The making of a ‘new’ hybrid cuisine

No discussion of ‘hybridity’ is complete without engaging with Bhabha's theorization of the ‘hybrid’ as ‘almost the same but not quite’.Footnote ⁵ Here a word of explanation is called for regarding how the concept of ‘hybridity’ has been defined in this paper. In principle, Bhabha's argument that the colonizer and the colonized were both constitutive of the experiential domain of colonialism is accepted, but ‘hybridity’ here has been defined as the intermingling of different elements in food, resulting in something completely new, and which represents the original only in a very remote sense. Seeking the origins of ‘Bengali’ cuisine will tend to dilute the diversity of the culinary cultures from which this cuisine stemmed.

Hybridity became a frequent feature in the recipes we find in most of the Bengali periodicals from around the late-nineteenth century. For example, a mutton chop recipe or a potato stew recipe contained ingredients like ghee or clarified butter, often used in Hindu ritual practices and Indian cooking.Footnote ⁶ But, at least for some, consuming the ‘foreign’ also included the danger of adapting something that was alien. Thus this alien had to be indigenized, and this process had to be so smooth that someone could easily gorge on a muffin, and yet not be bothered about losing their identity, since the muffin was made of potato and patol (a vegetable produced and consumed in Bengal).Footnote ⁷

The ‘foreign’ was sought to be incorporated into the indigenous through the invention of a ‘Vedic tradition’. The attempt is evinced in the writings of two members of the Tagore clan: Rwitendranath Tagore and Prajnasundari Devi, the wife of Lakshminath Bezbaruah, the famous littérateur of Assam. In her cookbook Prajnasundari did not show any alarm over the mixing of cuisines. She was not particularly concerned about preserving the authenticity of food. Similarly, Tagore too was not critical of the hybridity of Bengali cuisine. In fact, in his Mudir Dokan, he observed, ‘Just as the Europeans are adapting our rice these days, European food like chops and cutlets have been domesticated (gharoa) amongst us.’Footnote ⁸

Both Tagore and Prajnasundari were of the opinion that several European dishes derived their names from those of Indian ones. And, in playing on the partial homonymy that existed between the European and Sanskrit names of certain foodstuffs, Tagore made an elaborate argument that European food derived from Indian cuisine and thus has always been hybrid. He argued that most European food, like pies and pancakes, derived their names from ‘Vedic’ roots, for example, the Vedic ‘pup’ (cake) and ‘pie’ belonged to the same genre of food. Since Vedic ‘pup’ had transformed into the Bengali ‘pua’, it was not improbable that ‘pup’ had been distorted to become ‘pie’ in English. He further argued that ‘pastry’ was derived from the Sanskrit ‘pishtak’. For Tagore, the English always ‘fed on Indians’. He argued that even bread, which constituted one of the staples of the English diet, was not English but had Vedic origins.Footnote ⁹

Not to be left behind, Prajnasundari claimed that both the Bengali word ‘bhaji’ and the English word ‘fry’ originated from the Sanskrit etymon associated with cooking, ‘bhrija’.Footnote ¹¹

Thus, according to Tagore and Prajnasundari, all that was ‘new’ had its origins in the Aryan Vedic tradition. They argued that the food that modern India presumed to be a mixture of ‘the East and the West’ was, in reality, a product of the Aryan Vedic tradition.Footnote ¹² This reference to the ‘Aryan’ tradition was a fixation of cultural nationalism. Thus, on many occasions middle-class Hindus claimed that whatever was labelled ‘modern’ or even ‘Western’, such as women's education or women's volition in marriage, had existed in ancient India.

In Bengal, the middle-class literati imagined and constructed a ‘Golden Age’, when, for example, they argued, all women knew how to cook. Chakravarti argues that nineteenth-century Hindu men constructed a Hindu-Aryan identity to compensate for the loss of their self-esteem in the wake of colonial conquest.Footnote ¹³ Given its association with vigour, conquest, and expansion, the Aryan identity was seductive for Hindus in general. It was more so for Bengali Hindu men, given the colonial state's derision of their ‘effeminacy’.Footnote ¹⁴

In many senses Tagore's strategic play on homonymy was inspired by the work of comparative philology that had been pioneered by British Orientalists like Sir William Jones. Jones had argued that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, Celtic, and Old Persian all descended from one proto Indo-European language.Footnote ¹⁵ It was again he who publicized the claim that Vedic literature was the repository of the most ancient written records of Indo-European languages.Footnote ¹⁶ Tagore's arguments were predicated on romanticizing an ‘Indian’ tradition and were often conjectural. Nonetheless, the chief point is that a search for the indigenous etymology of ‘foreign’ words enabled the middle class to soak in ‘new’ pleasures because the ‘new’ in their discourse of taste was interpreted as ‘not-so-new’.

