Introduction: The politics and culture of food: South Asian women and their agency -- The subordination of women and the nature of resistance: 1. Curing the body and soul: Health, food and herbal medicines for nineteenth-century South Asian ; 2. The worship of taste: Rokeya Hossain and the politics of ritual fasting ; 3. Religious recipes: Culinary Motherlines of feasts and fasts in India -- Boundary-making, the construction of identity and commensality : 4. Transcendental transactions: Food practices among Barelwi Muslims ; 5. Between khatm-e qur'ans and slametans: Gender and class in South Asian and Indonesian interdomestic rituals ; 6. Buddhist women and food-gifting to monks -- Everyday life, power and agency : 7. Women's ritually shared bodies and food-penance in rural Maharashtra ; 8. Eating and fasting as a complex professional strategy ; 9. Fasting, feasting: Social and religious food practices at a Barelwi girls' madrasa ; 10. Praying in the kitchen: The Tablighi Jama'at and female piety.