The erasure of Dalit labour in the global spice aisle

In the spice aisles of his local halal grocery store in East England, Jonah Batambuze finds that the masala boxes and brands reveal more about caste than any conversation. These ouches, with their serif fonts mimicking royal emblems, and Sanskritized scripts reaching for temple legitimacy, do not reveal the hidden labour of the Dalit and Adivasi women whose callused, turmeric-streaked hands have packed them.

When I first met Swetha at 21, she was the first South Asian person to speak with me beyond polite surfaces — meeting me with openness rather than distance. She told me she was Telugu. I said, “Tele-who?” Before I knew it I was practicing Nēnu ninnu premistunnanu—I love you—just enough to make her laugh, wince, and then laugh again. Love didn’t just give me new words. It brought me to the stove with questions in hand and eyes reset.

Cooking someone else’s cuisine is a love language. It takes patience, improvisation, memory, and it always carries an accent. No matter how fluent you become, there will always be traces that you are not native. That was me at the stove, trying to perfect Swetha’s father’s keema recipe. I’d tasted his version in the plastic takeaway containers she brought back from home and tucked in a cupboard in the kitchen, containers that mirrored our relationship at the time: nourishing, but hidden from view.

We hadn’t yet met, but through those meals I was already in a relationship with him. However carefully I measured mine, it never matched his. Swetha would taste, smile, and with a squeeze of lemon or a sprinkle of salt, gently remind me: not quite. What I didn’t realize was that food would carry not just taste, but histories I hadn’t yet learned to name.

In the beginning, Patak’s pastes were my training wheels. Each jar was a shortcut through a culture I was still learning to name. Eventually, I graduated to powdered spices. Caste came later. Cumin came first.

Cooking became an education—not just in technique, but in the hidden histories of taste. It was the start of trying to make sense of ingredients I hadn’t grown up with, in a kitchen where every label carried a legacy. Where taste, like everything else, was political.

Before I could read the footnotes of the empire—on spice boxes, on tin cans, on tongues—I followed recipes to the letter. Years later, I still cook, but now with andaz in my wrists, and different questions in mind.

“I can't eat that. I’m Brahmin.”
“I don’t do a, b, c—or d—because I’m Brahmin.”

These weren’t things Swetha ever said. They were comments I heard again and again in the community. Each time, they arrived without context, but heavy with meaning. Sometimes offered within minutes of meeting someone. Sometimes dropped into casual conversation, like a badge. They left me disoriented, unsure whether I was being tested or excluded.

Swetha rarely said much when caste came up, but I could see something flicker behind her eyes, like muscle memory half-triggered.

I probably wouldn’t know much about caste if I hadn’t married a South Indian, Telugu woman. I was raised in a Midwestern town built on cornfields and forgetting, where my Ugandan parents sought refuge after fleeing Idi Amin’s regime in 1975. It was the kind of American smallness where passports felt like fiction, and Diwali might as well have been Mars. A place that never learned to pronounce our names — and never asked to.

So when I began hearing “I’m Brahmin” slip into diaspora conversations, I noticed. No explanation, no footnotes — just the phrase itself, dropped like a marker. It felt like a riddle without a punchline. You could feel the weight of it even if you didn’t yet know its roots.

At some point, I stopped just tasting. I started reading — boxes, brands, and the ideologies they carried. And soon, the spice aisle itself would reveal more about caste than any conversation ever did.

Somewhere between the rainbow of masala packets in my local Halal grocery in the Fens of East England— where hijabs brushed past Eastern Europeans and aunties bartered in five languages — something stopped me cold.

“Brahmin Sambar Powder.”

Kitchen Treasures was the brand. But the boldest word wasn’t Kitchen or Treasure. It was Brahmin.

I froze, caught in a lockdown flashback: a Clubhouse conversation where a man insisted caste didn’t exist in the West. As absurd as claiming racism doesn’t either.

Then I saw another box. The font curled like a temple script and read: Brahmins. This one didn’t just sell a caste. It was named after it.

What happens when godliness becomes branding? When caste isn’t denied, but shelved next to cumin and coriander?

The packaging was never just about flavour. Serif fonts mimicked royal emblems, Sanskritized scripts reached for temple legitimacy, ivory and gold palettes conjured ritual. Rajah didn’t just promise spice. It promised sovereignty in a pouch.

“Brahminism doesn’t need to shout anymore,” Ajantha Subramanian reminds us. “It whispers.”

Nearly 5,000 miles from the spice hubs of Kerala and the chilli markets of Guntur, where these masalas originate, the last thing we see are the Dalit and Adivasi women whose labour seasons the world. Their hands — callused, turmeric-streaked, bent from repetition — don’t appear on the boxes. Their names don’t travel with the turmeric. Their stories don’t cling to the cumin dust.

