 Good evening and welcome everyone to this evening's SOAS Food Study Center Distinguished Lecture. My name is Jacob Klein and I'm the Chair of the SOAS Food Study Center. The center was established in 2007 to promote research and teaching in the field of food studies at SOAS and to foster and facilitate links between SOAS and other individuals and institutions with an academic interest in food studies. The center runs a weekly seminar series, convenes workshops and conferences, and oversees an MA program in the anthropology of food, a program which like the center itself is now celebrating its 10th year. Each year the center invites a prominent figure in the world of food studies to deliver a distinguished lecture. The first such lecture, entitled Food and Diaspora, was given by the late Sydney Mintz in October 2007. Other speakers in the series include Melissa Caldwell, James C. Scott, Suman Sahai, James L. Watson, Suzanne Friedberg, and Yotam Otolenghi. All of the previous distinguished lectures have been recorded and can be viewed via the SOAS Food Study Center web pages and YouTube playlist. Tonight's lecture will also be recorded and made available online. Tonight's distinguished lecture has been made possible by the hard work of several people and institutions, and on behalf of the center I wish to express our heartfelt gratitude to them. I particularly wish to highlight the incredible assistance and support we've received from Jane Savry, Poppy Reindorpe, and Yasmin Jayasimi in the SOAS Centers and Programs Office, and from Anna Cohen in the SOAS Department of Anthropology. Since 2014, the SOAS Food Study Center has enjoyed the collaboration and sponsorship of Gastronomica, the Journal of Critical Food Studies. Tonight's lecture will be published in the journal, as have several previous distinguished lectures. We are profoundly grateful to Gastronomica, to its publisher, the University of California Press, and not least to its editor, Melissa Caldwell, and its managing editor, Rebecca Feinberg, both of whom are here this evening. A couple of practicalities before I introduce the speaker. First, could you please put your mobile phones on mute? Also, the lecture will last roughly 45 minutes and will be followed by about 20 minutes of Q&A. Afterwards, you are all warmly welcome to join us and the speaker for drinks and nibbles. The reception will be held in the SOAS Senior Common Room, located on the first floor of the SOAS Main Building. To reach the Main Building, turn right after exiting this building via the main exit onto Thornow Street and walk about 50 meters. The entrance to the Main Building will be on your left-hand side. Gain savory, poppy rindorp, and a few others will help to ensure that nobody gets lost. I will now introduce the speaker. Amita Bhavaskar is Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth in Delhi, India. She holds a BA in Economics and an MA in Sociology from the University of Delhi and a PhD in Development Sociology from Cornell. She was previously Lecturer and Reader in Sociology at the University of Delhi and has held fellowships or visiting professorships at numerous institutions, including the University of California Berkeley, Stanford, Yale, and Sciences Po. Professor Bhavaskar is internationally recognized for her wide-ranging research on the cultural politics of environment and development in India. She has written on the politics of water, on forest conservation and tribal rights, on untouchability, on class, and on food sovereignty, among other topics. Her monograph, In the Belly of the River, Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Navada Valley, was published by Oxford University Press in 1995, with the second edition released in 2004. She has published several co-edited and co-edited volumes, including Waterscapes, The Cultural Politics of a Natural Resource, published by Permanent Black in 2007, Intested Grounds, Essays on Nature, Culture, and Power, published by Oxford University Press in 2008, and Elite and Everyman, The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes, published by Routledge in 2011. Professor Bhavaskar's interests include both food production and consumption, and she wrote the Food and Agriculture Entry for the 2012 Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Indian Culture. Tonight's talk emerges from her exciting recent research into the life of industrial foods in India. It is a great pleasure and honour to welcome this year's SOAS Food Studies Centre and Gastronomica Distinguished Lecturer, Professor Amita Bhavaskar. Welcome. Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me to speak in the SOAS Food Studies Centre lecture series. Well, I think that the first person to deliver this lecture was the great Sidney Mintz. I feel equally honoured and intimidated. What I present before you today is the early stage of a research project on changing diets and changing agrarian environments in India, and this work on food is still very raw. I have assembled the ingredients and I have a recipe in mind, but for cooking it, I need your help in slicing and dicing, in tasting and improving it with your comments and suggestions. So the comments and suggestions in the Q&A would be particularly welcome. So my lecture today focuses on the role of processed foods, specifically instant noodles, in the political and cultural imagination of Indians across regions, across classes and the urban rural continuum, at the intersection of capitalism and citizenship. Now why did I choose to focus on noodles? Noodles are a device for allowing me to look at the category of industrial foods, commodities produced under capital intensive conditions. Historically, such foods have been a critical part of industrialisation and the emergence of a working class detached from the land, as Sidney Mintz showed in his analysis of the incorporation of sugar in diets in Western Europe. Industrial food regimes have also been a part of Fordist economies of mass production and mass consumption, backed by a Keynesian social contract on the part of the state. Equally pertinent in the Indian context is the defining feature of industrial foods as being free from the association with any specific community or region marked only by the brand of modernity. Yet there is virtually no social science research on the place of industrial foods in Indian diets. Nothing akin to Aaron Barberos train's work on white bread in the US or Melissa Colwell's work on McDonald's in Moscow, and certainly nothing to match Sidney Mintz's towering tale of sugar. So while food studies has come into its own now, the Suez Center and the Journal Gastronomica are the leading edge of a fast-growing field in the Anglo-American Academy, scholars of India haven't yet shown a sustained interest in contemporary food practices. The scholarship that does exist has tended to engage with that enduring anthropological concern, the Hindu principle of purity and pollution as it applies to social relations. Food and marriage transactions in Hindi, Roti, Beti, Vihar, organized around the purity, pollution opposition have of course affected what people eat with whom and where, not just among Hindus but among others on the subcontinent, but this matrix has become less and less relevant for understanding contemporary diets. My own approach to food studies comes from a different trajectory and that's a long-standing concern with the cultural politics of environment and development in India, with social movements that assert claims to land, to forests and water, with the everyday resistance of an urban underclass in search of secure jobs and stable homes. Along with other students of Indian history and politics and culture, my view of the last 100 years has been structured around defining events such as the anti-colonial nationalist movement, partition and independence in 1947, developmentalism since the 1950s and economic liberalization since the 1990s. And these chronological points, momentous though they are, have so strongly shaped our imagination of the past and the present that it's an intellectual and political challenge to look back across the long Indian century and to ask what other genealogies, transitional moments and trajectories may come into view once we lose and hold of these older narrative arcs. One of the significant trajectories that remains understudied in Indian political life is how citizenship is shaped by capitalism. To be sure, we have analysis of how capitalism in India shapes state action. I think here of the work of, that begins with Suzan and Lloyd Rudolph with Prana Bhartan. We also have studies of how contemporary capitalism causes the displacement and dispossession of India's poor citizens. For instance, the writings of Kalyan Sanyal, Felix Padel and Samarendra Das and Mike Levion. And we know how capitalism reshapes work and labor relations. The work of Johnny Perry, Gert, Deneve and Jamie Cross comes to mind. In addition, there are studies of capitalism that focus on its globalizing aspect in India, Arjunapadurai's work, including also work by William Mazzarella, that explicitly addresses the issue of mass consumerism, which is a subject of my talk today. All of these aspects of capitalism in India have implication for citizenship in its different dimensions. As the political scientist Neerja Jayal puts it, citizenship as legal status, citizenship as a bundle of rights and entitlements and citizenship as a sense of identity and belonging. Yet these analyses and critiques of capitalism tell us little about how capitalism shapes practices of citizenship in ways that are relatively unmediated by the state and outside the domain of work and production. Everyday encounters with capitalism, those where it's normalizing and totalizing effects are experienced and resisted, occur not only in the sphere of production, but also in the realm of consumption and reproduction. Citizenship too is produced and performed, not only in the sphere of formal politics, but also through the media, popular culture and everyday life. To understand how political economy and citizenship converge in conflict, it's necessary that we also focus on everyday life in its apparent ordinariness on the secular changes that have gradually but thoroughly transformed identity and belonging in India. So today I propose that one of the