Garlick and onions, a drachm of green ginger, ten or twelve pods of capsicum, a tea-spoonful of black pepper, and two or three drachms of turmeric.Footnote 1
Unko shaktidayi banao (It will build strength).Footnote 2
Introduction
The expanse of Indian food history, both methodologically and conceptually, has worked to set up food culture within sites of encounter: food becomes an ontology of the subcontinent, represented through the grains, plants, and herbs of its lands, matched in turn by an epistemological focus on flavour, aromas, texture, and presentation. The earliest texts on India published and circulated in the Western world were careful to delineate the extravagances of Indian cooking as well as the role of food in Indian culture, both in terms of the opulence of the food described and also in terms of the role that food and its consumption played in mapping out the social order.Footnote 3 Other travellers followed suit, describing their encounters with South Asian culture through the particular experience of embodiment that eating presents.Footnote 4 As modes of global finance brought attention—both fiscal and cultural—to the subcontinent, the consumption of food provided a backdrop for more prominent conversations about foodstuff. Imperial histories identify foods that were experienced strongly as demands on the market and remark upon the use of herbs and spices of non-Western origins rising to prominence in European contexts in everyday cooking and eating.Footnote 5 Against this background, Indian food was used to ascribe to Western food a complex history of its imperial experiences, as represented in encounters with culture and commerce that occurred over the dinner table: the Caribbean sugar stirred into steeped Darjeeling tea leaves at high tea, the curry powder accentuating the mayonnaise in a Coronation chicken sandwich, the chilli pepper that gauged the ability of its consumer to tolerate the heat of a foreign imaginary. This rendering of food history is seductive, suggesting a culinary cosmopolitanism that allows its consumer to move in space and time without leaving the dinner table.Footnote 6 The cost of this rendering, however, is self-evident. The West is allotted a complex and layered palette through the maintenance of the belief that the Indian components of the meal remain simplistic and reliable. The food substances are ahistorical, decontextualized, outside of the scope of agricultural change, and given political meaning only in so far as a substance or sensual moment interacts with the greater travails of empire.Footnote 7
Food in India, however, has a history—one that collides, confirms, refutes, and departs from the imperial rendering of it in significant ways. Perhaps more importantly, broader movements in the Indian engagement with imperial modernity identify food as a pertinent topic, relying on notions of the essential, the indigenous, and the ahistorical in ways similar to those employed by cosmopolitan imperial actors. From Gandhian abstention to Tagore's dyspeptic nationalists, the acts of eating, of cooking, and of ingesting are continually called upon to articulate the tensions of the late colonial/high nationalist period.Footnote 8 This is a backdrop to a new history of food in India. While agricultural or economic historians contribute to the rethinking of food substances themselves, a study of the social and cultural resignifying of food provides insight into the ways in which it came to serve as a discursive axle upon which negotiations of modernity turned.Footnote 9
This paper will examine the way in which the discursive deployment of food as a greater anchor of the historical, the political, the economic, and the cultural helped to shape debates about the Indian nation. These moments are situated in late colonial/high nationalist North Indian history, articulated through the circulation of ideas within the Hindi public sphere, and in dialogue with larger imperial and transnational conversations on the subjects at hand. Taking a cue from the subject and agents of this variety of nationalist discourse, the focus of this investigation remains the middle class, itself an imagined ideal at this time.Footnote 10 As such, food is more substantially linked to the transformative social processes of the day: food demands a space for storage and preparation; it has an economic value, both in terms of its purchase and the costs associated with its preparation; finally, it conforms or refutes an understanding of health and wellness, and of pleasure and abstinence, that pull it into the realm of the moral. Most significantly, it moves the centre of discourse away from the abstract and imperially determined spaces of mobility, and instead turns its focus to the spaces of consumption determined by Indian uptake of food ideals and food products.
This genealogy of food will chart three instances in which food was deployed to comment upon or transform the social condition, and maps out the transition to—and eventually from—the period of high nationalism in India. Beginning in the early twentieth century, food emerged as category of analysis and discussion amid broader movements to rationalize and modernize middle-class domestic space, and was made scientific according to the logic of home economics and the new concern over family health. By the 1920s, as the politics of the home made the transition to a more sophisticated politics of the nation, the substantive nature of food products became an indigenous response to the imposition of foreign and synthetic technologies and techniques of birth control, used to articulate desire and to monitor reproductive health. Finally, in the 1930s and 1940s, as new food technologies were developed and introduced, food advertising became the site for a break away from the rigidity of these messages, and yet still relied upon the intersection of the family, its physical and moral constitution, and the health of the nation to make way for innovative modes of consuming food. Taken together, these moments provide insight into the use of food to delineate the historical, but also take steps to historicize the representation of food according to the political demands made of it. More importantly, the deployment of food in these moments destabilizes and reintroduces understandings of home, nation, and consumption as experienced in mid-twentieth century North India.
