i read novels, magazines, screenplays, essays, memoirs and so on to understand the discourses of eating, feeding, rejecting, sharing, banning, restricting, and cooking rice in Kerala of the twentieth century. my hunch is that the politics of food, while visible in today's national electoral politics quite vividly, also presents itself in narratives in subtle forms which are not as visible. this politics revolves around not only what is allowed and what is not, but also around how it is eaten/fed/rejected… and the affective atmosphere it builds.
the developments in the cultural space of kerala and india in response to changes in other fields are also important to my project. i consult various texts to understand this.
in a broad sense, i am training myself to be a cultural critic, a material culture theorist, and an academic thinker+writer+reader.