LANGUAGE IN INDIA

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Volume 25:3 March 2025
ISSN 1930-2940

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Breaking Bread, Shattering Chains: Food, Caste, and Resistance in Dalit Women’s Narratives

Labani Biswas & Prof. Smriti Singh


Courtesy: www.amazon.com

Abstract

Food in Dalit women’s lives is deeply intertwined with caste and gender oppression, as illustrated in the autobiographical narratives of Baby Kamble’s The Prisons We Broke (2018) and Urmila Pawar’s The Weave of My Life (2009). These texts expose how caste hierarchies dictate access to food, relegating Dalit women to consuming discarded scraps, coarse grains, and foraged items, while the notion of purity and pollution further marginalizes them. However, food is not merely a site of deprivation but also an instrument of resilience and defiance. The communal preparation and sharing of meals foster solidarity among Dalit women, challenging their systemic exclusion. Moreover, the consumption of ‘impure’ foods such as beef and dried fish serves as a direct resistance to the so-called upper caste dietary norms. At the same time, in order to reclaim their agency, Dalit women dictate their access to food through culinary creativity and collective sustenance. These narratives not only document oppression but also forms a reposition of Dalit food practices as acts of survival, identity, and resistance, challenging dominant caste narratives and reclaiming dignity.

Keywords: Dalit women, food, oppression, joothan, class

Introduction

Food apart from being the source of sustenance is also a fundamental element through which cultural power is exercised. From being a genesis of delight, memory and identity formation, food also carries with it generation of pain, trauma, and oppression. The famous Indian political scientist Gopal Guru in “Food as a Metaphor for Cultural Hierarchies,” (2009) has navigated a new dimension in Dalit discourse that observes how the freshness and sweetness of cooked food serve as a major criterion in determining its taste and acceptance in Indian culture. It is obvious that freshly prepared food with equally fresh ingredients is always considered of superior taste as compared to stale or leftover food. For many people in India, desserts are intricate dishes meant for the rich as they become “a hegemonic presence in the cultural practices of the poor” according to Guru Gopal.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu says that taste is determined by the social and cultural position from which it emerges. This paper traces the ideological impositions on food in the Indian context. These impositions are guided by sociological and cultural norms which are predominantly upper caste Hindu principles. According to the societal norms, the Dalits are supposed to eat the stale and leftover food. Their meals are meant to be spicy to hide the stench of the stale food. It is generally the meat of the dead animal or the joothan (leftover or rotten food) which is prescribed as the staple meal of the Dalits which literally means “broken” that is seen in a revolutionary sense, relating to the “material social experience” of marginalization of the culture and stratification of caste (Guru, 2005).

The literal meaning of the Hindi word joothan, as Arun Prabha Mukherjee explains, is food left on a plate that is to be thrown in the garbage. But such food would be characterized as joothan only if someone else were to eat it. This particular term has connotations of purity and pollution attached to it, as the root word jootha literally means “polluted” (Valmiki, 2003). In The Prisons We Broke, the Dalit author from Maharashtra, Baby Kamble describes their food intake as largely relying on stale and putrid leftovers, which is also the title of the Valmiki’s autobiography, Joothan (2003), meaning scraps of food left on a plate, that signifies pollution through the saliva, a concept in Hindu Brahminical culture.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Labani Biswas & Prof. Smriti Singh
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology Patna
iamlabani18@gmail.com
smritichotu@gmail.com
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