Through an open-to-all mobile kitchen in Ahmedabad, artist Vipin Dhanurdharan imagines the community kitchen afresh. This performance piece feeds, but more so, it builds solidarities.
Between the years 2012 and 2018, multimedia artist Vipin Dhanurdharan was working in production for the fourth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. “I lived in a typical bachelor set-up with four other friends. There wasn’t much space to display my art, so I chose the kitchen [to do so]. I tried a practice where, if you cooked, you drew whatever you wanted and pasted it on the fridge,” he says, adding that the kitchen slowly became a gallery space where friends gathered. This laid the foundation for his work thereafter, forging an intimate relationship between his art and the kitchen.
Having grown up in Kerala, Dhanurdharan was influenced by Sahodaran Ayyapan, a social reformer and significant voice in the Kerala reformist movement. The reformist movement, pioneered by Sree Narayana Guru in the early 1900s, challenged caste hierarchy by fighting for reform in education, policy, and social relationships. Ayyapan belonged to the Ezhava community, then considered an oppressed caste. In 1917, he organised a Misrabhojanam (community feast), where around 200 people across castes in Cherai, Ernakulam, were brought under one roof to eat together, despite objections from different caste groups, including his own. This historical event was the pedal, literally, for Dhanurdharan’s project.
In 2022, Dhanurdharan began working on Untitled Kitchen, a mobile performance piece-cum-project in Ahmedabad. The project has its roots in his first community kitchen exhibit at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2018. Titled Sahodarar (brotherhood), it created space for visitors to cook, eat, and interact.
Located at the sea-facing venue of Aspinwall House, the project enabled Dhanurdharan to engage with neighbouring communities in Mattancherry and Fort Kochi, through conversations about Misrabhojanan and Sahodaran Ayyappan. “Sometimes, they would invite me to their homes, and cook me a meal. I’d sit and draw their portraits,” he says. About 45 of these portraits of people from various socio-economic backgrounds were showcased alongside the community kitchen at the Biennale.
As he sharpened his drawing tools and learnt about their familial histories, Dhanurdharan was able to draw connections between people and their kitchens. He archived faces and homes, and the ways in which people ate—seated on the floor, on chairs, around a table, with plates kept on laps.
Borrowing from the Misrabhojanam, Dhanurdharan envisioned the community kitchen as a liminal space where barriers of caste, religion, and gender would not apply. Along with his team of friends, he carefully cut pumpkins, washed tomatoes, spread dosa batter on a pan, and swirled appam batter. Because the kitchen was an open space, those visiting the Biennale joined to help prepare the food, sometimes bringing their own supplies.
He archived faces and homes, and the ways in which people ate—seated on the floor, on chairs, around a table, with plates kept on laps.
As chicken and mutton curries boiled, the kitchen gathered an audience comprising tourists, working-class locals, and trans/queer residents. The food prepared—served on banana leaves—was shared with the audience, who sat alongside and across each other. Dhanurdharan asserts that at the end of his Misrabhojanam, brotherhood isn’t miraculously attained. He is aware of the realities that exist beyond the space he is creating. But it is possible, he says, to encourage dialogue—an almost intimacy—and that is the foundation of his fluid kitchen.
In 2022, Dhanurdharan moved to Ahmedabad, and was offered a chance to present his community kitchen at Abhivyakti, an arts festival at the historic Gujarat University (GU). “Unfortunately, inside GU, you cannot cook meat. This was a first for me. Because the idea of the kitchen is to allow all food, we were a little demotivated,” he shares.
Only a year earlier, in 2021, a bizarre new law was proposed in Ahmedabad. The Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation banned food stalls from selling meat, fish, and eggs on main roads and within 100 metres of educational institutions, citing the “bad smell” of meat as a reason. Statistically, the ‘vegetarian state’ is a myth; Gujarat has a higher population of meat eaters (40 per cent, as of 2021) than Haryana, Punjab, and Rajasthan. Historically a meat-eating state, food is now heavily segregated, between new and old Ahmedabad, connected by the bridge over the Sabarmati river, on the banks of which lies the Gandhi Ashram.
At present, the Jains, who comprise one per cent of the total population of Gujarat, have a dominant voice in the state’s food culture, sidelining the culinary habits of Muslim, Dalit, and Christian communities. Over the years, the state has prohibited animal slaughter and the sale of meat during religious periods observed by the Jain community. However, food vendors in Ahmedabad contend that their customer base often comprises Jains opting for egg-based dishes—which occupy a curious and admittedly contradictory position of neither ‘veg’ nor ‘non-veg’.
