Notes on Being Eaten: Linguistic Cannibalism, Fatness and the Logic of Consumption

‘Ma’am, you look good enough to eat,’ was a statement made by someone I once knew. There were other compliments that followed every time I shared a picture. ‘I just dropped my phone trying to lick you through the screen’ was another quite visual one. More graphic compliments have on occasion followed that made me […]

Sensing the World: Fermentation as Erotic World-Making

Surrounded by the glossy foliage of citrus trees, Nanabu and I sit in the garden, slitting open the skins of green chillies, thumbing out their bitter white pith. Two trays of prepared vegetables lie spread out on a cloth-covered table before us: vermillion winter carrot batons, bone-white radish sticks, white knucklebone cauliflower florets, split yellow […]

The Use of Pleasure: Queer Belonging in Dhamija’s A Gourmet’s Journey

Our ideas about food and eating undergo a paradigm shift when we identify taste as a bodily way of making contact with the world. A faculty of perceiving and a sense-making activity, taste is tied to feelings of satisfaction and disgust as well as pleasure and nostalgia. That taste is not always a predetermined category […]

The Mango and Intimacy in South Asian Literature

The Mango Season, circa 1760, Farrukhabad. The mango is more than just a fruit in South Indian Literature. It is a metaphor for bodily desire,  fertility,  aesthetic ideals and much more. It acts as a medium of intimacy in most classical texts igniting, love, lust and desire in the hearts of lovers. This essay examines […]

What We Eat In The Dark

Saa In the city of Ahmedabad, where I grew up, food is decidedly queer. Couples gather after hours to wander the streets lined with food stalls, finding the right spot to either collect something to eat in the car or a restaurant just nondescript enough that you’re not recognised. In a city so small, intimacy […]

What My Mother Could Not Say, She Fried in Mustard Oil

In Bengali households, love is often plated before it is spoken. It arrives without announcement: in the extra spoon of dal, in the fish belly quietly shifted to your side of the table, in mango slices salted and chilled before the power cuts begin. It is possible, in homes like ours, to be fed with […]