Rajyashri Goody was born in Pune, India, and lives and works between India and the Netherlands. With an academic background in sociology and visual anthropology, her research interests include food and water politics, religion, literacy and literature, mobility and place-making in the context of caste-based violence and Dalit resistance in India. She works primarily with paper pulp, clay, text, photography and printmaking. 

Dalits represent the lowest stratum of the Indian caste system of ethnographic hierarchy. The project Eat With Great Delight emerged through a period of sustained research into Dalit literature that relates to food, which Goody then began compiling into a book of recipes. Though there are very few official Dalit cookbooks, the works produced by the Dalit literary movement contain many vivid and complex descriptions of food. These descriptions deal with cooking, eating, celebration, shame, hunger, and trauma, all of which draw attention to the Dalit community’s everyday struggle and resistance under the caste system.

Goody was born and raised in a half-Dalit, half-English family, with the privilege of access to a camera. While conducting her research into Dalit food culture, Goody became aware of the lack of positive imagery associated with Dalit communities in public circulation. With this in mind, she turned to photographs of her own family, and the happy memories they were able to capture on camera, most of which revolve around the sharing of food. Taken between 1984 and 2004 on point-and-shoot film cameras, the images displayed range from Goody’s mother drinking Maaza (a popular soft drink) at her wedding reception, her aunt serving paper plates of Budhani wafers and cake to guests at a birthday, and her brother learning how to use a knife and fork, amongst an assortment of other scenes of shared family meals and the preparation of food. The work questions the ways that photographic representations of oppressed communities can tend towards a gratuitous commodification of trauma, and underscores the humanising power of positive photographic storytelling in the reclamation of agency.