Memories Are Made of This

FOOD IN DALIT AND ADIVASI WRITING

- / COMMUNITIES MANASVI POTE ILLUSTRATIONS BY SHAMLA MUSTAFFA MOHAMED

“THE MANGOES were always eaten slowly, reverently, their juice running down our wrists as though time itself had paused to let us taste happiness,” Madhur Jaffrey writes in her memoir, Climbing the Mango Trees.

In much contemporary feminist life writing, food is bound up with nostalgia: mangoes, meals and kitchens are repositories of affection, patience, familial warmth and childhood. In Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s writing, particularly The Mistress of Spices, cooking is a medium through which women navigate memory, migration and emotional survival, and recipes travel across geographies, carrying the weight of longing. Jhumpa Lahiri, too, repeatedly returns to food as intimacy—in Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake, meals mark quiet reckonings with displacement, assimilation and the fragile ways love is sustained through ritual and repetition.

Several memoirs by authors from India’s marginalised communities read starkly against this mode— where food consoles, and nourishment becomes a metaphor. In them, meals appear stripped of flavour and nostalgia. Food arrives spoiled, rationed or forbidden, and the act of eating itself is often a reminder of humiliation rather than a benign symbol of homecoming. Few books show this more directly than Baby Kamble’s The Prisons We Broke. First published in Marathi in 1986, it is one of the earliest full-length memoirs by a Dalit woman. The English translation by Maya Pandit makes clear how blunt Kamble’s sentences are, how deliberately she avoids lyricism. Even moments of ritual abundance—a buffalo sacrifice; baskets of food carried to the goddess—turn quickly into a lesson in hierarchy, as portions are handed out according to caste, gender and age.