SAF 2025

Culinary Cosmopolitanism through Porotta Shops of Rural and Coastal Tamil Nadu (Workshop)

Free
Culinary Arts
Workshop

The Old GMC Complex
The Food Lab

14th December
01:00 PM - 02:00 PM

This project investigates how these establishments—serving the flaky, layered Porotta and its quintessential companion, Salna—operate not only as culinary spaces but as vital community hubs. While Porottas have become central to Tamil food culture, their presence is relatively recent, emerging over the past six decades yet now perceived as tradition.

The interactive session packing the project Culinary Cosmopolitanism through Porotta eateries in rural and coastal Tamil Nadu would be a presentation of Sumaiya Ahamed Mustafa’s field experiences in the course of the research. The central theme of the session would be the relationship between the Porotta eateries and the Tamil landscape. In it, the role of natural and human-made landscapes in the creation of tastes and subsequently the newness of traditions in the cultural production of literal taste would be engaged with by using the case of Porottas. Beside the landscape, the session would address Porotta eateries’ as a long-standing trope for cheapness, alcoholism, and “impure” ways of eating touted by sub-cultures like Tamil cinema against the collective fondness for the food of Porotta shops cutting across class and caste.

Diaspora as a locale of outmoded (well, carriers of traditions) ways of not only eating but modes of consuming, especially with regards to keeping Porotta places gendered very much in contrary to the liminality of the space’s nature in homeland Tamil Nadu, will also be discussed through Tamil Porotta shops in Mumbai’s Dharavi. Above all, the makers of Porotta, the cooks and labour from Porotta eateries across the Tamil world, their utterly diversified views of the porotta provenance, from village to village, which sits in sharp contrast with the academia’s understanding of the bread as though to collectively drive the idea of non-linearity of movement of tastes will also be discussed.

Artists:

Sumaiya Ahamed Mustafa

Noor Nisha (photographer)

Culinary Cosmopolitanism through Porotta Shops of Rural and Coastal Tamil Nadu (Workshop)

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Culinary Cosmopolitanism through Porotta Shops of Rural and Coastal Tamil Nadu (Workshop)

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