Introduction
Recent critical work on nationalism has tended to shift the emphasis, from long, drawn-out, anti-colonial 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, anti-hegemonic or contestatory exercises in cultural forms like writing about and remembering historical ‘events,’ literature, performing arts, or philosophical and scientific deliberationsFootnote 1. This paper 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 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, as well as the relationship between dietary practice and health.
The three sections in this paper 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 constructions were related to notions of masculinity and effeminacy. The final section examines the space that was given to cooking in the new ideologies of domesticity at the turn of the nineteenth century, and to the growing debate on vegetarianism and non-vegetarianism, 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 acclimatise 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 over-consumption 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’.Footnote 2 Curtis’ 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.Footnote 3 Other contemporaries—like the naval surgeon, James Johnson—however, unambiguously prescribed ‘the slender and unirritating food of the Hindoo,’ especially for those whose daily routine did not include strenuous activities like travel.Footnote 4
By and large, such medical exhortations were lost on the British in Calcutta, who ate huge amounts of every sort of meat, including pork and beef, both roasted and curried. ‘We were very frequently told in England, you know, that the heat in Bengal destroyed the appetite,’ wrote Eliza Fay in 1780.
I must own that I never saw any proof of that: on the contrary, I cannot help thinking that I never saw an equal quantity of victuals consumed. We dine too at two o'clock in the very heat of the day . . . I will give you our bill of fare . . . . A soup, a roast fowl, curry and rice, a mutton pie, a fore-quarter of lamb, a rice pudding, tarts, very good cheese, fresh churned butter, fine bread, excellent Madeira (that is expensive but eatables are very cheap).Footnote 5
Stomach disorders, inevitably, were common, but everyone blamed the climate rather than the unsuitability of their diet. The Governor, Philip Francis, wrote in 1775: ‘I am tormented with the bile and obliged to live on mutton chop and water. The Devil is in the climate I think.’Footnote 6
During the early decades of Company rule in India—as Elizabeth Collingham's work has shown—such ostentatious and unhealthy dining habits ‘served well to underline the status of the Company grandee in India.’ However, with the increasing racialization of the Raj after 1857, the body of the British official in India became an even more powerful signifier of ‘Britishness,’ and diet and dress became, accordingly, cultural sites on which a sense of bodily difference between the British and their Indian subjects was maintained.Footnote 7 Though this entailed a refinement of the eating etiquette compared with the meat-eating excesses of the earlier period, elaborate meals continued to be the norm, as indicated by the Bengal civil servant John Beames’ account of the average Anglo-Indian official's fare in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries:
Our chota haziri, or little breakfast, was at five-thirty to six, and consisted of tea, eggs boiled or poached, toast and fruit . . . . Breakfast at eleven consisted of fried or broiled fish, a dish or two of meat—generally fowl cutlets, hashes and stews, or cold meat and salad followed by curry and rice and dessert. We drank either bottled beer—the universal Bass—or claret . . . . Between four and five there was tea and cakes, . . . . Dinner at half past seven or eight consisted of soup, and entrée, roast fowls or ducks, occasionally mutton, and in cold weather once or twice beef, an entremet of game or a savoury, and sweets.Footnote 8
Similarly, Dipesh Chakrabarty's work on the culture of managerial power in Bengal's jute mills around the turn of the nineteenth century shows that the lifestyle—and especially the food habits—of the British jute mill managers contained an element of spectacle as an important aspect of their physical superiority vis-à-vis the millhands. In such circumstances, as Chakrabarty suggests, ‘eating was a ritualised expression of a colonial ruling-class culture . . . signifying . . . excess and plenitude’. Thus an early-morning chota haziri of a handful of toasts, a few eggs and a large pot of tea was duly followed by a regular breakfast consisting of ‘fish, stewed steak and onions, eggs, curried fowl and rice, with the usual addenda of tea or coffee, with bread, butter and jam’. Some went further and gleefully downed a few pegs of whiskey and soda before going back to work.Footnote 9
Just as these ostentatious eating habits were deployed as the cultural markers of a masculine, physically superior British Raj, the native kitchen or ‘cookhouse’ was very bleakly portrayed as symbolic of all that was filthy, dirty and uncouth about Oriental cultures. The author of a cookbook described a typical kitchen in an Anglo-Indian compound as ‘a wretchedly mean, carelessly constructed, godown [outbuilding] . . . inconveniently far from the house, and consequently open to every passer-by’.Footnote 10 Further, because of inadequate equipment, the cook had to use ‘his cloth for a sieve, and his fingers for a spoon or fork’.Footnote 11 Given this description, it is perhaps not surprising that yet another cookbook cautioned, ‘The native ways are not as our ways and the less you see of them over their cooking operations the more appetite you will have for the food set before you’.Footnote 12
