Clarified Commodities: Managing Ghee in Interwar India

This article explores genealogies of food, taste, nutrition and questions of governance through attempts to regulate the production and sale of vanaspati ghee in interwar India. It explores the "ghee wars" of 1927–29, when Punjab Province pushed to regulate the production of ghee alternatives so as to ensure the quality of the products on offer and regulate the trade in mass-produced food commodities. The possibility of a regulatory system brought to the fore a series of questions about the role of the Raj and the power of provincial legislatures as interwar structures of governance in India took hold: what was the responsibility of the provincial government to its citizens? Could taste and desire be gauged in rational terms? Could authenticity and fraudulence be measured? Finally, could food be governed? This article uses these questions to examine the unusual debates about clarified butter, its forgeries, and the context of interwar citizenship.