Abstract
This paper examines how to understand Sadhya not merely as a festive meal but as a historical site of caste politics, where inclusion and exclusion are enacted through culinary codes, spatial arrangements, and ritualised performances of purity. It explores how to read the Sadhya as both a cultural celebration and an instrument of social hierarchy, and reveals how food functions as a text through which Kerala’s caste order is sustained and contested. Drawing on historical accounts and cultural and social movements, the study traces the transformation of Sadhya from a Brahminical ritual to a field of democratic resistance marked by Dalit reinterpretations such as the Ayyankali Sadhya. The analysis highlights how food traditions become fields of negotiation between power and identity, between inherited ritual and lived experience, showing that the Sadhya continues to signify belonging and exclusion in equal measure.
Keywords: sadhya, caste politics, Kerala culture, food and identity, Ayyankali Sadhya, ritual and resistance, culinary hierarchy
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