Draft:Rajyashri Goody

Rajyashri Goody (b.1990) is a visual artist and ethnographer. Her practice is informed by her academic background in social science, as well as her Dalit roots. She lives and works in Pune (India), and the Netherlands. She is known for her work on decoding and making visible the everyday experiences of the Dalit community in India. Currently, she is working with narratives of food, hunger, and eating habits in the Dalit experience.

Notable Life Events
Rajyashri Goody was born in 1990 in Pune to British and Indian parents, and currrently lives and works in India and the Netherlands. She completed her Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from Fergusson College in Pune in 2011, and a Masters of Arts in Visual Anthropology from the University of Manchester, UK, in 2013. She has had two solo shows - with Galleryske, New Delhi and Clark House Initiative, Mumbai, and group shows across the world. She was a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam from 2021 to 2023. She is currently a visiting artist fellow at Harvard University exploring complexities, parallels, and the significance of food in race and caste narratives.

Work and Career
Goody's art work focuses on the caste-based discrimination still prevalent in urban and rural India. More than 160 million people in India are considered "Untouchable"- tainted by their birth into a caste system that deems them impure, less than human. Human rights abuses against these people, known as Dalits, are legion. Dalits are not allowed to drink from the same wells, attend the same temples, wear shoes in the presence of an upper caste, or drink from the same cups in tea stalls. India's Untouchables are relegated to the lowest jobs, and live in constant fear of being publicly humiliated, paraded naked, beaten, and raped with impunity by upper-caste Hindus seeking to keep them in their place. According to research, crimes against Dalits such as rape, murder, beatings, and violence are committed every 18 minutes. Yet, as Sharmila Rege put it, there is an "official forgetting of histories of caste oppression, struggles, and resistance .” Hence, Goody's interests lie within the strengthening voice of Dalit resistance since the 1920s.

As a half-British and half-Dalit artist, Goody attempts to bring to light the lived experiences of her community, and ancestors. She not only focuses on the historical atrocities committed against them, but also frames a positive narrative around Dalit traditions and culture.

Goody incorporates various mediums in her practice – text, voice, paper pulp, ceramics, photography, printmaking, video and installation.

Exhibitions
Goody's group exhibitions include Revelations: Reclaiming South Asian Narratives, Harvard University, Cambridge, April 2018; Micro-Subversions Playbook, Conflictorium, Baroda, January 2018; World Next Door, Khoj International, New Delhi, December 2017; and Odds & Ends, Galleryske, Bengaluru, September 2017. Rajyashri’s curatorial projects include the Students’ Biennale 2016 in Kochi, and Foreign Exchange at La Générale, Paris, a show involving climate justice activists and artists during COP21 in December 2015.

Notable Contributions
Through her work, Goody examines the links between food and caste, using written word, photography, documentation, installations et cetera. One reason why themes of food are so prominent in Goody's work is because food is so inextricably linked to the caste system. The food hierarchy, as Dalit icon B.R. Ambedkar said, segregates people into three different identities: Those who do not eat flesh (at the top), those who eat non-vegetarian food other than beef (in the middle) and those who eat beef (at the bottom). Contemporary memories of Dalit cuisine are thus linked to the caste system. The cuisine, such as it is, was born in the economics of survival, using resourcefulness and ingenuity to extract the maximum from available resources.

Artists like Goody are trying to engage with issues of food, caste and identity, and change the way their community’s food is viewed. Generally seen through the lens of discrimination or as cuisine that uses insects or animal blood, food made and eaten by Dalits is rarely treated on par with any other—as food that evokes the same kinds of emotions, from celebration and nostalgia to sadness and satisfaction.

Picnic
This installation is a part of Goody's ongoing exhibition, New Natures: A Terrible Beauty Is Born, at Gallery MMB in Fort, Mumbai. It consists of glistening ceramic objects in shades of red, blue and green set in a ring. Their shapes are indicative of foods common to a Maharashtrian kitchen—chillies, papad, groundnut, puffed rice, bhakri—though a closer inspection shows half-eaten samosas and eggs speckled with dust which could represent scraps of leftover food or joothan—one of the poignant markers of Dalit cuisine, where scraps of food left on the plate by members of the upper caste were given to those belonging to the lower caste.

