Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial by Parama Roy, and: The Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction by Annette Cozzi (review)

In a famous skit from the television show Goodness Gracious Me (1998), a group of Indians go out “for an English.” Inverting the British penchant for “going out for a curry” after the pub to comic effect, these citizens of the postcolony get “tanked up on lassis” before heading to Mountbatten’s restaurant, where they ask for the blandest food on the menu, order piles of chips, and decide to share dishes because that is the way so-called ethnic food is supposed to be eaten. The skit calls into question what it means to be “English,” but also pinpoints how unattractive that identity might be when not complemented by the spice of imperial legacy.

But how did curry come to symbolize something so central to contemporary British identity and equally central to Indian people’s relationship to the British? In different ways, both Parama Roy’s Alimentary Tracts and Annette Cozzi’s The Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction answer this question, elucidating the role of foodways in the textual construction of nations and their appetites. From the Indian Mutiny of 1857 to Madhur Jaffrey and beyond, Cozzi and Roy trace a network of relations that reveals just how central thinking about food—if not actually eating it—has been to geopolitics and to the literature of the Victorian and post-Victorian eras. And, as Roy notes in tracking the history of the word “curry,” the very terms of this discussion are complicated, even contentious.

Alimentary Tracts is a rich, theoretically engaging, and wide-ranging survey of the gustatory’s significance to Anglo-Indian relations, as well as to the reception of Indian cuisines inside and outside the subcontinent and among non-Indians and Indians in the diaspora. Building on the work of Arjun Appadurai and others, she convincingly argues that a notion of what constitutes Indian food has provided the English-speaking elite in India and people of Indian origin outside of it with some building blocks of nationality. Such “nation making through commensality” proffers a set of ingredients and rituals that defines Indianness and brings together a range of issues, including culture, caste, disgust, resistance, gender, and marginality (176). “At almost all points,” she argues, “the purported particularities of a South Asian alimentary grammar are interlinked with and illumined by non-South Asian modes of alimentary discourse” (20). Roy’s book situates itself within a growing body of criticism that links together Victorian and South Asian studies; in doing so, this criticism is also reshaping our understanding of British imperialism in broader temporal and theoretical terms. Moreover, she recognizes the importance of solid historical foundations; her book (like Cozzi’s) is attentive to the changes in legislation and governance that underpin its textual analyses.

What a nation is and how it comes to be is also a central preoccupation of The Discourses of Food. Here, Cozzi argues that “food and the novel both simultaneously construct and confirm British national identity” and highlights this identity’s dependence on colonization (5). And while both works are attentive to the intersections between hunger, violence, and imperialism, in Cozzi’s book, colonial voices only ever constitute the Other, the superfluous but threatening margin of excess. In this sense, The Discourses of Food owes a heavy debt to a previous generation of scholars—notably Edward Said, Linda Colley, and Benedict Anderson—leading to readings that sometimes lack sufficient nuance and complexity. Such is the case with Cozzi’s discussion of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–48), which ignores the influence of the author’s Indian childhood in averring, “for Thackeray, Englishness is measured by circumspect tastes. The unpolluted, wholesome Englishman...