To cut a long story short, the gastronomic habits of the British in Bengal—including conspicuous consumption bordering on gluttony in the early days of Company rule, and more refined but elaborate meals in the second half of the nineteenth century—served as a metaphor for the racial/physical superiority of the Raj. Although such dietary habits were firmly castigated from the ‘scientific’ viewpoint—most frequently by climatologists and medical men—the table manners of the Raj obviously valued symbolism more than science. The Indian kitchen as an object of revulsion was the other part of the same worldview. The dark mysteries of the Orient manifested themselves within the cookhouse in many ways—through the heat, smoke and filth, as well as through the cunning of foxy cooks or bawarchis, who pinched provisions, padded their accounts, and—worst of all—used their curry powder to enliven what a 1906 cookbook described as ‘superannuated fish or meat’.Footnote 13
The majority of medical men, however, sought to emphasise cultural, as opposed to physiological, differences between whites and non-whites. The prevailing ethos of the 1830s is best demonstrated in the work of James Ranald Martin, presidency surgeon of Bengal, and later president of the East India Company's Medical Board, who held climatological factors responsible for the ‘degenerate’ culture of the Bengalis. ‘When we reflect on the habits and customs of the natives’, he wrote, ‘their long misgovernment, their religion and morals, their diet, clothing, etc., and above all their climate [his emphasis] we can be at no loss to perceive why they should be what they are’.Footnote 14
Masculinity, effeteness, and diet
The growth of the idea of Indian ‘effeminacy,’ as Thomas R. Metcalf has contended, can be traced to eighteenth-century theories of climatic determinism, in which ‘heat and humidity were seen as conspiring to subvert manliness, resolve and courage.’Footnote 15 According to the eighteenth-century historian, Robert Orme, the diet of the ‘people of Indostan’ exacerbated these shortcomings, dependent as it was on rice, an ‘easily digestible’ food, obtained with little labour, and thus ‘the only proper one for such an effeminate race’.Footnote 16 Even among such ‘generally lethargic’ people, Bengalis were especially known for their feeble, ‘effeminate’ ways, and for their slothful habits. Herbert Risley, the amateur British ethnologist and physical anthropologist, observed that Bengali effeminacy had much to do with the ‘relaxing climate’, the ‘enfeebling diet’, and the premature maternity of women.Footnote 17 The self-perception of effeminacy, as John Rosselli has pointed out, was recognised by Bengali intellectuals and political leaders to be a peculiarly middle-class phenomenon. They offered various explanations for this effeminacy—the decline of native physical pursuits under the material security provided by British rule, the Bengali diet of rice, and the hot and enervating climate among them.Footnote 18
The relationship between bahubal (physical prowess) and civilization came to be debated in the 1870s in the meetings of the Hindu Mela, a social and cultural association in nineteenth-century Calcutta. Dietary practices became one of the keywords of this debate. As early as 1866, the Brahmo reformist intellectual Rajnarayan Basu's influential pamphlet ‘Prospectus of a Society for the promotion of national feeling among the educated natives of Bengal,’ submitted an alternative to western modernity by proposing a return to indigenous custom and etiquette after cleansing them of ‘native’ superstitions.Footnote 19 Based on the cultivation of physical culture, appropriate dress, and ‘proper’ dietary practices, this programmatic agenda was quickly adopted by the Hindu Mela, whose sessions reverberated with emotional exhortations on the colonial comparison between a martial race and a non-martial one. Manmohan Basu's keynote address at the second Hindu Mela in 1868 stated that that by introducing physical education within the country, the organizers of the Mela would successfully rid the Bengali of the humiliating reputation he had amongst the British and other Indian communities of being ‘fainthearted’ and ‘rice-eating’.Footnote 20 The principal crop of Bengal and an integral part of Bengali identity, rice—with its supposedly enervating attributes—thus cast a gloomy shadow over the Hindu Mela's anxiety-ridden project of overcoming the allegations of effeteness through the cultivation of an active physical culture.Footnote 21 Such anxieties were unmistakably present in Rajnarayan Basu's comparative evaluation of old and present times, Se kal ar e kal, published in 1873. Comparing ‘those days’ with ‘these days’, he spoke of health as one of the several key areas of Bengali life where lack of nutritious food, consumption of adulterated and harmful food, and excessive drinking had conspired to engender a decline. ‘We have seen and heard in our childhood,’ he lamented, ‘of numerous examples of how much people could eat in those days. They cannot do so now.’Footnote 22 Basu thus set the tone for an increasingly vocal strand of bhadralok thought on physical debility and ‘proper’ dietary practices that examined these themes from both a medical and a cultural point of view in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the initial decades of the twentieth.Footnote 23
