The House of Zaikanama is an independent research practice that studies food as historical evidence.
Its work moves across archives, oral histories, field observation, and experimental reconstruction. Meals, ingredients, and domestic practices are approached as historical sources that record labour, hierarchy, and everyday life.
The House brings together historical research, public scholarship, and experimental formats such as edible exhibitions and community archiving. Through these practices it develops new ways of reading the past through food.
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Why a “House”
The word House is used deliberately.
Historically, houses have been places where knowledge circulates informally: through kitchens, through conversation, through daily practices that rarely enter formal records.
The House of Zaikanama gathers these traces. It functions as a container for research practices that approach food historically while remaining attentive to the domestic worlds in which food is produced and shared.
Founder
Aali Kumar is a historian who specialises in the colonial history of the Indian subcontinent and is the founder and director of The House of Zaikanama.
Before establishing Zaikanama, she had an active career teaching history at the University of Delhi to undergraduate students for over a decade as an Assistant Professor. Her work grew from questions that emerged in the classroom and gradually moved beyond it.
Her current research draws on Urdu vernacular archives. These sources often preserve domestic detail that formal records overlook: recipes, household instructions, and passing references to meals. Small traces that open windows into everyday life. This is one thread of her many research interests and upcoming projects.
Questions of caste and gender remain central to the work. In the context she studies, both are tightly bound to food. They shape labour, access to the kitchen, the order of the table, and the boundaries of the household.