Dishing up diversity? Class, aspirationalism and Indian food television

This chapter examines emergent trends in lifestyle culture in contemporary India by focusing on a popular sub-genre of lifestyle television, namely food shows. It comes out of a larger Australian Research Council-funded project I have been working on with Asian cultural studies specialists Fran Martin and Wanning Sun, on lifestyle television in Asia, especially the styles and practices of life conduct, "ethicalised" selfhood, and consumer-citizenship performed and promoted on some of these shows (Lewis, Martin, and Sun 2012). In focusing on food television in India, the chapter is centrally concerned with the way in which this particular form of television and its respective modes of "ordinary expertise" (Lewis 2008) foreground key dynamics and tensions around contemporary discourses and practices of selfhood, lifestyle and modernity in India today. Acknowledging the limits of applying Euro-American-inflected theories of class, lifestyle and cultural citizenship in the context of South and East Asia and India in particular (Robison and Goodman 1995; Chua 2000), I use food television as a lens through which to examine how the middle classes have been positioned in Indian public life as "the sociocultural embodiment of India's transition to a committed liberalizing nation" (Fernandes 2006, 30).