Parnika Jain- Week 9


Week 9

Summary of Ashwaq Masoodi, A story of culinary apartheid and Manjiri Indurkar, Caste on your plate: Where is the Dalit food? Since time immemorial, people of higher castes or the privileged folk have adopted several mechanisms to portray their superiority within society; the most predominant of them being invisibility. Invisibility can simply be construed as outright exclusion of a certain culture owing to the fact that its roots belong to a lower caste. The preamble makes mention of India being a secular nation which essentially prevents the creation of any sort of disparity towards a certain culture, however, Dalit culture is non-existent or rather invisible in the field of cinema, music or literature. Ashwaq Masoodi and Manjiri Indurkar in their articles, lay down several examples where such exclusion is practiced and further, they paint a colourful picture of the food hierarchy in India which is filled with a mixture of so many different cuisines, unfortunately, Dalit culture does not form part of this hierarchy. The prevalent notion of Dalit cuisine is largely drawn from the caste system. Contrary to popular notion, the cuisine is quite spectacular in its own way, it evolved on the need to survive where people of the Dalit community ensured maximum utilization of what little resources they had. Despite the fact that the cuisine was in some ways forced upon them by a nation that actively practiced casteism, members of the upper caste make it sound like they are filthy human beings and the food they consume is also filthy. Finally, how much longer can we place the reason behind this exclusion on ignorance? Dalit food may have evolved on the need to survive but the bottom line being, that we ought to get off from our high horses to place Dalit food within the food hierarchy and moreover, protect its culture.

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