trajectories of the long Indian century that illuminates the relationship between political economy and citizenship is that of changes in food practices. In particular, the increasing incorporation of industrial foods in Indian diets is a telling index of the presence and power of specific forms of capitalism in shaping the substance of citizenship. We know that eating is an everyday practice that fulfills a basic biological and social need within an ecologically and culturally defined context. At the same time, it's a way of expressing one's sense of self individually and collectively in relation to the past, present and future. These expressions of identity and belonging are preeminently social, not only in their content, but also in the context in which they occur. At the same time, they speak most intimately to desires and fears, aspirations and vulnerabilities. As Alfred Gell points out, consumption involves the incorporation of the consumed item into the personal and social identity of the consumer. So food offers a core area in which to trace modes of social being and belonging, exclusion and inclusion. The majority of Indians in rural and urban settings are net purchasers of food, compared to deal with food as a commodity form. They also buy some essential food items at subsidized prices from government-controlled public distribution system or PDS outlets, but the bulk of consumption is sourced directly from the market. This embeds people within complex networks of production, processing and distribution characterized by multiple forms of property ownership and organization. What I do today is to trace the growing presence of one distinctive category of commodities, namely industrial foods. I borrowed this term, industrial foods, from Jack Goody, who used it to refer to mass-manufactured food commodities, produced using capital-intensive technologies and distributed by corporate firms. How industrially produced commodities have, of course, long-figured in Indian households across the social spectrum. Radios, bicycles, textiles and wristwatches were among the durable goods that spread throughout the country in the first half of the 20th century. However, diets remained relatively impervious to such transformation for a long time. Even those foods that were processed outside the home, such as oil and rice and pulses, were locally sourced. As historian Elizabeth Collingham reports, tea and sugar were among the few industrially processed items of consumption to be incorporated into Indian diets early on, and demand for branded commodities such as glucose biscuits, like on top here, and powdered milk and infant formula rose after the Second World War. Dry rations supplied to troops stationed in India during the Second World War also circulated in the civilian market. Incidentally, the institutionalization of widespread rationing during the war laid the groundwork for the post-independence public distribution system of subsidized food quotas that continues into the present. This system of food subsidies and other features of the centralized command economy put in place during the war, which then continued under Nehruvian socialism, have led the historian Indivar Kamthika to suggest that World War II should be accorded more attention in India as a critical event on power with the nationalist movement and partition. In many ways, the development in the US and in Europe of food technologies directed towards provisioning troops, such as industrial scale canning, the fortification of food with synthetic nutrients, and then the subsequent redeployment of wartime industries for peacetime food production, such as munitions factories re-engineered to produce synthetic fertilizers, chemical warfare research that was then brought to bear on developing pesticides. All of these post-war developments played a major role in shaping food production and consumption in India and the rest of the colonized world. The work of Timothy Mitchell and Michael Pollan traces some of these neglected links between war and peace, guns and butter. Now industrial foods are an increasingly important part of diets across the Indian subcontinent. According to the two national sample survey data, the share of processed foods in total food consumption has risen across all classes, including among the poorest. So processed foods allow us a vantage point to re-examine the idea of the nation as imagined economy, to use Satish Deshpande's term. In the post-colonial context, this concept has primarily been used to study planned interventions by the developmental state, with a view to expanding production, so the establishment of heavy industries and infrastructure, and the accompanying rise of a techno-managerial bureaucracy. Less attention has been paid to the simultaneous expansion of commodity circulation, especially of industrially manufactured consumer goods, from home appliances and mobile phones to clothes and cosmetics, as an equally important mode of constituting citizenship. The spread of these goods has, however, only grown in significance in the post-liberalization period from the 1990s, as the developmental discourse of austerity and deferred consumption