'Da Lit' Café

Dalit Cuisine was born in the era of scarcity and economics of survival, using resourcefulness and ingenuity to extract the maximum from available resources. This scarcity meant eating everything they could lay their hands on—which was usually (basically) everything that the upper castes allowed them to eat. Beef-eating has emerged as a political act of subversion in contemporary India, in the context of its current ban by the Indian state which is transforming unapologetically into a theocracy under the aegis of Hindu fundamentalist groups.

 

This project is a satirical attempt to mock the politics of food in the Indian anthropocenic age, question the concept of a ‘normative’ Indian diet and raise a silent voice against the culinary apartheid prevalent today. The violence which ‘vegetarian’ India has unleashed on such transgressions has laid open the structural violence embodied in the caste system and questions its claim to moral superiority.