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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*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Notre Dame, 219 O'Shaughnessy Hall, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA Email: jayantas@yahoo.com

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
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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23 The increasing importance of this theme is attested to by the space that diet and nutrition regularly commanded in medical journals like Chikitsa Sammilani, Bhishak Darpan, and Swasthya. Between 1885 and 1935, more than 600 Bengali-language books, pamphlets and periodicals dealt with issues related to health and hygiene. See Prasad, Srirupa, ‘Sanitising the Domestic: Gender, Hygiene and Health in Bengal/India, 1885–1935,’ Wellcome History (2005), 28: 6Google Scholar. For representative late-nineteenth century samples of the treatment of diet in such periodicals, see Bose, Pradip Kumar, ed., Health and Society in Bengal: A Selection from Late 19th-Century Bengali Periodicals (Delhi: Thousand Oaks and London: Sage, 2006), esp. pp 120133Google Scholar.

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29 Somprakash, 25 July, 1887 in Report on Native Newspapers in Bengal, 30 July 1887.

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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.

33 ‘Sripantha’ [pseudonym of Nikhil Sarkar], ed., Bangla Bhashar Pratham Duti Rannar Boi: Pakrajeswar o Byanjan Ratnakar [‘The first two cookbooks in the Bengali language: Pakrajeswar and Byanjan Ratnakar’] (Calcutta: Subarnarekha, 2004).

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. 1314Google Scholar.

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40 Mukhopadhyay, Bipradas, Pak-pranali [‘Recipes’] (Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1987Google Scholar; originally published 1885–1902), p. 29.

41 Prajnasundari Devi, Amish o Niramish Ahar, vol. I, pp. 51–53 passim.

42 Swami Vivekananda, letter to the Editor of Bharati, dated Darjeeling, 24 April 1897, in Vivekananda, Swami, Patrabali [‘Letters’] (Calcutta: Udbodhan, 5th edition, 1987), p. 537Google Scholar.