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- Convenors:
-
Omer Aijazi
(University of Manchester)
Rubina Jasani (University of Manchester)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Transfers:
- Open for transfers
Short Abstract:
What can attention to the entanglements of food reveal about violence and moral reconstruction in South Asia? The panel interrogates cooking and eating amidst conflict, disaster, militarization, and colonial occupation as forms of risk-taking that reveal what is at stake in the world.
Long Abstract:
From the weaponization of food to reinforce social hierarchies to the centrality of culinary practices in resisting oppression, food is integral to the moral and social fabric of South Asia (Kikon, 2021; Kikon and Rodrigues, 2023). Cooking and eating provide entry into life’s structuring forces. They offer glimpses of the worlds that take root during violence; the delicate ways life is re-claimed (Aijazi, 2023; Dossa, 2014). Food also allows us to enter a fleshier relationship with others (Ray, 2022). Annemarie Mol (2021) wonders: “What if our theoretical repertoires were to take inspiration not from thinking but from eating?” (3).
Taking food practices as modes of world-making and relationality, the panel interrogates how food creates and recreates moral and ethical life in South Asia amidst conflict, disaster, militarization, and colonial occupation. We ask: What can the entanglements of food, such as foraging, cooking, and eating, reveal about violence and moral reconstruction? How do culinary practices contribute to refinding joy and strength while navigating histories of oppression and diminishment? How can cooking and eating reframe ethnography? What does attention to food illuminate about social and political life?
We invite scholars of South Asia to submit papers that interrogate these questions and beyond and foreground cooking and eating as urgent practices and compelling forms of risk-taking, revealing unique understandings of what is at stake in the world.
Accepted papers:
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how culinary practices in Dholavira reflect & reinforce intersectional hierarchies of caste, class, gender, and environment among Meghwal, Koli, & Thakar communities. It explores food's role in shaping identity, memory, and social stratifications amid historical transformations.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation will explore the intersectional hierarchies embedded within the culinary practices of Dholavira, a village in the Kutch region of Gujarat, India. Focusing on three communities—Meghwal, Koli, and Thakar—we investigate how food practices not only reflect caste, class, gender, and environmental factors but also serve as a means of preserving cultural identities in the face of social and historical transformations. Drawing on theories of food as identity (Appadurai 1981; Nandy 2004) and the concept of "culinary landscapes" (Aldrich 1966; Gold 2002), the study highlights the complex interplay between food, memory, and hierarchy.
Through a combination of participant observation, culinary documentation, and interviews the paper addresses the role of food practices in reinforcing social stratifications, such as the Meghwal community's transition from non-vegetarianism to vegetarianism as a marker of caste purity and upward mobility, the Koli community's meat-centred cuisine as a challenge to gender norms, and the Thakar community’s adherence to strict vegetarianism as a cultural and political statement. Additionally, the research draws on Blunt’s (2003) idea of kitchen spaces as sites for memory-making and Sutton’s (2008) concept of community meals to explore the ways in which food traditions carry layers of historical, social, and emotional significance, shaping and preserving collective identities through food.
It concludes by demonstrating that food is not just a material practice, but also an embodied, lived experience shaped by subtle forms of oppression that intersect with broader socio-cultural, political, and environmental dynamics.
Paper short abstract:
The paper asks: how is radical care and community understood and practiced by the transgender community in Pakistan through the act of cooking and eating together? What does queer ethnography centered around food in a South Asia context look like from a (non)visibility politics point of view?
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the central role that food occupies in building community and radical care networks for the transgender community in Pakistan. While in theory, there are some legal protections instituted for the Pakistani transgender community, in practice, trans people continue to face violence physically, emotionally, politically, and socio-economically. This paper centers the historic care structures that trans people have created for themselves in order to find and create community for themselves rooted in the “guru” system but highlights more specifically the role of food as the site of building community, redefining strength and joy, and providing essential sustenance.
Particularly around the times of religious rituals such as the celebration of Ramadan, the feeling of isolation from their biological families faced by the trans community is exacerbated. Hence, the act of making Iftar and breaking their fasts together becomes a revolutionary act of creating one’s “chosen family”. The paper aims to take a non-Western-centric approach to understanding indigenous Pakistani queer culture while situating food both as the site of resistance as well as care for Pakistani transgender people.
The paper asks: How is violence in terms of food insecurity experienced by the transgender community in Pakistan? What does queer ethnography centered around food in a South Asia context look like from a (non)visibility politics point of view? And finally, how is radical care and community understood and practiced by the transgender community in Pakistan through the act of cooking and eating together?
Paper short abstract:
Food can illuminate the inner workings of violence; how people refuse and resist systems of domination. Eating, cooking, foraging can be thought of as subtle invitations towards more collaborative worldmaking, where knowledge is speculative and the fleeting and ephemeral holds analytical promise.
