Biryani Feminism and the Politics of Gender

The biryani debate on South Asian Twitter may look like a joke, but it isn’t. Who cooks, who serves, and who eats reveals the invisible architecture of patriarchy. The problem is that online feminism, wrapped in biryani jokes, often forgets the women whose unseen labour makes the conversation possible at all.

This is not to undermine the essential significance of labour and food in the feminist enterprise. Who cooks, who serves, who eats, and who does the cleaning up? These are very important questions that reveal the secret dynamics of patriarchy. But in the South Asian Twitter echo chambers, these questions tend to turn into a form of feminism so individualistic, so consumerist, and so embedded in aspirational middle-class existence that it threatens to become a caricature of itself. We are witness to the rise of what one might call ‘Biryani Feminism’, a potent blend of performative outrage, Instagrammable activism, and an uncanny ability to dissect the nuances of relationship dynamics while conveniently overlooking the structural injustices that underpin our societies.

Biryani Feminism and the Politics of Gender

The appeal of Biryani Feminism is undeniable. It’s relatable. Who hasn’t had an auntie ask about their cooking skills? Or a cousin lamenting a husband’s culinary incompetence? These conversations are low-stakes and bite-sized and reward us with instant gratification through likes, retweets, and the temporary approval of online solidarity. They provide space for the public expression of private complaints, converting individual anguish into a collective spectacle. We argue about whether a man who can’t cook perfect biryani is really a husband. material, or if a woman who won’t cook it is really free. We analyse dating profiles for warning signs regarding domestic responsibilities and cooking demands. This conversation, empowering people to speak up for their preferences, tends to stay anchored in precisely the intimate relationships and hopes that preoccupy middle-class worries. 

However, this is precisely the point at which the satirical discourse becomes most poignant, as Marxist disillusionment begins to collide with the urbane veneer of online feminism. While we hotly argue about the gendered politics of biryani, who is making the biryani that sustains these debates? The middle-class woman, newly empowered to insist that her partner do his part at home? More often, yes. But most often, it is the unseen, underpaid domestic labourer, possibly a woman from a lower caste or economic category, toiling for hours for paltry pay, whose work subsidises the very leisure that allows for these digital conversations. She is the silent designer of our ease, the faceless hand stirring the broth while we talk about its metaphorical meaning. Her exploitation, her absence of equal wages, benefits, dignity, and, in many cases, basic human rights, lies largely beyond Biryani Feminism. 

This is the big, scented elephant in the virtual room, the obvious lack of class, caste, and labour politics. As the virtual debate rages over whether lovers should share the expense of a haute cuisine meal or the labour of preparing a home-cooked one, South Asian women are fighting for their lives. They are farm workers, factory workers, domestic workers, and street vendors. Their bodies and labour are exploited, and their voices are drowned out in the privileged din of virtual disputes. Food questions are about survival, not gendered expectations between lovers. It’s not about who cooks, but if there’s anything to cook. 

Think about the caste question. In societies where hierarchical discrimination is deeply ingrained and certain communities have long been associated with particular, ‘impure’ types of work (such as food preparation and garbage disposal), a conversation about biryani fails to address the long-standing biases surrounding who is responsible for touching, serving, and consuming what appears to be terribly impoverished. Is our feminism intersectional if it does not seek to upend casteist systems that determine whose work is valuable and whose work is considered unclean?  When we concentrate on individual actions within a consumerist context, we miss the systemic violence that involves castes in refusing entire groups access to decent labour, schooling, and social mobility. 

The online feminist community, as great a tool for information exchange and creating community as it can be, is often driven by immediate gratification and performative solidarity. It promotes a sort of lifestyle feminism in which human agency is expressed more in terms of consumer freedoms (what to wear, what to buy, and whom to date) than in the form of collective resistance to systemic oppression. The focus is no longer on the deconstruction of structures but on maximising personal life, on resisting capitalism in favour of living it out more consciously. The book is not a summons to personal self-beating but an analytic examination of the way our energies sometimes veer from revolution to acceptable change. 

To be faithful to the spirit of feminism, to leave the dizzying but finally empty scent of Biryani Discourse behind, we have to reclaim our radical cutting edge. That involves looking beyond the personal kitchen table to the wide, exploitative terrain of capital and power. It is to ask not only who makes the biryani, but also who gains from the structure that makes some make it for survival and others argue over it for pleasure. It is to bring the Dalit women, Adivasi women, working-class women, and queer women to the fore, whose lives every day tell us that patriarchy cannot be separated from casteism, classism, and other oppressions. 

Let us indeed continue to subvert gender roles in the kitchen, in our homes, and in our relationships. But let us expand our aperture. Let our digital spaces be not merely sites for viral hot takes but incubators of collective action — for pleading for labour rights, deconstructing caste bias, and calling for economic justice. Only when our feminism is as interested in the unseen hands churning the butter as it is in the celebrity chef’s new recipe, only when it values the freedom of the most oppressed above that of the cooking desires of the powerful, can we honestly say we’re cooking up something revolutionary. Otherwise, amidst the glorious aroma of biryani, we might simply be suffocating the very promise of a truly just and equitable future.