• Cooking in the Shadow of Shells: Bunkers, Foodwork and the Gendered Labour of Memory and Survival in Tamil Eelam and the Diaspora

This paper investigates how Tamil women’s food practices within wartime bunkers during the Tamil genocide functioned as everyday acts of resistance, cultural continuity and memory activism. Challenging dominant portrayals of bunkers as passive shelters, the research reconceptualizes these underground spaces as subaltern and gendered sites of survival, care and political labour. Informed by feminist geography, trauma theory and feminist food studies, the analysis foregrounds how foodwork—often dismissed as domestic or apolitical—becomes a central modality through which Tamil women resist erasure and reconstitute viidu (home) amid displacement and violence.

The paper employs an interdisciplinary methodology combining autoethnography and literature-based analysis. Drawing from intergenerational memory transmitted through familial stories, particularly the author's mother’s recollections of cooking during shelling, it weaves personal narrative with theoretical insights to trace how food practices operate as forms of embodied knowledge. Comparative case studies from Afghanistan and Palestine offer transnational frames to understand how women across war-affected contexts transform precarious domestic spaces into geographies of resistance and care.

Findings reveal that Tamil women’s foodwork in bunkers—grating coconut, preparing puttu, feeding children before themselves—was not merely about sustenance. It was a form of political labour that preserved culture and memory when official archives and institutions failed. These acts constitute memory activism, where cooking becomes testimony and survival becomes resistance. The paper argues that the bunker is not an apolitical site of hiding but an unmapped geography of feminist resistance, where cultural reproduction occurred through care, improvisation and affective labour.

In centring Tamil women’s embodied practices during and after the genocide, this research calls for a deeper recognition of food as a medium of historical memory and political struggle. It affirms that Tamil cultural continuity was not preserved in official histories, but in the hands, recipes and routines of women who cooked through war.