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Culinary culture in colonial India: a cosmopolitan platter and the middle-class, by Utsa Ray, New Delhi, Cambridge University Press, 2015, x + 274 pp., Rs. 695.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781107042810

cases themselves reveal the ‘overwhelming patriarchy’ of colonial law, which was quite compatible with ‘indigenous patriarchy’ and complicit in the structural silencing of female voices. Women remained voiceless unless they ‘decisively stole the stage from men’ (201). This remained true in postcolonial India. When women did force the independent Indian state to recognize their presence, as did Phulan Devi through her rather successful outlaw career and her subsequent surrender, their gender fundamentally structured their interactions with the (male, patriarchal) state. And finally, when this state apparatus was ‘penetrated’ by the communal fascists in a populist electoral democracy, Tanika Sarkar’s powerful piece describes how it unleashed unimaginable violence and cruelty targeted specifically at the weakest of the weak: women and children of religious minorities. Undoubtedly, the volume covers much historiographical ground, yet the framing categories of ‘crime’ and ‘time’ are singularly insufficient to adequately describe its richness. All essays, in some way or the other, map change over time; but for historical essays to do so is unsurprising and do not warrant special emphasis on temporality. One suspects that ‘time’ is invoked for the purpose of little more than the (somewhat unimaginative) chronological division of sections into precolonial, colonial and postcolonial. Even in that case, the essays escape the classificatory schema: Malavika Kasturi’s work, classified within the section called ‘Precolonial premonitions’, has almost nothing precolonial about it, dealing essentially with the nineteenth century and drawing entirely upon colonial sources. On the other hand, Sumit Guha’s fascinating essay examining notions of rights governing law and custom in eighteenth-century Maharashtra through Maratha sources sits somewhat uncomfortably with the most tangential relation that it can possibly claim with the history of ‘crime’. On the whole, part of the Themes in Indian History series, this book serves as a resourceful handbook for scholars as well as a comprehensive introduction to the theme for students of history and the social sciences. However, far from being a mere compendium of essays, the selection, classification, presentation and, not least, the insightful introduction evidently make it a distinct contribution to historiography.