Eat With Great Delight / Rajyashri Goody.

There are only a few Dalit cookbooks in active circulation. However, the works produced by the Dalit literary movement contain many vivid and complex descriptions of food. These descriptions deal with hunger, eating, cooking, joy, and trauma, all of which serve to call attention to Dalit communities’ everyday struggle and resistance under the caste system. Since 2017 I have been collecting extracts of Dalit literature that relate to food, and compiling them into books of recipes. Creating a cookbook which emphasizes the foodways of Dalit communities, to whom access to both food and literacy has been sparse, is an attempt to contest what Sharmila Rege has described as the “‘official forgetting’ of histories of caste oppression, struggles, and resistance”.