Alimentary Affairs: Historicizing food in modern India

This essay surveys a broad landscape of studies that take up the preparation, imbibing, and distribution of food in significant ways, focusing on the way in which the field of food studies in South Asia is cohering in recent scholarship. It begins with histories of the imperial period that frame food around imperial encounter and then move on to studies that address the crises of food through famine and their political aftermath. It then turns to the postcolonial, globalized context of making food Indian in a large-scale market and concludes with thoughts on where food studies and food cultures are headed. Ultimately, food is determined to have symbolic and pragmatic meaning as an icon of national presence in the greater world, a tool for assessing social relations, a measure of taste and values, a challenge for the political and environmental systems of a geo-economic space. As eating in India has taken on new political dimensions that have arisen from the synchronous rise of both neoliberal practices of political economy and the rise of Hindu fascism, the anxieties articulated through the cultures of food at work in the region are revealed.