Manpreet K Janeja

In a radical departure from previous ethnographies of food, this book asks how and why food is pivotal to social relations and forms of identity that emerge as normal and not-normal. It does so by describing the production, consumption, distribution, and disposal of ‘normal Bengali food’ in middle-class households that employ cooks from poor classes, and in Bengali restaurants, in contemporary Calcutta (India) and Dhaka (Bangladesh). In a rare comparative foray into Bengali Hindu and Muslim food-ways on both sides of the border, the book includes addas (‘idle-talk’) and interviews with both men and women. It initiates a dialogue that links issues of agency, place, hospitality, and ownership with a new field that places food as an ‘artefact’ at the centre of its inquiry. It invites the reader throughout to approach food afresh, as the key that unlocks the complexities of what is mundane yet profound — the everyday.

The book thus analyses the constant and fraught negotiations that feed into definitions of normality, class and identity through networks of human and non-human interactions – persons, places, and things - in the deeply intimate yet intensely public domain of food. Food transactions here provide a window into shifting configurations of trust, power, and conflict integral to social relationships, shaped by events such as the 1943–44 Bengal famine, the 1947 partition of India, and the 1971 Bangladesh War.

Table of Contents:

List of Photographs

Foreword by Marilyn Strathern

Preface and Acknowledgements

Note on Language, Translation, and Transliteration of Bengali Words

1. Food as Agency: Introducing Normality

2. The Actants of a Normal Foodscape

3. 'Like Everyday’: Creating Normality

4. The Everyday Normal Sacred Kitchen

5. Of Seducing and Respectable, Hospitable and Stingy Foods: Subjectivities of Normal Food

6. Cha (tea), Gan (song), aar (and) Adda (‘idle’/’care-less’ talk): Making and Consuming Normal Food Identities

7. Normal Food and Ownership

8. Postprandial Ruminations

Bibliography

Index

This paper focuses on re-imagining contemporary urban intimacies through the aesthetics of food in a city that aspires to be ‘world-class’. Taking the meal as the fulcrum of much activity in Bengali Hindu daily life in Calcutta in the Indian state of West Bengal, this paper traces the vicissitudes of what emerges as constantly negotiated and contested normal home food. It describes the relatively new phenomenon of cooks from ‘cooking centers’ working in middle-class households, and their work in such strategic negotiations, on the one hand, and the ambivalent role of hospitable street foods on the other. In the process, it renders visible the dynamics of (dis)trust, risk, and uncertainty in which these contextual culinary engagements are entangled. In doing so, it reveals the manner in which food-ways in a state of flux are reconfiguring forms of intimacy, belonging, and domesticity in a city caught in the throes of redefining itself.

This lecture focuses on how and why food is critical to social relations and forms of identity that emerge as normal and not-normal. It does so by describing the practices of everyday cooking and eating ‘normal Bengali meals’ in middle-class households in contemporary Calcutta (India) and Dhaka (Bangladesh) that employ cooks from poor classes. It examines the constant and tense negotiations that feed into definitions of normality vis-à-vis not-normality, the middle-classes vis-à-vis the poor, and identities, through networks of human and non-human interactions – persons, places, and things. It thus invites the audience to approach the form that a meal acquires as a window on the flux of everyday life.

Food elicits myriad forms of imagining Bangladesh. This paper focuses on the role of relations of ownership as belonging generated by food that are recognized/disputed, and appropriated as rights of possession, in imagining Bangladesh. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Dhaka, Calcutta, and London, it examines the dynamics of such imaginings emergent in the claims of ownership of the creative performance of "authentic" Bengali food. In so doing, it reflects on understandings of ownership and creativity when diverse norms seek to regulate it.

This paper focuses on re-imagining contemporary urban intimacies through the aesthetics of food in domestic settings in a city that aspires to be “world class”. It examines the practices of everyday cooking in Bengali middle-class Hindu households in Calcutta in the Indian state of West Bengal. It offers an ethnography of the anxious negotiations of what constitutes ‘normal home food’ in such households. It describes the relatively new phenomenon of cooks from ‘cooking centres’ working in these households, and their role in such strategic negotiations. In the process, it renders visible the trans-national networks of uncertainty, risk, and trust in which these contextual culinary engagements are entangled. In so doing, it provides a window into the manner in which Bengali food-ways in a state of flux are reconfiguring norms of intimacy, belonging, and formations of domesticity in contemporary Calcutta, caught in the throes of redefining itself.

Food plays a prominent role in variegated trajectories of imagining Bangladesh. It figures in visual art, music, religious rituals, as well as literary tropes, development discourses, and the political economy of hunger. This paper focuses on the aesthetics of normal food in imagining Bangladesh. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Dhaka and London, it examines the practices of preparation, presentation, and consumption of such food. It highlights the networks of trust and risk in which these practices are embedded. In so doing, it illuminates the collaborative character of the aesthetics of food as integral to Bangladeshi national and trans-national configurations of belonging and not-belonging.

This lecture focuses on consumption as a mundane practice as explored through social anthropological accounts of food and eating in South Asia and beyond. Drawing on anthropology’s core traditions of ethnography and comparative studies, it situates the scholarly focus on the consumption of food in wider contexts beyond those only of choice, meaning, and identity. Some of the issues that the lecture addresses: - How can the consumption, exchange, (and preparation) of food, amongst other things, be used as a heuristic device for examining processes of the political economy of hunger and affluence, trust and risk, domesticity and nationhood, ownership and belonging? Thus, - Is the growth of, for example, Bengali restaurants serving 'normal Bengali home food' indexical of new configurations of the inside/outside? - Can food, and historically and culturally informed networks of hospitality, provide us with a tool to explore relations between 'host' and 'guest'? – Is there an emergence of newer forms of engagement with all kinds of others – persons, things, animals, images, places – as entangled in such networks of food?

In contrast to studies of street hawkers and vendors that focus on the urban ‘informal’ economy, labour protection policies, regulations on street vending, and geographies of urban food distribution, this paper describes street-food hospitality in the city of Calcutta in the Indian state of West Bengal. Through an ethnographic analysis of fraught negotiations of what constitutes street-food vis-à-vis normal home food in Bengali middle-class Hindu households, it explores the ways in which current hospitality practices of preparation, consumption, marketing, and distribution are reconfiguring formations of the inside/outside. In so doing, it treats street-food hospitality as an event for negotiating differences across scale.

Bangladesh is a country that appears only on the margins of western news and academic interest. When it does, it is usually in the context of catastrophes. In this Introduction to the special issue, we agree with Lewis (2011) that this large, complex and dynamic country merits more attention. Looking at it through the lens of ‘contested narratives’ centring on identities, notions of home and belonging in transnational Bangladeshi communities and the development, economy and politics of the country, we identify areas in which these contested narratives are particularly pertinent to current events in Bangladesh and which the papers in this special issue touch upon.