Food preparation: cookbooks and labour in the Indian kitchen
The question of food in Indian modernity was most dramatically transformed by the political and cultural processes that began to politicize the domestic space and its practices within the broader political spectrum, especially surrounding the role of Indian women within both politics and the home. The late nineteenth century has come to symbolize, in the Indian context, the pinnacle moment of a century of reform centred on the female body and the subject of femininity. Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak connects this process to a decade of imperial control, in which ‘white men saved brown women from brown men’ through a consistent focus on the need to reform women's lives within ‘traditional’ Indian patriarchy.Footnote 11 Partha Chatterjee, in turn, argues that this discursive interchange, established around the plight and state of the Indian female subject, allowed Indian men to articulate a nationalist politic, organized around the reform of their women. This was a politic that they could discard and relegate to the home when a more formal, public, and political organization was formulated with the advent of the Indian National Congress in 1885.Footnote 12 This dismissal of the women's question from the realm of formal politics has occluded the dynamic transformation that resulted from the recentring of gender politics in the domestic space.
Mary Hancock and others have highlighted the role of empire in attempting to structure the Indian home according to the rational, liberal tenets of the modern household.Footnote 13 Focusing on the advent of new realms of ‘scientific’ education made popular in the field of domestic science, the state and various imperial charitable organizations introduced guides to household upkeep and the formal teaching of home economics in new schools for women.Footnote 14 More recently, historians working in vernacular languages in regional contexts have begun to piece together a set of Indian responses to this trend, sketching a coherent arc (characterized by a diverse set of experiences) that gives voice to Indian female-authored acquiescence and resistance to the imperial norms of domesticity imposed upon them—as well as the series of reforms discussed by Indian nationalists. The large body of writing on the household, which exploded from the late 1890s to the 1910s, provides a much more complex, nuanced, and diverse set of interventions, refutations, commentaries upon, and ambivalences to this process, made public in cheap textual material aimed at—and often written by—women.Footnote 15
The idea of ‘home’, however, was itself an imagined ideal. While Chatterjeee and others have relied upon it as a counter to the ‘public’ space of the nation, the new space of informal nation-building was itself undergoing a huge transformation. Rather than resolving the role of women in both imperialism and nationalist protest, what resulted was a radical reworking of the role of the domestic sphere, therein positing ‘home’ as a central ideology of Indian modernity.Footnote 16 The task of containing an indigenous authenticity, replete with the feminine energy of the spiritual East, had to respond also to the modernist leanings of the newly formalized and politicized tenets of national thought. The notion of dichotomous spheres, where men could be modern in public and traditional in private, was itself an imagined state: rather than offering reprieve from public space, the home, instead, was transformed to meet the demands made of it by public politics. The physical and moral constitution of the family was at the centre of this transformation. Where nineteenth-century debates had taken up marriage and education as the targets of gender reform, the twentieth century ushered in the idea of the middle-class nuclear family as a nationalist ideal—gone was the larger context of the joint family, the complexities of kinship ties, and the addition of labourers who amassed around large households. Instead, the focus lay on the housewife, her progeny, and the contested space over which she reigned.
The pragmatics of negotiating this new space of the nuclear family are seldom held up as objects of study and are instead cast as the subject of more intricate explorations of discourse around the home. This is where the history of food and its related effects and activities can offer an intervention: instructions on selecting, cleaning, preparing, and serving food products carries a variety of assumptions, of details, and of revelations about the set-up of the household which are merely hinted at in these other explorations of ‘home’ and ‘nation’. The space of the kitchen, the designation of the cook, and the substantive focus on particularities of the food at hand offer insight into the lived experience of social transformation. For, indeed, the recasting of food and its preparation did touch on these other subjects of debate. However, rather than seeing food preparation and consumption as a product of discourse, initiated as a conscious transformation by the agency of housewives keen on adhering to the new social order, the change in food culture can be seen as a transformative—and also ambivalent—component of a broader project to articulate, identify, and delineate the Nationalist ideals of middle-class life.
