When Kitchens Speak: Storytelling Aesthetics in Shahu Patole’s Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada

Abstract

This research examines how food in Shahu Patole's Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada serves as an aesthetic of storytelling based on myth, memory, and shared meals. This analysis contends that Patole makes Dalit kitchens spaces of narration in which cooking practices retain cultural identity, resist caste violence, and exhibit indigenous ways of knowing. Through the use of narratology and Native theory, t he paper investigates how Patole's work re-defines food as both a literary trope and cultural repository of resistance. The paper uses a qualitative, text-based analysis of Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada. Drawing from narratology (Genette’s narrative voice and temporality, Barthes’ cultural codes) and Native/Dalit theory (Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s decolonizing methodologies, LeAnne Howe’s concept of tribalography, Dalit cultural criticism), the study examines how Patole structures his memoir through episodic anecdotes, oral traditions, and communal food narratives. The methodology emphasizes food as a site of cultural memory, mythmaking, and collective storytelling. Patole's work illustrates that Dalit kitchens are not just home spaces—they are cultural storages in which hunger and survival myths are reframed as counter-myths of dignity. Culinary memory keeps erased histories alive through recipes, anecdotes, and oral testimonies, serving as an archive of endurance. Shared meals become acts of solidarity and subversion, breaking caste-enforced hierarchies of purity and pollution. Through narrative and indigenous modes of storytelling, Patole's autobiography insists on Dalit identity and turns the meal into a story of belonging and defiance. Through the placing of Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada within the intersection of myth, memory, and food, this paper illustrates that food narratives are not simply culinary but fundamentally
political. Patole's narrative sensibility recovers Dalit foodways as expressions of cultural continuity and resistance, placing gastronomic literature in the center as an important repository of identity, history, and anti-caste agency.