WRITING FOOD: UNDERSTANDING SUFFERING AND RESISTANCE THROUGH FOOD IN DALIT WRITINGS

Abstract

The Dalit experience of food is both suffering and resistance. While Dalit food culture is treated as uncivilized and impure, the upper caste food culture is considered pure and civilized. This hierarchisation of food culture is legitimized through religious norms which produces a conflicting vision of food habits, taste, aesthetics, and food politics. Translating the conflicting visions and experiences of food into literary writings is one of the modes of writing history and cultural life. Dalit writers have written about their world of food culture. Dalits and their cuisine are always stigmatized and degraded in the so-called mainstream food culture. Hence, the paper aims to understand and analyze the food culture by focusing on Dalit literary writings.