Episode 5 - Bad Table Manners

Where There Are No Butchers, There Are Cinnamon Buns

This episode flips the script on caste and food by celebrating and exploring the food practices of caste oppressed communities. Is there such a thing as “Dalit cuisine?” Do Dalit chefs and food enthusiasts accept this term? What are Dalit recipes, and how have they been archived and reproduced? Can food be a site of caste abolitionism? The two guests on this episode – Vinay Kumar and Rajyashri Goody – who self-identify as Dalit, offer their own personal reflections on food and food politics. 

In this episode of Bad Table Manners, Meher chats with:

• Vinay Kumar currently teaches at Azim Premji University. A writer, he is the author of the widely read article Blood Fry and Other Dalit Recipes from My Childhood. Meher borrows the title of this episode from him.

• Rajyashri Goody is an Amsterdam-based artist and the creator of Writing Food, a series of Dalit cookbooks

Episode highlights:

Caste in India

• Meher begins by explaining the caste system in India and outlines Dalit people’s place in the hierarchy. Calling it “hidden apartheid,” Meher explains that because they are placed categorically in the lowest strata of the system, Dalit people experience social exclusion and oppression in their everyday lives. Often, they are not allowed to cross the line dividing their part of the village from that which is occupied by higher castes; they may not use the same wells, visit the same temples, or drink from the same cups in tea stalls. Dalit children are frequently made to sit at the back of classrooms. 

• Despite being abolished in the Indian constitution in 1950, caste oppression persists. It became especially visible during the COVID pandemic, when Dalit people were left to dispose of and cremate bodies infected with COVID.

The Caste System in Food

• Caste oppression is evident in Indian foodways too, Meher adds. In order to maintain their monopoly over land and food access, Brahmins, the highest caste group, arranged food in a hierarchy of three groups: satvik, rajasik, and tamasik. Satvik food—the top group that includes only vegetables and some dairy—is considered ‘their food,’ while anything from animal scraps to rats are considered tamasik, or polluted. Those who consume tamasik food are similarly contaminated by the food's supposed impurity.

• These “dirty” foods are sometimes exoticized. Botee, for example, or goat intestines, is considered a delicacy because it takes many hours to prepare and cook. Meher remarks that it is often the “dirty” foods that require the most skill and preparation. 

Dalit Cuisine

• Vinay explains the political debate behind considerations of a standalone Dalit cuisine. Do Dalits want to be considered as a group separate from the rest of the population, or do they want to be considered equal among a population that is unified as a whole?

• Rajyashri agrees, adding that she considers Dalit food as a separate category not in terms of the types of food that make it up but rather in terms of the memories and emotions Dalit people associate with the cuisine.

Food Access

• Food access is an important factor to consider when thinking through Dalit foodways. Both Rajyashri and Vinay comment on access to food (and lack of it), and Meher points out that where access is not granted, a cooked meal is not a guaranteed outcome. 

• Many representations of food in Dalit communities are not actually about eating, but the antithesis of it: hunger.

Where There Are Cinnamon Buns, There Are No Butchers

• Meher digs into the slow disappearance of butcher shops, particularly ones that sold beef, in parts of India. “Discrimination is embodied by urban plans for modernity,” she says, “and this idea of Indian modernity manifests itself in olfactory wars where the buns, the fragrance of buns, that are indigenous to no one win. The butcher shops did not entirely disappear, but a certain kind of meat consumption certainly became not only rarer, but even dangerous to consume.”

• Vinay comments on the protests that followed the beef ban imposed in Maharashtra in 2016, stating that the most important part of the conflict was that people were having conversations about the ways in which food can be used to control people.

Dalit Cookbooks and the Limitations of a “Recipe”

• Rajyashri has been researching Dalit food since about 2016, when atrocities began occuring against Dalit and Muslim people in India related to the beef ban. Initially, there wasn’t much writing for her to find as far as research on Dalit foodways, and there were certainly no cookbooks.

• When you try to introduce the traditional idea of a “cookbook” to conversations about the Dalit community, a number of complexities arise. First, cookbooks typically assume that access to food is plentiful, the recipe is stable, and ingredients are guaranteed.

• Second, The popular imagination of a cookbook is straightforward: You follow a recipe that you don't know very well, one that is perhaps from your own community or culture or passed down through your family. “But what do you do when your community hasn't been allowed to read and write for centuries?” Rajyashri asks. “There's no way of passing down, forget food recipes, but anything.”

• Rajyashri reads a “recipe” she created based on the way Omprakash Valmiki talks about food in Joothan, a memoir about being Dalit, or “untouchable” in the 1950s.

• Meher adds that Rajyashri’s work makes for joy, for a way of telling stories that account both for emancipation and suffering.

Many Forms of Resistance

• Rajyashri explains that joy has arisen from struggle through resistance, and that she tries to balance the moments of struggle and oppression with moments of joy in her work. 

• Food can also be a form of protest. Meher reminds us of the protests that arose as a result of the beef ban in 2016, and Vinay emphasizes that conversation-starting is important, but that protest needs to go beyond eating beef to make a statement.

• Rajyashri echoes these sentiments, and adds that sometimes, in the Dalit community, simply getting a daily meal is resistance. “Any act to do with pushing yourself to survive and grow for another day can be an act of resistance.”