Recipes of Resilience
Ankita Shah spoke to artist Rajyashri Goody about ‘Eat with Great Delight’ a photography exhibit on Dalit resistance, resilience and celebration told through a history of food in the community.
When locals from the Goan village of Aldona, the striking architecture and history of their homes, and a host of photographers and anthropologists, come together - an interesting dialogue begins. One where the culture and history of old Goan homes is as much in the conversation as the photographs that emerged from ‘private’ spaces across the world. This dialogue is at the essence of GoaPhoto, an international photography festival that produces location-specific installations connecting photographic displays and their architectural contexts. This year, the locals at Aldona open their beautiful homes for the exhibit, and art finds a home, literally.
The idea of the private, the interior, the domestic is at the centre of curation and experience at GoaPhoto. Because many of these homes continue to be used as residences, the works and the audience engage with ‘living heritage’. Founding Director Lola Mac Dougall says "I feel one of the merits consists in creating bridges between fine art photography and everyday life while questioning the art gallery as the privileged locus to experience art. In contrast with the aseptic white cube gallery space, our homes-venues retained their furniture. This encourages site-specificity while testing our ability as curators and exhibition designers to work around them: not one nail is hammered on account of the festival, as we want to minimise our intrusion while investigating how the two aesthetics -the photographic and the domestic- engage with each other."
One of the pertinent themes in this exploration of the domestic and private this year is that of food. Associated with food is hunger, and with hunger, power to feed, to be fed, to have choice, to have access. Artist Rajyashri Goody explores the politics of food through her work Eat with Great Delight which is amongst the featured works at GoaPhoto. It comprises a collection of her own family photographs representing joyful enjoyment of meals. In these vernacular images, we are confronted with a celebratory Dalit experience of food that responds, in Goody’s own words, to the “need for positive images to break this onslaught of violent images of Dalit people”. In this Q&A Rajyashri shares why food is not a ‘choice’, how access informs representation, how this work was made possible, the politics of food and what she feels about these works being represented in people’s homes.
Could you elaborate on food as the centrepiece that has been affected and in turn affected the Dalit experience and status in society? What was the thought behind choosing the act of consuming or relishing or cooking or collecting food, instead of presenting food as food choices itself?
One of the reasons the caste system has such deep roots is because rules of adhering to caste have been applied on activities that seem basic and necessary for survival. Something as everyday as eating and drinking is coloured by caste rules and notions of purity and pollution. Practices of begging, being paid in leftovers, eating carrion beef, not being able to draw water from the same source as upper caste people, let alone share a meal with them, and chronic experiences of hunger, are active tools used by Brahmanical forces to suppress Dalit communities.
It’s hard then to see food as merely a choice when we have so much history lurking behind every bite that we take. The word choice also alludes to ‘freedom’, and this is a tricky word when we look at how aggressively caste has controlled day-to-day activities of Dalits. Despite being ‘free’, the agency of Dalit people has often been questioned or even shut down, even in eating choices. That’s why I found it more pertinent to include narratives that encompassed a range of experiences with food, so as to recognise that these are stories of resistance and resilience, and not just about food in general.
The photos are from the ‘80s upto early ‘00s. Did you consider including photos after that or oral stories prior to 1980 that could provide insights in the way collecting, cooking, and eating habits have shifted or passed over the generations?
The photographs, taken on point-and-click film cameras between the ‘80s up to early ‘00s, refer to a manner of documenting family and Ambedkarite history. Prior to the ‘80s, my family didn’t have the means to get a camera, and because access to education has been so tough for Dalit communities, there is comparatively much less written or photographed matter coming directly from Dalit voices. The recipe booklets that I compile though, adapted from a range of Dalit memoirs, contain insights into food practices well before the ‘80s, some often going back to the early 20th century. Rather than collecting oral narratives myself and putting them out as my own research, my first responsibility is to look at the writing and photography that exists in my community, and acknowledge that all this history-making has already been done by incredible individuals, I am simply a vehicle for it.
Tell us more about the photographs in this series: the time they were taken, the moments they capture, and the thought behind having the booklet of recipes accompany them.
The photographs in this series ‘Eat With Great Delight’ were taken between the 80s and 00s. They capture moments of celebration, like birthdays and weddings, as well as some quieter everyday moments, all of which involve eating, or an interaction with food. They are my family photos, often taken by my mother and father. On one hand, they could be just that, but in the other, I see them as an account of humanised Dalit narratives, one which reveals the sort of joy that any family anywhere in the world might possess.
The booklets of recipes tell a more layered relationship with food, eating, and access. They are adapted from Dalit memoirs, and explore how oppression is often experienced through the belly, how caste practices are deeply entwined in the every-day.
