Hansal Mehta's AI-Powered 'Khana Dil Se' Explores India's Culinary Heritage

Collective Studios has partnered with True Story Films, founded by filmmaker Hansal Mehta and producer Sahil Saigal for the project.

The newly released teaser offers a first look at a distinctive episodic series exploring India's culinary heritage through the lens of artificial intelligence.

For Mehta, 'Khana Dil Se' marks a return to the terrain where he first made his mark.

For the uninitiated, in the early 1990s, Hansal Mehta had created Khana Khazana, the pioneering cookery show that turned Chef Sanjeev Kapoor into a household name.

It has changed the way India thought about food on screen. Now, three decades later, the director has returned to food, but this time with AI as his collaborator.Joining him in this new endeavour is Indian Master Chef Shamsher Ahmed, who shall be seen coming on board as subject matter expert and culinary consultant.

Talking about the show, at its heart, 'Khana Dil Se' is a cultural exploration of India through its kitchens, tracing stories of migration, memory, and identity through recipes passed down across generations.

The use of AI will not just be as a visual and imagination tool, but as a collaborator in the storytelling itself.Khana Dil Se reclaims food as a living cultural heritage.Speaking about the show, Hansal Mehta said, "Food is memory.

When you cook something from another culture, you are not just following a recipe, you are stepping into a piece of someone else's life."

"A recipe carries within it an entire history: of land, of migration, of a grandmother's hands. These are probably humanity's most durable cultural documents, passed down through generations, across borders, surviving when almost nothing else does. That's what makes food such an honest way to look at people and who they really are."

He added, "With Khana Dil Se, we want to use every tool available to us, including AI, to trace those stories before they disappear."

Producer Sahil Saigal who is a restaurateur himself, added, "Khana Dil Se gave us a chance to ask what food television could look like if AI were part of the process, not replacing the human story, but helping us reach deeper into it. There are culinary traditions across India that have never been documented. This is our attempt to find them."

Vijay Subramaniam, Founder and Group CEO of Collective Artists Network, said, "At Collective, we've always believed that storytelling evolves with the tools available to us."

"India's culinary traditions are among the richest cultural archives in the world, yet so many of these stories remain undocumented. Khana Dil Se brings together creators, filmmakers, and technologists to surface those stories in a way that hasn't been attempted before," he added.

Produced by True Story Films in collaboration with Collective Artists Network's Collective Studios, Khana Dil Se - An AI Journey Through India's Kitchen is touted as a first-of-its-kind series that brings together culinary heritage and artificial intelligence to tell the story of India through its food.

- IANS