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

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.