Travelling and Food in Colonial India:

Experiences of Japanese Travellers in the Early Twentieth Century

抄録

This paper examines Japanese travellers’ narratives of food in early twentieth-century colonial India. It focuses on three travellers’ journeys in and around the 1920s and explores their eating experiences in detail along with their analyses of ‘native’ dietary habits in local society. These travellers utilised ‘modern’ facilities for dining that had been developed for the British and other Europeans in colonial India, and tasted food that was the product of interaction and negotiation between the ‘coloniser’ and the ‘colonised’. They also observed the often-contrasting food habits and taboos of people from different classes, castes, and religious communities, which significantly influenced their views of India.