The impetus for social change around food consumption took the form of the cookbook, a largely twentieth-century commodity aimed at the newly reading women of the emerging Indian middle class. The idea of the cookbook was not an entirely new one, especially among more affluent families; keeping ledgers of meals cooked, food bought, and instructions for its preparation had been standard practice among large households for centuries. This practice, however, was the product of a much broader set of social and labour relations—domestic labourers who managed the household kept ledgers relating to food costs, and records of meals were kept within the broader context of family lore. The cookbook reconfigured a notion of household labour by raising questions about the distribution of labour in the household and of what constituted ‘women's work’. What was the relationship between the reader and the process of food preparation and distribution in the household? Missing from most guides was a discussion of which members of the household completed which aspects of food preparation, a time-consuming activity for most recipes.
The most glaring difference between the traditional culture of cooking and the instructions set out in printed form was the absence of any mention of the role of the domestic servant, an omission that ignored the lived domestic experience of most of the women in a position to both purchase and read a cookbook. Food and its preparation has traditionally had great significance in Indian culture, as in most areas of the world, and the delineation of hierarchy and status in a household was often represented—and perhaps even reinforced—by the preparation of food. At the same time, because of the anxiety about pollution that was of particular concern to Brahmans, as well as those attempting to attain ‘Brahmanic’ status in society, it was not uncommon to employ a Brahman cook or to keep domestic helpers of ‘outcaste’ status away from kitchen duties.Footnote 17 At the same time, a menstruating woman was considered to be impure and, in some households, was relieved of her kitchen duties if another family member or domestic servant could replace her.Footnote 18 The recipes as they appeared in the cookbook ignored all of these processes and put forth instead an uncomplicated ideal of food preparation that was far removed from the lived experience of cooking and eating in middle-class households. This representation of the Indian household that posited the housewife as primary labourer was itself a move towards envisioning a new kind of domestic space.
The tenacity of this transformational ideal is easily readable in the format of the cookbooks made popular during this time, which tended to be straightforward and simplistic. They generally contained an index of recipes, with each one laid out in similar ways: list of ingredients, cooking instructions, and, sometimes, a note or two on the expected results or the benefits of the dish to the family. While some cookbooks were published by individuals, others were published by women's groups, sometimes to raise funds for a particular cause. For instance, a cookbook compiled by J. A. Sarma in 1933 had ties with regional and religious groups. Though it was published by Chand (one of the most popular women's magazines), Paka-Vijnana (literally, ‘cooking for life’) was commissioned by the Adarsh-Parivar (Ideal Family), a women's group affiliated with the newly founded Hindi Sahitya Samellan (the Hindi Academy), which encouraged the promotion of printed materials in Hindi and had close ties with the Arya Samaj religious movement.Footnote 19 Included on the list of contributors were prominent ranis and maharanis (queens and princesses within the aristocracies of Indian princely states and other landholdings), securing its role as one of the many books sold by women involved with charity work and which featured recipes from individuals celebrated in other fields.Footnote 20
Manirama Sharma, a specialist author of cookbooks who published three different books several years apart, provides an interesting entry point to this genre. His first was a simple cookbook; in his second, Pak-Chandrika, recipes remained the focus, but the first part of the book, entitled ‘On the Subject of the initial preparation of food’, was concerned with matters like ‘the necessity of food’, ‘the most important task of the housewife’, and the ‘signs that it is time to make certain sauces’.Footnote 21 The author also discussed the importance of food to the development of a healthy body, warning that it is a daily project to make—and keep—oneself healthy. He related this to the broader health of the nation, stating that the aim of the book was to create ‘healthier people of the land’.Footnote 22
The most prominent cookbook writer of this period was Yashoda Devi, a descendant of Ayurvedic practitioners, who invoked the science of Ayurvedic medicine when putting together domestic science guides. While Sharma's book and others like it dealt primarily with food, and touched briefly on its larger significance, Yashoda Devi's work had at its root the idea that food and health were intimately connected and that a discussion about one necessarily touched upon the idea of the other. She addressed women's health in her cookbooks, promoting a holistic approach to the specific health care issues that threatened her female readers. Yashoda Devi began her book with an explanation of food and what it does to the body, discussing everything from the correct time to eat to the quality of different oils to food-related causes of illness.Footnote 23 At the same time, the book was region-specific and she took great pains to explain the particulars of the agriculture of North India, including the fruits and vegetables available in each season, along with instructions on what to eat in different sorts of temperature: there are many entries under the rainy season, for instance, and the varieties of mango in the summer have their own entry.Footnote 24 She also included a section on flowers and their use in cooking, as well as different methods of making vegetable curry with them, and dedicated chapters to discerning the quality of onions and other root vegetables, spices, beans, and oil. In so doing, she introduced a logic behind food that wove together questions of embodiment, economy, and environment, and synthesising eating, cooking, and caring as stalwarts of efficient modern living. Yashoda Devi, in turn, referred to her cookbooks as Pakshastras (literally, the written scriptures of nutrition), echoing a Sanskritic turn of phrase that gave historic gravitas to her writings as textually authoritative and backed by the sense of ‘timeless wisdom’ allotted to classical texts of the Hindu tradition. Her invocation of the ‘ancient’ put her readers’ anxieties to rest by smoothing over the aggressive methods of modernization and by presenting them in a familiar form.