Paper long abstract:
What can foraging, cooking, and eating reveal about the conflict in Kashmir? Can they be considered a mode of study? In this essay, through the entanglements of food (and a bloated stomach), I offer a relational praxis that is deeply felt, savoured, corporeal. Food—its preparation, eating, sharing—provides a different scale for intercepting the conflict in Kashmir, a disputed territory shaped by securitised geopolitical narratives. Small, evanescent stories structured around food offer glimpses of the worlds that take root during violence in the longue durée. These affective swirls illuminate the saturating of violence, its ineffable textures and tonalities, which are difficult to approximate otherwise. Within the push and pull of food lie traces of everyday acts of sovereignty and refusal that do not readily map onto a syntax of action. Telling different stories about Kashmir, such as through food, can offer new understandings of what is at stake while allowing us to feel coherent with the world as encountered.
Paper short abstract:
This article examines the role of food markets in shaping the “moral ecology” of Karachi in providing economic livelihood, as well as affordable and accessible food [bazaars] to the poor in Karachi.
Paper long abstract:
This article examines the role of food markets in shaping the “moral ecology” of Karachi in providing economic livelihood, as well as affordable and accessible food [bazaars] to the poor in Karachi. The food pathways shape the rhythms of the city, the identity of a neighborhood, and the politics of place. The literature on food studies has focused on production and consumption, but less so on the labor and logistics of provisioning . Karachi’s street food economy provides the migrant poor with a foothold in the city and a path to survival in the city. Hawkers and street vendors in Karachi claim their right to encroach on public land [in many poor/lower middle-class sections of the city] by invoking the right to feed their families even when in clear violation of the law. This article offers a granular ethnographic analysis of food markets to understand how retailers, traders navigate risk, balance their slim margins of profits and keep sight of the general social welfare of their suppliers and consumers in times of hyperinflation. A focus on the food geographies of Karachi reveals the central role of food provisioning shaping the mechanics of informal urbanism and markets [bazaars] in Karachi that allow the poor to defy and define spatial settlement, administration (in terms of the degrees of planning, or improvisation) and the question of law (licit/illicit, corruption/ legal regulation and illegal encroachments) and generate social surplus (effervescence) as well as the social-cultural costs that comes with it.
Paper short abstract:
Traces emergence of 'immunity nationalism' during COVID-19 pandemic in India, exploring its production via commercial and vernacular discourses. 'Immunity' was constructed in accordance with north Indian dietary idioms, offering a distinct class and religious imaginary of the nation.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the emergence of ‘immunity nationalism’ during the COVID-19 pandemic in India, exploring its production through interlinked commercial, political and vernacular discourses. Through fieldwork in Banaras along with media discourse analysis, the vernacularisation of immunity is traced as a category congruent with a pure, vegetarian north Indian diet, and ayurvedic models of heat and energy. A distinct conception of immunity emerged during the pandemic as a middle class imaginary of nationalism that positioned strong, often implicitly Hinduised, bodies in opposition to a chemical-saturated western modernity as well as, in certain instances, a generalised Muslim other. Its constitution as an imaginary occurred both through the statements of political figures and the marketing strategies of medicinal and food-based businesses, as well as the everyday dietary practices and ethical theories of middle class north Indians.
The paper seeks to explore how this emergent discourse of nationalism affected the reception of vaccines in north India, which offered a divergent, opposed conception of immunity. It also examines how theories of immunity developed and transformed over the course of the pandemic, as death and disaster undermined existing vernacular understandings of health. Immunity nationalism is read here as a development of older South Asian theories of nationalism, what Joseph Alter terms ‘somatic nationalism’, yet also as something that allowed for the incorporation of novel biomedical and epidemiological ideas within longstanding class-based and religious framings of the self centring on food and ethical dietary practices.
Paper short abstract:
In bringing food histories, rituals, and recipes of the Muslim communities of Gujarat to the conversation on Gujarati food, this paper shows how food is a metaphor for life, loss and belonging for these communities.
Paper long abstract:
In July 2024, Palitana a city in Gujarat became the first city in the world to ban the sale and consumption of non-vegetarian food. This process is symptomatic of a larger history of violence and erasure that is backed by the state and what is understood as ‘Gujarati’ food. Earlier research on Gujarat has shown the cities are divided into ‘gastronomical zones’ with very clear spatial boundaries around purity/ pollution and clean/unclean attached to Muslim bodies and their food habits (Jasani, 2014). This paper seeks to systematically document the erasure of the unique food histories of the Muslim communities of Gujarat - the Memons, the Bohras and the Khojas. These communities originated in rural Gujarat and have migrated to Pakistan (during the partition) and other urban Indian centres) in India. These histories though mobile carry a sense of place in their narration. This food culture comes with its own materiality, traditions around community kitchens, foods that are served during festivals and in mourning and nuanced rituals during eating and drinking.
This paper draws attention to the larger politics of food in Gujarat while showing how these food histories keep the moral universe of these communities alive.