While Dhanurdharan did not start his community kitchen with the intention to centre the discourse around meat, this kind of policing restricted him to think of food as veg and non-veg, where ‘veg’ is the norm, ‘non-veg’ the dis-order.
At Abhivyakti, with the help of visitors, Dhanurdharan prepared a traditional Bohri dessert, cashew salad, upma, and payasam. He observed that the festival was mostly attended by elite art enthusiasts. The removal of meat from the menu had likely isolated thousands of people in the city, including those from the working class. “So, we bought a cycle with a handcart, and made our kitchen mobile,” he says.
Of its almost 26 lakh migrant population, many of Ahmedabad’s residents are from Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Maharashtra, whom he met as he travelled the city on his cart. The handcart was equipped with a makeshift stove and cooking ingredients. Parking on street corners, Dhanurdharan would often start simple, by making black tea, to pique curiosity.
“It was like mapping a city,” he says. “We would cycle to areas picked at random, talk to people about our work, and ask if we could set up [the mobile kitchen] there. We’ve been lucky—people have even given us physical space for the handcart.”
Dhanurdharan and his friends stocked some basic ingredients, like chicken (for chicken curry, biryani, chicken fry, etc) and vegetables (for Kerala-style snacks). Often, the community contributed as well. “We went to Vastrapur Gham (village) and cooked vegetarian food such as pazhampori (banana fritters) and other south Indian snacks, but when we went to Dilli Darwaza in Old City, we cooked surmai fish. Whatever the community wants, we cook,” he says.
They’ve had a couple of stink eyes over cooking meat, but have largely been able to get different people together, understand regional recipes—mostly simple Gujarati dals and bhajis—and their respective food cultures. Soon after the festival, Dhanurdharan planned more such cooking excursions with his bicycle kitchen. “The idea was not always about specific recipes, but recipes that people had access to, whether through desire or economic means. This kitchen has always been about building solidarities,” he elaborates.
In 2023, Untitled Kitchen received a grant from Experimenter Kolkata for a year-long project in Gulbai Tekra, a small neighbourhood in Ahmedabad, from where Dhanurdharan would often buy chicken. Gulbai Tekra, meaning ‘hillock’, is home to migrants from the Baori community from Rajasthan who settled here in the mid-nineteenth century. While most families in the neighbourhood are labourers, the narrow bylanes and kutcha houses are known for their inhabitants’ intricate idol-making skill during Ganesh Chaturthi. I am told the infrastructure here is crumbling, and the government’s promised rehabilitation project has not yet begun. These informal jobs are what sustains the community.
"The idea was not always about specific recipes, but recipes that people had access to, whether through desire or economic means. This kitchen has always been about building solidarities."
As part of his project, Dhanurdharan moved his kitchen to Gulbai Tekra. To nudge children from the neighbourhood to think about food and community more deeply, he encouraged them to make drawings as responses to the kitchen, to foster a creative education, and help them archive these experiences. Children are important but often neglected participants in these discourses. Their role in archiving food is pertinent, given the unprecedented impact of economic inequality and the climate crisis today. Through his kitchen, Dhanurdharan hoped for the children of Gulbai Tekra to experience food not just as a means of survival, but also as pleasure.
Growing up in a meat-eating family in Ahmedabad forced me to be a part of the ‘non-veg’ category, or away from the norm. Meat eaters were often told we were “smelly” or “uncouth”. Over the years, the structures that allowed us access to meat in new Ahmedabad—like fish vendors with fresh catch on Sunday mornings right outside the walls of the centrally located IIM Ahmedabad—vanished. With this history still fresh in my bones, learning about Untitled Kitchen has been healing. Dhanurdharan’s work is birthing a renewed community spirit across the city, where laws and socialisation heavily segregate religious and caste groups. A city populated with migrants does not hold much space for them, but a simple moving kitchen is gradually changing that.
Saachi D’Souza is a writer based in Goa, examining society and culture, and all the things that make them.
Inside My Kitchen
Every kitchen has a unique story to tell. Attempting to capture some of these stories from across India, Inside My Kitchen is a series that examines the relationship between the kitchen and the people who inhabit it.