Yashoda Devi's biggest contribution, however, was the way in which she used a discussion of food and its consumption to make way for more serious conversations about the body. Her work reached beyond creating tasty food and instead attempted to comment upon the significance of food to general health. In the last chapters of the book she included a guide to ill-health, in which she addressed everyday illnesses and recommended food-related remedies, suggesting the addition or removal of foods from the patient's diet or changes in his or her pattern of food consumption. The illnesses she mentions include high temperatures, stomach upsets, itching, diarrhoea, inflammation of the nose, pimples and boils, illnesses of the ear, and the common cough. She also offered advice about beauty and its maintenance, offering tips on how (and when) to dye one's hair, how to treat the skin, and what to do to prevent hair from falling out. She included a separate section on women's problems, which consisted mostly of menstrual conditions. Further to all of this, she wrote a section on the quality of water, including a discussion of well versus river water as well as hot versus cold water. She also wrote an entry on tips for healthy living, which discussed the appropriate time lapse between eating and sleeping, and various food prohibitions, including the mixing of different varieties of food.
While the cookbook shed new light on the relationship between food, the body, and the maintenance of health for modern housewives, its most disruptive contribution lay in the way in which it reconceptualized the labour traditions around food preparation, distribution, and consumption. The food presented was simply purchased and prepared, generally familiar to the reader, and represented staples of a diet already entrenched by region, class, and common practice. Its symbolism, however, was entirely new: rather than relying upon someone else to make a decision about the daily practices around food consumption, the middle-class housewife was encouraged to imagine food as the key to her and her family's successful transition to modernity. The relegation of women back into the realm of the household, and the subsequent depiction of the domestic sphere as crucial to the nation, worked to solidify the position of the home—and, more specifically, the kitchen—as the centre of indigenous Indian life. The recasting of the labour involved in food preparation and distribution, now undertaken solely by the housewife, worked to reimagine labour relations in the household, undoing the effects of caste, class, and religion that had previously dominated. Food emerged in this context as a fundamental part of the reordering process. Recipes and cookbooks used food to familiarize housewives with the new logic of the modern household. The form of the cookbook and the reordering of food substances within it facilitated more sophisticated conversations about health and wellness, linking the tasks of cooking and preparing food to the health of both the nation and the empire. Taken together, what emerges is the way in which the reordering of the domestic space of the kitchen—and the activities that happened within it—became central to the political project of constructing an image of the nation: at a time when women were being sidelined from formal politics, the domestic sphere was acquiring and shaping a new one of its own.
Food consumption: gendering food production, sexualizing reproduction
The initial boom in cookbook and recipe publishing gave way in the 1920s and 1930s to a more profound commentary on food and its embodied effects which revealed the gendering of food consumption and the importance of sexuality to understandings of what food could do in the body. These conversations took on the broader discourses of sexuality and reproduction, which were interlinked and dominant themes of North Indian popular discourse. As such, food was cast as important to both the performance of sexuality and to the national pledge to create a strong, vibrant, and superior Hindu nation. By the 1920s, the relationship between women and the household—and the role of food within it—had been successfully transformed into a rhetorical ‘truth’—and discursive context—for discussions of modernity and intimacy. In the 1910s, housewives had to be taught to take up their ‘proper’ role in the kitchen to wield some control over the household. By 1930, however, the focus had shifted to more literal questions about the physical constitution of the nation, moving away from the kitchen to the contested space of the marital bed. As nationalist India began to draw communal and communitarian boundaries around the national community, often privileging religious, ethnic or caste communities over the racial make-up of the nation in empire, the question of what made a proto-citizen/colonized subject truly Indian reared its head.Footnote 25 At the same time, a particular strand of Indian eugenics that valued the strong and superior citizen sought to make extinct the socially marginal, economically unproductive, and physically ‘weak’ members of society. Buttressed by the growing importance of global debates about these issues, the question of the authentic Indian resonated along nationalist and also transnational lines. Food, especially in its most basic, substantive form, took centre stage in the popular discussions, not as a cooked commodity as it had done previously, but as an organic, ahistorical, and authentically indigenous substance, invoked in constructions of desiring the nation, but also in the discussions of its appropriate regeneration.
