Culture of Food in Colonial Bengal

Author:

Ray, Utsa

Graduate Program:

History

Degree:

Doctor of Philosophy

Document Type:

Dissertation

Date of Defense:

August 28, 2009

Committee Members:

Professor Mrinalini Sinha, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Professor Mrinalini Sinha, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Professor Kumkum Chatterjee, Committee Member
Professor Joan B Landes, Committee Member
Professor Nancy S Love, Committee Member

Keywords:

colonial Bengal
taste
middle-class
colonial modernity
Bengali cuisine

Abstract:

In “Culture of Food in Colonial Bengal” I seek to relate the rise of a new middle- class in colonial Bengal to the development of a new gastronomic culture. I argue that the colonial transformation of the relations of production contextualized the cultural articulation of a new set of values, prejudices, and tastes for the Bengali Hindu middle- class. These cultural values, together with the political and economic conditions of colonialism, formed the habitus of this class. I investigate the historical specificities of this instance of class-formation through an exploration of the discursive and non-discursive social practices that went into the production of a new “Bengali” cuisine. Drawing on government proceedings, periodical literature, recipe books, and visual materials, I demonstrate that the Bengali Hindu middle-class created a new cuisine, one that reflects both an enthusiasm to partake of the pleasures of capitalist modernity and an anxiety about colonial rule. The Bengali Hindu middle-class gave a double-faceted response to these new gastronomic possibilities. A distinct enthusiasm for the satisfactions of modernity was counterbalanced by an agonized awareness that this specific cultural innovation arose within a political context that was fundamentally alien, racist, and exploitative. This double-faceted response resulted in a discursive project, the articulation of a set of values, prejudices, and tastes that I have called the “rhetoric of cuisine” of the Bengali Hindu middle-class. The “rhetoric of cuisine” was an aesthetic choice tied to the upper caste and patriarchal agenda of middle-class social reform. My dissertation investigates how this rhetoric made possible certain social practices, including the imagination of the act of cooking as a classic feminine act and the domestic kitchen as a sacred space. These acts of imagination possess important elements of continuity from pre-colonial times, especially evidenced in the reinstitution of caste-based norms of gastronomy. Thus, the deployment of the “rhetoric of cuisine” was simultaneously anti-colonial yet capitalist, cosmopolitan yet gendered and caste-based.