The middle class were discovering themselves as a community of taste through their adaptation, incorporation, and localization of new pleasures. Concrete examples of such hybridization are replete in the recipe columns and cookbooks available in colonial Bengal. The first Bengali cookbook, Pakrajeshwar, came out in 1831.Footnote ¹⁷Byanjan-Ratnakar (1858) followed next.Footnote ¹⁸Pakprabandha, written by a Bengali woman who remained anonymous, appeared in 1879. However, none of these had the success of Bipradas Mukhopadhyay's (1842–1914) cookbook, the Soukhin Khadya-Pak, published in 1889. Later, two volumes of Soukhin Khadya-Pak were published together as the Pak Pranali (1906/07).Footnote ¹⁹ Before the book came out, Mukhopadhyay had been publishing a monthly periodical of recipes (also known as Pak Pranali) since 1883. The next significant publication in the genre was Prajnasundari Devi's (1870–1950) Amish o Niramish Ahar (1907).

The image of the ‘modern Bengali woman’ was at the centre of these cookbooks, which aimed at expanding her ‘modern’ culinary skills. In fact, in the nineteenth century various domestic manuals and women's journals began publishing recipes for the benefit of the ‘modern’ women. And from the late nineteenth century the inclusion of culinary skills in the educational curriculum became an issue for discussion.Footnote ²⁰ When middle-class Bengalis insisted upon the inclusion of cookery in the curriculum at schools, they often argued that this was because cookery was a part of the curriculum in Britain too. However, this cannot simply be called a ‘derivative’ modernity. Unlike in Victorian England, where cookery was clearly part of women's education, in colonial Bengal the discourse of cooking was gendered in a more complex way.

In Victorian England a clear-cut demarcation was visible between the public and the private spheres, whereas in colonial Bengal the demarcation was much more complex. Although women were situated in the space of the family kitchen and had the responsibility for preparing food, the knowledge of cooking came primarily from men. While women were not considered lesser beings so far as the art of cuisine was concerned, it was often lamented that they had forgotten their natural knack in the matter. Hence women needed the guidance of men. Cooking became an object of reification. It was defined as the most important of all household activities since it produced food. Everything around cooking had to be sacrosanct and clean as it came to be prepared with Yagna (a Hindu worshipping ritual involving fire), and the kitchen was considered a sacred place where even the scriptures could be read.Footnote ²¹ According to Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay, the educationist and journalist, a home that did not promote good cooking was not a good home as it neglected a component of the sacred rites.Footnote ²² But what was considered to be a woman's domain was being co-opted by middle-class men who began to take a keen interest in the subject of cookery and wrote about it. But then writing a recipe was a much more complex and gendered performance. Recipes were written from within a public/professional domain instead of a private/domestic one. Women were active participants in contributing to recipe columns and writing cookbooks. The innumerable recipes that women produced cannot be explained away as being engendered by the hand of patriarchy. Through the production of recipes, cooking as a domestic act crossed the boundaries of house and home. Through the writing of recipes, women created new identities for themselves, which were not much different from those of the men who also wrote recipes. Thus when we juxtapose Bipradas Mukhopadhyay's cookbook with Prajnasundari Devi's we have to read them as creative endeavours of gastronomes, setting aside their differences in gender.

Both Mukhopadhyay's and Prajnasundari's cookbooks are classic testimonies to the changing diet of the Bengalis. The vegetarian recipes that Mukhopadhyay described were mostly made from vegetables already available in India. However, the cosmopolitan Bengali gastronome also took delight in new vegetables such as cabbage and cauliflower. Since cabbage was a new vegetable, Mukhopadhyay deemed it necessary to first introduce cabbage to his readers.

Mukhopadhyay tried to make his readers aware of different categories of cabbage, like drumhead and sugar loop, and they also learnt from Pak Pranali that cabbage seeds were brought into India every year from abroad. A detailed discussion of how to choose and clean a cabbage preceded the recipes in the first volume of Pak Pranali, the periodical: this discussion was imperative since cabbage was a new vegetable.Footnote ²³ In the periodical, as well as the cookbook, so-called Bengali recipes happily coexisted with ‘new’ recipes, which ranged from British to Italian to French cuisines. Recipes included Jewish fried fish, Italian mutton, French cutlets, English chops, plum pudding, ginger pudding, hasty pudding, orange jelly, Irish stew, orange custard, and the like. What has to be noted in this context is that the nomenclature itself was becoming hybrid. For example, Mukhopadhyay had recipes for ‘English bhuni khichuri’ (khichuri being a dish made of rice, lentils, and spices consumed commonly by people all over India) and ‘English shik kebab’ (shik kebab again was a form of skewered mutton generally eaten by the Muslims in India).Footnote ²⁴ The British who resided in India loved khichri/khichuri.Footnote ²⁵ Mukhopadhyay went one step further and gave an English flavour to Indian dishes. He was creating a cuisine that was a synthesis of incorporation and localization. The end result was a ‘new’ cuisine that would shape the identity of the Bengali middle class.

