know who we were. We are not backward. We are brave.”

In a city with rooftop cafés and millet startups, and people consuming meals for Instagram, Renuka is selling rotis at ₹15 under a torn tarpaulin. But do not make any mistake; this woman is no less a warrior. Her battlefield rises from the bandi she owns. Her hands are her instruments — the tools that craft her rotis and which she wields for her resistance.

As I watch her from the side, I realize that this is much more than food. It's food offered by a woman who is tendering an ignored past to an ever-hastening present. And with every roti flipped, she's saying, “Don’t just eat. Remember us.”