Articles
Preface: Food, Space, and Power in South Asia
2021 Volume 11 Pages 1-3
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2021 Volume 11 Pages 1-3
In recent years, food has been the subject of active discussion and research across many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Food ‘influences virtually every aspect of human life’ (Pilcher 2012: xix), and topics concerning it can and should be studied from multiple perspectives. Many people find it easy to associate research on dietary and culinary practices with their daily life. Studies on food therefore attract a wide range of readers both in and outside academia.
When one of the editors of this special issue, along with other scholars in Japan, began a five-year research project in 2011 entitled ‘Multidisciplinary Studies on Food and Identity in Modern India’, one of the questions that all the members were interested in was how to incorporate stories of food in the courses they had been teaching in Japanese universities. Among the participants were historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and scholars of literature. Based on their experiences, they knew how effective the stories of food could be for explaining important aspects of South Asian society and history to the students in an accessible manner. Yet, they often wondered how they could convey at the same time the difficulties, complexities, ambiguities, fluidity, and diversity that one should bear in mind when discussing the relationships between food and communities, food and nations, and food and identities.1 Conscious of this dilemma, once the project started, each member began to closely examine food-related debates in different regions in colonial and postcolonial India, based on archival research and fieldwork. In particular, they tried to understand the ways in which multiple ideas of ‘our’/’their’ food were articulated in different contexts by different groups of people and how some of these ideas became dominant in society. At the same time, they also explored how such dominant notions of food were simultaneously resisted and challenged by other sections of the same society.
Meanwhile, the editor mentioned above and the other editor of the current issue began to discuss the possibility of starting a new research project on food with scholars from both Japan and India. As a step toward this, two international workshops were organised, one in 2014 at Janki Devi Memorial College (University of Delhi), and the other in 2015 at the University of Tokyo. These eventually led to a two-year project entitled ‘Ideas of Food and Body in South Asia: Analyses of Cookbooks from the Medieval Times to the Present’ with financial support from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) and the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR). Three academic events were organised in relation to this. The first, a workshop at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi, took place in 2017; the second in 2018, in the form of two panels at the 30th annual conference of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies (at Toyo University, Tokyo); and lastly, a workshop was held in the same year at Osaka University. This series of dialogues among scholars working in a variety of disciplines, for different academic institutions in Japan and India, and with diverse research and teaching experiences, turned out to be extremely fruitful. In each workshop, discussion focused on different key questions related to food and identities, including those concerning space and power, which became the title of the current issue.
After the JSPS-ICSSR project was over, an edited book was produced by the Japanese members and published under the title, Shoku kara Egaku Indo: Kingendaino Shakaihenyo to Aidentiti (Food, Social Change, and Identities in Modern India) (Isaka and Yamane 2019). Then, with the aim of publishing the findings of their research in English, members in Japan and India resumed a dialogue, this time in the form of online seminars between July 2020 and February 2021.
The four articles included here feature some of the results of these workshops and seminars. The first article by Shivangini Tandon explores the interconnections between food practices/feasts among the Muslim elite and state formation in Mughal India. Based on Indo-Persian sources, it vividly shows how gastronomical and culinary practices in imperial and aristocratic households played a symbolic role in cultivating political alliances, reinforcing the redistributive nature of the state, and reproducing class and gendered identities. The next paper, by So Yamane, in turn examines a variety of food-related descriptions in Urdu literature during the late nineteenth century. These accounts provide us with important insights into the ways in which the Muslim literati, exposed to the expansion of British power, perceived the social and political changes of the time and negotiated them. Their loss of power can be witnessed in their nostalgic reminiscences of a refined court culture combined with a discomfiture towards modernization.
Riho Isaka’s paper too considers questions of colonialism and modernity through the lens of food. Focusing on the food narratives of three Japanese travellers in early twentieth-century India, it follows their eating experiences in detail and analyses their observations about local food habits, which significantly influenced their perceptions of India. Even as they mostly ate in the public dining spaces of the Raj, these travellers provided interesting insights into social practices around eating in colonial India. The last article by Ishita Dey describes the journey not of people but of ‘Cadbury Mishti’, a new category of sweets created in contemporary Bengal as a result of a campaign by a multinational company Cadbury and the leading regional media house, ABP One. Using the concepts of inter-referentiality and placemaking, Dey’s work illustrates the way in which a ‘marriage’ took place between local technology and a new ingredient, chocolate, broadening our understanding of ‘fusion food’.
The workshops and seminars of these two projects confirmed the ongoing need for interdisciplinary and cross-regional dialogues in the realm of food studies. There is a plethora of topics that require further exploration; our ‘journey’ has only just begun.
We would like to express our gratitude to the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) and the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) for their support for our projects (JSPS Kakenhi Grant Number 23310174, April 2011-March 2016, and the JSPS-ICSSR Grant for a Bilateral Joint Research Project, April 2016-March 2018). We are also grateful for various forms of help from the following organisations and their staff: Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Tokyo (TINDAS), the Integrated Area Studies on South Asia project (INDAS), the National Institutes for the Humanities (NIHU), the Janki Devi Memorial College (University of Delhi), and Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. Our special thanks to all our project members and to the speakers and participants in our seminars and workshops for sharing their insights and making the discussions lively and enjoyable.
* Department of Area Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo.
** Department of History, Janki Devi Memorial College, University of Delhi and Fellow, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi (2021-23).
1 Such complexities were expressed vividly in various works, including Appadurai 1988; Collingham 2006; Sengupta 2010; Ray and Srinivas 2012; Ray 2015; Natrajan and Jacob 2018.
