Manikya Manaswini Week 9

Food has always been an essential part of one’s cultural identity and beliefs, one that comes naturally to everyone since birth. But today, what you eat or choose to eat have become political statements.
There have been several instances of violence towards those that go against the hegemonic culture and this aggression over food choices exists only because of the way food defines identities. The public sphere is not yet open for other cultures to openly practice or choose to do what is essential to their identity.
This dominance of one religion and its upper caste has silences the cultures of others and pushed it inside private spaces, away from the public eye.
This is a huge reason why most of us today are completely unaware of Dalit culture and what food constitutes as Dalit culture.
The silencing of other cultures had been because of the belief that Brahmanical culture is superior and it still remains to be the reason.
We try to inquire into other cultures to discover what the others do but we still look at their as inferior choices, something that we wouldn’t do but would want to know of to showcase our so-called tolerance and acceptance of the other culture.
but the fact remains that we’ve still made them feel insecure of their choices and yet again they’re pushed into hiding.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

week 10- Aishwarya Ramkumar

DALIT MUSIC Arivarsu Kalainesan, fondly called Arivu amongst Tamilians is a popular playback singer who has sung songs for mainstream setups. However, his focus lies on writing music and poems about caste and poverty. He is highly inspired by Ambedkar and Buddha, and his music brings to life many of their ideals. He is a proponent of the Arivoli movement which is a southern left literacy movement and got introduces to these ideas by his parents who discussed these with him. His family used to attend Dalit culture events which celebrated anniversaries of leaders and organized protests. He is currently working on writing lyrics a project called the 'Casteless Collective' and had made raps on Ambedkar by drawing inspiration from various Dalit poems. While many have deemed his raps anti-Indian, others appreciate his ideas and welcome these into mainstream cinema and music. He was written various songs for other pertinent social causes such as the LGBTQIA+ movement, and his rap...
Read more

Nayonika Sen Week 2

Contested Citizenship, Caste, and the Politics of Chandrashekhar Azad ‘Ravan’             The CAA-NRC agitations have perhaps reached a tipping point in mainland India. Yet, the contention and agitation has been brewing in Assam for a while now. Until the threat of a nation-wide NRC, it wasn’t even a peripheral topic of discussion. ‘We people’ were largely unfazed by it. However, a brief reading of the recommended articles and a short explanatory video with Ms. Bina Pallical reaffirms my continuous contention with the NRC. Even the ‘Liberals’ comprising mainly of upper-caste educated persons have bought the narrative of it being an exclusively Hindu-Muslim problem. Yet, how is it going to affect the people who have historically never been considered Hindu? The current political narrative is trying to homogenise the ‘Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan’ identity. The BJP has repeatedly issued statements about how the CAA is pro-Dalit and yet...
Read more

Week 10 - Samyuktha Rao

I'm sharing something interesting that I've come across during my search for dalit music. In the state of telangana, India's largest tribal festival is conducted on an annual basis in the month of February. The festival witnesses largest gathering of dalit communities as the goddess who is worshipped during the festival belongs to the Koya tribe. However, Hinduization of this festival has begun to take place in the last few decades. I'm attaching articles from the wire and feminism in india which talks in detail about how upper castes are controlling the image of the goddess as theirs and their other  other practices of Hinduization that are taking place during the festival. There are multiple songs on the internet (by upper castes) but most of them as talked above, fail to emphasize on the history and story and are centered around celebration of the festival.  https://www.google.co.in/amp/s/feminisminindia.com/2020/03/18/the-medaram-jana-jatara-indias-largest-tri...
Read more