The question of population became an important one in India from the mid-nineteenth century on. Early attempts to define, categorize, and calculate the numbers of the many ‘peoples’ of South Asia had resulted in the refinement of an India-wide census from the 1860s on, made manifest through a wide variety of practices set on collecting information about Indians, their affiliations, and their practices.Footnote 26 As the population debate began to shift transnationally from a concern about the local into a conceptualization of the global, India's place in humanity, as both colony and independent entity, began to take on new significance. Early British eugenicist discourse posited a variety of Indian characteristics that helped define the role of Britons within empire, where brownness gave shape and substance to debates about race and degeneration. In later Anglo-American debates about birth control, India's Hindu (read: non-Catholic) teeming masses made it a prime site for the experiments of birth control advocates Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes.Footnote 27 At the same time, interwar developmental economics also highlighted the interplay between resources, population, and questions of scarcity.Footnote 28
It is in this context of a heightened concern about the constitution of the nation and the pragmatics of its regeneration that the language of science and the question of indigeneity were reframed. Moving away from the specificity of cookbooks and other earlier domestic guides that aimed to regulate the home front, the new turn in women's writing tended to address larger questions of the nation. The interesting turn is that the language of national importance, made evident in the scientific rhetoric used to describe social and economic problems of overpopulation, facilitated a foray into the world of sexuality never before allowed to circulate in polite society. For instance, one author had this advice to offer her audience:
After bathing with sandalwood, applying hari to the body, putting on perfume and having eaten strengthening substance, and wearing clothes of saffron and perfume of musk deer and camphor, or what's available at the time, and having eaten paan, a healthy man who has extreme desire for producing a son and is happy in the love of his dear wife, should go to his wife when his desire is strong. He should adorn his wife with jewels; there should be the desire in both to have intercourse to produce a son.Footnote 29
While the actual curative value of these substances for this purpose is specious at best, the prescriptive language, written in a guide to health, and coupled with the distinctly indigenous nature of the ingredients, lent these instructions a scientific authority. The mention of the desire to produce a son justified a foray into the more illicit acts implied in the encounter. Finally, the mention of a saffron shirt, widely recognized within the Hindu tradition as an auspicious colour, situated desire within a distinctly communal context. Science, in this instance, responded to the social demands made of it.
In her work on the history of smell, Constance Classen argues that smell ‘is cultural, hence a social and historical phenomenon. . . Odours are invested with cultural values and employed by societies as a means of and model for defining and interacting with the world. The intimate, emotionally charged nature of the olfactory experience ensures that such value-coded odours are interiorized by the members of society in a deeply personal way.’Footnote 30 This is a particularly compelling take on the senses that is well articulated by these instructions around conception. The dislocation of the senses invoked here—taste, smell, touch—from a merely physiological set of responses to the stimuli involved makes room for a variety of other factors to enter into this configuration of sense and desire. This set of instructions and others like it focused on the stimulation of the senses and relied upon a variety of organic, indigenous, and substantive ingredients that reinforced discussions of the Indian authentic that were circulating more broadly in the public sphere.