The recipes and photographs both go together. Having just one perspective of Dalit food politics would be compromising on the complexity of this history.
The dominant narratives are ingrained into the system by those who have the power. Where culture is largely determined by dominant narratives in the arts, how are galleries and curators responding to the need for representation?
The power structure in the art world is definitely still in the hands of those with more resources, both in terms of class and caste. However, we must remember that this is a fast-evolving industry that is constantly looking for challenging narratives. This isn’t necessarily out of the need to abide by one’s moral compass, it’s could just be to keep up with social and political trends that might affect funding, etc. But whatever the reason may be, I do see many galleries and curators actively trying to make space for a range of voices, from biennales and large art festivals to smaller-scale gallery exhibits.
With the political frenzy around eating beef and pork, the plate gets smaller and smaller for those who cannot afford any other meat. How have these ongoing events and growing control over what people eat shaped Eat With Great Delight and/or your other works?
The current socio-political climate has had a massive impact on my work around food and caste. It spurred me into studying the roots of these laws and lynchings, about my heritage, and the histories that have already been documented but perhaps ignored by many. The works in themselves are not direct responses to these ongoing events, but try to place what is going on as consequences of something much more deeply ingrained in Indian society.
Why was it important to bring the positive side especially when the documentation of struggle or challenges many others in the Dalit community face itself continues to remain under-represented?
These are two sides of the same coin, and it’s important in my practice to constantly address both in order to acknowledge the resilience of Dalit communities despite horrific oppression for thousands of years. The challenges are not going anywhere, unfortunately, but Dalit voices are growing stronger too. I’m not making my art to educate or shock people on the realities of caste, that is possible to learn very easily, it just requires opening the newspaper or a quick Google search. My practice is particularly an attempt to unlearn many of my own assumptions about caste and respect the diversity and depth of narratives that exist within oppressed communities. The responsibility to connect the dots falls on the viewer, in the end.
When the relationship with food is so troubled and complex, was it challenging to portray as well as articulate its nuances through an experience that is perhaps more privileged than many others within the Dalit community?
It wasn’t challenging to articulate its nuances, it was a sense of personal responsibility that comes from being in a privileged position. Complexity includes both troubled facets as well more positive ones, and it’s dangerous to box an entire community of millions into that of a victim, and not account for agency and human dignity within every human being. As an artist, I have to acknowledge that I’m not the voice of all Dalit people, far from it, but the least I can do is study my history and portray what has shaped my life as honestly as possible, and make full and mindful use of every single opportunity that comes my way.
What do you feel about categorisations that signify representation but can also set stereotypical expectations - such as women artists, or Dalit artists, or Dalit art?
Personally, I like playing with these labels because it reveals a lot of stereotypes people have about women, about what a Dalit artist ‘looks’ like, what Dalit art is etc. And because I don’t fit into many of these stereotypes, perhaps it puzzles people to call me a Dalit artist.
I don’t think there’s a problem with any of these categorisations, but it’s the limited understanding that accompanies these boxes, and also the fact that artists from higher castes are not boxed into ‘Brahmin Art’ or ‘Kshatriya Art’ etc. There must be more focus, study, and research on Dalit art aesthetics, as there increasingly has been with Black art aesthetics in other parts of the world.
In the end it’s a very personal decision to allow someone to call you a woman artist or a Dalit artist though, and many of my peers are very against such labels because they have found that these boxes directly affect how the art world perceives them and their practice, and often hampers their opportunites accordingly.
What were some of your favourite books from which you selected the excerpts for the cookbook? Can you tell us of any one such striking passage or story?
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about Laxman Gaikwad’s Uchalya, the book that I made my first set of recipes from. There’s a recipe I call Recess, which describes Gaikwad, the first of his family to attend school, skipping school and wandering about in fields and in the jungle with a matchbox and a catapult, hunting for eggs, honey, and birds to eat. The next day, his class teacher would beat him for taking off like he did. I found it to be a very beautiful, melancholic scene, full of wonder and adventure, but adventure born not out of a childlike innocence, but out of real hunger and with possibly dire consequences.
This year’s festival is location-specific and is being hosted at homes, not galleries. How do you think it will impact the way Eat With Great Delight is perceived?
I’m very excited about Goa Photo being hosted in homes. That’s exactly where the photos belong, as well as the recipes. It is in intimate spaces and moments that perhaps caste plays out most often, and therefore it feels apt to look at, read, and think about such themes in intimate settings too, rather than a white cube that could often be very alienating, and cut itself off from a range of potential visitors and conversations.
Eat with Great Delight will be exhibited at Goa Photo in Aldona between Dec 6-8, 2019.