This play on nomenclature was perhaps most evident in both Mukhopadhyay's and Prajnasundari's use of the term ‘curry’, which was often an English innovation of an Indian recipe of a mixture of spices. We get to know about recipes such as lamb curry, egg curry, prawn curry, and English rohu fish curry in Mukhopadhyay's cookbook.Footnote ²⁶ However, for Mukhopadhyay, curry had an entirely different definition, quite dissimilar to what the British recipe writers had to say. Mukhopadhyay defined curry thus: ‘Europeans learnt to cook “curry” from the Jews and the Jews learnt it from the Muslims.’Footnote ²⁷ When Mukhopadhyay described recipes for ‘curry’, he was quite emphatic that he was either following the Muslims or the English. He did not consider ‘curry’ to be a Hindu dish and hence put its name within quotes. He wrote that the English did not use ground spices in their ‘curry’ and he invented something called the ‘Calcutta-curry-powder’ which was made of a mixture of one tablespoon of poppy seeds, one tablespoon of turmeric powder, half a teaspoon of red chilli powder, half a teaspoon of ground cumin, and one teaspoon of salt.Footnote ²⁸ Collingham argues that curry was created for the British in India.Footnote ²⁹ Her interpretation of curry is, of course, drawn from her readings of Anglo-Indian memoirs and cookbooks. However, it seems from Mukhopadhyay's account that the colonized were eager to erase all their connections with curry. Hence Mukhopadhyay connected curry to a different trajectory, but his insistence on curry being an outside influence on Indian cuisine should not make us think that he was interested in some sort of an indigenist gastronomy. Far from it: Mukhopadhyay, in fact, was the archetypal middle-class Bengali whose ‘life-world’ was a mélange of both British and Indian elements.

Although Prajnasundari was not so emphatic about severing ties with curry, she hardly used the English formulaic recipe for curry, which was generally made out of a hodgepodge of spices known as curry powder.Footnote ³⁰ She used different recipes for curry and these recipes were applied to quintessentially Bengali vegetables like enchor (green jackfruit) and mocha (banana blossom), and fish like hilsa and parshe (almost iconic ingredients of Bengali cuisine).Footnote ³¹ She used different spices for each curry recipe. Again, her play on names in this context is noteworthy. She named one dish ‘firingi [Anglo-Indian/Eurasian/European] curry’ even though she used patol (wax gourd), a vegetable native to Bengal, in the recipe.Footnote ³² Neither firingi nor curry can be called either British or Bengali, but hybrid.

Although Mukhopadhyay claimed that ‘curry’ did not originate in India and hence could not exactly be called an ‘Indian’ dish (here he equated India with Hindus), he was not necessarily aiming to create a so-called authentic and indigenous cuisine. His book included a number of recipes from other regions of India. For example, he stated that yellow lentils grew better in northern India than in Bengal and therefore they tasted better if they were cooked in a ‘Hindustani’ (non-Bengali, specifically northern Indian) way. In this recipe, Mukhopadhyay incorporated asafoetida which was not used frequently in Bengali cuisine as yet.Footnote ³³ Similarly he included recipes for Kashmiri lentils and Gujarati dishes in his cookbook. In drawing from other regions, his intention was not to make Bengali food a stand-in for all-India food. Rather, he wanted to enrich Bengali food by drawing upon a variety of gastronomic traditions from around the country and, indeed, from other national cultures.

In his essay on Bengali cuisine and nationalism, Sengupta describes how the kitchen, the essence of Bengali domesticity, became integral to Bengali Hindu middle-class nationalism.Footnote ³⁴ He writes about Bengali and Indian kitchens in the same vein, thus promoting the idea that the nationalist discourse of the Bengali Hindu middle class was just another form of Indian nationalism. However, Mukhopadhyay and many other such cookbook writers clearly demonstrate that their intention was to make Bengali cuisine more iconoclastic and global, rather than to intervene at the national level or indeed to make this new food part of the nationalist discourse.

Kiranlekha Ray, whose book Jalkhabar came out in circa 1924, showed similar tendencies in writing recipes.Footnote ³⁵ Through her emphasis on the use of language, Ray made a clear distinction between what was foreign and what was not. A significant feature of her cookbook was that whenever she wrote down a recipe that did not have an Indian name, she put the word in English script alongside the Bengali script. If she wrote ‘omelette’ in Bengali, it was always followed by the word ‘omelette’ in English within parenthesis. Similarly, when Ray used highly technical terms, such as ‘crystallization’, ‘amorphous’, and ‘fermentation’, she preferred to write the word in English. However, she showed considerable courage in incorporating ‘foreign’ elements into ‘traditional’ recipes’. Although her husband professed, in the introduction to her cookbook, that the recipes for yoghurt and ‘sandesh’ were authentic recipes from Varendrabhumi (northern Bengal), she had included vanilla and strawberry essences in these preparations.Footnote ³⁶