has been replaced by a celebration of consumerist gratification in the present. Within the widening circuits of consumption, processed food commodities demand analysis because they're becoming more and more ubiquitous, forming an increasing part of diets across India, and because of their distinctiveness that they appear neutral in a Hindu dominated cultural matrix renowned for the formidable complexity of its dietary rules based on caste, religion and region. The consumption practices that industrial foods engender are productive sites for imagining citizenship, cutting across social hierarchies, creating new identities and diluting stigmatized ones. Even as poor Indians struggle to secure access to basic foods, as evident in the right to food campaign and area of extensive research and activism, they also attempt to include more processed foods in their diets, a tendency that shows the significance of these commodities in the politics of inclusion. The connections between states subsidize basic foods and privately produced processed foods can often be complicated. Kerala in the state in southern India, for instance, consistently reports consistently high offtake of wheat through its PDS ration shops, a curious fact in a rice eating state. It turns out that the PDS wheat is actually siphoned off and sold to private bakeries that make biscuits and bread, popular processed foods that cater to the growing demand of low-end consumers. So from these sorts of links, let me now turn to noodles. If you walk along Chhatramarg, the main road through the Delhi University campus, you'll come across pavement vendors selling not long-time Indian snacks such as peanuts or chaat, but Maggie noodles. College canteens and restaurants that students frequent may still have samosas, but their popularity has been eclipsed by Maggie. Elsewhere in India, a scenic lookout point on the road to the Hill Resort of Masuri, known for decades as Sunset Point, has now been renamed Maggie Point because that's why one goes there to look at the sunset while eating Maggie. Talking to college students in places as far away as Guwahati, Chidambaram and Alabad, I'm struck by how many said that Maggie was their favorite food. Some said that they can't go a day without eating Maggie. Restaurants serve Maggie dosa, Maggie sandwiches, Maggie milkshakes, indicating the emergence of a vibrant fusion cuisine. Vijay Rao in a book, Army's Wars and Their Food, describes something called the Siachen omelet. Cookpaste soldiers stationed 20,000 feet above sea level on the Siachen glacier along the contested border with Pakistan, often described as the world's highest battlefield. The omelet is made of powdered eggs stuffed with cooked Maggie noodles, two of the only foodstuffs that can survive at that altitude. In a survey of midday meals in government-run primary schools in Delhi, children said that they didn't want to eat rajma chawal or beans and rice or chole chawal, chickpeas and rice, the nutritious foods that they were usually served. They wanted noodles. Unbranded noodles are popular across social classes in urban and rural India. Riksha pullers in a busy retail market in Delhi crowd around a so-called chowmein cart, twirling strands of noodles slippery with oil and soya sauce onto forks, while workers at construction sites in Bihar and Orissa do the same. In urban bastis or squatter settlements and in small rural towns, five-rupee packets of Maggie make it possible to occasionally and for some regularly indulge in the street, one that's advertised in television by no less national icon than the mega star Amitabh Bachchan. So what's going on? How has food virtually unknown to the vast majority of Indians' generation ago noodles becomes so ubiquitous across the country? How has a particular brand of this food, Maggie, as manufactured by Nestle, managed to capture millions of Indians' imagination in terms of what they like to eat, what they eat, who they are, and what they want to be? How has Maggie become, as Mumbai-based advertising expert Kiran Khalab said, the third staple of Indian food after wheat and rice? What is the success of Maggie, a brand name synonymous with noodles in India? Tell us about the changing contours of social inequality and aspirations. I analyze a phenomenal popularity of instant noodles through the concept of consumer citizenship or how the social life of things to use a padurai's term of objects of consumption, including, for instance, mobile phones in Asadora and Robin Jeffery's recent study, opens up unintended and unexpected political possibilities. Here, I examine citizenship not as a purely political concept of relationships based on rights between state and citizens, but as a social and economic concept focusing on belonging within a nation, as expressed through practices simultaneously material and symbolic. Scholars have drawn attention to the shifting articulations between constructions of consumer and citizens. Arguing that access to consumer goods and the freedom to choose was considered a fundamental political right in the West by the middle of the 20th century. Within India, earlier nationalist constructions of consumption linked