The Warp of Hunger: Visualising Food, Forest and Femininity

Katyayani the Large, the protagonist of Amruta Patil and Devdutt Pattanaik’s Aranyaka (2019), unabashedly states at the start of the book, “The warp of my story has always been hunger.” With a voluptuous body and insatiable appetite, having even stolen food meant for the gods, she appears on the page of the graphic narrative in defiance of the expectations set for women in (Ancient) India with respect to eating and appetite. Food in the Vedic texts has frequently been identified with flavour of life, vital strength and vigor, attributes that are largely masculine.  Consuming food, and certain kinds of food, is an exercise of power, especially as it gets associated with symbolic feeding of the mind. On the other hand, feeding and being fed are regarded as roles to be fulfilled through the feminine characteristics of nourishment, coming from the largely feminine domain of the kitchen. This paper argues that Katyayani’s quiet conviction, free-spiritedness and rootedness to the forest space effectively question the hierarchy of feeding, but without derision. Literally translated as “Book of the Forest”, Aranyaka explores the mythic space of the forest more than the tropes of exile, hardship and enlightened transformation, to a space where the individual becomes a part of the membrane of its vast network. Katyayani shifts the perspective to embrace the chaos, the scary and the nourishing aspects of the aranya/forest, to live-with and die-with in a kind of solidarity with prakriti/nature. Katyayani prompts us to consider whether food is meant to satisfy hunger, acts as a fleeting substitute for a deeper yearning in life, or is given to others with the expectation of receiving nourishment in return. Moreover, Patil’s graphic rendition builds on the long enduring legacy in tribal, folkloric, mythological, indigenous visual narrative traditions to transform the medium of graphic narratives.