Food and the Ambiguities of Identity
Date: 23 May 2025
Time: 5:30 - 7:00 pm
Venue: KCC Library
This May we have Dr Utsa Ray, Assistant Professor of History, Jadavpur University delivering a talk on the unique culinary culture of Bengal as developed by the Bengali colonial middle class. In focus in her book Culinary Culture in Colonial India: A Cosmopolitan Platter and the Middle Class published by Cambridge University Press in 2015.
ABOUT THE BOOK
This book utilizes cuisine to understand the construction of the colonial middle class in Bengal who indigenized new culinary experiences as a result of colonial modernity. This process of indigenization developed certain social practices, including imagination of the act of cooking as a classic feminine act and the domestic kitchen as a sacred space. The process of indigenization was an aesthetic choice that was imbricated in the upper caste and patriarchal agenda of the middle-class social reform. However, in these acts of imagination, there were important elements of continuity from the pre-colonial times. The book establishes the fact that Bengali cuisine cannot be labeled as indigenist although it never became widely commercialized. The point was to cosmopolitanize the domestic and yet keep its tag of 'Bengaliness'. The resultant cuisine was hybrid, in many senses like its makers.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Dr Utsa Ray teaches History at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. She holds a Ph.D. from the Department of History and Religious Studies, Pennsylvania State University, United States of America. Dr Ray is primarily interested in looking at how taste and consumption aids in the construction of class. She has published widely in journals such as Modern Asian Studies, the Indian Economic, Social History Review, and South Asian History and Culture.
