In contemporary discourses on gender, the kitchen has been a matter of much contention. On one side, it is considered a prison, but on the other, it is also viewed as a sacred heart of the home. However, in the Indian domestic sphere, the reality and meaning of the kitchen for most women remain much more complex. The article aims to highlight the multiple levels of association women have with kitchen space from the perspective of gender. By analysing Ambai’s short story, ‘A Kitchen in the Corner of the House,’ the article strives to question the very idea of the kitchen as a woman’s space and attempts to understand why and how women’s identities are built around the space. The article mainly takes its theoretical base from feminist geography to understand both the spatial and symbolic construction of the space and the role of gender in such construction. Lastly, the article attempts to show that the kitchen in the Indian domestic sphere does not have a fixed set of gender rules and norms but contains an insidious web of gender ideologies that entail women to occupy the space.

Axone is a recently released Indian film revolving around Northeastern cuisine. Through culinary reimagining, the film raises several issues regarding Northeastern migrants who largely remain invisible in the public discourse. The present article attempts to examine the embodied experiences of the Northeasterners in the Indian capital, Delhi, through the analysis of the film from a culinary lens. Affirming the film’s status as a food film, the article first tries to locate axone in the Indian culinary order, which has been hegemonized by the caste ideas of ganda (dirty) and gandha (smelly). Secondly, it engages with the politics of otherness played around the Northeastern food by employing social and sensorial boundaries. Thirdly, it brings to the fore the discourse of racism, which is central to the experience of Northeasterners living in the city. Lastly, the article delists the Northeastern migrants only as victims of the city and explores their place-making strategies by taking into account the agentic potential of their culinary culture.

Food is the most elementary aspect of human society and culture. It embeds in itself multiple contexts and discourses which makes it a perfect conveyor of social structures and cultural systems across diverse cultural spheres. Indian writer, Bulbul Sharma capitalizes on this discursive and multi-contextual significance of food to represent the gendered nature of the Hindu domestic sphere in her works by focusing on women’s culinary practices. The present paper attempts to analyze women’s food practices in two of her select works titled The Anger of Aubergines and Eating Women, Telling Tales to deconstruct how women are brought into the structures of patriarchy through their consumption and production of food. The paper intends to unveil the norms and politics of gender in shaping and controlling women’s food choices which keep them under the patriarchal yoke. The paper also aims to represent how food provides women with a site of agency to resist and subvert the normative structures of patriarchy.

Widowhood, in Indian society, is a dreaded condition of a woman after the death of her husband. It is an imposed performance that entails a set of ritualized practices and behavior to mark her transition to the state of a woman without. On many occasions, this state is ensured and maintained through multifarious rituals and practices, which range from restrictions on mobility, choices, and desires to injunctions on clothes, bodily demeanor, and food. This physio-social exercise of control and restraint alludes to a framework of religio-cultural discourse that renders widows as social and sexual non-beings. The present paper attempts to understand the state of widowhood through the analysis of two short stories in the collection, The Anger of Aubergines (1997) by Bulbul Sharma from the perspective of food. Food and eating, being the elementary aspects of everyday life, become important signifiers in studying the deprived state of widowhood. The paper intends to unpack the politics behind the imposition of a curriculum of gastronomic injunctions and food taboos on Hindu upper-caste widows. Further, the paper conceptualizes the appetite of widows as a subversive category not only in challenging the gender discourses behind their oppression but also in exonerating their status as desireless beings.

Cooking and women share a discursive relationship in Indian social and cultural spheres. The culinary practices of women not only reflect the gender norms prevalent in Indian society but also in Indian marriages. Marriage as a social institution in India adheres to the protocols of gender relations that regulate the culinary activities of married women in the domestic sphere. The present article attempts to unveil the politics of gender working overtly and covertly in Indian matchmaking and conjugal relationships through the analysis of women’s culinary practices in the recently-released Hindi film, Tarla (2023) directed by Piyush Gupta. In order to do so, the article takes a feminist standpoint in its investigation of the central character, Tarla’s cooking activities in her marital and professional journey. Tarla chronicles the biography of the Indian culinary icon, Tarla Dalal, and thereby represents the working of gender norms and rules that regulate women’s lives in Indian society. Through the vignette of Tarla’s journey, the film adds new dimensions to the general discourses on Indian feminisms that view cooking as only repressive and unresourceful. By analyzing the film, the article aims to broaden the horizon of feminisms by positing the agentic and mediative potential of women’s cooking.

The article locates the caste-spaces in India through the sensoriality of smell emitted by food in different gastronomical zones and its influence on the socio-political condition of Dalit women. It focuses on the embedded olfactory value of food to inform the contested nature of the Indian caste system and enables an understanding of the gendered aspect of the caste-spaces. By examining caste as spatial, sensorial and corporeal, the article confronts the crucial gaps in caste and food studies by deconstructing the order and odour of foodways in U.R. Ananthamurthy’s Samskara (1976) and Urmila Pawar’s The Weave of My Life: A Dalit Woman’s Memoirs (2008). While critiquing the caste system narrative, the selected texts map different olfactory zones in intercultural culinary landscapes. The article argues how the caste society is built on the gastronomic idea of ‘we are/smell what we eat’ by mapping the ways in which the two texts explore the physical and sensorial consumption of food in different socio-cultural spaces. It is argued that gendered meanings around smell are invariably connected to the caste system, and that Dalit women’s relationships to food and smells should be foregrounded in the olfactory politics of caste. The article traces the ways in which smellscapes highlighted in the selected texts create invisible boundaries of spatial and moral stratification (order) through the invisible medium of smell (odour). It also situates the praxis of deodorisation as a tool of dissent by Dalits, and especially Dalit women. The article raises critical inquiry into how the olfactory effect of food is not just a chemical by-product, but rather a symbolic agent which can work both to oppress − through spatial and corporeal discourses − or be opened up to rigorous inquiry.

This article revisits two well-known novels in Indian diasporic writing, Anita and Me (1996) by Meera Syal and The Namesake (2003) by Jhumpa Lahiri, to examine the cultural agents behind the formation and sustenance of the Indian diaspora. The article first establishes the multivalence of food to understand Indian literature and culture and then contextualizes the novel into the tradition of Indian diasporic food writing. By focusing on the culinary discourses in the novel, the article argues that Indian women employ their culinary strategies and ingenuities to produce a cultural version of Indianness, central to the construction of the Indian diaspora. The article draws the theoretical framework from Anita Mannur’s postcolonial concept of “kitchen Indians” to unravel the structural working of gender roles that operate at the foundation of the Indian diaspora.