ABSTRACT
In British India the everyday gastronomic practices of the colonial subjects had their own logic of negotiations with colonial modernity. The resultant cuisine was a process of indigenisation that tweaked and appropriated new food crops, new recipes, and new modes of consumption to produce a colonial cuisine. Food and foodways became a marker of identity politics, especially among the middle class. For all its cosmopolitanism, the ‘new’ colonial cuisine – a two-way process in which both the coloniser and the colonised participated – remained fraught with casteist, communal, class-based, and gendered anxieties. An account of food and intoxicants can thus enrich our understanding of not just taste and consumption but also identity politics.
