ABSTRACT
The description the author offer in this chapter depicts how food, in its ongoing assembling and reassembling of normal everyday and hospitality relations, elicits modalities of ownership. In this chapter, the author describes the food served in these restaurants, the clientele they cater to, and the associations they have for contemporary Bengali sociality and 'identity' in a state of flux. Attributes of property rights in normal food emerge clearly when their ownership is in dispute, as in the example of the hilsa fish. In the assertion of claims of ownership over the performance of normal food, then, is revealed the potential control or appropriation of social relationships, of being-with-all-kinds-of-others, of future possibilities of forms of sociality and animation, of life itself. Such restaurants differ from the bhaat–machch hotels that refer to roadside stalls, with benches, that serve limited fare, and cater to a rather different clientele.
