The Hindu Home Kitchen and the Internet of Landlords

Tuesday, April 8, 5pm
Blithewood Conference Room or on Zoom

Join us for the fourth session of the 2025 Spring Semester, with Sucharita Kanjilal, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Bard, on Tuesday, April 8th, from 5pm to 6pm in the Levy Conference Room at Blithewood, or on Zoom. Kanjilal’s presentation will be followed by an open Q&A session with audience members—both those in person and on Zoom are welcome to ask questions.

The emergence of the “creator economy”, the $100-billion global industry of monetized online content creation, raises critical questions about how platform economies articulate with social life. Some Marxist scholars argue that platforms act as rent-seeking landlords, inserting themselves as indispensable digital intermediaries between producers and consumers of services. Bringing a feminist, ethnographic lens to ‘the Internet of Landlords’, this paper follows Indian creators who make food content on YouTube and Instagram in order to theorize creator labor as household industry, re-fashioned as the ‘household start-up’. It describes how creators perform home-based piecework, while their household infrastructures subsidize platforms’ production costs. How are situated relations of reproduction transmuted into the means of global content production? Why is the Hindu home kitchen, once a stubbornly guarded space of heterosexual caste-making, now open for business? I posit, consequently, that reproductive relations of gender, caste and race are constitutive of the material relations of production within platforms’ rentier arrangements.

Sucharita Kanjilal is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Bard College. Her research focuses on feminist theories of global capitalism, shifting regimes of social reproduction, critical food studies, and contemporary caste-class relations in South Asia. She draws connections between feminist economic anthropology, anthropology of media, gender studies, the anthropology of food, and anti-caste epistemologies. Her current book manuscript, titled Home Chefs: Indian Households Produce for the Global Creator Economy, is an ethnographic study of Indian food media producers engaged in global platform-based industries of online content creation.