南アジア研究センター・セミナー: Dr. Jayeeta Sharma (University of Toronto), ‘Listening to Street Foods: Urban Liveliness, Livelihoods, Justice’

南アジア研究センター・セミナー: Dr. Jayeeta Sharma (University of Toronto), ‘Listening to Street Foods: Urban Liveliness, Livelihoods, Justice’
日時/ Date: 2025年12月1日（月曜日）19:00-20:30/ 1 December 2025 (Monday) 19:00-20:30
場所/ Venue: 東京大学駒場Iキャンパス14号館7階706/ Room 706, 7th Floor, Bldg No.14, Komaba Campus, The University of Tokyo/ Zoom*
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報告者/ Speaker: Dr. Jayeeta Sharma (University of Toronto), ‘Listening to Street Foods: Urban Liveliness, Livelihoods, Justice’
要旨/ Abstract:
The street sounds of food, drink, and kitchen provisioning were integral to the ‘livelihoods and the liveliness’ of past cities, on the Indian sub-continent and worldwide. Street foods and vending adroitly adapted and thrived particularly in the changing economies of modernizing cities such as colonial Bombay and Calcutta. They were particularly important in feeding mobile groups of urban workers and recent migrants. The sounds – cries and music – of those foods were as familiar as their sights, tastes, and smells. The paper explores how and why that changed, when from the late-19th century, a powerful bourgeois-led campaign began to ‘silence’ those sounds, and limit the mobility of street vending. Ironically, that ‘silencing’ went side by side with the cultural memorializing and glorification of street foods.Today, little remains of those acoustic spaces of past street foods and vendors. However, unlike their ‘cries’, street foods and vending could not be legislated out of existence. Almost a century after that ‘silencing’, the street foods of Indian cities continue to thrive. The National Association of Street Vendors of India is a powerful advocacy group. Street food vloggers draw in thousands of ‘views’ and ‘likes’ everyday, just as Bombay cinema did in the past. The paper asks: what does it mean for cityscapes where street foods and street vending are very much alive, but their ‘voices’ are ‘silenced’? How might the enduring ‘liveliness’ and ‘livelihoods’ of street foods connect to a ‘just’ policies of urban spaces in the twenty-first century? How might we might truly ‘listen’ to street foods and their ‘cries’ – historically, aurally, symbolically, politically?

共催：東京外国語大学南アジア研究センター