the consumer to the exercise of citizenship through the notion of the producer's patriot at the service of the nation. The anti-colonial Swadeshi or indigenous movement politicized the buying of foreign goods to produce a new kind of nationalist consciousness. The Swadeshi movement notably focused on the production and consumption of cloth, cloth from cotton grown in India, but spun and woven in the mills of Lancashire and imported back into India at high tariffs to be sold to Indian consumers. Leading the struggle against colonialism, Mahatma Gandhi urged Indians to boycott this foreign product and fostered in its stead the indigenous economy of Khadi or handspan hand woven cloth supporting hundreds of thousands of local weavers keeping their knowledge and skills alive while challenging the unfair economic relations imposed by the imperial order. Spinning Khadi and Gandhi urged everyone to do so as form of embodied work that was also a gesture of solidarity with the weaver became a symbol of the producer patriot liberating his or her country through labor. For this movement, the consumption of commodities was linked to the image of the economy as a locus of production in the service of the nation. The elite reformist modernizing middle class as the vanguard of the new nation was sometimes imagined as comprising consumers whose practices were tied to appropriate forms of modern domesticity. Such discourses of consumerism and the ways they were linked to understandings of citizenship within India are marked by debates about westernization, modernization and tradition generated out of the problematic of colonial and post-colonial nationalist cultural projects. Satish Deshmond is analyzed how the idea of the nation and its citizens has been imagined as an economy after independence through the five-year plans, through investment in capital-intensive infrastructure, dams, steel plants, nuclear reactors, through the development of dedicated industrial towns like Bhilai, Rautkela and Bokaro where the citizen was meant to be a new kind of producer-patriot. This analysis focused mainly on the production of goods, not on the circulation and consumption of commodities. However, consumption, especially of industrially manufactured consumer goods, has emerged as an equally important mode of constituting citizenship. The spread of these goods increased after the policies of economic liberalization began in the 1990s when a developmental discourse of austerity and deferred consumption came to be rapidly replaced by the celebration of consumerist gratification. As William Mazzarella observes, increasingly in forms of consumer citizenship in the era of liberalization articulate the citizen through the notion of the right to consume, a right that must be protected through state action. In dominant discourse, the economy is now imagined no longer only as a locus of production, but more consistently as the marketplace of commodities for consumption in a shift that also entails a move away from the idea of the citizen as producer-patriot to one of the cosmopolitan consumer. For members of societies being transformed by globalization, consumer practices and discourses are now an increasingly important axis for negotiating citizenship. In a book on youth and politics in Kerala, anthropologist Riti Lukos also points out that while the discourse of generational shift from midnight's children to liberalization's children rightly focuses on the eclipsing of the Nehruvian vision of the nation within liberalizing India, it obscures more than it reveals when it simply highlights a triumph of consumerism. For members of societies that are being transformed by globalization, consumer practices and discourses are an increasingly important axis of belonging for negotiating citizenship. In other words, for the politics of social membership, for negotiations of public life and for an understanding of politics within the nation. Lukos goes on to argue that consumer citizenship is not a depoliticized retreat into private behavior, but rather a form of cultural politics with implications for how citizens negotiate public life within and beyond the boundaries of the elite nationalist middle class. So how is social membership re-articulated through consumer citizenship and specifically through eating Maggie noddles? The first notable aspect of Maggie consumers in India is that they tend to be young, their children, adolescents and young adults. Capturing this demographic slice of India is crucial for the manufacturers of consumer goods. As market analyst Rama Bijapurkar points out, about seven out of 10 households in India have what she calls a liberalization child who acts as a change agent in that household. Children are not just a very attractive niche market opportunity, but are also critical to the mainstream. She goes on to say, the mainstream Indian market is a youth market. This resonates with Riti Lukos' study of college students in Kerala where she points out that the intensification and expansion of consumer flows through the liberalization of the Indian economy have made consumption of goods and mass mediated images a key site for the production of