Organizer and Chair: Usha Nilsson, University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Focus on food, as a symbol of power and structuring of gender and caste hierarchies in Indian literature and expressive traditions forms the core of this panel with four papers. The gathering, preparing, serving and partaking of food has been regulated by a vast set of rules in every caste and at every stage of life. The injunctions against eating or offering the forbidden food are deeply ingrained in the culture. The papers in this panel explore and analyze the myths, symbols and the strategies that are used by both genders, high caste as well as the low, to gain control through food. Sally Sutherland examines the symbolic structures of myths of insemination which reinforce the patriarchal power. Philip Lutgendorf analyzes the transcendence of food taboos through the famous episode of Shabari and Rama in different regional Ramayanas. Usha Nilsson's paper explores through oral tales how women have appropriated the forbidden and have legitimized it as pregnancy cravings and gender determination. Robert Goldman examines the relationship between diet and sexuality attraction and revulsion in Valmiki text.
Soul Food: Eating, Conception, and Gender in the Literatures of Premodern India
Sally J. Sutherland Goldman, University of California, Berkeley
Insemination and pregnancy/childbearing are theoretically a function, or even a definition, of biological gender. Yet exploration of the mythic literature of the traditional Sanskrit corpus demonstrates that even this seemingly uncontested realm of gender identity is frequently denied women. Men, too, are not unscathed in this respect. For the male subject is not uncommonly denied his biological gender defining function of insemination. Instead, the traditional Sanskrit corpus uses a variety of substitutes for insemination, these substitutes are commonly popular food substances. The paper will examine the types and symbolic structure of myths of insemination which use food as seminal substitutes and how such symbolic structures help reinforce patriarchal power and gender constructs of gender relations.
Bhakti and Ber Interpretations of the Shabari Episode
Philip Lutgendorf, University of Iowa
During his wanderings in the forest, the hero of the Ramayan epic is entertained by a tribal woman, Shabari, who lovingly offers him refreshment-usually the wild fruit known as ber, which she has gathered with her own hand (and, in some accounts, pre-tasted to insure its sweetness). The precise nature of their interchange has been the subject of diverse interpretations during centuries of oral and written retellings of the epic cycle, interpretations that center around themes of violation of social propriety and of dietary pollution taboos through the overriding influence of bhakti or heartfelt devotion. This paper retraces the trail of treatments of this episode through a series of influential Ramayan retellings, including textual versions, folk plays, and a television serial, to explore the enduring appeal and evolving meanings of Shabari and her gifts.
Pregnancy Food Cravings and Gender Determination in Women's Expressive Traditions
Usha Nilsson, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Women's lives at all stages and at all occasions are deeply controlled by food in Indian culture. Most of the injunctions are transmitted to them orally and often concealed in popular religious practices. In my paper, I argue that these subtexts become sites of resistance. Oral tales and songs reveal how women have created strategies to subvert the power hierarchies during the time when their own longings and desires go uncontested in the form of pregnancy cravings. The oral tales also enhance the notion that the gender determination is based on foods eaten by the pregnant mothers. In my paper I consider two oral tales told from a woman's point of view, bringing out her general anxiety about bearing a girl child and how she uses food to shift the blame on people in authority and power.
Ravana's Kitchen: A Testimony of Desire and Other
Robert P. Goldman, University of California, Berkeley
The construction of alterity in South Asia has, as in many parts of the world, focused centrally on issues of desire with reference chiefly to exotic or forbidden practices in the areas of sexuality and diet. Contemporary scholarship has tended to highlight the former of these areas in a plethora of books and articles on women, sexuality, and gender. Less intensively studied but equally important in the construction of identity is brahmanical India's related fascination with food-permitted and forbidden as a marker of discrimination between the self and the other and as a site of revulsion and desire. The present paper examines some aspects of the relationship between diet and sexuality, attraction and revulsion as they are illuminated by Ualmiki's meditations on food and sex in his Ramayana.