By the early decades of the twentieth century, the ruminations on the debilitating effects of the Bengali diet had given way to ‘scientific’ explanations. By this time the Medical Colleges were well-established institutions, and for many chemists, attention had come to focus on the science of health, hygiene and nutrition. Interestingly, however, even such ‘scientific’ explorations into the chemical ingredients of the average Bengali daily fare—and their characteristic-moulding properties—were imbricated with the cultural politics of self-conscious attempts to historicize the gastronomic trajectory of the nation. Consider, for example, the following passage from a treatise on food written by Chunilal Bose, a Chemistry Professor at the Calcutta Medical College and one-time Chemical Examiner to the Government of Bengal:
The health and physique of the Bengalis were not so poor a few generations ago. Time was when the people of this province were not unaccustomed to military life and service, for they formed regiments which successfully fought against the disciplined army of the Mughal Emperors of Delhi. In the latter half of the 18th century . . . they showed their prowess, courage, endurance and the other manly qualities of a soldier in successfully counteracting the military operations of the French in the struggle for supremacy in South India. There was then plenty of nourishing food (such as milk and fish) available in the land, and people could afford to take them in the right quantity. It is the dearth of these two staple articles of food in Bengal at the present moment that has made the diet of the generality of the people so poor in its nutritive value and has contributed to the deterioration of the health and the lowering of the resisting power against the onslaught of diseases. It is the duty of every true son of Bengal to devise means and adopt measures for the increased supply of milk and fish throughout the province. This will improve the diet of the people and make the country smile once again in health and prosperity.Footnote 24
In Bose's, view the Bengali diet was far too rich in carbohydrates but markedly deficient in protein, the ‘muscle-forming element’. Such a ‘one-sided’ diet, according to Bose, led to retardation in one's growth and development, disinclination for physical exercise and any kind of active work, weakening of the powers of endurance, lowering of vitality, loss of the natural powers of resistance against infectious disease, and premature old age as well as mortality. In order to make up for the deficiency in protein, he prescribed ‘a more liberal allowance of protein-foods of animal origin [e.g. milk, fish, meat and eggs] in the present-day diet of the people’.Footnote 25
In short, by the turn of the twentieth century the scientific quest for a suitable diet had become inextricably linked with the cultural politics of bhadralok identity. So much so, in fact, that the scientific explanation was often offered as a posteriori justification of a project that was already under way in political terms. The bhadralok needed to beef themselves up in order to lay a better claim to an historically unsustainable ‘martial tradition’. What was a better way of doing this than imitating the flesh-eating ways of the West? But, as we will see in the final section, the culinary nationalism of the bhadralok shied away from mere emulation and came to focus on what it perceived as the distinctive identity of Bengali cuisine.
A recipe for modernity: The art of fine cuisine
This section will explore the new importance accorded to food and cuisine by bhadralok publicists in Bengal in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. This was, of course, part of a larger discourse of new domesticity that was emerging not only in Bengal, but also in other parts of India during the period in question, and occupied a key space in the nationalist politics of gender.Footnote 26 In its turn, this new ideology of domesticity was embedded in the vernacular print culture that mushroomed in different parts of India in the late-nineteenth century and opened up a broad discussion on issues relating to family, household and kin relationships to newly literate audiences, including middle-class women. Compared with the middle decades of the century, the much wider circulation of these vernacular texts represented a shift of literary culture and spawned a public sphere in whose discussions women came increasingly to participate—initially as consumers, but subsequently also as authors, of ideas on education, family life, and social etiquette.Footnote 27
This period witnessed the emergence of a new cultural artefact—cookbooks—that were used to advise a newly-wed woman in the culinary arts and to reassure the young wife that skills in the kitchen would ensure a happy married life. It is obvious that these cookbooks were part of a larger discourse that sought to limit women's roles to those of wife, mother, and homemaker. But, interestingly, they did more than that. Quite often they defined Bengali/Indian cuisine in contradistinction to European cuisine, and, in doing so, took positions on the distinction of Western and Eastern cultures as a whole.
