How India's Queer Community Reclaims Its Agency Through Food

A FEW YEARS AGO, Shanthi Muniswamy, a transgender mural artist with Aravani Art Project in Bangalore lost the opportunity to travel to the United States for an important art project. She still found reason to celebrate because her trans sisters got their visas. To mark this journey, Shanthi packed freshly roasted, coarse podis (dry chutney powder), made entirely from memories of watching her mother and grandmother. 

"From the sun drying the chillies to the moment all the ingredients were blended to powder, I can still smell that kitchen,” she says. For her chosen family, Shanthi packed remnants of her birth-home she had to leave behind. It was an act of passing heritage, important to the sustenance of queer communities. "The spice journey," she calls it. Podis, much like Shanthi and her sisters, have a fluid nature, too. As an accompaniment to dosas, idlis, rice or fried fish, they have their own freedom.

Historically, a lot of heritage and belonging in heterosexual families have been built through witnessing the world of food. But the same food becomes a complicated experience for queer folk who have either been pushed towards the kitchen or denied this witnessing. 

Apart from abandonment from families, a Socio Legal Information Centre report stated that, as of 2020, trans persons in India were not afforded social welfare schemes for subsidised groceries. Hindrances with identity proof make it harder for them to receive nourishment through the state. As many as 96 per cent of trans folk in India are denied jobs across the board and are often forced into begging and sex work. Bans on both during the pandemic hit the community hard. It was in context to this reality that Chennai Trans Kitchen or CTK was born in January 2020.

“During the Covid-19 pandemic, food became a symbol of who gets to eat and who doesn't,” says Jeeva, a trans woman and the proprietor of CTK. Many in the queer community were quarantined in abusive homes or were homeless. The Wire reported how homophobic families of queer persons forcefully tried to “cure” them while quarantined together. Mental health helplines were overwhelmed with grievances. 

Jeeva, an activist in the community, started receiving daily calls from trans persons in Chennai struggling for food. She arranged provisions with a local grocery store to cook meals en masse. This formed the basis of what went on to become Chennai Trans Kitchen.

CTK (which held two branches in Chennai) is managed by Jeeva and 10 transpersons. In a bylane tucked away in Bazaar Street, the second branch is an eight-table space employed by trans persons. Even though it was fully functional till earlier this year, it currently operates mostly as a cloud kitchen for orders and partly as a restaurant. Food is cooked every day and the demand varies. Unfortunately, metro work in the area rendered the main branch at GKM colony unmanageable, so it shut down temporarily. There’s hope that it will reopen once the area is quieter. 

Even with shutters of its main branch down, CTK echoes a powerful, quiet legacy of queer cookery. Swasti, an organisation that works with marginalised communities (including queer folks) to provide healthcare access, supported CTK. But this kitchen is not the first of its kind. Swasti also provided aid to one Covai Trans Kitchen in Coimbatore in 2020. Operating along the same lines, Covai Trans Kitchen saw its ultimate demise with the murder of Sangeetha, the trans woman who ran it. 

‍Food as queer history‍

CTK’s birthing marks an important cornerstone in understanding how food creates a narrative in queer lives in India. It is an exposition on how food moves beyond sustenance to claim its stake in queer history. It records vulnerability, experiences of being othered, and how queer communities reclaim agency through food.  

Food has allowed the employees of CTK a respectability that was otherwise, socially and politically, a Sisyphean task. Under the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956 (ITPA), several activities under prostitution in India were illegal, more specifically, earning from it. The Act emphasised that sex work was possible but had to be done at least 200 metres away from any public space, thus giving impunity to the police who harass, intimidate and violate sex workers, many of whom are trans. It was only in May 2022, that the Supreme Court of India (SC) recognised sex work as a valid profession and declared sex workers’ right to dignity in labour. 

A large part of CTK's success for its employees is that they take up space in public without the usual accompanying stigmas. With a bus depot just a stone’s throw away from the restaurant on Bazaar Street, bus conductors and daily wage workers are CTK regulars.

Delhi-based anthropologist Akshay Khanna says, “In a typical kitchen, who cooks, who eats, who cleans, etc., is predetermined. It's not just that the woman cooks and the man eats.” If a man cooks he is a chef, despite leaving a mess behind for the woman or the domestic worker, a reality wonderfully demonstrated in the Malayalam movie The Great Indian Kitchen. ‍

For trans persons too, history doesn't just build through recipes, but through life in a kitchen.

In Mumbai’s Versova, a couple - Diego Miranda and Glenice D’Sa opened Bambai Nazariya, a café that employs trans persons. “Life was very different for me before working at the café. Either people only called us to give blessings, or they would run away from us. There was nothing in between. However, working at the café has helped us earn the respect we deserve. People appreciate the work we do and view us like any other citizen. That’s what matters,” Piyu, a trans employee told Citizen Matters. 

In 2022, theatre artist and activist Srijith Sundaram created the play Nooramma: Biryani Darbar, along with renowned trans theatre artist Revathi. Srijith was in Tamil Nadu’s Pollachi a few years ago when he observed that trans women there were allowed a seat in buses if they were carrying food. This went on to partly define his play, where Revathi embodies seven generations of trans women. 

