“Without Sympathy There is No Cookery”: Imperial Knowledge and the Creation of “Indian” Cuisine SUE SAMUELSON AWARD FOR FOODWAYS SCHOLARSHIP 2019

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Julia Fine

Abstract

By viewing colonial British cookbooks and Indian cookbooks in conversation with one another, this essay analyzes the cultural melding and appropriation that occurred in foodways during the colonization of the Indian subcontinent. It particularly explores how British cookbooks published in India at this time attempted to bind Indian cooks within an ahistorical and homogenized vision of India. Yet, as demonstrated through a close reading of two prominent Bengali cookbooks, South Asian cooks adapted these recipes in order to present a vision of nationalism that undercut British superiority and reified Indian independence. The dialogue that emerges by exploring contemporaneous cookbooks affords a space to view changes to foodways that emerged from the colonial encounter as well as their impacts and cultural importance.

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Lead Essays