Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food, and South Asia

4. Nation on a Platter: The Culture and Politics of Food and Cuisine in Colonial Bengal

73 Four Nation on a Platter The Culture and Politics of Food and Cuisine in Colonial Bengal Jayanta Sengupta Recent critical work on nationalism has tended to shift the emphasis from long, drawn-out anticolonial political struggles for emancipation from political subordination to the more complex and nuanced struggles or contestations over cultural or intellectual domains or sites. It has been argued that the political movement of nationalism often derives new strength from, or is supplemented by, antihegemonic or contestatory exercises in cultural forms like writing about and remembering historical events, literature, performing arts, or philosophical and scientific deliberations.1 This chapter seeks to establish the cuisine and culinary art of a nation as one more site in which the hegemonic aspects of colonial culture may be adapted, emulated , subverted, or resisted. For colonial India, such a study of cuisine holds out immense promise because of the infinitely rich and complex heritage of India’s “traditional” cuisine, the variegated nature of the non-Indian influences to which the latter was subjected, and the many ways in which the cooking and eating of food came to be implicated in histories of intimacy and in the cultural politics of the body. Bengal makes an appropriate case study because of its early exposure to colonial rule, because of the vibrancy of nationalist thought in Bengal, and because of the availability of a substantial vernacular-language literature on subjects related to cooking, food and nutrition , and the relationship between dietary practice and health. The three sections in this chapter deal with three different discourses on food and cuisine in colonial Bengal. The first one examines British perceptions of “ideal” food habits in tropical Bengal, and how these perceptions were linked—through a gendered politics of the body—to specific ideologies of the Raj. The second examines late-nineteenth-century Indian nationalist constructions of an ideal and healthy diet, and the ways in which these 74 • The Princely-Colonial Encounter constructions were related to notions of masculinity and effeminacy. The third and final one examines the space that was given to cooking in the new ideologies of domesticity at the end of the nineteenth century, and to the growing debate on vegetarianism and nonvegetarianism, which became a surrogate commentary on the contrasting natures of Western and Eastern cultures. A Cautionary Tale: Food in the Tropics European attitudes towards India and its inhabitants were varied and often ambivalent, yet there was one basic assumption underlying all colonial medical texts from 1770 until at least 1858. That is a belief in the uniqueness of the Indian environment and its maladies, and the need for a fundamental reappraisal of European medical knowledge in the light of these new circumstances . Belief in the distinctiveness of the tropical disease environment raised the fundamental question of whether or not it was possible for Europeans to acclimatize their bodies to their new surroundings. Most medical men believed that there was nothing inevitable about sickness in the tropics and that much could be done to prevent it. In this context, attention was frequently drawn to the inappropriate diet of Europeans. Charles Curtis, a surgeon attached to the naval hospital at Madras in the 1780s, believed that overconsumption of meat was the root of many of their ills. “They cannot too soon . . . accustom themselves to what are called the native dishes,” he maintained, “which consist for the most part of boiled rice, and fruits, highly seasoned with hot aromatics, along with meat items and sauces, but with a small proportion of animal matter.” He regretted that the majority of Europeans injured themselves “from a kind of false bravado, and the exhibition of a generous contempt for what they reckon the luxurious and effeminate practices of the country” (Curtis 1807: 280–281; Harrison 1994: 40–41). Curtis’s sentiments were echoed by the Calcutta surgeon Adam Burt, who warned that “the too liberal use of wine combines with the climate to render Europeans ill-qualified for digesting the great quantity of animal food which most of them continue to devour as freely as before they left their native country.” Although he did not think it advisable to emulate Indian dietaries in every respect, they seemed to suggest “very useful hints” for survival in hot climates (Burt 1785: 9–10, 14; Harrison 1994). Other contemporaries— like the naval surgeon James Johnson—however, unambiguously prescribed Nation on a Platter • 75 “the slender and unirritating food...