“These ceramics are just interpretations of food. If you see them as samosas and eggs, that’s fine,” says Dalit artist and writer Rajyashri Goody, referring to her installation. A poem by Goody with the same title stands on an easel beside the installation, a moving account inspired by the discrimination Marathi writer Sharankumar Limbale faced at school as a child in the 1960s.

Goody’s recipes—written as poems—don’t have ingredients and cooking methods; they examine food experiences like untouchability, hunger and joothan through Dalit literature. The installation and poem evoke a spectrum of feelings, from joy and nostalgia to guilt and sadness. “I look at it like a digestion of experiences,” says Goody.

Eat with Great Delight
Eat with Great Delight was her first solo exhibition, where she used photographs of her family and turned Dalit literature into recipes, to highlight the significant and complex relationship with food among people who were historically denied it. This exhibition was held at a small curatorial collaborative art exhibition space in Colaba, and housed eleven photographs of her own family engaged in routine activities. One photograph captures them sitting in a garden munching on fruits, in another, they can be seen celebrating a birthday with Budhani wafers and cake served on paper plates; in yet another photograph, a bride holds a glass of Maaza. These photos, which capture commonplace family activities, are bound by a common factor - food. According to Goody, the exhibition titled 'Eat With Great Delight' is an attempt to change the way the Dalit community is perceived. Talking about her motive, Rajyashri says, “In the public sphere, violent and sad images of Dalits are spreading everywhere. And as important as they are, what happens is that people get angry at the situation, and start looking at Dalits with pity, instead of seeing them as just people. I thought there was a need of positive images to break this onslaught of violent images of Dalit people.”

Accompanying the photographs is a booklet with six extracts and poems from Dalit literature that shows a violent, traumatic, deeply inhibited and dehumanising relationship of the writers with food. Wanting to actually, discuss the complexity of access of food by a Dalit person, she says, “It is an attempt to build up a conversation even further. If people are reading the poetry, and looking at the images, then they could probably think about both and how you can be happy and joyful, and also have that history of violence and struggle that you have to probably still deal with. Which is what eating food is, culmination of so many experiences.”

Is the water Chavdar?
This particular exhibition is a tribute to the Chavdar Tank, an important site of pilgrimage for the Dalit Community. In 1927, Indian social reformer and activist Dr. B. R. Ambedkar led more than ten thousand Dalits to the Chavdar water tank in Mahad, Western India. . Considered untouchable, the Dalits were not allowed to drink water reserved for upper-caste Hindus. Thus, by gathering and collectively drinking from the pond, the community asserted their basic human rights and appealed for social equality. This formed the premise for Goody's installation, which displays images of people visiting the tank, posing either with family and friends or in selfies.The gallery walls were filled by twenty-seven monotypes, which the artist made by ink-jet printing the images on plastic sheets and then manually transferring them onto paper while the ink was still wet. These images pay homage to the unknown ten thousand who participated in the Mahad satyagraha (peaceful protest). Furthermore, her exhibition includes an untitled central installation of about ten thousand small ceramic objects, largely glazed in blue-green tones to signify water; these items were arranged in the shape of the square pond allowing people to gather around as if praying around a stupa.

Ukadala
Her work Ukadala comprises an installation of several ceramic pieces laid out on the floor, each resembling a food item, highlighting how the Dalits have had to struggle to put food on their plates, often resorting to leftovers or even spoilt food.

Writing Recipes
Goody, who was interested in exploring the politics of the written word, cookbooks, and access to ample food resources in the context of Dalit communities in India, created a series of booklets, and eventually an anthology, tracing Dalit writers' memories of food in text. Picking extracts that discuss food (or lack of it) in Dalit autobiographies, these words are converted into second-person accounts, deconstructed and broken down to resemble something between recipe instructions and poetry.

Awards and Recognition

 * She was awarded the ‘Exhibition of the Year – Gallery’ for her poignant exhibit titled ‘Is the Water Chavdar’, showcased at Galleryske
 * In 2018, she was awarded the Emerging Artist of the Year by India Today Art Awards.