youth identities. The second striking feature of instant noodle consumers is that they're not confined to big cities, but they're people who live in small towns and large villages. They eat noodles now, a fact that resonates with the Pankar Gupta's wider analysis of the changing villager. Rural India still continues to suffer serious deprivation in terms of certain basic amenities. Forty-five percent of Indian villages have no electricity. Seventy percent of rural households have no toilets. But they're growing consumers of manufactured goods, not only durables like mobile phones and motorbikes, but also processed and packaged foods. At the share of these foods in the rural households, food expenditure is rising. Even though food still makes up 50 to 65 percent of the total monthly expenditure of households in rural India, this category now includes far larger outlays on tea, on glucose biscuits, corn chips, bottle beverages, and noodles. This spread into rural India has not only been made possible by companies investing in their distribution networks, but by innovations in packaging technology. This conjuncture of changing technologies of organization and materials is a major factor in the spread of industrial foods. For big-band brand producers, or what are called FMCG, or fast-moving consumer goods, such as snacks and cosmetics, producers like Nestlé, Unilever, ITC, and Pepsi, the development of metallized polymer film allowed packaging to be eye-catching and airtight, enabling brands to deliver the guarantee of quality that they claim. Metallized polymer film also made it possible to sell small units of processed foods at low prices to those who market in Guruji K. Pralad, called the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid. So these shiny packets of corn chips, instant coffee, chewing tobacco, and other products are now ubiquitous in urban and rural markets, especially in poorer settlements. In the case of Maggie Noodles, the big breakthrough occurred in 2002, when in response to emerging competition from brands like Nissen's Top Ramen, Nestlé decided to sell its noodles in five rupee packets of 50 grams and to aggressively expand their availability in small towns. So Maggie now has a 75% share of a 250 billion rupee or 300 million pounds market growing at 20% annually. Consumers for this new food commodity does include not only the so-called new middle classes, but also working class people in rural and urban India who can now, in a modest way, enjoy some of the same pleasures as the class above them. In a nation still defined by sharp economic and social disparities, this convergence of consumption styles, similarities in form, if not always in substance and quality, is celebrated in the media through numerous television advertisements that resonate with the aspirations of subaltern classes for upward mobility. These ads also signify that citizenship is about shared national belonging as constituted through the consumption of mass-manufactured and marketed packaged goods. One Maggie ad, for instance, shows a fisherman in the sea off the Konkan coast in Western India, as well as young Tibetan monks in the Himalayas enjoying this national dish. As the data show, processed and packaged foods are proliferating across the class and urban rural divide among social groups for home-consuming products such as instant noodles and soups would have been previously unthinkable. The association of these foods with modernity is signaled not only by the snazzy packaging, but also by advertising campaigns that stress convenience and hygiene, while also appealing to the premium placed on instant gratification in the present. But their appeal lies not only in their association with modernity, that slogan, best the minute or just two minutes is indeed about instant gratification, but it's also about empowering a mother to immediately satisfy her child's hunger and enduring cultural value across India and perhaps the world. Another advertisement shows a girl making Maggie while her mother watches bristling with disapproval. But the mother's worry is soon replaced by a gratified smile when she sees that her daughter has cooked Maggie exactly the way she does. So Maggie is now a way of transmitting family tradition, a bond between mother and daughter. For Indian students abroad, 25 to 35 year olds, the mouth feel of Maggie noodles, that soft curly form that you suck in and the unique flavor of the masala taste maker that converts white flour, oil, sugar and assorted chemical additives into a veritable sensorium is the stuff of nostalgia and longing, a cultural memory from which they're exiled unless they bring back packets of the stuff in their suitcases. Since 2008, 25 years after Maggie launched in India, the ad campaign, Me and My Maggie, with stories from Maggie Eaters about how they personalize the dish, consolidates a sensual sentimental association between the commodity and its consumers and one possible reason for the overwhelming prevalence of this form of Maggie noodles, the sachet that you break open and put into boiling water, as opposed to the styrofoam cup of noodles, which doesn't sell at all in India, is the