Ray came from what might be called an upper-class Bengali Hindu background. Her husband was a landlord in Dighapatia in northern Bengal. He was a member of the Varendra cultural society which took an active interest in promoting the regional history of Varendrabhumi. He also encouraged his wife to write Varendra Randhan, a history of food in this region. Writing a history of a region was definitely an integral part of self-fashioning because it excavated the ‘life-world’ of the people of the region. This was a time during which Bengal as a cultural entity became an object of academic and antiquarian inquiry.Footnote ³⁷ What is noteworthy in this context is that even within the idea of Bengal, we find a sub-regional consciousness of history. This middle-class project of writing history was aimed at infusing a sense of belonging in the region. Indeed in other parts of India too, for instance in contemporary Maharashtra, there was a keen interest in sub-regional specializations. Many such histories developed around the narrative of caste-based identity formations.Footnote ³⁸ Sudhir Kumar Mitra's Hooghly Jelar Itihas o Bangasamaj, Satish Chandra Mitra's Jashohar-Khulnar Itihas or Kiranlekha Ray's Varendra Randhan exemplify how a region's history was imagined to have existed in everyday life.Footnote ³⁹ This sense of belonging in a region, however, was as much about figuring out the ‘traditional’ recipes of the Varendra region as about having a ‘jalkhabar’ (generally an evening snack but it can also mean breakfast) that consisted of a jam tart or grilled chicken.Footnote ⁴⁰ It is possible to perceive a self-conscious separation of Ray's class position here, for she would surely have known that such ‘jalkhabar’ would have sounded alien to an ordinary middle-class person, even in the cities of Calcutta and Dhaka. What one ate in the form of ‘jalkhabar’ imbued the gastronomic narrative of Bengal with a cosmopolitan flavour. In this context it should be mentioned that ‘sandesh’, something claimed as ‘authentic Bengali’ by Ray's husband, was actually made from chhana or cottage cheese that the Portuguese had brought into Bengal.Footnote ⁴¹ These new recipes did not remain confined to cookbooks. New eateries that sprang up in colonial Bengal and new feasts often served such new and hybrid food.

‘Old’ and ‘new’ food: Reformulating the rhetoric of caste

Gastronomic pleasures reached their heights by the end of nineteenth century, both because of the slowly increasing number of hotels and restaurants and because of the new cookbooks that made it easier to enjoy ‘exotic’ cuisine at home. For many Indians, consuming ‘new’ food was not always possible within the domestic sphere. For them, the new hotels and the restaurants that sprang up in Calcutta in the nineteenth century had their attractions. They formed a convenient locus for those who wanted to enjoy a chicken cutlet without being concerned about polluting their home. At the same time, the pleasure of eating out could be realized in these new public eateries. This new experience, however, did not pass without comment. A central point of criticism was that the city had become a place of excess and greed. The expenditure on the feasts symbolized that excess in consumption. Closely connected with this criticism, however, was a rhetoric of caste that had been reformulated and readjusted to suit modern times. Thus the defence of caste became a defence of a simple and aesthetic ‘tradition’, imagined in an idyllic village life.

While the middle class certainly visited the new public eateries, the food that they consumed there was mostly denied entry into the middle-class Bengali Hindu household. Bipin Chandra Pal (1858–1932) wrote about this public/private divide in Calcutta.Footnote ⁴² When he first came to Calcutta from Sylhet in eastern Bengal, Pal stayed in a hostel. Residents were not allowed to bring in food that could offend Hindu sensibilities. However, by this time loaves and biscuits had become quite common in Calcutta and there was no ban on bringing these foods into the hostel. Residents could of course consume what they wanted outside the hostel.Footnote ⁴³ Pal and his friends discovered the pleasures of the new gastronomy in the newly emerging hotels. Later, Pal, obliged to be on a vegetarian diet after his mother's death, followed it only at home. But, as he tells us, his evening meals always consisted of the boiled eggs and crabs that he relished in the public eateries.Footnote ⁴⁴ There was thus a sharp distinction between what was consumed at home and what was eaten in the public eateries. However, notions of the public and the private also need to be problematized in this context. A hostel, which was considered a ‘public’ place as opposed to home, had rigid rules for food, whereas at least some—like the Tagores and other upper middle-class Hindus—had started enjoying ‘new’ food in their homes. But generally speaking the newly emerging hotels served as the locus of gastronomic pleasure. These eateries not only introduced new food, they also changed the eating patterns of the middle class.

The Spences’ hotel was one of the first hotels established in Calcutta in the 1830s. In the 1860s it transformed into a limited company owned by both the British and Indians. In 1841, a second hotel, named the Auckland hotel, started up, which later became the famous Great Eastern hotel, where Bipin Chandra Pal and his friends were counted as frequent visitors. Bengalis also started taking an active interest in the hotel business in European quarters in the 1870s and 1880s. The Sen brothers, for instance, started the Esplanade hotel in 1874 and another the next year.Footnote ⁴⁵