Cooking was a skill in which the capacities of the ‘modern’ woman came under attack from the 1870s onwards. It was said that the ‘New Woman’ (nabina) was no longer able to cook, and relied on the skills of professional cooks to perform a function traditionally handled by the women of the household. Numerous instances can be cited from didactic manuals on normative ideals of domesticity and femininity, and from contemporary periodicals like Bamabodhini Patrika, Antahpur, and Sadharani.Footnote 28 These were accompanied by occasional exhortations to include cooking in the school curriculum for girls, thus institutionalising the transmission of a traditional domestic ability.Footnote 29
What made these lessons necessary was as much a change in taste and food habits as a perceived loss of competence. As the bhadralok fanned out to different parts of India and came into contact with non-Bengalis and Europeans, greater experimentation in cuisine became the rule. The ideal modern grihini (mistress of the household) was one who was skilled in the new ways of cooking as well as the old. Girish Chunder Ghose noted of Bengali women in 1868 that they no longer collected fame by cooking ‘a simple soup or a dish of porridge’, but ‘must master the mysteries of pillaos and know exactly the true colour of a kebab in order to pass for learned in the art’. ‘Some even aspire’, he continued, ‘to the glory of preparing fowl curry and cutlets in exact imitation of the Great Eastern Hotel.Footnote 30 A writer in the Bamabodhini patrika in 1874 similarly enumerated the types of cooking a bhadramahila (an educated woman) should learn:
Native Brahmin dishes of rice and curry; meat in the Moghul style; sweetmeats made from chhana, coconut, semolina, lentils, pumpkin, and thickened milk; western-style pickles and jams, cakes, biscuits, puddings, and bread; and Indian roti, luchi, and puri.Footnote 31
It should be noted, firstly, that though such skills were integral to the emergence of an essentially Hindu nationalist ideology of domesticity, the range of dishes included in the bhadramahila's expected culinary repertoire displayed an eclectic, cross-communal mix, granting Islam its rightful place on the bhadralok's table. Secondly, exhortations against employing the professional cook were hardly motivated by considerations of mere economisation. In the didactic manuals on the norms of femininity, cooking by the grihini was given an inalienable affective dimension. It was repeatedly asserted that the real zing in a recipe came from the love and nurturing care of the grihini, which professional cooks were unable to provide.Footnote 32 In other words, while revulsion against the professional cook distanced Anglo-Indian women from the kitchen even further, the same sentiment had precisely the opposite kind of effect on the Bengali bhadramahila at the turn of the nineteenth century.
