Call for Abstracts for an Edited Volume

                                       Tastes of Text: Food and Indian Literature

                                                                  Editors

                         Dr.Auritra Munshi, Assistant Professor, Raiganj University

                   Dr. Surabhi Jha, ICSSR Postdoctoral Researcher, Aliah University

Concept Note

Food is never simply nourishment; it is an archive where culture, politics, and affect sediment. It carries with it the weight of history, the intimacy of memory, and the urgency of identity. In Indian literature, food rarely stays confined to the plate—it becomes metaphor, medium, and method, circulating across texts to evoke belonging, mark exclusions, and stage resistance. To eat, refuse, share, or withhold food is to participate in a dense semiotic field that is as political as it is sensorial. From the ritualized offerings embedded in early literary traditions to the sensorial excesses of Bhakti and Sufi poetry, Indian literatures have consistently foregrounded the cultural meanings of food.  Partition memoirs and famine narratives record hunger as trauma, exposing the violence of both nature and nation. Dalit writings disrupt normative culinary imaginaries by reclaiming the stigmatized spaces of consumption, challenging caste-coded notions of purity and pollution. Diasporic novels often stage kitchens as hybrid sites where culinary memory negotiates displacement, nostalgia, and cultural translation. Folklore, oral traditions, and popular culture continue to script food as both everyday practice and collective imagination. Despite the global rise of food studies as an interdisciplinary field, the study of food in Indian literature remains undertheorized. Critical scholarship has tended to focus on food in anthropology, sociology, or history, while its literary imagination across Indian languages has received relatively little sustained attention. This volume, Tastes of Text: Food and Indian Literature, aims to address that gap by reading food as a prism through which texts can be reinterpreted, repositioned, and re-imagined.

 The volume draws upon a range of critical frameworks: postcolonial and decolonial studies to unpack culinary encounters in colonial and nationalist writing; feminist and queer theories to interrogate the gendered and intimate economies of the kitchen; Dalit and subaltern studies to explore how caste politics are inscribed through practices of eating and exclusion; ecocriticism and posthumanism to consider food in relation to ecology, nonhuman life, and sustainability; diaspora and migration studies to trace the flows of food across borders; and cultural materialism and affect theory to understand food as both material culture and affective archive. These theoretical tools allow us to see food not merely as motif but as discourse, as structure of feeling, and as a method of literary reading. By situating Indian texts—classical, medieval, modern, and contemporary—within the interdisciplinary terrain of food studies, the volume seeks to highlight how literature makes culinary practices legible, contestable, and culturally resonant. Food, in these readings, emerges not as background detail but as constitutive of identity, ideology, and imagination.

Scope & Themes

We invite chapters that explore food in Indian literature across genres, languages, and historical periods, using diverse theoretical and methodological approaches. Suggested (but not exhaustive) themes include:

• Food as Memory
• Caste and Cuisine
• Gender and the Kitchen
• Famine and Hunger
• Food and Migration
• Food in Regional Literatures
• Colonial Culinary Encounters
• Food in Folklore and Oral Traditions
• Food and Ecology
• Cookbooks as Literature
• Food in Visual and Popular Culture

• Submission Guidelines

• Abstract: 300–350 words outlining your proposed chapter, including theoretical framework and primary texts.
• Bio-note: 150 words
• Full Chapter Length: 6000–7000 words (including references).

• Important Dates

• Abstract Submission Deadline: September 30
• Notification of Acceptance: October 15
• Full Chapter Submission Deadline: January 31
• Publication Timeline: 2026

• Publisher

The publication house is yet to be finalized. Once we receive the abstracts, we will prepare the complete book proposal and then approach potential publishers. We are certainly considering internationally reputed publishing houses for this volume.

• Submission & Contact

Please send abstracts and queries to: textweave@gmail.com

• Publication charges

There are no publication charges for this volume. We invite unique abstracts on Food Studies and Indian Literature, with a particular emphasis on unexplored areas of research. Selection of abstracts will be based on originality and the relevance of the proposed topic to the theme of the edited volume.