Those who frequented the fancy restaurants set up by the British, and later by the upper-class Bengalis, in Bengal were small in number. The lower ranks of the middle class were more likely to visit small eateries and hotels. By the 1940s, several small eating places had cropped up in Calcutta. These tiny eateries, like the Basanta Cabin, serving toast and boiled egg, and the Chachar hotel, were all run by Bengalis. Two other small Bengali hotels called Café-de-Monico and the Bengal Restaurant were established around 1936. Although many of these hotels were given so-called English names such as the Café-de-Monico, they were more likely to be owned by local people. Other eateries called ‘pice hotels’ (where a full meal was supposedly served for one-sixteenth of a rupee) or ‘bhater hotels’ (rice hotels where daily meals were served), which catered to people with small budgets, chiefly students, also emerged by the 1940s. These places served meals consisting of rice at a cheap price.Footnote ⁴⁶ In Adarsha Hindu Hotel (Ideal Hindu Hotel), the acclaimed novel by Bibhutibhshan Bandopadhyay, the famous Bengali littérateur (1894–1950), the hotel was primarily a rice hotel where daily meals were served for daily wage earners and other office workers.Footnote ⁴⁷ The hotel was situated near the railway station so that the travellers could easily come and eat at there. Although not one of the high-end hotels, this hotel was divided hierarchically into first and second class.Footnote ⁴⁸ While those who ate in first class would get better quality food, like split green gram, those who ate in second class could only expect a combination of red gram and split black gram.Footnote ⁴⁹ Often the latter's lentil soup would be mixed with rice starch if the supply was less than the number of customers.Footnote ⁵⁰ Bandopadhyay's novel described how these rice hotels functioned and portrayed an image of an ideal rice hotel where everyone would eat similar meals.

Overall, the new culinary pleasures were enjoyed by a wide social spread, although to a limited extent. Since many of these foodstuffs were produced on a large scale, their price was naturally quite low. As a result, new food like tea could be consumed even by those on the lower rungs of the social ladder. A number of Bengali novels of the period attest to the fact that even the poorest took delight in drinking tea. Thus in a sense the pleasure cut across class and caste boundaries, which were becoming a matter of angst among many middle-class Bengali Hindus. Ratarati (Over the Night), a short story written by Rajshekhar Basu (1880–1960) (who wrote under nom de plume Parashuram and who was a famous Bengali satirist) demonstrates this point. In Ratarati, Charan Ghosh, a middle-class gentleman, comes to a hotel, called the Anglo-Mughlai Café and located somewhere in Calcutta, with his friend Mr Chatterjee in order to find his son Bantul.Footnote ⁵¹ Charan Ghosh is aghast by the smell of meat in the restaurant. However, it is full of young customers, like Bantul, who take delight in foodstuffs like ‘French Malpoa’ (a Bengali pancake) made from chicken.Footnote ⁵² But what really captured the imagination of the people was tea. In this context, the endeavours of the Indian Tea Association to popularize tea were very successful indeed.Footnote ⁵³ In fact, as Collingham argues, tea often improved intercommunal relations. It was considered to be free from the burden of associations with purity and hence easier to share with members of the other castes.Footnote ⁵⁴ It was this potential of the new public eateries to expand the frontiers of social interaction that attracted criticism from respectable middle-class society.

Ramesh Chandra Ray was a doctor who wrote a tract on the restaurants that were gradually emerging in Calcutta. By the 1920s they had become ubiquitous in Calcutta. Ray was concerned about the unhygienic atmosphere and the unhealthy food in these restaurants. However, he made a cultural analysis and in the process brought class into the sphere of nutrition.Footnote ⁵⁵ It seems from his tract that, for Ray, restaurants implied small, ‘low’ eateries and not the new and extremely sophisticated large restaurants, mostly established by the British. The latter were hardly frequented by the middle class. Upper-class Bengali Hindus sometimes visited these clubs and restaurants, but not the middle middle or the lower middle classes. It is for this reason that Ray considered students to be the most important patrons of the restaurants. These restaurants, according to Ray, were made dirty and unhygienic by their staff who, in Ray's own words, ‘are recruited from a class in which venereal is almost universal’.Footnote ⁵⁶ There could be a ‘gentleman proprietor’, but, in Ray's opinion, he was deceived by his personnel who cooked and served at the restaurants.Footnote ⁵⁷ Ray made a lengthy analysis of the adulteration of food by the lower-class staff in the restaurants. He described curry that was made from stale meat and leftover cutlets that were converted into potato chops; veal was passed off as lean mutton and lard was used in several restaurants in place of ghee.

In a satirical essay, Bholanath Mukhopadhyay ridiculed the new middle-class gentlemen who ate with various castes in the new restaurants.Footnote ⁵⁸ Similar was the surprise of Durgacharan Ray who wrote a fictional travelogueFootnote ⁵⁹ in which he described how the gods who had come down from heaven to take a tour of the world were aghast at the way Bengali Hindu men were consuming food prepared by Muslims, which constituted a threat to the caste status of the upper caste Hindus.Footnote ⁶⁰ Both Mukhopadhyay and Ray resented the idea of eating with other castes, which was a characteristic feature of the public eateries, as opposed to the communal eating of earlier times when men only ate with their caste brethren. In a sense these authors were contributors to a discourse of taste, refined in content, and in many senses defined by a negation of other tastes.