Desire, however, was only one facet of this conversation. It was made a relevant discussion for public consumption when it was situated within its broader context: the regeneration of the Indian nation. Sexual desire was only made respectable within the context of the pragmatics of the sexual act, which amounted to conceiving, carrying, and birthing a citizen of the nation. Writing on sex and sexuality was almost always framed within the reproductive processes and their outcomes. In fact, some of the debates about the illicit nature of several different texts that addressed homosexuality framed the homoerotic act as depraved because it considered desire primarily as the fulfilment of pleasure, rather than as a perfunctory function of reproductive necessity. Most notable is the 1927 text Chaklit (Chocolate) which linked homoerotic themes of desire among teenage boys to their desire for indulgent food, including the chocolate candy bars that they coveted and bought in secret, hiding and revealing both the candy and their desire from each other.Footnote 31
The reliance on indigeneity, both substantive and imaginary, however, carries through. Food came into fruition as a prime mode of signifying the authentic indigeneity of the entire enterprise, building on the idea of appropriate Indian bodies conceiving appropriate Indian babies. Indigenous food substances and food practices became central tenets of guides to birth control, population control, and reproductive health—often making operational the politics of the authors involved—and signifying a uniquely Indian experience of maternity that determined the experience, progress, and health of regeneration. For instance, Yashoda Devi, in her Dampati Arogyata Jeevanshastra (Guide for a Healthy Married Life), detailed the development of the foetus each month in a section called the ‘Cures for Illness in the Womb’.Footnote 32 In each section she describes the various herbs and plants that should be imbibed every month to ensure the health and development of the child. The birthing process is not ignored, but is discussed in medical terms, explaining the way in which the baby turns in the womb and descends through the vagina. In another passage, one of the signs of pregnancy is revealed to be a desire for certain foods, with a prediction of gender linked to the grammatical gender of the food craved.Footnote 33
Other guides instructed mothers on the uses of their bodies for childrearing after birth, and how to make judgements about the health of their children. Guides entitled Shishu Palan (Illnesses in Children) and Hindu Mata (Hindu Mother) were among the most popular publications of the day, sold cheaply but published in huge print runs.Footnote 34 A very popular 1918 guide called Dudh-Chikitsa (The Curative Aspects of Milk), written by Ramnarayan Sharma, explained the benefits of milk to ensure a child's healthy development—but also to ensure the mother's recovery. The book begins with the author's reference to the work of a videshi mahila (a foreign woman) called Edith Wheeler Wilcox, who claimed that a lack of milk in children led to ‘hardayase sambandh raknevale rogonko’ (which the author translated in parenthesis as organic heart trouble) and that sufficient milk could also rid a body of cancer.Footnote 35
However, in the next line, the author tempers this foreign knowledge of the body with the reiteration of the appropriateness of native medical regimes for native bodies, claiming that ‘a body will be free of illness if a plain diet is followed, according to the panchjanevale, the Ayurvedic fiveway path, and if spicy foods like mirch masala (chilli-based spice mixture) that have a sharp edge are avoided’.Footnote 36 In Dudh-Chikitsa, we see the coming together of a variety of themes that framed the discussion of female-centred medical discussions around the preparation of food. First and foremost, the author situates his discussion of female reproduction within the context of the nation, using the health of the national child to speak about the potential ill- health of the mother. Secondly, health edicts that were foreign in nature were made appropriate through their incorporation into a wider spectre of healthcare based around the consumption and preparation of inherently indigenous substances.
Throughout these conversations about conception, reproduction, and the regeneration of the nation, the careful and incisive use of Indian food substances in their natural forms served to underline the Indian stake in a transnational debate. Ultimately, food was employed as both an aide to the stimulation of desire and also as the means to facilitate the transformation of desire into the fulfilment of the nationalistic reproductive imperative. The competing discourses of international eugenics and global (over)population introduced a range of models for thinking about the constitution of the Indian nation. The nation was then interpreted by different groups along sectarian, religious, ethnic, regional, and linguistic lines, and reformulated by each to compete with each other, but also to stake a place in the world of nations and states. The negotiation of an inherent claim to authentic indigeneity—as central to popular conversations about the reproduction and regeneration of the nation—and food emerged as a pragmatic stalwart of the Indian authentic: food was tied to the land, it was represented as timeless and without history, used as both determinant and marker of health, and entirely produced in its most substantive form outside of the realm of global politics or global capital. Though not a direct focus of debate—as it had been in the first days of the cookbook, and as it would be in the new era of food advertising—it remained an uncontested and inherently authentic anchor of Indian identity in an era when the Indian nation was both coming into being and coming into question.
Food distribution: making new foods for the masses
The subsequent turn in this genealogical reading of the evolution of food and its discourse explores its commodification in different forms. Taking as given the reformation of the space and morality of the household, this next manifestation of food culture built upon the easy consumption of ‘modern’ ideas about food in order to sell new food products to the Indian middle class. This final section will therefore explore the visual and textual cues used by food advertisers to link food consumption with the already-developed understandings of the importance of food to the body, but will also shed light on the ways in which new food products and technologies were introduced to the Hindu middle class.