fact that with this, you have more room for creativity, you can manipulate it as you like. So I know students from Northeastern India who add pieces of dried beef and pork as well as special spice mixtures that they bring from home. People elsewhere will add vegetables, some will crack open an egg and swirl it into the broth and so on. All of these things you can't do with cup of noodles. So Maggie is something that a lot of young people see as cooking and they don't see it as a snack that you simply consume as it is. With its emphasis on the sociality around food, the bonding of families and friends, Nestle has taken an unfamiliar food and domesticated it so thoroughly that as Melissa Corville observes about McDonald's in Moscow, producers and consumers began blurring the boundaries between the global and the local, the new and the original, through a series of tactics grounded in flexible ideologies of trust, comfort and intimacy. Unquote. If Maggie is a comfort food for millions of Indians, for even more millions, it's a desired taste, a lifestyle aspiration, and even a measure of distinction in Baudiot's sense of the term as Lozada remarks in his story of KFC in Beijing. Comfort and aspiration, need and want, belonging and striving are the cornerstones of consumer citizenship. However, I want to emphasize that locus of this noodle-shaped citizenship in India is national, a cosmopolitan national, but national nevertheless. Unlike court, McDonald's and KFC, the community that Maggie constructs doesn't have a global reference and it isn't held together by the cultural allure of America. Maggie's glamour is anchored in Indian icons and values. At the same time, the claim to represent national identity is a contested one. It was challenged in 2005 by allegations of pesticide contamination in the taste maker-flavouring packet following which the yoga guru, Baba Ramdev, who now runs a fast-growing packaged food, cosmetic and medicine empire under the Patanjali brand, launched his own natural noodles. So Nestle's cosmopolitan Indian product is confronted, this is as you can probably guess, not the original packaging, it's a spoof. So Nestle's cosmopolitan Indian product is confronted by a business rival's claim to a more authentically Indian identity on the rather ironic battleground of instant noodles. One could argue that eating the same product across different social contexts creates a semblance of equality. A shared moment when you are as good as anyone else. In the context of sharp inequalities, is this feeling a consolation? Or is the dissonance between this moment and other aspects of one's everyday life where inequalities experienced a provocation? These are open questions. We are all the same, we eat the same food, is not a sentiment that has had much success in Indian social life. The emergence of differentiation is already evident with Maggie. There is the much more expensive whole wheat atta-maggie with vegetables, marketed with a slogan tasty bhi or healthy bhi for consumers conscious of the low nutritional value of the product. The idea of mera-maggie, my-maggie, is not just about difference as unity in diversity, but also about distinction and cultural dominance. Embedded as they firmly are in a multinational food industry, one that's been implicated in the explosive growth of obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease among children and adolescents, the larger political economy of these products is deeply compromised. One transformation of cultural politics with which we can certainly credit commodities like instant noodles, is the decisive shift in the demographics of power, the creation and affirmation of a youth identity within the household and outside. You one thought that noodles could not be consequential to that shift. One has to only recall Jitendra Chhattar, the Khaap Panchayat leader or community government leader from Jindh, Haryana in North India, who blamed noodles for causing hormonal imbalance in young men so that they became sexually violent. The widespread derision with which this comment was greeted shows how thoroughly noodles have become incorporated into local diets. Old men may express a fear of foreign foods and frustration at rebellious youth who no longer listen to their elders, but for the younger generation, noodles are here to stay. As a career of instant noodles demonstrates, food is not only about nutrition and biological needs, it's about cultural desires. Even as right to food activists strive to accommodate the diversity of Indian food ways to some extent, promoting millets to end the monopoly of wheat and rice, they confront the challenge of a generational shift in what is considered good to eat. Moving away from local, more nutritious diets to branded industrial foods of low nutritional value, basically junk foods. At the same time, for poor people stigmatized by caste and rurality, eating these foods signifies participation in a desired modern lifestyle of being as good as everyone else. So these foods play an important yet contradictory part in claiming social belonging and equality, equality which must be an intrinsic element of social well-being. Thank you.