Eating potato for dinner

 We often hear someone who wants to show that he is "casteless" exclaim, " I never see caste! I bring all my friends, even my lower caste friends, home and share my food with them!"

Besides this statement being pretentious, duplicitous and condescending, the casteism in the statement can be accentuated by an unsaid line in this. Instead if we ask him whether he had ever partaken food of his Dalit friend at his friends home, he would be exposed for his hypocrisy. This is always about "his/her" food. Not about the food of the lower caste / Dalit ‘friend' being shared. It never is.

This book is journey born out of a workshop of an open class course work of a bunch of students from Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule Women’s Studies Center, University of Pune. The course opened up with the readings of Jhotiba Phule, Ambedkar and Periyar on empowering women and moved on to a workshop on caste and feminism. This workshop which opened as an earnest effort to understand, learn and thereby illuminate the ignorance on caste and gender in modern institutions and practices. That activity by the students opened-up into a journey that to brought out memories of the food and in the process brought in the awareness of the unsaid politics and casteism in food.

The atrocity of side-lining the food choices of masses by projecting the upper caste Hindu menu as "Indian" / "Regional"/ “Clean” and the politics behind it is what the book seeks to introduce and highlight.
This starts with the awareness how numerous volumes and varieties of cookbooks that speak about “Indian food” and “Indian recipes” never had anything on what the marginalized masses had for food. The ‘sanitized’ versions of each of these books seek to assert the ‘Clean’ vegetarian or ‘exotic’ non vegetarian food of privileged classes as the singular identity of “Indian” food.

This also brings out how the “Sathvik food” subtly yet aggressively seek to use food to promote trumped up superiority of Brahminic order of hegemony over the food that is source of sustenance and existence for the marginalized.

It also brought out how most of the entitled Indians are unaware of what the ‘other’ India eats. This work is an earnest effort in not only documenting food that the marginalized and poor section of the societies but also the people and their lives behind it. It focusses on people around Maharashtra, mainly around Pune. However, the people come from various underprivileged castes not just limited to those who are native to Maharashtra. It also brings out the migrant Dalit community folks that have made Maharashtra their home and naturalized themselves to its culture. The people showcased here are all from most humble backgrounds that perform simplest form of vocation and has been subjected to various level of Caste discrimination.

Some of them have found a negotiated identity within the urban landscape. From the Girl who has been taught to hide her identity and non vegetarian food at home by saying “ we are having Potatoes today” when asked about what is her food at home that day, to a male who goes to Pushkar, Rajasthan where his roots lie, hiding his identity as a clan of Shivaji, to be treated with respect and approval which would not have possible had he revealed his original root- retain their food as part of their identity and heredity.

This exercise also opens up to so many threads that spread across the land that is India. For example worship of “Mari Aai” which is relegated to subaltern identity in Maharashtra shares a common phenomenon across the southern India as Mari Amma, Yellamma, Etc…

This is also a big learning for the Students who participated in the workshop breaking a lot of taboo and illuminating their awareness about caste and Gender discriminations as expressed by each of them. For readers, it questions the conscience about our own preconceived notions about food.

Link for the Book

Thanks also:

https://www.goya.in/blog/blood-and-beehives-culinary-ingenuity-of-the-marginalised-dalit-food

https://blog.worldvision.com.au/dalits-untouchables/