Still from Nooramma: Biryani Durbar. Image via BehanBox

In Nooramma, Revathi makes a large vat of biryani for the audience during the performance. When the curtains fall, this biryani is shared with all. Srijith made an active choice to include biryani as a standalone character in the play.

Biryani has a long history in southern India. Historians believe that the dish originated in Iran and probably reached south India through pilgrims and Deccan nobles, challenging the belief that Moguls brought it to India.

Biryani is rife with political repertoire. It became a symbol of anti-national rebellion when it was served to protesting farmers between 2020-21. Similarly, large biryani offerings were common during the anti-CAA movement, particularly in Shaheen Bagh in Delhi.

“We wanted to tell stories of those rendered untouchable by way of their gender, but practices around food tell stories of anyone marginalised by gender, sexuality, caste and religion,” says Srijith. Through Nooramma's biryani, he wanted to demonstrate the relationship between different marginalisations. His next project will explore the lives of older trans women, their loneliness and desires, told through the politics of beef in the country, another political, heavily criminalised working-class food.‍

Food as queer belonging‍

In Chennai, biryani is a common street food as a filling, affordable meal, and a feast for groups. CTK offers biryani, and evenings were often the busiest time of the day when the main branch was open for seating. For the employees, it was an exciting time to cook meat, serve more people and engage with the customers in their space.

For Idhayakani, an employee of CTK, a big part of working there is the camaraderie. There is banter with colleagues and customers. The more the merrier, he says. “I used to enjoy large groups coming to eat our food.”

Even the shutting down of the main branch is not a huge setback for its trans employees. CTK always operated as a community more than a restaurant. Even with smaller orders in its cloud kitchen, it’s a chance for them to cook together, laugh, gossip.

A few years ago, around 2017, Akshay began inviting queer folk to cook and eat together as a kind of community building. The group would spend some eight hours breaking down recipes together, (re)figuring out what they knew about food. They called this project ‘Sattu for Queers’, after sattu, a type of flour made from ground pulses and cereals. Typically from Bihar, Akshay says sattu as an ingredient has rigid, conventional uses. 

Sattu itself tastes quite bland. It can be edified in a variety of ways, but generally isn't. Akshay has experimented with sattu, building the foundation of what they say is queer food - to not just use ingredients but witness their possibilities, their abundance and flirtations. Even in food, that which the gender binary cannot hold, queerness makes a home for.‍

Food as queer service‍

Jeeva’s history with NGOs that deal with healthcare and financial aid, by making HIV/AIDS treatment more accessible for trans persons gave her a knack for business and management. This wouldn’t have been possible otherwise, since trans persons seldom get a chance at education and the conventional college-to-job pipeline.

Idhayakani from CTK corroborates this by saying that his choice to be a part of the restaurant came from wanting to be a part of something 'essential’. “During the pandemic, everything came to a standstill and people cut down on so many of their indulgences. Except food. Whether or not it is an indulgence, you cannot live without food. It will always be something that is in need," he says.

During the pandemic, Srijith along with other queer activists had started the Trans Community Kitchen, a venture similar to that of CTK,  in Chennai after witnessing a poor family die of hunger.  

Its goal was to make and deliver food to migrant workers, labourers and other working-class citizens who were left stranded by the overnight lockdown. When asked whether it mattered to people that queer persons were delivering their food, Srijith smiles and says, "The PPE kit was a good shield." 

They managed to pack and deliver 64,000 meal kits, and post-COVID, began a crowdfunding initiative to support queer entrepreneurs. They raised funds for one of their trans sisters to start her boutique, and more notably, raised enough funds for a trans woman to buy a fridge for her food stall 'Tasty Hut.' 

When Srijith discussed the work of the TCK, he asserted that it was because trans persons he worked with wanted to feed a society that left them hungry, that these spaces were able to become successful. 

Service is both a sentiment and opportunity for several trans persons in India. It is also the largest sector of employment for trans persons who are shut out of other industries.

‍Food as queer questioning‍

It is impossible to speak about queer food without caste. Dalit queers have for long spoken about the violence of food narratives that are elite, heterosexual and discriminatory. “Where Queerness asks us to navigate life outside the heteronormative expectations, much of these possibilities have been taken away from us due to caste,” Dalit trans-feminine writer Aroh Akunth wrote for Outlook. 

In her keynote address for Delicious Desires: Queer Foodways in South Asia, at Ashoka University, Professor Parama Ray says, "Food can be a boundary, but also a portal," illustrating how food, which imprisons many identities, also opens up possibilities. Food does not belong to one group and cannot be claimed. It grows and evolves.

Feeding others also allows us to learn kinship. The act of preparing and eating food can be a lonely experience. “Because to be queer is to exist outside the norm, queer food, then,” says Akshay, “is an agency outside of normative ways of eating.” So, perhaps, to eat queer food is to not just include others, but also one’s own queer selves.

(Additional reporting by Sambhavi Varadarajan)

This article was reported and published by queerbeat and has been reproduced here after due permission. Read the original article here.