Mohini Mehta: The Kitchen and the Marketplace: Exploring the Gastropolitics of Delhi through the Lens of Caste and Gender

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation, entitled The Kitchen and The Marketplace: Exploring the Gastropolitics of Delhi through the Lens of Caste and Gender, explores the negotiation of caste identity at the intersection of gender, class, and food culture, boundary formation across different caste groups through commensal practices, and the strategies adopted by Dalit food entrepreneurs to operate in Delhi. Dalits are socioeconomically and historically marginalized caste groups in South Asia who face discrimination and exploitation owing to their (often menial) hereditary occupations. The ethnographic information is generated through nine (discontinuous) months of participant/non-participant observation and in-depth interviews. 

The core objectives of the research include a) understanding the culinary practices of Dalits based in Delhi; b) exploring the role of caste-based commensality in negotiating agency among Dalits in some neighborhoods of Delhi, and; c) examining the strategies adopted by Dalit food entrepreneurs to navigate the caste-focused public consumption in Delhi for both Dalit and non-Dalit clientele. The dissertation’s theoretical concepts constitute intersectionality, commensality, gastropolitics, and anticolonialism. Within this framework, the construction of social identity among Dalit participants has been analyzed at the intersection of caste, gender and class. The anticolonial ideas of ‘indigenous sociology’, ‘perspectival realism’, and the politics of standpoint have been used helped to explore how the embodied experiences of Dalits have contributed towards an assertion of identity in the mixed-caste setting of Delhi. The negotiations of Dalits with caste identity range from confronting and challenging the casteist hierarchies and grappling with the complexities of both assertion and conformity, to practices of assimilation and conformation to the dominant caste culture through colloquial food habits. 

I draw from the Ambedkarite legacy of struggle against caste discrimination and the assertion of identity, and from the academic work of Dalit- and anticolonial feminist scholars which have highlighted issues of intersectional oppression, intra-caste dynamics, as well as academic representation and the assertion of political identity through cultural practices. Understanding the agency asserted with and negotiated by Dalit women through food and culinary practices is a key component of this research. The role of migrant Dalit women as ‘gastronomic ambassadors’ in Delhi is analyzed to understand how the marginalized caste identity is reproduced or abolished through the re-creation and re-imagination of cultural traditions and recipes. The significant findings of this research include: a) highlighting the intersectional economic and cultural factors entailed in the gendered division of labor in Dalit households; b) the influence of internalized ideas of caste-based purity and the desire for social mobility among Dalits in the mixed-caste commensal relations in the public domain; c) abolishing shame in the consumption by Dalits of ingredients which are deemed ‘impure’ and ‘unhygienic’ by the dominant caste groups; and d) the role of social capital and ‘passing privilege’ in sustaining food businesses by Delhi-based Dalit entrepreneurs.