Otherized food, racialized bodies: Discourses of food, smell and racism in Nicholas Kharkongor’s Axone

ABSTRACT

Axone is a recently released Indian film revolving around Northeastern cuisine. Through culinary reimagining, the film raises several issues regarding Northeastern migrants who largely remain invisible in the public discourse. The present article attempts to examine the embodied experiences of the Northeasterners in the Indian capital, Delhi, through the analysis of the film from a culinary lens. Affirming the film’s status as a food film, the article first tries to locate axone in the Indian culinary order, which has been hegemonized by the caste ideas of ganda (dirty) and gandha (smelly). Secondly, it engages with the politics of otherness played around the Northeastern food by employing social and sensorial boundaries. Thirdly, it brings to the fore the discourse of racism, which is central to the experience of Northeasterners living in the city. Lastly, the article delists the Northeastern migrants only as victims of the city and explores their place-making strategies by taking into account the agentic potential of their culinary culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Axone
• Northeastern migrants
• othering
• culinary
• racism
• smell

Acknowledgments

We are extremely grateful to the editor, Prof. Gita Rajan, for her continuous support throughout the publication process. We also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and observations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In the article, Northeastern is being used as a conceptual category to refer to the demographically and racially homogenized aspects of Northeasterners without meaning to reify them. It is rather done for the purpose of analysis.

2. Northeasterners refer to the migrants who have left the Northeast to come to live in cities like Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru for multifarious reasons. Some of the primary reasons for coming to metropolitan cities, especially Delhi, include job opportunities in the service sector, educational aspirations, economic exigency, and the prestige associated with living in the big city (McDuie-Ra 61–83).

3. Northeast is a demographic category located in the north-eastern part of India, which comprises eight federal states of the Indian Union: Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura, and Sikkim.

4. Brahminical code encapsulates those tenets of Hinduism that are espoused and propagated by the upper caste Hindus for the perpetuation of a hierarchal structure in the Hindu caste system.

5. Shutki maach is a popular ingredient among Bengalis, which is sun-dried fish and has a distinct smell of itself.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rajbir Samal

Rajbir Samal is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Roorkee, India. He is currently working on Critical Food Studies for his doctoral thesis, and his areas of research interest include Sensory Studies, Indian Cinema, and Indian Writing in English.

Binod Mishra

Binod Mishra is a Professor of English at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India. He works in the areas of Film Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Environmental Humanities, and Indian Literature in English. He has published extensively in these research areas in leading journals from Taylor and Francis, Sage, and De Gruyter, amongst many others.