How the Hindu Home Kitchen Opened for Business

The Moynihan Institute’s South Asia Center presents Sucharita Kanjilal from Bard College.

This talk explores why the Hindu home kitchen, historically a guarded space of heterosexual caste reproduction, has recently opened up to culinary commodity production, especially as it relates to online content creation and hyperlocal catering ventures. It places this paradoxical repurposing of domestic infrastructures and its social relations in the context of advancing platform capitalism and entrepreneurial striving in contemporary India. As kitchens are repurposed into studios, living rooms converted into editing rooms and husbands turned into stagehands, the Hindu household is re-signified into a start-up in the making.

The talk argues that home cooks are opening themselves up to the digital piecework of content creation because its particular material relations enable them to participate in the conjuncture of entrepreneurialism without unsettling the ritual constitution of the Hindu household. The reification of social difference, as a result, becomes a cornerstone of platform-based media production, with particular sociopolitical and labor consequences. Consequently, the talk demonstrates the constitutive relationship between the household and the global supply chains of digital economies.

Sucharita Kanjilal is a feminist and economic anthropologist, and assistant professor of anthropology at Bard College, New York. Her work explores the relationships between capitalism, social difference, platformization and food systems. Her forthcoming book, Home Chefs: The Creator Economy and Capital's Domestic Abode, is an ethnographic study of platform capitalism as told from the kitchens of home-cooking content creators in India. Her writing and scholarly work has appeared in Cultural Anthropology, Feminist Media Studies, Gastronomica, The Routledge Companion to Caste and Cinema in India as well as The News Minute, Scroll.in, The Indian Express and Hindustan Times.