Fourteenth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

A jewellery market by the day and a street-food market by night, Indore’s Sarafa Bazaar is a cultural site of inquiry to understand the fertility of urban foodways. Resulting from the urban local jewellery seller’s need for security, the night food market serves vegetarian delights including recipes generated in everyday household kitchens to delicacies assimilated to globalized experimentation. The bazaar, in this initiative, is treated as a rich repository of history where food preserves a nostalgia for flavours unique to Indore and also transitions to cater to contemporary demands. This paper studies it as a palimpsest, where the new superimposes over the past cultural nuances. It follows a walking methodology. The researchers have taken on a flanerie identity for over three months, gathering data in the form of photographs, field notes, and interview responses. It highlights how this space becomes a site of negotiation between the local and the global, foregrounding the centrality of foodways of the urban poor in preserving locality, seasonality, and regionality while embedding it with external adaptations, transforming formalized urban space into a place where meanings are transacted informally through food. In the argument of this paper, food allows for the effacement of gastro-politics of space as the phenomenon of food vendors laying claim to the market space post 8:30 P.M. is not addressed as encroachment but is lodged in a discourse of belonging. It also looks at the ‘gastronomic heritage’ that emerges from this discourse of belonging and questions the culinary marginalization embedded in it.