Imagine if their fingerprints came sealed under the freshness tab. If the aisle carried the smell of their sweat, or the echo of their kitchen songs. Would the branding still feel sacred?

This is the choreography: the further you get from the source, the purer the packaging becomes. Authenticity doesn’t speak in the aisle. It scans. The faces missing from the boxes are the same ones missing from the table.

And this isn’t new. It echoes something older, something ritualized. In temple kitchens, Dalit and Adivasi women cooked but never served. Their food was divine. Their presence was forbidden. That choreography passed down like a sacred recipe — the labour erased, the holiness inherited.

Now, centuries later, we trade in sealed pouches stamped with ISO-certified purity — blessed, priced, and stripped of the hands that made them. Belief becomes a brand. Godliness flattens into design cues: ivory backgrounds, temple fonts, gold seals of purity.

The myth that Brahmin = vegetarian = pure = authentic has been strategically maintained through packaging and culinary gatekeeping. Taste here isn’t just about flavour — it’s cultural taste, what gets framed as refined, clean, desirable. Certain foods don’t just nourish; they redeem. Vegetarianism becomes a proxy for virtue, while those who cook or consume meat are cast as impure, lesser, even threatening to the social order.

As Anand Teltumbde reminds us, caste doesn’t need a whip. Sometimes, it just needs a menu.

It’s food that decides: who can touch the fire, who plates the meal, who’s left waiting. We buy spice blends, but what ideologies are we seasoning with?

In the diaspora, caste isn’t just carried—it’s denied. Yet it travels in lunchboxes, resumes, and spice tins, coded into cultural memory and shelf-stable purity. That denial is beginning to fracture. California and Seattle have passed caste discrimination protections. In New Jersey, a sprawling Hindu temple was exposed for keeping Dalit workers in bonded conditions, with similar abuses surfacing in the American South.

Treating caste purity as mere dietary preference conceals the structural violence it enables. What gets moralized on the plate gets normalized in contracts, in kitchens, in policy.

Some will wonder why I don’t “stay in my box.” Why a Black man is writing about caste. Why I’m in the spice aisle, in the archive, in the kitchen. But there is no box big enough to contain the weight of our entangled oppressions—or our collective liberation. Black thinkers like Ava DuVernay and Isabel Wilkerson have long traced the lines between caste and anti-Blackness, showing it isn’t just a South Asian problem but a global structure living in colorism, class, policing, migration, and more. Naming caste here isn’t stepping outside my struggle. It’s walking deeper into it.

I met Swetha in 2001, while studying abroad in Dublin. Her childhood friend lived in my dorm, and that’s how our paths crossed. Which means I’ve been tweaking this keema recipe for over twenty years.

Food travels in our communities as a love language. Pickles, podis, tiffins, takeaway boxes—all ways of saying: I remember you. I made this for you.

My father-in-law has always scoffed at my attempts at keema. The other day, when my in-laws returned from a trip to India, I left a container in the fridge. The next morning he messaged: “It wasn’t bad.” High praise in father-in-law dialect.

Swetha says my keema is almost like her father’s. And maybe that’s the point. The recipe is still changing. So am I. Still seasoning, still unlearning.

A family recipe that rewrites the laws of taste and lineage — one spoon of spice at a time. It is a nod to Manu (my father-in-law — the man and the myth. The recipe that began at the stove and became a meditation on caste, care, and inheritance.

RECIPE FOR KEEMA ACCORDING TO MANU (ALMOST)

Serves 6

Ingredients

1 kg minced lamb or chicken
2 tbsp vegetable oil or ghee
2 large red onions, finely chopped
5 cloves garlic, minced
1-inch piece ginger, grated
⅓ packet keema masala mix (Shan or Laziza Int.)
1 green chili, slit lengthwise
Salt to taste
Juice of half a lemon
Fresh coriander leaves, chopped (for garnish)

Method

Heat oil or ghee in a pan over medium heat.
Add onions, garlic, and ginger. Sauté until golden brown and aromatic.
Add the green chili and the keema masala mix. Stir for a minute or two until the oil begins to separate and the spices bloom.
Add the minced meat, breaking it apart as it browns.
Add a splash of water midway to retain juiciness, if needed.
Cook for 20–25 minutes until the meat is tender and fully cooked through.
Finish with lemon juice and chopped coriander.
Serve with basmati rice, roti, or pav.

Jonah Batambuze is a Ugandan-American artist and cultural architect reimagining solidarity through food and ritual. He convenes the Left Hand Supper Club — a dining series born from refusal and remembrance, where you can taste Keema According to Manu (Almost) if you’re lucky. @realjonahbatambuze | @blindianproject