An exploration of the ways in which caste structures are rigidly enforced when it comes to food, water, eating and drinking in India. Food is usually seen as celebratory, as a source of cultural pride and as a symbol of nostalgia but today's Mehfil cuts through these ideas to foreground the pain that food, eating rituals, and culinary and gastronomic traditions can wreak upon Dalit communities. The oppressive caste system in India is one of the most enduring, violent and pervasive forms of apartheid and segregation, and food is a potent instrument for furthering this violence and discrimination
Our guests Rajyashri Goody and Ari Gautier discuss this tenuous and complex relationship between caste and cuisine. Goody reminds us of the 1927 Mahad Satyagraha in Maharashtra when B.R Ambedkar led a resistance movement to initiate Dalit people to exercise a basic gesture– drink water from the Mahad water tank that was barred for usage for those who did not belong to upper castes. Gautier speaks from personal experience and shares memories of living along caste lines in the city of Pondicherry, where it was neither possible to drink water in the upper caste neighbor's house nor drink their water. Goody talks about her art, family stories, and her creation of Dalit recipe books, and argues that we must think about the act of writing and access to technology as necessities for documenting recipes, a right that has been historically denied to the Dalit community. Gautier brings up the specifics of religion and how this shapes Dalit cuisine, his mixed heritage, and constructing fiction that can go beyond essentialized and exoticized understandings of Dalit cuisine. Goody and Gautier reflect on how food and water also create formations of haptic and mnemonic codes, prejudices and sharing of public spaces that dangerously enable ideas of tainting and purity within the nation-state. Host Amrita Ghosh asks the guests about the historical trajectories of Dalit cuisine and also urges the guests to share moments of joy around food or certain beloved foods.
Rajyashri Goody is an artist from Pune, India and based in Holland. Her art and installations explore everyday and historic instances of Dalit resistance. She is interested in creating space and time for thinking through these themes, and incorporates reading, writing, ceramics, photography, printmaking, and installation in the hope that these mediums enable further conversations about caste and hierarchies. Goody is currently an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam.
Ari Gautier is a French writer and poet of Indo-Malagasy origin. Carnet Secret de Lakshmi and The Thinnai are his two first works on the history of Pondicherry where he spent his childhood. His most recent publication is Nocturne Pondichéry, a collection of short stories on postcolonial Pondicherry. He currently lives in Oslo.
Amrita Ghosh is Assistant Professor of English, specializing in South Asian literature at the University of Central Florida. She is the co-editor of Tagore and Yeats: A Postcolonial Reenvisioning (Brill 2022) and Subaltern Vision: A Study in Postcolonial Indian English Text (Cambridge Scholars 2012). Her book Kashmir’s Necropolis: New Literature and Visual Texts is forthcoming with Lexington Books. She is the co-founding editor of Cerebration, a bi-annual literary journal.
To inaugurate our Mehfil which means a celebratory gathering in Urdu, we asked Uday Bansal to compose a small poem for us. It was read out by Amrita Ghosh at the start of the program.
Tumhaari taal se betaal / Duniya tumhaari shaunq se ghafil hai / Taqaluf Chhod bhi do / Aao yeh tumhaari hi mehfil hai
This roughly translates as "cast off your inhibitions and come join our celebrations."
We want to thank Bansal who writes poetry in Hindustani, the confluence of Hindi and Urdu. Bansal has performed at the world's largest Urdu Literature festival Jashn-e-Rekhta in 2022 and has given a TEDx talk titled "Zabaan-e-Urdu" where he explores the misconceptions about the Urdu language and its relevance in today's times.
