About

This study posits the representation of food in Dalit literature as a form of resistance against hegemonic Brahmanical notions of taste, cuisine, pure food, and Hindu casteism in general. By exploring the fictional tactics used by Dalit writers against their dehumanisation in an era of rising global fascism, it will contribute to the global study of resistance cultures. Building on my publications-to-date, it will contribute to shaping current discussions in Food Studies surrounding the politics of inclusion and exclusion, food justice, and the individual right to participate in food systems. In the Hindu caste system, food choices are typically shaped by one's caste position. Who can eat what is regulated by the Brahmanical social order, which assigns purity and impure status, underlaying concepts of social exclusion. Dalits, outcaste and with limited access to resources, developed eating habits deemed polluting by upper castes, further subjecting them to oppression. Post-2014, with Hindutva politics dominant and dietary profiling rife, violence against Dalits, often related to food, has increased by 46.11% (National Crime Record Bureau, 2022).              

Concepts such as ‘food voice’, ‘culinary interjections’, and ‘eating words’ allow me opportunity as a scholar who has routinely witnessed food-related violence, to engage with issues of food, marginalisation, and resistance across twentieth-century Dalit literature. This interdisciplinary project merges literary analysis with Food Studies (Hauck-Lawson 2005; Appelbaum, 2006; Gilbert, 2014), theories of humiliation and rejection (Guru 2009; Fanon, 1952), and notions of cultural resistance (Hall 1983 & 1997; Scott, 1990 & 2002) to ask how my primary material inverts the concept of humiliation to render it a weapon of self-assertion. The project crosses different genres of Dalit writing from diverse Indian states, supported by newspaper records and archives on Dalit activism at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and National Archives of India, New Delhi.