It was in this context that the first cookbooks began to appear in Bengal. The very first Bengali cookbook, Pakrajeswar, was published in 1831, and a second edition came out, with financial assistance from the Raja of Burdwan, in 1854. Full of esoteric recipes collected from royal households in Mughal India, the book was hardly suitable for use in ordinary bhadralok homes.Footnote 33 The gap was filled in 1883 with the publication of Pak-Pranali, a monthly magazine devoted entirely to cooking and edited by Bipradas Mukhopadhyay, a well-known author of instructional manuals on different aspects of family life. The magazine aimed to teach ‘modern’ women the culinary skills allegedly lost through education and refinement, as well as to help them keep up with changing tastes in food, and save money by preparing food at home themselves. Women's journals soon followed suit. Bamabodhini Patrika had an occasional recipe column from 1884, and Mahila had a similar column from 1895. Punya, which was not specifically for women, carried recipes by the editor, Prajnasundari Debi, from its inception in 1897. Antahpur also had a regular cookery column from 1900, written by women contributors. From around this time, books on general household topics, too, started routinely to include recipes for both ordinary household cooking and for festive dishes.Footnote 34
But, insofar as the bhadramahila's perceptions were concerned, was cooking an art or a science—to be approached with the same meticulous, systematic orderliness that had made the European scientific/material civilization such a powerful entity? The publisher of Prajnasundari Debi's Amish o Niramish Ahar had no doubt at all that the turn-of-the-century culinary opus represented an ideal mix of ‘the poetic imagination and the scientific spirit’. The ‘scientific’ bit lay in the precise directions and exact measurementsFootnote 35 that accompanied each recipe in the book. In the foreword, the author herself presented a very strong case for the necessity of preparing an orderly inventory of Bengal's eating habits and culinary practices:
In our Bengal, some aspects [of life] are characterized by a lack of orderliness (bidhibaddha bhav). In this country, there is no discipline (srinkhala) and finesse (paripatya) in any matter. This [distinctively] Bengali trait is especially noticeable in the way we eat. Fish and cream (kshir) freely go together to make an abra-ca-dabra of our diet; such a diet is as much detrimental to health as it is against the scriptures (shastra). One of my principal objectives is to rescue the Bengali cuisine from this chaos, and to give it a disciplined character. Unless this is done, Bengali cuisine will never develop a backbone. It is not of much use to collect a few recipes and publish them in a book. Just as a disciplined regiment of even a few soldiers is of much greater use in war than the mobilization of millions of troops, so is discipline a crucially important matter in the writing of cookbooks. This discipline is not evident in the few books on food that have been written in Bengal. It is for this reason that I have started with the staple vegetarian food of rice, and [then] systematically moved on to other categories.Footnote 36
The publisher's preface set great store by vegetarian food, taking this as a mark of distinction between Oriental and Western foods. Because of the cold climate of their habitat, the ‘Western Aryans’ of necessity had to develop meat-eating habits. But the gathering of animal flesh entailed relatively greater hardship, and so cut down on the time available for leisure and, thereby, for ‘progress’. This led to the attainment of a comparative superiority on the part of the Oriental civilizations. This historical debilitation had even a contemporary touch, as the publisher concluded, ‘Till this day the Europeans have not learnt the magnificent art of combining a variety of vegetables [in a dish]’.Footnote 37
In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century discourse on food, the issue of vegetarianism versus non-vegetarianism became a cultural question, with much significance for nationalist thought. Whether one ate animal flesh or not became a marker of civilisational characteristics or distinctions. The material/spiritual dichotomy—a rhetorical creation of nationalist thought, in which the difference between western and Indian civilizations is reflected—was used freely in the comparative discussion of food as well. The flesh-eating habits of the west were argued to have contributed to what was considered to be a grossly materialistic civilization, thriving on crude physicality/coarse vulgarity. Conversely, the refinement and spiritual superiority of Indian civilisation was reflected in the immense variety of its vegetarian cuisine.
A compelling force in favour of vegetarianism in India is the ethical one against the consumption of food that necessitates the taking of life. Such perceptions have a long history in the country, and, so, being a vegetarian occasions little surprise here. And even as long ago as 1000 BC, so extensive was the range of cereals, pulses, oilseeds, vegetables, fruit, milk, condiments, spices and sweetening agents available, that vegetarian meals of high nutritional quality, and with gustatory and aesthetic appeal, could be fashioned. As K.T. Achaya suggests, ‘perhaps nowhere else in the world except in India would it have been possible 3000 years ago to be a strict vegetarian’.Footnote 38
The advanced creativity of Indian cuisine was argued to blossom in its vegetarian cuisine. In the foreword of one of the most popular, modern cookbooks of the turn of the century, the publisher proclaimed that the vegetarian diet was ‘discovered’ by the early Aryans living in the west of the Urals. He argued that meat-eating, as a habit, was more difficult and time-consuming and, therefore, cut down on the leisure time of the westerners. Since leisure was essential to the ‘progress’ of any civilisation, this meant that at the height of the Aryan civilisation of the East, the West lagged far behind in civilizational refinement. ‘To this date, the Europeans have not mastered the exquisite art of combining different vegetables [into a marvellous dish] . . . . Many a century will pass before the Western race will manage to learn these mysteries of vegetarian cooking’.Footnote 39