The reference to caste was thus central to the discourse of taste. It has been argued by scholars like S. N. Mukherjee that although bhadralok (respectable society, chiefly represented by the Bengali Hindu middle class) as a category was exclusively a Hindu group, caste did not play a role in the selection of this group.Footnote ⁶¹ Men who held a similar economic position, enjoyed a similar style of living, and received a similar education could be considered a bhadralok.Footnote ⁶² While it is true that it was possible for men belonging to the lower castes to climb up the social ladder on the basis of the characteristics mentioned by Mukherjee, it does not undermine the fact that the significance of caste never really died down for the bhadralok. It may not have played a role in the formation of the middle class as a class, but it was ensconced in the quotidian identity of the middle class. In fact, the caste question was being reformulated and intrinsically related to the issue of food as ‘pure’ and ‘impure’. Certain types of food such as rice came to be imagined in terms of ‘pure’ or ‘impure’. The sharing of cooked food, basically meaning rice, symbolized the unity of the family. Family in this context implied clan. Thus if a person partook of rice cooked by another, it meant that the latter's clan was accepted by the former's clan.Footnote ⁶³ This association of cooked food with rice is best exemplified in Bipin Chandra Pal's memoir in which he narrates an incident that took place in his hostel in Calcutta: an inmate refused to have rice cooked by his friends since he was a Brahmin and his friends were not. However, he did not mind consuming curries or dal (lentils) made by the non-Brahmins. He told his friends that no one would ever ask him if he had taken curries or dal cooked by non-Brahmins.Footnote ⁶⁴ As Pal said, ‘The Bengali idiom never used curries or dal as the name for cooked food, bhat or cooked rice was the only term used in this context.’Footnote ⁶⁵ In an essay on ‘traditional’ feasts, Jogendrakumar Chattopadhyay, a noted journalist, discussed in detail the fact that rice was served only in the houses of the Brahmins. No one partook of rice in the house of a person ranking lower in the caste hierarchy. In fact, as Chattopadhyay claimed, Shudras considered rice served at a Brahmin's place as prasad (sacred food that is offered to the gods) and not merely food.Footnote ⁶⁶ Caste thus became an element of the past that was to be cherished.

These issues regarding the relationship between food taboos and caste can be understood most clearly in the case of the new social feasts, which became a major irritant for those imagining this ‘tradition’. The new forms of caste rigidities that emerged were clearly visible in the critique of new feasts. Interestingly, Kedarnath Majumdar (d.1333 BS [circa 1926]), who wrote a regional history of Maymansingha, noted with ridicule that there was a reverse casteism by the lower castes, in this case the Untouchables, who refused to take rice served by the Vaidyas and the Kayasthas (who ranked lower than the Brahmins in caste hierarchy but were much higher than the Untouchables). Muslims too refused to eat at the house of the Kayasthas, which they had always done in the past.Footnote ⁶⁷

Although there was a difference in opinion on the role of caste in social feasts, one unifying theme ran through these discussions of feasts. This unifying theme was that of a simple pristine village life where money did not have an overriding influence. In the self-fashioning of the middle class, money took a backseat and learning, which was reflected in culture, civility, and respectability, became a predominant factor.Footnote ⁶⁸ In the discourse of taste, the ideal type of Bengali cuisine seemed to be the regular affair it was in the villages, where caste rules were observed almost as aesthetic practices. Caste and money became interlinked through the critique of the new feasts.

Caste was thus interpreted in terms of a just society and a value-system. The new feasts were disdained not just because they flouted caste rules, but also because many felt that these feasts were an excuse for squandering money. Calcutta's nouveau riche became responsible for transgressing the caste rules as well as for ‘vulgar’ display of splendour in the discourse of taste. Majumdar convincingly demonstrates in her work that from the late nineteenth century every aspect of the Bengali marriage ceremony assumed a strictly ritualized, standard form, with its attendant feasts and trousseau.Footnote ⁶⁹ Giving of lavish gifts was accompanied by printing menu cards, not just for weddings, but also for other occasions such as engagement ceremonies. These menu cards provided the upper and the upper middle classes with an opportunity to exhibit their wealth through new modes of display.

A 1925 wedding menu card from urban Calcutta discloses the enormous array of food that was served at the celebration. The card was divided into different sections, like vegetarian, non-vegetarian (fish) and non-vegetarian (meat), finger food, pickles, fresh fruits, dried fruits, desserts, and various kinds of juice.Footnote ⁷⁰ The list was a long one. Vegetarian items included fried flour bread, fried eggplant, fried pointed gourd, sweet rice, green jackfruit curry, cabbage ball curry, mango chutney, ginger chutney, dried apricot chutney, and papaya chutney. Non-vegetarian items included rice made with fish, a vegetable made with fish heads, a hodgepodge of fish, bekti (a type of fish) fry, shrimp with bottle gourd, fish balls, prawn kebab, two other prawn preparations, roast carp, hilsa (a type of fish) made with yoghurt, and four forms of meat preparations. Among the fruits offered were oranges, apples, pineapples, mangoes, pears, guavas, papayas, Indian plums, cucumbers, and bananas.

