Anxious Hearths and Ambivalent Intimacies

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2019

Kolkata has had a long and troubled relationship with food and hunger, which has shaped Bengali food-practices in the city. From famine in the 1940’s to food-movement of the 1960’s, as food production dwindled, Kolkata saw a gradual decline of its economic fortune. In the 1970’s and 80’s, it was common to portray Kolkata as a failed postcolonial metropolis filled with starving millions. With this troubled history in the backdrop, this paper focuses on culinary experiences in Kolkata as reflected in Amit Chaudhuri’s novella A Strange and Sublime Address. The novella, in its bid to highlight the trivial and the mundane in Bengali life in Kolkata in the early 1990’s, portrays culinary experiences as epiphanic expressions of an introverted, inner existence. Chaudhuri describes food-practices in an attempt to preserve an esoteric food-system – a system that connects inner life with cooking, serving and eating of food. Bengali food-practices, I argue, appear in this novella as “edible chr...

Food Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2012

The liberalization of the Indian economy since the 1990s has widened the food market in India, a corollary of which has been the availability of packaged food and foreign products. The dynamics of the market have permeated the increasingly affluent urban middle class households, setting up a trend of negotiation with the ‘exotic foreign’ through an introduction to newly available ingredients, cooking techniques and cuisines. An important factor has also been the advent of coloured, commercial television and the entry of private players, which has enhanced the overall television viewing experience through changes in content, production, transmission and reception of television shows. One could mark the entry of food shows on national and regional television in India at this point, where cookery is extracted from its routine context and granted a performative facet. Cookery has existed as ‘creative performance’ within the largely male domain of the professional chef, while its mundane aspect has been associated mostly with the female. Once could say, however, that the ‘performance’ of cooking on television has rendered the specialized art accessible to the urban Indian viewer, whether male or female. This paper seeks to make linkages between food, television, gender and the market economy with pertinent data, in order to address some crucial questions. What makes cooking shift from being a chore to a performance? Has food being performed on television changed overall attitudes and processes of buying, cooking and eating in urban middle class India? It may be argued that the market context has enhanced the scope for a shift in the male and female roles inside and outside the kitchen. The shift from mundane to exotic consumption on television, however, may or may not have invoked the same. Does the ‘modern, Indian’ woman stay on in the kitchen with re-invented reasons to cook?

International Journal of Sociology of the Family, 2006

Storytelling: Exploring the Art and Science of Narrative, pp. 97-115, 2013

In a multi-cultural, traditionalist country like India, food is an important marker of ethnic identity. As Indian society witnesses increasing migrations and merging, recipes become repositories of history, ethnicity and memories. Each recipe tells multiple stories – of familial traditions and cultural inheritances, of changes borne out of travels, inter-mixings, and adaptations. Recipe-stories are told and re-told in cook-books, food-blogs and food-related advertisements. Books (traditional print media) and blogs (new participatory media), being authored by individuals, offer narratives of empowerment and progress. Advertisements (mass media), being produced by market-driven forces, reinforce stereotypes and status quo. Taken together, the collection of recipe-stories across various media offers a kaleidoscopic insight into an unfixed, post-modern, shape-shifting society and its globally-dispersed yet rooted-to-the-homeland Diaspora. The paper proposes to study specific cook-books and food-blogs by Indian women writers and to decode the stories they narrate. In the context of rapid social changes and cultural assimilations, the paper aims to show how recipes are used by Indian bloggers, writers and admen as both ‘museum’ and ‘playground’. Through recipes, the collective, inherited past is remembered, recorded and passed on to posterity; and through recipes, new innovations are experimented and adapted, each adding to the composite story of the nation. An important dimension in these Indian recipe-stories is the role of the auteur/cook. In most Indian homes, it is still only the women who cook, although most professional cooks are male. This feminist sub-plot in the recipe-stories is also investigated in this paper, which looks at the changes in the status of women from silent and unseen cooks toiling away in family kitchens to the empowered Indian woman-cook of today who not only records the past in recipes but also re-tells it in innovative ways, and in doing so, also re-fashions her-story and her identities. space is designated for the 300-word abstract. Please read the text that follows carefully. It provides you with a set of instructions as to how to use this template.

2021

The paper seeks to trace the progress of food cultures in Bengal and the emergence of a culinary<br> Thirdspace with respect to gender and nation formation. Food in middle – class Bengali homes has always<br> been a gendered concept. Edward Soja while propounding the theory of the Thirdspace says that it is a<br> space that is born out of the friction of binaries and grows to offer resistance to the Centre. He cites bell<br> hooks' argument about how the margin can be seen as a space of radical openness. Although Soja being<br> an urban geographer limits the concept to architectural spaces, this paper seeks to explore the idea of<br> Thirdspace with regards to the middle-class Bengali kitchen and the gendering of food that has resulted in<br> the development of a culinary Thirdspace. Food mainly divided into masculine and feminine where the<br> best piece of fish is reserved for the man can further be divided into food for the unma...

Southeast Asian Review of English

Culinary nationalism in India has given rise to a hegemony of vegetarianism, excluding numerous regional and ethnic cuisines in the process. A homogeneous culinary identity is attempted by othering specific communities like Christians and Muslims, lower caste Hindus, and tribal groups, disputing the legitimacy of their national belonging and, hence, their culinary traditions. The traditional gender roles of women in kitchen spaces, along with their higher vulnerability to food insecurity, make food a prominent motif in Dalit women’s writing. This paper analyses how Dalit culinary practices, as recounted in the life narratives of Urmila Pawar and Baby Kamble, contest and redefine culinary nationalism and subvert the notion of ritual pollution or purity. Pawar’s The Weave of My Life and Kamble’s The Prisons We Broke detail the everyday practices of Dalit women, particularly those concerning food, as resistance to ethno-religious nationalism. Using Michel de Certeau’s theorization of e...

Proceedings of the 11th International Conference Synergies in Communication (2023), 2023

Chitrita Banerji's memoir The Hour of the Goddess (2001) explores, among other things, the association between food and cultural identity. Growing up in a middle-class household in the Indian state of West Bengal, Banerji recounts the various everyday and occasional food practices that shaped her cultural consciousness. From the sights, sounds, and smells emanating from the kitchen, ritual offerings of food to the domestic deity, to the celebratory feasts held by her family and community played a pivotal role in Banerji's embodiment of Bengaliness. However, it is only when she travels to the United States, befriends and finally marries a Bangladeshi Muslim man that she truly recognizes the limited and limiting scope of the tastes she grew up associating with Bengaliness. This paper will analyze the text of Banerji's food memoir to study the gastro-political constitution of modern Bengali identity which is revealed through the author's representation of the charged cultural exchange between West Bengalis and East Bengalis that has permeated all spheres Bengali life from late twentieth century onwards. Using Bourdieu's theory of taste and De Certeau's concept of the Everyday, this paper delves into the distinctions in Bengali local, religious, and economic classes that is actualized through distinctions of alimentary preferences. Banerji is the quintessentially Bhabhaian unhomed migrant, whose defamiliarized perspective could appreciate the plurality of everyday gastronomic performances of Bengali identity. Within the postcolonial world of gastronomic pluralism, taste creates a play between separation and connection among Bengalis on either side of the international border.

Food, Culture and Society: An International …, 2007