Sucharita Kanjilal

SUCHARITA KANJILALA, then a graduate student at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, was awarded funding in August 2020 to aid research on “Gendered Labor in the Gastroscape: Food Politics, Digital Technology and Domestic Cooking in India,” supervised by Dr. Akhil Gupta. The project funded by this grant sought to undertake ethnographic research with Indian women who work full-time or part-time as “food bloggers”, now called “content creators” in the $100-billion global “creator economy.” Initially, the project set out to understand — during a historical conjuncture of violent Hindu nationalist food politics — the prevalence of vegetarianism among Indian women food bloggers. The initial research questions were based on findings that popular Indian food blogs are overwhelmingly vegetarian, though a majority of Indians eat meat. During the research period, carried out remotely owing to the Covid-19 pandemic, ethnographic fieldwork was carried out with more than 30 content creators in the form of Zoom interviews, online participant observation, a quantitative survey and digital data scraping. The research questions around vegetarianism, caste and Hindu nationalism elicited a range of responses around caste rules of meat eating and avoidance on digital platforms. These findings informed the researcher’s dissertation project and one chapter was later published in a peer-reviewed journal Feminist Media Studies. Additionally, during this time, broader issues of content monetization came to the fore, and raised new research questions about the global creator economy, which subsequently took the dissertation in new directions.