One engagement menu surpassed even this wedding menu. In 1927, an engagement ceremony for Indira Devi served fried flour bread, fried leafy vegetables, fried pointed gourd, Bengal gram, vegetables made with banana blossom, cauliflower and peas curry, cottage cheese curry, rice made with cottage cheese, cucumber raita (a yoghurt dish), ground raisin chutney, and a chutney made from dried apricots and dates among the vegetarian items. There was also a long list of non-vegetarian food, and unlike the former wedding menu, this menu's dessert section was divided into three sub-sections, according to different categories of sweet. Even beverages had two sections: the juice section and the ‘fancy water’ section, which incorporated new beverages like soda water, lemonade, lime juice soda, and ice-cream soda.Footnote ⁷¹ Another engagement ceremony two years later, in 1929, incorporated peach pudding, pear pudding, pineapple pudding, and ice cream in its menu.Footnote ⁷²

This excessive expenditure on food served at weddings became a point of criticism for the middle class as they felt that this huge display of money destroyed the sanctity and simplicity that had been regular features of earlier feasts. The new feasts epitomized the increasing dominance of the market economy and the professionalization of cooking, and were juxtaposed by the middle class with the ‘traditional’ feasts that the women of the house used to cook.

The commercialization of agriculture had resulted in a decline in peasant subsistence production which necessitated a migration to the towns. A large number of the men who migrated from the villages to the city in search of work often took up cooking as a profession. While at home cooking was considered a feminine task, when translated into being a profession, it became a male job, making for a distinct demarcation in the realm of culinary practice. Thus, increasingly, occupational cooks who were mostly men became a common sight at social feasts.

Not only was the practice of hiring cooks, who were mostly male, an intrusion into the domestic space of the middle-class Bengalis, it was also an indication of the growing professionalization of something that had been considered a ‘natural’ task. Unlike each household, which had its own novel cuisine, the hired cooks implied that a standardization of cooking was taking place. Mahendranath Datta lamented that with the coming of the Brahmin cooks, the uniqueness of food cooked by each woman disappeared for ever.Footnote ⁷³ Basantakumar Chaudhuri wrote:

This emphasis on novelty is inextricably linked with the question of authenticity. As Terrio argues in the context of chocolate manufacturing in France, craft commodities that bear the social identity of their makers are generally produced in limited quantities. Traditional methods are used in crafting these commodities, and hence they provide continuity with the past.Footnote ⁷⁵ These commodities are different from those produced for the mass market. Terrio aptly says that the historicity of these goods gives them special value. Similarly, in the case of women's cooking in colonial Bengal, what made it special was this imagined continuity of their cooking, which was different from what the male cooks conjured up. The latter's food, as already stated, smacked of standardized cooking made in return for money. According to some texts, Westernization led to the degeneration of indigenous culture and a decline in principles.Footnote ⁷⁶ The aesthetic value of a proper ‘Bengali’ feast seemed to lie in its domesticity.

There was, however, hardly any consensus on the issue of what exactly constituted the aesthetic of a ‘Bengali’ feast. The degeneration of indigenous culture was a widely debated issue. The custom of ‘sora bandha’ (taking leftover food home) is an instance which showed fissures in the discourse of taste. Saratkumari Chaudhurani (1861–1920), who was a regular contributor to journals like Bharati, Bharati o Balak, Sadhana, Bangadarshan, Manasi, Sabujpatra, Manasi o Marmmabani and Biswabharati, welcomed the disappearance of ‘sora bandha’, which she described as a vulgar ritual, from new feasts.Footnote ⁷⁷ ‘Sora bandha’ implied that guests could take whatever they could not eat (and even more food) back home with them. For Chaudhurani, therefore, the new feasts symbolized civilization and an advance in aesthetics. However, for those who idealized an ‘imagined’ village life, the obliteration of this custom signified an erosion of affective memories. According to Jogendrakumar Chattopadhyay, there were two reasons for the disappearance of this custom. First of all, he held Western civilization responsible for disaffection for the family. Second, he argued that new feasts had become so elaborate and expensive that it was no longer possible to sustain such a ritual.Footnote ⁷⁸ Chattopadhyay narrated an incident to elaborate his point:

In a way romanticizing customs like ‘sora bandha’ was linked to the idealization of a village life, which the middle class had left behind when they migrated to the big city. For a long time the indigenous middle class who settled down in Calcutta had ties with the rural areas of Bengal where they had their permanent homes, and they regarded their residences in Calcutta as temporary. Even when they permanently settled down in Calcutta, the middle class often retained their rural ties. Social relationships of this group tended to be determined by the villages they had come from rather than the city itself.Footnote ⁸⁰ The image of a self-sustaining village community became a locus where an archetypal Bengali cuisine was a possibility. Hemantabala Devi (b.1894) compared the ‘traditional’ world with the ‘modern’ world in a rhetorical passage in her autobiography:

