New Vegetarianism: Food, Gender and Neo-Liberal Regimes in Bengali Middle-Class Families¹

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1The fieldwork on which this article is based was conducted between 1995 and 2005 and the research was supported by the ESRC. Earlier versions of this article were presented at SOAS, the University of Oslo and the LSE and I am grateful to all participants for useful suggestions. 2Jun Jing (ed.), Feeding China's Little Emperors: Food, Children and Social Change (Stanford: Stanford University Press, Citation2000). 3Pat Caplan, 'Food in Middle-Class Madras Households from the 1970s to 1990s', in Katarzyna Cwiertka and Boudewijn C.A. Walraven (eds), Asian Food: The Global and the Local (Richmond: Curzon, Citation2002), pp.46 – 62. 4Two recent examples are Mark Liechty, Suitably Modern: Making Middle-Class Culture in a New Consumer Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, Citation2003); and William Mazzarella, Shovelling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (Durham: Duke University Press, Citation2003). An earlier example is Frank F. Conlon, 'Dining Out in Bombay', in Carol A. Breckenridge (ed.), Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Citation1995), pp.90 – 127, which focuses on the pre-liberalisation period. 5See Joseph S. Alter, 'Seminal Truth: A Modern Science of Male Celibacy in North India', in Medical Anthropological Quarterly, Vol.11, no.3 (Citation1997), pp.275 – 98. 6See Rukmini Bhaya Nair, 'Are We What We Eat?', in Seminar, Vol.545 (January Citation2005) [http://www.india-seminar.com/semframe.html, accessed 29 Nov. 2007]. 9Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism (London: Hurst, Citation2001), pp.202 – 3. 7See Indira Chowdhury, The Frail Hero and Virile History: Gender and the Politics of Culture in Colonial Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, Citation1998), p.130. 8See Uma Chakravarti, 'Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India: Gender, Caste, Class and State', in Economic and Political Weekly, (3 April Citation1993), pp.579 – 85. 10See for details of these processes Judith Walsh, Domesticity in Colonial India: What Women Learned When Men Gave Them Advice (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, Citation2004). 11See Malavika Karlekar, 'Reflections on Kulin Polygamy—Nistarini Debi's Sekeley Katha', in Patricia Uberoi (ed.), Social Reform, Sexuality and the State (New Delhi: Sage, Citation1996), pp.135 – 55. Karlekar points out that early marriage did not necessarily imply that parents had transferred the responsibility for a daughter's wrongdoings successfully to a husband, i.e. in the case of kulin Brahmins, whose wives remained in their parental home. But even here the concern was not with the actual sexual activities of women, but with the possibility of illegitimate offspring. 12Uma Chakravarti, 'Gender, Caste and Labour: Ideological and Material Structure of Widowhood', in Economic and Political Weekly (9 Sept. Citation1995), p.2251. 13Judith Walsh discusses this ideal in terms of a 'global domesticity' that emerged in the colonial period. See Walsh, Domesticity in Colonial India: What Women Learned When Men Gave Them Advice. I have written elsewhere about the significance of lunchboxes as a site for intensive mothering and the reproduction of ethnic and class-based identities. See Henrike Donner, 'Committed Mothers and Well-Adjusted Children: Privatisation, Early-Years Education and Motherhood in Calcutta Middle-Class Families', in Modern Asian Studies, Vol.40, no.2 (Citation2006), pp.339 – 64. 14This is evident in the large number of food memoirs produced and marketed for the Bengali diaspora and the importance migrant communities put on keeping their diet 'Bengali'. For a very detailed description of new patterns among middle-class migrants in the US see Krishnendu Ray, The Migrants' Table: Meals and Memories in Bengali American Households (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, Citation2005). For an annotated cookbook see Chitrita Banerjee, Life and Food in Bengal (London: Penguin, Citation1991), as well as her memories of growing up in an affluent Bengali middle-class household in her The Hour of the Goddess: Memories of Women, Food and Ritual in Bengal (Calcutta: Seagull, Citation2001). 15A common complaint among married women is that any food taken outside makes them ill. See Sara Dickey, 'Permeable Homes: Domestic Service, Household Space, and the Vulnerability of Class Boundaries in Urban India', in American Ethnologist, Vol.27, no.2 (2000), pp.462 – 89. 16This is also reflected in public discourse on marriage, see for instance Patricia Uberoi, 'When is a Marriage not a Marriage: Sex, Sacrament and Contract in Hindu Marriages', in Patricia Uberoi (ed.), Social Reform, Sexuality and the State (New Delhi: Sage, Citation1996), p.342. 17For a further exploration of these physical processes see Henrike Donner, 'The Place of Birth: Childbearing and Kinship in Calcutta Middle-Class Families', in Medical Anthropology, Vol.22, no.4 (Oct. – Dec. Citation2003), pp.303 – 41. 18The street food available in Calcutta carries multicultural connotations, especially local specialities like chow min noodles, invented by its Chinese community, or the mouthwatering phuchka balls, a variation on North Indian pani puri. 19See Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay, 'Between Elite Hysteria and Subaltern Carnivalesque: The Politics of Street-Food in the City of Calcutta', in South Asia Research, Vol.24, no.1 (Citation2004), pp.37 – 50. 20 Ibid. 21Alter, 'Seminal Truth: A Modern Science of Male Celibacy in North India', p.278. 23 Ibid. 22Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), p.154. 24Ann Anagnost, 'The Corporal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)' in Public Culture, Vol.16, no.2, (2004), p.201.