Consuming Bodies: Representation of Food, Gender and Desire in Kari and Aranyaka

Consuming Bodies: Representation of Food, Gender and Desire in Kari and Aranyaka

The concept of the food, desire and hunger are closely associated with the control of women’s bodies. Most of the women in the Indian society spend their lives in kitchen but are not allowed to imagine food as an object of desire. Many of the Indian cultures forbid women to eat certain kinds of foods during mensuration, pregnancy and post-partum. In some cultures, widowed women cannot consume non-vegetarian food along with certain food items presumed as aphrodisiac like onion and garlic. Desirability of the women’s bodies is visualized as directly proportional to the food consumption. Women starve, eat or diet to fit in the lens of this male gaze. 

In the light of the above cultural characteristics, I propose to examine, analyse and interrogate the visual representation of food, desire and bodies in Amruta Patil’s graphic novels Kari (2008) and Aranyaka (written with Devdutt Pattanaik, 2019). The location, setting and timeline of both the novels are far apart and hence, narrate the stories of women from realistic urban city to mythological forest. This paper would also like to analyse the feminine visualization of the women’s bodies belonging to different sexualities, timeframe and society.