In this book, Parama Roy engages with a variety of “alimentary tracts”—texts which arguably illuminate the transformational nature of the colonial encounter through tropes of famine, hunger, aversion and commensality in South Asian contexts. Centrally, Roy problematizes the commonplace that “eaters merely eat the eaten” and, from a postcolonial perspective, marshals a creative range of texts to demonstrate the mutual metamorphoses experienced by eaters, who, she argues, imbibe substance and social norms through alimentary acts.
Some of the themes in this book will be familiar to readers of Roy's earlier works, (e.g., Gandhi's writings and “Meatless Days” by Sara Suleri, Roy 2002); the 1857–8 Indian Insurrection (Roy 2005), the “famine” literature of Mahasweta Devi (Roy 2005), and the cookbooks and acting career of Madhur Jaffrey (Roy 2002). Despite being part of a Duke University Press series, Alimentary Tracts is but peripherally concerned with Women's Studies; disciplinarily, it is a strong contribution to the field of English Studies.
Roy's skills in performing historical interpretation, engaging with postcolonial theory, and conducting imaginative readings are best displayed in the first chapter, “Disgust.” Here, Roy reads the “so-called Mutiny” through alimentary-driven themes, ranging from the familiar (the greasing of the sepoys’ cartridges with fat made from animals taboo to both Muslims and Hindus) to less considered staples, including salt and chapattis. Here, Roy's splicing of themes from cannibalism and contamination to army mores and the Anglo-Indian's hyphenated body works remarkably well; her analysis of Anglo-Indian identity as a somatic paradox is truly illuminating.
Next, “Abstinence” continues to showcase Roy's achievement, in her careful perusal of Gandhi (1927). Roy's reading of Gandhi's vegetarianism and his inflexibly and even violently consistent practice of it convincingly deepens the work of others, including Leela Gandhi (2006), through reflection on the “masculinity” of Gandhi's “gastroaesthetics” (p. 76)(gastroasceticism?).
“Dearth,” the third chapter, reflects on the fiction of Mahasweta Devi and the themes of hunger, the post-colonial state's failed responsibility to rural and indigent peoples, and the use of (trans-) realism to portray famine adequately (p. 27). A turn to Derrida and the “impossibility” of his “true gift” gives Roy a useful opening to discuss the ideas of aporia and ineffability as key undercurrents in Mahasweta's portrayal of famine. I found this chapter to be more theoretically superficial than the previous two and also to meander from the core theme of the book. Also, Roy's discussion of Derrida's “impossible” gift seems curiously disconnected from its many critiques, particularly those arguing against its ethnocentrism on the basis of South Asian data, such as Laidlaw (2000).
The fourth chapter, “Appetite,” focuses on Madhur Jaffrey. As other reviewers have noted, Roy has a tendency toward generalizations (Hai 1998); her occasionally perfunctory engagement with theory may be cited as an example of this here. For example, in just two pages, Roy interleaves her reading of Jaffrey against Walter Benjamin, A. L. Basham, Fredric Jameson, Arjun Appadurai, Renato Rosaldo, Sandhya Shukla, Verne Dusenbery, and Benedict Anderson (pp. 178–9). Were this done in depth, this section could valuably argue towards a reassessment of Madhur Jaffrey as an important post-colonial interlocutor; in its current form, it is a superficial mapping.
In summary, I find that the main weakness of the book is an over-reliance on postcolonial theory and a lack of engagement with the tropes of eaters and reciprocity in South Asian terms, both of which have been considered extensively (e.g., Khare 1976; Smith, 1990; Toomey 1994). R. S. Khare is briefly cited once (p. 168), surprisingly, since so many of his publications speak directly to this topic; Smith also appears just once in this book (p. 107)—but in a discussion unrelated to his seminal essay on eaters in South Asia. Secondly, one of Roy's key arguments is that the “alimentary tract” in the visceral sense needs to be re-imagined as a permeable margin between self and other, and that alimentary acts are reciprocally transformative, e.g., “colonizers themselves were not immune from the embodied obligations of biopower, which surely has something of a relationship with soul making … carnality, including alimentation … was an important theater for the soul making of Indians …” (p. 11). These arguments about embodied reciprocity, biomoral transferability and the like are echoed by numerous scholars who have written on prestations in South Asia (e.g., Mauss 1990; Babb 1986; Parry 1995; Raheja 1988). While Raheja is cited in a list of anthropologists who work on caste (p. 17), Roy's analysis could have usefully built upon Raheja's well-known work on reciprocity and prestations in South Asia or Parry's groundbreaking essay on reciprocity in South Asia.
In summary, the final sentence of the introduction may, perhaps, be read as a cipher for Roy's discursive mode in this text: “[t]he alimentary tract that speaks in a goat's tongue offers no straightforward lesson but one that has to be strenuously and sometimes counterintuitively learned” (p. 30). As such, the reader is left wishing that a slightly less eldritch aesthetic had informed the execution of this book, while knowing that Roy has raised an important—and deeply considered—topic.
