The Transit Kitchen Space as an Affective Archive: Beyond the Plate

Abstract

The exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley during the 1990s led to the trauma of reestablishing their lives in an alien territory, which Rahul Pandita called ‘Shahar’ or city. Rahul Pandita, a prominent journalist and writer, works on exploring the undocumented narrative of the exodus and the trauma of being a refugee in one’s country, which is reflected in his memoir, Our Moon Has Blood Clots: A Memoir of a Lost Home in Kashmir (2013). The focus of this study is to analyse one of the key aspects in this memoir: how the changing spatial grammar of the displaced Pandits’ kitchen from their homeland to the refugee camps of Jammu contributes to the micropolitical affectivity of memory. The underexamined relations between the kitchen as a site of agency, food, and foodways contribute to the micropolitical affectivity, which is central. Within this analysis, food is studied as multidimensional, unfolding in dynamic assemblage; its material markers are rooted in visceral bodies, definite places, and operate within complex political spaces of ambivalence. This article explores the transit kitchen/home space as it inhabits an embodied archive of culture and creates ‘food assemblages’ where social, geopolitical, ethno-cultural, and heritage sites intersect. The image of an archetypal feeder of a community is often associated with mothers, and when this complex relation between generations and kitchen space is disrupted, it results in cognitive and affective fractures. Furthermore, the process of changing home and setting up a kitchen is not just corporeal but has the ability to affect and be affected. Memory and its affectivity emerge relationally within the assemblage of food and kitchen space, always relational, contingent, and co-constituted by its entanglement with the material and heterogeneous world. In short, this article, through Pandita’s memoir, presents the kitchen as a mnemonic mechanism for underpinning spatial trauma, micropolitical techniques of governance, and the recreation of identity through affective memory and everyday resistance.