Food and the Caste Question: Dietary Politics and the Question of Belonging

Food as a Structure of Caste

In India, food is more than just sustenance—it is deeply ingrained with social and ritualistic values. It has been a powerful yet silent medium of transmission for generations, simultaneously enforcing, challenging, and redefining social order. The shared meal becomes a conflict between dignity and subjection; the plate becomes a place of politics; and the kitchen becomes a battlefield between pollution and purity. In this article, I analyse M.M. Vinodini’s The Parable of the Lost Daughter to examine how food is used as a complex tool of the Indian caste system, embedding cultural norms, legal ambiguities, and sites of resistance, change, and retaliation.

Historically, caste has been deeply intertwined with food practices. At the top of the varna hierarchy, Brahmins are required to eat only sattvic (clean) foods, avoiding meat, fermented items, and any food that has come into contact with so-called “polluting” castes. The caste of their consumers was also reflected in the containers used for meal preparation and serving. Dalits were not only prohibited from entering the inner sanctums of numerous temples, but also from entering the dining rooms and kitchens. A key component of the Brahmanical patriarchy’s ideological and geographical control was the kitchen. The foundation that rendered caste “palatable” in both literal and symbolic ways was formed by these early writings. In everyday life and in communal establishments like temples, the hierarchy of edibility and touchability was expressed. Particularly in South India, temple kitchens evolved into physical representations of these antiquated directives. The prasadam, or sanctified food, could only be prepared by Brahmins or ritually “clean” individuals. It was then delivered in a strictly regulated order of ceremonial hierarchy.

Food and Caste in The Parable of the Lost Daughter

It is within this deeply structured food culture that Vinodini’s story unfolds. The text traces the life of Suvarthavani, a Dalit Christian woman who had to leave her home to enter the “casteless” world of a Brahmin household. Her journey captures her attempts to reject her Dalit identity, language, and most importantly, her food. Suvarthavani begins by hiding “details of the food they [Dalits] cooked and ate at home” while talking about “how her mother made brinjal curry, sambhar and coconut-and-lentil chutney, like the food she had seen her friends bring for lunch” and “wearing a red thread around her wrist like she had seen many Hindus do” (Vinodini, 759). Her relationship with her parents is distorted by her desire for Brahmanical traditions; “she began to dislike the way they spoke, their habits, their work, everything that annoyed her now” (Vinodini, 760).

“You stopped eating [beef] not because you don't like it anymore, but just so that you can tell your friends that you don't eat beef,” her brother Zachariah says, highlighting her hostility against the Dalit Christian identity from which she is attempting to distance herself (Vinodini, 756). Suvarthavani's unease with her Dalit status is heightened by the beginning of her friendship with Gayatri in Rajahmundry. Gayatri is a traditional Brahmin who refuses to apply turmeric to her friend's feet during a religious occasion because “Brahmins should not touch the feet of harijans [Dalits]” (Vinodini, 760). When Gayatri's other visitors believe that her acquaintance “doesn't look like a Harijan girl at all,” Suvarthavani seems to feel honoured. (Vinodini, 760) She even attempts to follow the Brahmanical customs connected with the family's daughters, such as putting a bottu (a bindi or red dot) on her forehead and removing the cross pendant, which represents her Christian identity, from the chain around her neck (Vinodini, 758). Yet, her performance of belonging remains incomplete. The so-called “casteless” space continues to treat her as the other, revealing the limits of assimilation.

Learning to Hide: Food, Shame, and Belonging

My own engagement with Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan in my third year of college made me rethink whether cities can ever truly be an escape for Dalits from the rigidity and shame of caste. Like any protagonist of Dalit literature, I too, hoped that migration to the capital, in the heart of one of the most elite institutions of the country, would free me from the shackles of caste, providing me with dignity and acceptance. However, my last three years tell me something different.

These cosmopolitan spaces, predominantly inhabited by upper castes, are not spaces of freedom but rather chambers that strip us of our identity. Acceptance here depends on how well we can disown our identity to blend in, soften our voices and erase the very markers that define us. Caste here does not announce itself in open hostility but creeps in insidiously, in the form of their friends refusing to sit at the same table with them on a Wednesday night when meat is served in the hostel or in protests by their upper caste batchmates against people consuming certain food on Navratri. It seeps into friendships, with every disapproving glance, slowly drawing the invisible line between them and us. To a nineteen-year-old arriving in the city, desperate for belonging, these exclusions first seem trivial. But over time, their repetition normalises discrimination. No one preaches caste supremacy aloud, but its logic is reinforced through rituals of exclusion, through what is unspoken but deeply understood.

The internalization of shame seeps into the most private of spaces—the kitchen, the dining table, the plate I eat from. Food, which should nourish, becomes a battleground, where my identity is constantly compromised. With the dominant caste landlord asking about my food practice, customs, and family name, the desperation of being equal and being accepted looks even farther away. The purity of their home, its walls and the oppressive history must not be tainted by the touch of the Dalit plate. Caste re-emerges in quotidian encounters with the neighbour asking if the house stinks when my fish is cooked, or with the awkwardness of keeping my culinary practice a secret in an effort not to offend upper caste sensitivities. In a country where the celebration of every culture is linked to its food, I wonder what happens when a culture does not have a mainstream celebration of its own? Does its food also get invisible just like its people? Three years later, I ask myself, did this city make me more skilled at hiding who I am? It did. With every attempt to conceal my caste, with every carefully chosen piece of clothing meant to blend in, and every instinct to walk away from spaces that spoke of identity, I ran. I escaped.

Like Frantz Fanon’s Black man, who saw manhood only through the lens of whiteness, I too saw social elevation as inseparable from the image of an educated, casteless woman. Every mention of my family name made me conscious and defensive, as if I had to prove my education, my worth, my right to be here. I was so busy fighting that it took years of rejection for me to realise that more than anything, it was an internalised battle. More than anyone else, I believed in my inferiority and looked everywhere for upper-caste approval to validate my worth. I am never going to find it. People who built their bloodstained merit and fortunes on the ruins of our exploitation—who still cling to the power of selective erasure and exclusion are never going to see us as equals. I have accepted and know now. And, if there is only one thing this city has taught me, it is the courage to live without that.

Regaining what has been denied, including food, is what it means to regain dignity. Holding onto one's plate becomes extremely political in a society where caste still determines what one can eat, where one can cook, and with whom one can share a meal. It is a rejection of a system that requires erasure in order to be accepted. Saying “don't take away my plate” is thus an assertion rather than a request. It claims dignity, history, and identity.

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Bibiography

1. Vinodini, M. M. (2013). The parable of the lost daughter. In G. K. Satyanarayana & S. Tharu (Eds.), Steel nibs are sprouting: New Dalit writing from South India (pp. 755–767). HarperCollins India.

2. Valmiki, O. (2003). Joothan: A Dalit’s life (A. Mukherjee, Trans.). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1997)

3. Fanon, F. (2008). Black skin, white masks (R. Philcox, Trans.). Grove Press. (Original work published 1952)