The history of advertising in India is strongly linked to the further solidification of class identity among the Indian bourgeoisie in the interwar period, along with the evolution of branding and the introduction of brand-name, ready-made goods developed, in part, to serve them.Footnote 37 The interwar period witnessed an explosion in advertising: in the 1920s, advertising consisted of a series of graphics-free, printed advertisements that occasionally appeared in the pages of newspapers and the back pages of popular books; in the 1940s, advertising took up most of a page in local and national newspapers (with articles structured visually by the space allotted to the advertisement). The style of advertisements had changed as well, with the advent of graphics, photographs, and catchy slogans dominating the field from the early 1930s on, often conceptualized by an advertising firm or by the marketing department of brand-name companies.Footnote 38 The struggle to market ready-made goods, to both serve the perceived ‘needs’ of the population and to stimulate the steady growth of consumption, was in essence a struggle to overcome the lure of the easily accessible and affordable presence of the bazaar.
While the lure of luxurious or limited goods could adopt an effect of the unattainable—for instance, a printed sari, a pair of new shoes or a collection of holiday cards—products that aimed to replace goods easily conjured or created by bazaar purchases remained a harder sell.Footnote 39 This was particularly prescient with regard to food products, considering the ways in which food had become a site of resistance to other modes of modernization, Westernization, and the encroaching global that organic, wholly substantive, and authentically indigenous food substances had helped to stave off. The introduction, branding, and marketing of prepared food products that already circulated widely in unbranded forms posed a particularly vexing problem to advertisers, as consumers had to be taught to purchase—at a mark-up—the ready-made goods (curry pastes, tea bags, and packaged spice mixes, for example) that they were used to preparing for themselves. Food needed to be marketed in such a way as to convince the consumer to negotiate his or her relationship to its preparation.
The Dalda company's advertisement for canned vanaspati ghee (hydrogenated vegetable oil, intended to be used in place of traditional clarified butter, or ghee) to be added to sabzi (vegetable) dishes provides an interesting example of the genre.Footnote 40 The advertisement bears pictures of fresh fruit and vegetables laid out on a very basic-looking thali, a traditional Indian plate. Somewhat obfuscated by the image of fresh produce is a cookbook, which bears the name of the company and features a tin of the ghee; a tiny image of a woman, her arms spread over the large corner of the book, strives to open its pages. Atop this image is a slogan in large, bold print reading: ‘It will build strength.’ Also featured across the text of the advertisement is a woman in a sari, to signify the mother figure, looking down at a group of boys running towards her; placed across from her is a man, legs spread, hands firmly on hips, and chin facing upwards. Clearly he is meant to be the father, and the instigator of the family's shift in consumption. Lower down the page, the toothy grin of a boy is featured, with a cartoon bubble in which he informs the reader that: ‘Father says that this will invigorate me.’ The slogan of the company, found at the bottom of the advertisement, placed next to the company's name, reads ‘For invigoration’.
Tea posed another interesting question for advertisers. Though tea had played a role in daily Indian life for a couple of centuries by this point, the mass consumption of tea is an inherently modern phenomenon. The infusion of herbs in water is an ancient practice, but the infusion of leaves resembling Camellia Sensis (the most common tea leaf), taken from the Indian Sanjeevnani plant, did not become a popular practice until the mid-nineteenth century. The British attempted to cultivate tea from the 1860s on, resulting in the development of colonial tea plantations in the damp and elevated hills of various pockets of the subcontinent—including, for example, Darjeeling, Ootacamund, the Nilgiris, the lower Himalayan foothills, and Munar in Kerala—in an attempt to curb the need to import tea from China.Footnote 41 Despite rough beginnings, South Asian (both from India and Ceylon) tea accounted for almost 90 per cent of the tea consumed in the British empire by the turn of the twentieth century.
