Zaikanama featured on South China Morning Post, Mint Lounge, The New Indian Express, Zee Zest, The New Indian Express
Research Environment
The House of Zaikanama is an independent research house that operates outside a single institutional structure of academia but remains closely engaged with scholarly, academic, and public conversations around food history.
The work moves between archives, kitchens, classrooms, and community spaces. Each project or vertical contributes to an evolving body of research that examines the architecture of food, sustainable food systems, domestic life, gender, class, caste, and migration/displacement.
For many, food may seem too ordinary—an everyday encounter—to warrant scholarly attention. For the House of Zaikanama, however, it is an encoded universe of information that reveals not only the past and present, but also the precarious and unpredictable food systems of the future.
Research within the House unfolds through several practices. Each examines food from a different angle and contributes material to the archive.
Select a practice below to explore further.
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Edible exhibitions based on historical reconstruction. The meal is used as a form of inquiry.
Learning urban foraging through community conversations and field observation, currently focused on Delhi's urban landscape.
Explorations of regional cuisines and their histories. We examine the ruptures and cultural contacts.
The drawing is a trace (a khākā), not an illustration. It records what is said and what remains partial.
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