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Modern Mixes: The Hybrid and the Authentic in Indian Cuisine

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Exploring Indian Modernities

Abstract

This essay introduces food and cooking as elements significant to the understanding of historical processes and concept categories such as the ‘modern’. It draws upon crisscrossing tales of cooking and cuisine from Bengal and other parts of India and Britain between the late nineteenth and twenty first centuries to underscore hybridization and innovation as constant, enduring, and intrinsic components not just of food and cooking but also of human lives and encounters in general. This allows it to raise questions about the novelty and rupture on which the ‘modern’ is supposed to be based. Exploring the centrality of food, cooking, and taste in the shaping of personhood, identity and belonging, status and class, and examining how the claims of novelty and distinction often besets the modern with anxieties and desire, this chapter calls for a reconsideration of concept-categories and a scrutiny of the ‘authentic’ and ‘pure’ to make a case for identities poised on the indeterminate and impure.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.merriam-webster.com, accessed on 25.02. 2017.

  2. 2.

    Bhabha, 1993; García Canclini, 1990.

  3. 3.

    Arjun Appadurai, “How to make a national cuisine: cookbooks in contemporary India”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 30, 1 (1988), p. 5.

  4. 4.

    Appadurai 1988, p. 15.

  5. 5.

    Nandy 2002–2003, p. 246.

  6. 6.

    Nandy 2004, p. 15.

  7. 7.

    Collingham, 2006, p. 4.

  8. 8.

    Collingham, 2006, p. 4.

  9. 9.

    For an incisive discussion of the everyday reproduction of the nation in banal, mundane arenas in established nations, see Billig (1995). Igor Cusack has creatively extended this notion of banal nationalism to the construction of a national cuisine in some African countries as a key element of national culture that flags the nation in the quotidian arena. See Cusack, 2000, pp. 207–225.

  10. 10.

    Burton, 1995, p. vii.

  11. 11.

    My thanks go to Dipesh Chakrabarty and Rochona Mazumdar for immediate help in translating the titles of these early texts.

  12. 12.

    Ray, 2014, p. 63.

  13. 13.

    Appadurai, 1988, p. 13.

  14. 14.

    Ray, 2014, p. 63.

  15. 15.

    Ray, 2014, p. 63.

  16. 16.

    Borthwick, 1984, p. 213.

  17. 17.

    Ray, 2014, p. 63.

  18. 18.

    Cosmopolitan is used in the meaning provided in the online Merriam-Webster Dictionary: ‘sharing or interest in different, cultures, ideas’, in this case different dishes of different cultures.

  19. 19.

    Mukhopadhyay, 1987.

  20. 20.

    Amish of Niramish Ahar (Vegetarian and Non-vegetarian Food), Calcutta: Debendranath Bhattacharya, 1900. I have used the new edition published by Ananda Publishers, Calcutta in 1995 that has one volume of vegetarian recipes and one of non-vegetarian ones. According to Ira Ghosh, editor of the new edition and granddaughter of Prajñasundari, the two volumes of vegetarian recipes were originally published in 1900 and 1904 and the third volume of non-vegetarian recipes in 1907.

  21. 21.

    Banerjee-Dube, 2016, pp. 100–121.

  22. 22.

    Peterson, 1980, p. 317.

  23. 23.

    Monroe, p. 25.

  24. 24.

    Laudan, 2004, p. 33.

  25. 25.

    Laudan, p. 38.

  26. 26.

    See Devi, 1995, p. 233. It is interesting that the word ‘rich’ is used in parenthesis after the word gurupak in Bangla that signifies food difficult to digest.

  27. 27.

    Yule & Burnell, 1994, p. 595.

  28. 28.

    Fisher, 1996, p. 258.

  29. 29.

    The Indian Cookery Book: A Practical Handbook to the Kitchen in India, by A Thirty Five Years’ Resident, 7th edition, Calcutta: Thacker Spink & Co. Ltd., 1958. First published 1933. My sincere thanks to Sanjeet Chaudhuri for making this book available to me and for maintaining a fullsome archive on materials related to food, cooking, cuisine.

  30. 30.

    The Indian Cookery Book, pp. 7–8.

  31. 31.

    The Indian Cookery Book, pp. 8–30.

  32. 32.

    Banerjee-Dube, 2016, pp. 79–99.

  33. 33.

    Monroe, pp. 25–26.

  34. 34.

    Roy, 2010, p. 66.

  35. 35.

    Roy, 2010, p. 66.

  36. 36.

    Burton, 1995, p. 94.

  37. 37.

    Roy, 2010, p. 67.

  38. 38.

    Devi, ‘Bijñapan’ (Advertisement) to the first edition included in Devi, 1995.

  39. 39.

    Devi, 1995, vol. II, p. 49.

  40. 40.

    “Founding family sells Patak’s”, The Guardian, 29 May 2007.

  41. 41.

    Appadurai, 1988, p. 7.

  42. 42.

    The chef in question is Sharmistha Ghosh and she appears on DD Bangla, Zee Banglar Rannaghar (The Kitchen of Zee Bangla), and Radhuni (the cook) on Akaash Aath.

  43. 43.

    Lu & Fine, 1995, pp. 335–353.

  44. 44.

    Lu and Fine, 1995, 535).

  45. 45.

    Nandy, 2004, p. 11.

  46. 46.

    Nandy, 2004, p. 11.

  47. 47.

    Achaya, 1988.

  48. 48.

    The literature is too vast to be recounted here. Said, 1978; Asad 1993; Chakrabarty 2002, Dube 2017 offer very few representative examples.

  49. 49.

    Dube and Banerjee-Dube, 2006, p. 2.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. El Colegio de México, Mexico City, Mexico

    Ishita Banerjee-Dube

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  1. Ishita Banerjee-Dube
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Correspondence to Ishita Banerjee-Dube .

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  1. Professor of International Law, Director of the Thematic Initiative in Democratic Citizenship, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, United Kingdom

    Leïla Choukroune

  2. Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities (CSH), New Delhi, India and , St. Edmund's College, University of Cambridge , Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom

    Parul Bhandari

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Banerjee-Dube, I. (2018). Modern Mixes: The Hybrid and the Authentic in Indian Cuisine. In: Choukroune, L., Bhandari, P. (eds) Exploring Indian Modernities. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7557-5_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7557-5_9

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