ABSTRACT
This article critiques photographs and material culture pertaining to the consumption of food and alcohol during the first Australian cricket tour of India in 1935/36. The artefacts—menus, seating plans and food advertisements—enable the present-day researcher to interpret the rapidly transforming political, cultural and sporting landscape as well as the internal dynamics of the tour. The archival objects function as links to the cricketers and are pivotal in interpreting the 1935/36 tour in light of the absence of living participants. Food and beverages represent a significant ethnographic difference and the cricketers’ response to the customs of culinary consumption in late-colonial India exposes broader societal sentiments and reflects imperial politicking. The Australian cricketers encountered bicultural culinary influences comprising the vestiges of British hegemony in combination with a new nationalistic indigenous influence.
