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Nation on a Platter: the Culture and Politics of Food and Cuisine in Colonial Bengal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 November 2009

JAYANTA SENGUPTA
JAYANTA SENGUPTA*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Notre Dame, 219 O'Shaughnessy Hall, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This paper examines themes related to cooking, food, nutrition, and the relationship between dietary practice and health in late-nineteenth century and early-twentieth century Bengal, and argues that food and cuisine represented a vibrant site on which a complex rhetorical struggle between colonialism and nationalism was played out. Insofar as they carried symbolic meanings and ‘civilisational attributes’, cooking and eating transcended their functionality and became cultural practices, with a strong ideological-pedagogical content. The Bengali/Indian kitchen, so strongly reviled in European colonialist discourses as a veritable purgatory, became a critically important symbolic space in the emerging ideology of domesticity during the colonial period. The gastronomic excesses of gluttonous British officials—crucial in asserting the physical superiority of a ‘masculine’ Raj—became an object of ridicule in Bengali culinary texts, signifying the grossness of a materialistic. The cooking and eating of food thus became deeply implicated in the cultural politics of bhadralok nationalism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 1: The politics of work, family and community in India , January 2010 , pp. 81 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 The literature on the role of these forms and practices in shaping the cultural politics of nationalism is substantial and expanding. To give just a few selected examples: for history writing, Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; for the visual arts, Guha-Thakurta, Tapati, The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art: Artists, Aesthetics, and Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; and for music, Bakhle, Janaki, Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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31 ‘Garhasthya darpan’ [‘The mirror of the household’], Bamabodhini Patrika (June 1874), 10: 130; ‘Grihasthalir katha’[‘Tales of the household’], Antahpur, 5: 5–6.

32 For an in-depth discussion of this theme, see Banerjee, Swapna M., Men, Women, and Domestics: Articulating Middle-Class Identity in Colonial Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), Chapters 2, 5Google Scholar.

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34 For a discussion of the increasing importance that food and cooking commanded in Bengali vernacular publications in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, see Borthwick, Meredith, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal, 1849–1905 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 The original editions of the book replaced ‘spoonfuls’ with tolas (11.66 grams approx.) and chhataks (58 grams approx.) as units of measurement. Metric measurements, however, were only used as late as in the 1995 reprint, and at the behest of the editor, Prajnasundari's granddaughter.

36 Debi, Prajnasudari, Amish o Niramish Ahar [‘Non-vegetarian and vegetarian cuisine’], vol. I (Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1995; first published 1900), Foreword, pp. 13–14Google Scholar.

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