Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.

Accepted Paper:

The cosmopolitan and the regional: understanding Bengali cuisine  
Utsa Ray

Paper short abstract:

Making a claim to a Bengali cuisine was integral to the project of self-fashioning of the middle-class in colonial Bengal. This paper argues that the lack of commercialization of ‘Bengali’ cuisine actually became a marker of its cultural capital that went into the making of the Bengali middle-class.

Paper long abstract:

The middle-class in colonial Bengal indigenized new culinary experiences, which were the products of colonial transformation of the relations of production. While enabling the middle class to soak in new culinary pleasures, this process of indigenization also made possible certain social practices, including the imagination of the act of cooking as a classic feminine act and the domestic kitchen as a sacred space. In these acts of imagination, there were important elements of continuity from the pre-colonial times, especially evidenced in the reinstitution of caste-based norms of gastronomy. The process of indigenizing new gastronomic practices was at the same time anti-colonial yet capitalist, cosmopolitan yet gendered and caste-based. Thus, the idea of a refined taste that was so integrally associated with the formation of the middle-class in colonial Bengal, became a marker of 'disgust for other tastes'. When the middle-class made critiques of the eateries, when they romanticized women's cooking or when they formulated a new discourse of nutrition, the Bengali Hindu middle-class was driven by an urge to define an entire world-view of cuisine, refined and restrained in its content, and embedded in the material culture of Bengal. However, although it never became widely commercialized and never came under the rubric of a standardized Indian cuisine, Bengali cuisine cannot be labeled as indigenist. The point was to cosmopolitanize the domestic and yet keep its tag of 'Bengaliness'. The resultant cuisine was hybrid, in many senses like its makers.

Panel P22
Taste
  Session 1