Already a British leisure activity, running the gambit from genteel high tea parties to the tea breaks (and suppers) of the working classes, the expansion of British tea production also called for the identification of new markets, and colonial contexts provided just that. Indians were taught to make tea a part of their everyday activities through a rigorous series of tea-drinking campaigns, beginning in the late nineteenth century, which often targeted key upper-caste/class families in regional districts, with the aim of having the trend trickle down. At the same time, a chai break was readily incorporated into the culture of work among the labouring classes, with the hope that labourers would incorporate the practice into their home life. Tea also became a staple of migratory and travel experiences, sold on train platforms, and cries of ‘chai garam! garam chai!’ (‘Tea that's hot! hot tea!’) became an accepted part of the travel encounter.Footnote 42
This is where the Bharat Chai (Indian Tea) company enters the picture: not as the means to introducing a new product, but rather interested in reclaiming an older one, staking their own claim as an Indian producer of Indian tea. The challenge facing Bharat Chai was to sway the Indian masses away from their affinity for tea as a British commodity, and to appreciate it as an Indian one instead.
A popular advertisement for Bharat Chai proclaimed that tea was ‘A Good Habit to Exert’, but rather than employing a visual aide that privileged the genteel or practical aspects of drinking tea, the advertisement used a photograph of a young mother feeding her toddler tea. Rather than using a teacup, the girl was learning to drink tea poured into a saucer, a common practice for cooling down hot tea and other hot substances in the subcontinent. Both mother and child are wearing tikka marks (denoting their Hindu identity) and are adorned in simple but elegant jewellery, marking them as members of the middle class, and therefore reflecting the appropriate consumers of the substance and appropriate advocates for the practice. The intimate depiction of the act of feeding and being fed, in which both figures are smiling happily, lends to the framing of this activity as natural, comforting, and safe.
A more complicated category of food product development and advertising was posed around the question of baby formula. This product was most disruptive to the natural order of things in South Asia as it posed a quandary for those babies imbibing it: it presented the literal substitution of the mother's own product, breast milk, with a fundamentally foreign substance, hailing from Western discourses of health practice and also located outside of the body. The construction of this product in the public sphere most closely follows some of the logic of those conversations about reproduction and regeneration discussed earlier: that bodies needed to be controlled, that the health of the child is paramount to the health of the nation, that modern scientific rationales for health must replace ‘outdated’ practices.
The constitution of the Vitamilk advertisements reinforced the ideal of the family, with an interesting twist. Where other advertisements depicted figures racially Indian and often ethnically Hindu, the milk advertisements—including those for Vitamilk, Ovaltine, and milk substitutes for older children—tended to depict children as deracialized: the tikka marks, ‘Indian’ features (most often visualized through black hair), and South Asian clothing and accessories were replaced by naked, chubby, curly haired babies, whose gender was generally ambiguous and whose hair was outlined but never filled in. In essence, the cleverly crafted racial neutrality of the child—constructed through simple lines, invoking hair rather than depicting it overtly, and absenting colour rather than filling it in—could serve as the default child of the world. The racial politics at play in this construction of the child subject is obvious: the absence of race, ethnicity, and gender results in the construction of a ‘neutral’ global child, whose parents (and whose state) are less invested in the politics of identity than in the demands of health, and thus erases the concerns of nationalism, anti/imperialism, and interwar internationalism in the everyday experiences of consumption. In fact, the attempts to identify one's child with the Other, to literally adopt the claim that childhood is not mediated by the citizen/subject dichotomy of interwar politics, makes evident the importance of these larger questions in the minds of nations caught up in thinking beyond the parameters of contemporary politics—and thinking forward, instead, to a differently balanced political future.
This strategy reveals the uncontested tenacity of these themes, which were secure enough in the realm of the social imaginary that they could be relied upon to introduce new behaviours into daily life. Ultimately, food advertising was made readable and relevant by the earlier cementing of food as a marker, a determinant, and a protector of health and wellness in the family, and, subsequently, the nation. That it turned this argument on its head, using the health of the nation to introduce new food technologies, further intertwined the steady relationship between the body, its needs, and its place in the nation. In the 1910–20s, the cooked meal was relied upon heavily to secure the image of the new household within its older orientation and function. As debates about the family became more sophisticatedly tied to the future of the nation, food became more simplified—both literally and discursively—representing the unchanging, organic substance that so thoroughly symbolized the Indian authentic. By the 1940s, the discourse of indigeneity had flipped: the tenacity of the ideals of family, health, reproduction, and regeneration secured the introduction of new ready-made food technologies, like baby formula and processed goods, to the Hindu middle class. Food, in essence, provided a historical reference point for new debates about the nation, meaningfully linking modernity to the Indian past and projecting the possibility of new futures for the independent nation.
