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4 / Red Hot Chili Peppers: Visualizing Class Critique and Female Labor Entrust the selection of materials and the whole management of affairs to a commercial company, like for instance, the East India Company. Allow them to make use of as much corruption as they please. Throw in various green things, such as incompetent judges, cruel tax-gatherers, and overbearing military officers. Stir up the above with a large Spoon of the Ellenborough pattern. Mix the above with native superstitions, and by no means spare the official sauce. Allow the above quietly to ferment for several years without taking any notice of how matters are going on. When you come to look into the state of things, you will find that you have as fine an Indian pickle as you could wish. You need not trouble yourself about the jars, for they will be supplied to you afterwards, gratis. For further particulars, inquire of the great Indian Pickle Warehouse in Leadenham Street. N.B. No pickle is genuine unless there is the mark of “John Company” plainly visible on the face of it. —anonymous, “how to make an indian pickle,” 1857 Moving from narratives about culinary Orientalism to contemporary narratives attuned to the exigencies of class, capitalism, and labor, I want to indulge in an anachronistic detour, delving back into the pages of history to the moment of the Indian Uprising, or Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 (hereafter Uprising). Putting forth an analysis of this moment is appropriate for this chapter, not because of the deep-seated connection between culinary beliefs and the Uprising, but because it offers a singular instance of when action and resistance coalesced around the mutable significance of food. For most historians of India’s colonial period, the winter of 1856–57 is most closely aligned with nationalist agitation and anticolonialist fervor in the northern states of India, a historical moment that would culminate in the Indian Uprising of 1857. A particularly telling anonymous prose poem published that year in Punch, “How to Make an Indian Pickle,” satirizes the perceived state of chaos and corruption within the East India Company (here referred to as John Company ). Scripted in the form of a recipe, the poem identifies the East India Company’s policies as the root cause of the Uprising, here referred to as “the pickle.” While the sympathies of the poem’s anonymous author are not made explicit, the words paint an unsympathetic portrait of the Brit- red hot chili peppers / 115 ish East India Company. The pickle—a preservative designed to contain and preserve—becomes symbolically linked with the purported failure of John Company to contain the Uprising, and by extension the very real threat to the edifice of the British Empire in India. The insurgency of the Indian soldiers is what lands the forces of British imperialism in a “pickle.” The undisciplined bodies of the Indian soldiers become a potent threat because they epitomize the troubles to empire: the refusal of Indian bodies to be contained by the demands of imperialist enterprise. At around the same time that the anonymous poem appeared in the pages of Punch, another type of culinary message was making its way across portions of northwest India, the area of British India that would soon become associated with the Indian Uprising of 1857. In The Glass Palace, a multigenerational novel about an Indo-Burmese family set in India, Burma, and Malaysia, Amitav Ghosh imagines this historic moment : “Well before the firing of the first shot, signs of trouble had appeared on the north Indian plains. Chapatis—those most unremarkable of everyday foods—had begun to circulate from village to village, as though in warning. No one knew where they came from or who had put them in motion—but somehow people had known a great convulsion was on its way” (246). Here, the convulsions parallel events in the Glass Palace. In the wake of an imperial coup, a series of rumors circulate among insurgents and supporters of the new leader via informal channels in a manner reminiscent of the 1857 “circulating chapatti incident.”1 This historical incident has generated a great deal of speculation, most of which hones in on the fact that a series of seditious messages, apparently encoded within chapattis, circulated rapidly through a number of villages in northwest India. One of the earliest historical accounts of the episode suggests that a local villager would deliver chapattis to the adjoining village with an injunction to make six others—to be...

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