The dharmic argument against flesh-eating was also frequently used to mark out the Hindu diet as a spiritually superior one. Bipradas Mukhopadhyay, the author of the first truly popular Bengali cookbook, Pak-pranali, made no bones about the claim that ‘when human society arrives at the crest (uchcha sikhare) of dharma, the urge to fill one's stomach by the killing of animals declines’. He then went on to quote ‘an Englishman’ who supposedly compared the dining table of the English to ‘a great cremation ground’.Footnote 40
Prajnasundari Devi herself traced the divine origin of vegetarian food and related the origin of flesh-eating to the dietary practices of asuras, i.e. demons. But she also ascribed the primacy of vegetarianism in India to the hot, tropical climate, and to the privileging of non-violence in the Hindu and Buddhist religions. The sages of ancient India, she contends, did not refrain from eating non-vegetarian food. In fact, she argues that even the varieties of non-vegetarian cuisine were picked up by the Islamic Orient (Arabia, Persia, etc.) and Europe from the Indian dietary practices.Footnote 41
But the person who brought the vegetarianism versus non-vegetarianism issue directly within the orbit of contemporary nationalist concerns about masculinity and physical culture was Swami Vivekananda. To him, non-vegetarianism—especially meat-eating—was a compulsion imposed by the material/practical realities of modern life. He even went to the extent of saying that it was meat-eating that created the difference between the power to rule others and the abject surrender to physically more robust peoples:
As long as men have to practise rajas, as required by the modern age, there is no other alternative than meat-eating. It is true that king Asoka saved the lives of a couple of millions of animals by his sword, but is not a thousand years’ slavery even more terrible than this? Which is a greater sin—to kill a few goats, or to fail to protect the honour of my wife and daughter, and to fail to prevent others from plundering the food meant for my children? Let those who belong to the elite, and do not have to win their bread by physical labour, shun meat. But as for those who have to provide for their subsistence by means of continuous physical toil, forcing them to be vegetarians is one of the reasons for the eclipse of our national independence. Japan is an illustration of what good, nutritious food can achieve.Footnote 42
In other words, Vivekananda cared little for vegetarianism as a possible cultural/nationalist marker of Indian cuisine. For him, meat-eating provided the only way to a robust health, which was indispensable for a host of things—like community's ‘honour’, labour's productivity, and nation's ‘progress’. Vegetarianism, on the other hand, was an emasculating habit that put insurmountable obstacles on the path of nation-making. Subsequently, the debate continued well into the twentieth century without being completely resolved, despite the participation of prominent bhadralok nationalist publicists such as, for example, Prafulla Chandra Ray, Ramendrasundar Trivedi and Rajsekhar Basu.
Conclusion: Nation on a platter
By the turn of the nineteenth century, food and cuisine represented a vibrant site on which a complex rhetorical struggle between colonialism and nationalism was being played out. It can be argued that for the Bengali bhadralok food became a politically charged tool of contestation, from both a gastronomic and a culinary viewpoint, i.e., relating to the ways in which the bhadralok ate their food as well as to the ways in which the bhadramahila cooked dainty dishes. In so far as they were shot through with symbolic meanings and ‘civilisational attributes’, cooking and eating transcended their functionality and became cultural practices, with a strong ideological-pedagogical content that continued to inhabit the discursive space of nationalist thought through the late-colonial period. The Bengali/Indian kitchen, so strongly reviled in European colonialist discourses as veritable purgatory, became a critically important symbolic space in the emerging ideology of domesticity in the late-nineteenth century. The gastronomic excesses of gluttonous British officials—so crucial in asserting the physical superiority of a masculine Raj—became an object of ridicule in bhadralok culinary texts, signifying the grossness of a materialistic Occident. And yet, serving the ‘nation’ on a platter did not involve, for the Hindu bhadralok, a simplistic drawing of exclusivist communal boundaries in matters of food. As is evident from the repertoire of dishes expected of an ideal grihini, food belonging to other religious and cultural traditions found its way to the bhadralok's table, and Bengal's manifold local traditions were freely drawn upon in an effort to delineate a regional palate. And, for all of the contestatory character of this cultural politics of food, the perceived discipline and orderliness of the Western kitchen were considered things worthy of emulation. It was through this curious interplay of emulation, adaptation, contestation and resistance that some of the least noticed but nevertheless most important cultural practices of bhadralok nationalism unfolded in the Bengali kitchen. And, if this kitchen appeared to be mysterious in a negative sense in the colonizer's gaze, we do need to think through these mysteries in a much more nuanced manner in order to unravel some of the less explored intricacies of nationalism.
