Like Pandey’s gallery-appropriate sculptures mask a gritty origin, Rajyashri Goody’s ceramic installation, Losing All Taste, appears, at first sight, to be a colourful, whimsical view of local Maharashtrian food: bhakris, various types of meats, fruits and flowers. But when you read the ‘recipe booklets’ that accompany them, inspired by literature from Dalit writers like Laxman Mane, Eknath Awad and Urmila Pawar, you find yourself staring at emotions that Savarna kitchens rarely hold: shame, fear, desperation. How does one authentically and respectfully document a food culture that includes so many experiences of hunger? In ‘Cactus Pods’, inspired by Babytai Kamble’s ‘The Prisons We Broke’, Goody offers a heart-wrenching prescription: “If your children haven’t eaten for three days and look like corpses, go to the stream,” she writes. “Pull cactus pods down with a stick.” The viewer is then told that the cactus seeds will turn into “slabs of concrete” in the intestines. “But for that one night,” Goody continues, “sleep peacefully.” Goody tells me that she could very easily use AI to create these poetry recipes; all it would take is a simple search through the original text for instances involving food and a prompt to rephrase them as English-language poems. “But for me, there’s value in going through the books myself. It is work that has to be done,” she says. “You’re learning and unlearning about yourself through these books.”
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