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ABSTRACT
Caste in the South Asian context is a deeply felt phenomenon, practised through bodily and sensory regimentation, and the prescriptive social organization of bodies in space. These relationships between caste and embodiment have historically been closely regulated in norms around the partaking, sharing and cooking of food, and meat in particular. This paper examines how these gastronomic prescriptions endure and take on new meanings in digital food media, which disrupts physical space and food’s relationships to the body and sensory experience. Drawing on two years of ethnography with creators who produce home-cooking content in the emerging Indian “creator economy,” this paper considers how caste is embodied, articulated and remediated online during a time of violent Hindu nationalist food politics in India. How is caste articulated even when it is not explicitly named by creators in their posts? How are caste-based disgust and humiliation, and conversely, caste intimacy elicited by creators as they labor for the creator economy? Bringing together feminist and anti-caste theories of experience, articulation and embodiment, the paper theorizes caste as affect, and in doing so, illuminates how it comes to have a digital life.
KEYWORDS:
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Notes
1. The real names of my interlocutors have been anonymized.
2. Brahmins are the apex of the Hindu caste order, occupying positions of power in many aspects of sociopolitical life.
3. See S. S. Jodhka (2016) for a genealogy of these claims, and their contestations. See A. Teltumbde (2010) on Hindutva politics and caste resurgence amidst globalization.
4. Here, I demonstrate how caste can be elicited when dominant caste South Asian ethnographers attend methodologically to their own and their interlocutors’ shared caste knowledges in the field rather than primarily “studying” those from marginalized caste locations, to whom caste is more readily ascribed and who have historically served as objects of ethnographic inquiry.
5. TamBrahm is a colloquialism for “Tamil Brahmin”
6. “Pure veg,” as a sub-category of vegetarianism, is an emic term for vegetarianism that eschews eggs, and in some cases also onions and garlic, and is associated with dominant-caste Hindus and Jains.
7. The lotus is the official symbol of the Bharatiya Janata Party.
8. See Ambedkar (2020) and a generative annotated version of the original text (Ambedkar 2020) for a discussion the relationship of beef taboos to the caste order.
9. See Shepherd (2019b) for an account of the many protests that have taken place over the right to eat beef since 2014.
10. Presciently, Ambedkar takes the notion of imitation from 19th century French sociologist, Gabriel Tarde, who has re-emerged in recent studies on affect (N. Thrift 2008, 84).
11. See also Kikon (2021; 2022) on the relationship between smell, disgust and the racial and caste-based politics of citizenship in India.
12. See Kanjilal (2021) for a longer discussion of taste’s imbrication with affect.
13. Under the National Food Security Act, 2013, government-run schools must provide free lunches to students on all working days.
14. This rationale between the “inside” and “outside” (Khare 1976; P. Chatterjee 1993) dovetails caste-based notions of touch/untouch. However these distinctions are regularly breached, crystallized and re-mediated as foreign objects (such as eggs or beef) enter bodies, homes and public spaces (Solomon 2016, 110–111).
15. This experience of the digital home kitchen as the site of caste intimacy also explains why Hindu Indians, and especially urban, elite Indians, might be more willing to see beef being eaten on, say, TV shows set abroad such as MasterChef Australia, or YouTube channels run by ethnic and tribal groups from whom they do not expect such intimacy.
16. B. Natrajan and S. Jacob (2018) detail how vegetarianism correlates with class, caste and gender.
17. A reference to educated progressives.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Sucharita Kanjilal
Sucharita Kanjilal is a doctoral candidate in the department of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and starting Fall 2023, will join Bard College as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Her doctoral research examines the entanglements of class, caste and household industry in Indian digital publics, drawing on perspectives from the anthropology of food and media, and theories of affect. It investigates the salience and limitations of the growing ‘creator economy’ in contemporary India, where digital technology is simultaneously expanding and regulated amidst the complex contestations around Hindu (trans)nationalism and neoliberalism.