By Prajna Desai
Image from the Dharavi Food Project at The Dharavi Biennale 2015
Early in February, while organizing content for the exhibition display of the Dharavi Food Project which I curated for The Dharavi Biennale 2015, I found termites in my flat. A powdery tunnel had surfaced on the wall behind stacks of books, which had mutely succumbed to legions of hungry critters. One casualty was a copy of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1601). Opening a random page led me to Act 1, Scene 3, where Andrew Aguecheek’s famous declamation about beef was intact: ‘… but I am a great eater of beef, and I believe it does harm to my wit.’ In the play, Aguecheek is a pompous arse given to making blunt admissions about his foibles. But that’s not why the line grabbed me. Despite the separation of civilizations and centuries, they reminded me that the Dharavi Food Project had begun with a similar admission about meat and wit, by a woman who was every bit as clever and rational as Aguecheek was silly and reckless.
2 June 2014: Orientation day. A group of women had assembled to discuss with me what the Dharavi Food Project entailed. Personal preferences about eating and cooking were revealed in quick outbursts after shy silences. One attendee claimed not to eat chicken because she thought it to be an indecisive bird. Eating it was bound to make her stupid, she said. When prodded, she confessed that it was taste of chicken she didn’t like. Not eating it had nothing to do with a link between its character and her wit. As it happened, the woman didn’t return. But her account haunted me, for its curious conjunction of gustatory preference and myth-making, and eventually inspired the title of the book based on the food project: The Indecisive Chicken: Stories and Recipes from Eight Dharavi Women (May 2014).
The Indecisive Chicken: Stories and Recipes from Eight Dharavi Women (May 2014)
Before the book, The Dharavi Food Project was a process-based workshop that involved live demonstrations of cooking. Its cohort includes 20 or so collaborative projects commissioned by The Dharavi Biennale, Mumbai, to explore the umbrella theme of ‘health’. Artists, writers, curators, musicians and environmental professionals, from India and abroad, were invited to collaborate with Dharavi residents towards developing artworks that were relevant to the area’s multiple health concerns. This two-year odyssey of collaborative workshops has recently been realised in an exhibition called Alley Galli Biennale (15 February – 7 March, 2015), currently on view across three exhibition venues and multiple event sites in Dharavi.
Image from the Dharavi Food Project at The Dharavi Biennale 2015
Dharavi is a megaslum: a 535-acre settlement in central Mumbai, inhabited by people hailing from all corners of India. Ten times more densely populated than the rest of Mumbai, Dharavi is estimated to be home to at least half a million souls. Long ago it was a small, marshy fishing village, and in the 19th century, the site of an innocuous British fort. Soon, migrant-run tanneries spawning working-class enclaves for dock workers and other industrial labour created a slum. As colonial Bombay (now Mumbai) industrialized, Dharavi became a garbage dump for industrial waste and commercial industries that were deemed too dangerous to remain in the city’s gentrified areas to the south. Its population of refugees, squatters, migrants and people with no secure land rights, along with some slightly better off working class and entrepreneurial populations, now occupy run-on single tenement houses, makeshift hutments, and a few new high-rises. Collectively they all suffer and thrive in what is probably the most polluted micro-climate in Mumbai. This is the setting of The Dharavi Biennale, 2015.
Image from the Dharavi Food Project at The Dharavi Biennale 2015
The Mumbai-based non-profit organization Society for Nutrition, Education & Health Action (SNEHA) is the logistical engine behind the initiative. It addresses public health issues relating to women and children in Dharavi’s informal settlements and employs a network of community officers and experts without whom local participation might well have been impossible, despite generous funding by The Wellcome Trust, UK. The bulk of the commissions, including the Dharavi Food Project, were workshopped inside a building called Colour Box located on 90 Feet Road in Dharavi’s potters’ enclave known as Kumbharwada. This flagship venue – which was previously a potter’s studio, kiln, shop and home – is also a synecdoche for what the initiative hopes to achieve. As ground zero, it has witnessed the eruption of dozens of pages of comic book narratives, ecstatic sculptural transformations of ingots containing recycled plastic, a panoramic sound and light staging of alcoholism and marital health through mechanized puppets, and a colossal map worked in quilted appliqué plotting the sites of domestic violence in Dharavi’s homes. Regardless of how grave the subject matter, the organizers were clear that aesthetic discourse must prevail over sloganeering.
Image from the Dharavi Food Project at The Dharavi Biennale 2015
So the event is not about educating Dharavi’s residents about health? The query is justified, given that SNEHA and The Wellcome Trust gain are more associated with health than art. They might as well scream incomprehensible messages through a megaphone on the streets, say SNEHA’s Dr Nayreen Daruwalla and UCL Professor Dave Osrin, the Co-Directors of The Dharavi Biennale, who have jointly conceptualized and produced the event. To them, artworks produced collaboratively with Dharavi residents – that might reflect epiphanies about health – is what the initiative is about.
The Dharavi Food Project took place across 13 sessions in June and September 2014. Eight homemakers from various communities across Dharavi prepared 40 dishes in live demonstrations designed to teach, share and showcase everyday cooking to an audience of their peers. While discursively exploring nutrition, tradition and chemistry, these sessions also pressed junctures between the multiple culinary habits that distinguish but also separate Dharavi’s polyglot world – Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Bihari, Bhojpuri, Gujarati, and Hindi. This was their first time, the women confessed, they had actively examined something that is second nature to them. The company of women from other communities was like being at a symposium of culinary experts. In discussing their cooking, recipes, ingredients and method, the women also conversed about what food means in their personal lives. Despite being routinely characterized by authorial effacement and a sense of gender-defined duty, cooking is also a way to express themselves, they said.
There was a consensus of opinion. Fashioning a stage through cooking outside the home offered the women an audience for their art, which, like air, is usually invisible. Once cooked a meal is eaten, and once eaten its multiple meanings disappear, until the next meal is cooked and also eaten. But being cast into new roles as performers encouraged the cooks to move fluidly between the personas of cook, epicure and gourmand. Some identified this as being in direct ideological opposition to the invisibility of women’s labour and its undermined aesthetic value.
Image from the Dharavi Food Project at The Dharavi Biennale 2015
The Indecisive Chicken: Stories and Recipes from Eight Dharavi Women certainly celebrates the women who headline the food project. But it also explores what cooking means beyond making a meal. At various points, the project felt like an experiment, because it was also instrumentalizing food practices by everyday cooks to revisit definitions and perceptions of aesthetic labour. I was interested in the outcome of an overlap. Could a language that parallels art-historical thinking applied to the practice of household cooking reinvigorate the notion of aesthetic value and aesthetic labour? When conceived, however, the project seemed altogether different. I went in expecting to document Dharavi’s ethno-culinary traditions but ended up writing about displays of gastronomic prowess which create spaces of intellectual and physical pleasure that as much as they channel female desire and well-being also configure the hunger for art.