South Asian Women's Expressions of Piety through Everyday Food Practices and Fasting

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Our panel asks: how do women of different religious traditions articulate a sense of agency through the cooking, offering, gifting, or withholding of food? What kinds of agency do they display by using cooking or fasting as tools in contexts as varied as the home, school, and work? Our papers are grounded in ethnographic fieldwork in a wide variety of national contexts, from Sri Lanka to Pakistan and India, in three different religious traditions: Buddhism, Islam, and Hinduism. Our discussant, Sufia Uddin, adds a transreligious Bangladeshi/Bengali dimension to our panel, as her work explores shared sacred space and religious elements common to both Bengali Hindus and Muslims.
Pascale Engelmajer looks at Pali texts and women’s daily distribution of food to Theravada Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka. She shows how women achieve religious agency in their social functions of wife and mother by the preparing and giving of food, while simultaneously embodying the Buddhist path. Faiza Hussain examines the food practices of Pakistani Muslim women, asking why they choose to hide their practices, given that offering food and fasting for religious reasons is a meritorious act. Usha Sanyal examines the social and religious role of food in a residential girls’ madrasa in U.P., India, including the etiquette (adab) of food consumption practices and students’ voluntary fasting as an act of self-discipline, emotional fulfillment, and the creation of “pious selves.” Nita Kumar tries to understand why professional Hindu teachers undertake voluntary fasts despite the heavy demands on them as full-time working women.

Area of Study

• South Asia

Session Organizer

• Usha Sanyal, Queens University of Charlotte

Individual Presentations

• Buddhist Women and Alms Giving - Pascale Engelmajer, Carroll University

• Food Matters: Social and Religious Food Practices at a Barelwi Girls' Madrasa in India - Usha Sanyal, Queens University of Charlotte

• The "Piety" of Fasting Hindu Women Teachers: A Complex Professional Strategy - Nita Kumar, Claremont McKenna College

Discussant

• Sufia Uddin, Connecticut College