There was a subtle critique of colonial economy in the romanticization of villages and of subsistence economy. Panchkari Bandopadhyay, a well-known journalist, narrated nostalgically that no one ever bought rice from the market in the past. Villagers had their own paddy fields which would supply them with whatever they needed. If anyone bought food from the market they would be called ‘lakshmichhara’ (one deserted by Lakshmi, i.e. prosperity).Footnote ⁸² In a sense this glorification of a subsistence economy was a critique of the increasing circulation of money and a growing market economy, which encouraged consumerism. Thus whatever could be bought came to be an object of annoyance for many.

In the imagination of the Bengali middle class, Bengali cuisine was thus associated with a ‘life-world’ that was shaken by the onslaughts of capitalist modernity. The apocryphal village cradled this ‘life-world’. The ‘villager’ became an alter ego for the middle class. The food of the past mentioned in the texts was basically an upper caste Hindu food. The majority of the villagers were Muslims and lower castes like Haris, Bhowries, Dhangars, and Domes. Often, especially in times of scarcity, the lower castes survived on consuming snails, frogs, crabs, shrimps, and even snakes.Footnote ⁸³ Only a few villagers could afford plenty of vegetables, milk, fish, and rice. These groups might have had a few fields of their own where they grew produce. Thus when they shifted to the city, it seemed like a great loss of a ‘life-world’. However, for the majority, that is the lower classes, whether living in the village or in the city, life had never been easy. They benefited neither from the ‘pure’ uncorrupted food imagined by people like Jogendrakumar Chattopadhyay or Panchkari Bandopadhyay, nor from the new pleasures of gastronomy.

It was revealed in a survey on the Bengal Famine of 1943 that the day-labourers, petty agriculturalists, artisans, and traders who formed more than 65 per cent of the population of Bengal could not afford to pay for milk, meat, eggs, vegetables, and sweets. In many cases they produced these products, but even under normal conditions their low average income forced them to sell them in order to purchase rice.Footnote ⁸⁴ An average diet of a lower class villager remained almost unchanged throughout our period. Their diet consisted of very coarse rice and dal (lentils). Vegetables were consumed, but only occasionally.Footnote ⁸⁵ In a survey of a village in the Midnapore district of Bengal, Baboo Bisweshar Banerjee, the deputy collector, found out that an ordinary villager could hardly afford two full meals of coarse rice and they chiefly ate tank plants for their subsistence.Footnote ⁸⁶ The condition of the lower classes varied from one district to another. Irrespective of regional differences, however, it can be argued that a meal twice a day was something that the lower classes could afford only in ordinary times and that the situation changed in times of scarcity.

During these times, the decline in standards of living was steep. Satishchandra Dasgupta, the Gandhian nationalist, led a relief camp during the scarcity of 1931 in Bengal. He reported that in Camp Roumari, in the Rangpur district of eastern Bengal, children ate arum stalks without salt. In another place called Kathgirai, a man named Bastulla ate the dirt that came out after husking rice, and which was generally given to the cow. Observers noticed that men, women, and children remained hungry for three consecutive days. The situation deteriorated to such an extent, reported Khsitishchandra Dasgupta, that Zaher Sheikh, who had been the secretary of a local cooperative bank, survived on arum leaves.Footnote ⁸⁷

The above description of the condition of the people in the villages dealt a rude blow to the romanticization of a village life where a simple and yet aesthetically superior Bengali cuisine might have existed. The dark and macabre sides of gastronomy reached its height with the Bengal Famine of 1943. In a survey on the destitute in Calcutta, Das, a lecturer in anthropology, described the condition of the famine-stricken in detail.Footnote ⁸⁸ He lashed out virulently at the government relief centres in Calcutta, where, he maintained, the food distributed lacked in both quality and quantity. The government's insistence on distributing bajra (millet) in these relief centres wreaked havoc on the digestive systems of the stricken. Their digestive systems, the author suggested, already weakened by consuming unwholesome food, were worsened by eating bajra.Footnote ⁸⁹ A passage from the survey revealed the horrors of the famine:

New pleasures had broken down many caste taboos. The pain of the famine had a similar effect. The ‘purity’ of food or caste remained in texts, but the materiality of the situation made the fluidity of caste much more palpable. The famine almost did away with caste rules regarding interdining.Footnote ⁹¹ In Calcutta, Hindus received cooked food from the Muslims and vice versa.Footnote ⁹² In Bibhutibhshan Bandopadhyay's novel Ashani Sanket (Sign of Thunder), also about the Bengal Famine of 1943, even the priestly class was ready to eat snails (eaten by the lower castes) when the famine struck them.Footnote ⁹³ These violent images left indelible marks on the discourse of taste that the Bengali Hindu middle class had constructed as an epitome of aesthetic and refined gastronomic practices.