Food, heritage and affect: an urban ethnography of Shahjahanabad, Delhi

Abstract

Despite the importance of food in everyday life and its central role in South Asian public culture, geographical research on food remains persistently Anglo-American in focus, even more so in relation to heritage. However, food still continues to be an important curative and creative medium in the expression and experience of a city’s heritage, culture, politics and identity. By focusing on an old urban neighbourhood in the postcolonial city of Delhi, Shahjahanabad, with a chequered historical past and a rich culinary culture, this dissertation explores the idea of food as cultural heritage. It examines the potential of newly emerging consumer practices, of heritage and food walks, and their effects on the cultural heritage and urban landscape insofar as they contribute to recent scholarship in geography on new spatial and embodied relationships between people and their built environments. In doing so, it contributes to the domain of urban cultural geography – one at the intersection of postcolonial theories, critical heritage studies, geographies of (food) consumption and contemporary geographies of affect, emotion, and new materialism.

In recent decades, geographers and other researchers, through the critical studies tradition, have come to conceptualise heritage as more than its built environment (such as archaeological sites) paying close attention to the intangible dimensions of lived cultural heritage. This has been characterised by a concomitant rise in geographical scholarship on the embodied qualities of the built environment. This dissertation, drawing on recent theories of affect and emotion, explores how these heritage and culinary practices, situated within wider socio-political processes, are reconfigured or reinvented as heritage. Using ethnographic and archival fieldwork, it attends to how affect and emotion circulate between (non)human actors and their environments through registers of the food and built environment/architectural heritage in the multisensorial spaces of the heritage and food walks. In doing so, the thesis unpacks the socio-cultural production of a postcolonial culinary heritage that renders heritage as processual and emergent.

Date of Award	25 Jan 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Northumbria University
Supervisor	Jacob Miller (Supervisor) & Kathryn Cassidy (Supervisor)