Articles
Travelling and Food in Colonial India:
Experiences of Japanese Travellers in the Early Twentieth Century
2021 年 11 巻 p. 33-46
詳細
2021 年 11 巻 p. 33-46
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.
This paper analyses Japanese travellers’ narratives concerning food in early twentieth-century colonial India. As pointed out by scholars of food studies, eating is an ‘inevitably participatory experience, requiring more than simple observation’. Thus, when people travel, they have ‘no choice but to engage’ as they have to eat and drink whatever is available there and then (Tam and Frost 2008: 128). This often leads travellers to record interesting details about their eating experiences during their journeys and the features of society that they observed through these experiences.
There are a significant number of travelogues written by Japanese intellectuals, businessmen, and others who visited colonial India (Matsumoto 2006; Adachi 2006).1 Some of them include details not only about where they went, what they saw, and whom they met, but also how they travelled, where they stayed, where they took meals, and sometimes what they ate there. This paper focuses on such narratives in travelogues written by three Japanese intellectuals who travelled in India around the 1920s (more precisely, between 1918 and 1929). It illustrates their experiences related to food during their journeys and considers what implications these had for their understanding of Indian society.
C.A. Bayly, in his The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914, described in detail the ‘growth of uniformity’ around the globe from 1780, which he described as ‘the beginning of the revolutionary age’, to 1914, the beginning of the First World War (Bayly 2004: 1). This ‘growth of uniformity’ was visible, he argued, ‘not only in great institutions such as churches, royal courts, or systems of justice’, but also in ‘bodily practices’, such as dress, bodily deportment, language, food, sport, and leisure (12-19). One can find examples of such uniformity in the experiences of Japanese travellers in colonial India. For instance, when they communicated with people in India, they mostly used English, the language whose knowledge was shared by the elites and even by some non-elites not only in British colonies but also those in other regions of Asia, including in Japan. These Japanese travellers used railways, the symbol of ‘modernity’, in India as well as in Japan. Those who could afford to took meals in train dining cars or at refreshment rooms attached to stations. There they found familiar items, such as bread, butter, sandwiches, tea, and coffee, which were available also in Japan and known as ‘Western’ food and drink (Kawaguchi 2002; Tenri Sankokan 2010). According to A Handbook for Travellers in Japan (1913), written by Basil Hall Chamberlain and W. B. Mason and published by John Murray in London, besides dining cars, which had been introduced on the main rail artery, ‘neat little boxes of Japanese food (bento), sandwiches, tea, beer, cakes, and ice’ were also offered for sale at principal stations in Japan (Chamberlain and Mason 2000: 11). Similar items, excluding bento, were readily available at station refreshment rooms in India too. Yet, in spite of this familiarity of food available on railways, Japanese travellers abroad also encountered unexpected experiences in relation to food not only outside stations and trains but also even inside.
The period in which the three travellers discussed in this paper visited India saw the expansion of Japanese political power in the world on the one hand, and the rapid growth of the Indian nationalist movement on the other. It also witnessed the development of Indo-Japan trade, especially in the field of the cotton industry. In this context, some Japanese intellectuals were attracted to India and visited the country by themselves. Among them were Shun’ichi Amanuma (1876-1947), a well-known architect and a professor of Kyoto University; Hokei Izumi (1884-1947), a scholar of Buddhism and Indology and a professor at Otani University; and Teijiro Ueda (1879-1940), a professor of economics of Tokyo Shoka University (presently, Hitotsubashi University). Although their style of travelling differed, their narratives of food in India provide us with interesting insights into how eating experiences contributed to the way in which travellers shaped and reconstructed their ideas of the region.
Among the three intellectuals whose writings are examined here, Shun’ichi Amanuma travelled most extensively in India in terms of geographical space. His first trip to India was from 20 November 1921 to 10 February 1922 and its main aim was to visit historical buildings, archaeological sites, and museums.2 Having landed in Bombay and made the necessary preparations, he ventured out across different regions in India and Sri Lanka. He was accompanied by Siva, a servant whom he employed in Bombay. Together they visited Sanchi, Agra, Delhi, Lahore, Taxila, Peshawar, Lucknow, Benares, Sasaram, Patna, Nalanda, Gaya, Calcutta, Madras, Tanjore, Madurai, Tuticorin, Columbo, Kandy, Anuradhapura, and Mihintale, before coming back to Bombay (he also made a couple of short trips from Bombay) (Amanuma 1928-30). Several years after his first visit, he published detailed essays on it in a journal of architecture, Kenchikugaku Kenkyu, between 1928 and 1930 (Amanuma 1928-30).3 These articles, entitled ‘Indo Ryokoki’ (Records of Travel in India), contain details of his daily activities, daily accounts, photos, and a number of quotes from a variety of literature in English, German, Chinese, and Japanese. These essays were later shortened and revised to be published as a book (Amanuma 1931). Amanuma visited India once again between 9 December 1935 and 11 April 1936 (Amanuma 1945, II: 301). He wrote another travelogue after this trip (Amanuma 1936-8, Amanuma 1944-5), though in this paper, I will focus on his first trip to India in the early 1920s.
Hokei Izumi stayed in India for almost a year from 11 October 1918 to 21 September 1919 (Izumi 1928: 18, 30; Izumi 1931: 392). He also spent a month in Sri Lanka before reaching India. As a scholar of Sanskrit and Indian literature as well as a Buddhist monk,4 he spent his time in India reading classical literature and visiting historical sites, especially those related to Buddhism (Izumi 1928: 1). He was acquainted with Sanskrit and Pali, and while he was in India, he also acquired some knowledge of Hindustani (Hindi), which helped him communicate with local people, especially when he travelled in rural areas of North India (Izumi 1931: 285). Izumi stayed in Mysore and Bangalore as a guest of Prince Kantaraja, a member of the Mysore royal family, for four months, before moving to Calcutta, where he lived for six months at a residence of Benkichi Kobayashi, a Japanese businessman there. From Bangalore and Calcutta, he made trips to different parts of India, including Western, Northern, and Northwest India. The places he visited include Bombay and Pune (where he went from Bangalore in December-January), Gaya, Benares, Sarnath, Kasia, Lucknow, Rajgir, and Nalanda (where he went from Calcutta in February-March), and Ambala, Shimla, Lahore, Peshawar, Taxila, Delhi, and Agra (where he visited in August-September before leaving India for UK from Bombay) (Izumi 1928; Izumi 1931). Izumi later published two books on his time in India, Indo Tabi Nikki (Travel Diary in India, 1928), and Indo Mandan (Stories of India, 1931).
The third traveller, Teijiro Ueda, reached Columbo with his wife on 26 December 1928, after travelling in Europe and Egypt (Ueda, 23 March 1929: 4; Ueda 1963: 127-33). According to his own narrative, he had been eager to visit India for more than a decade. He was not particularly interested in Buddhism nor the old architecture and sculpture of India, he explained. For him, it was a country with which Japan traded on a large scale and where many Japanese people resided for business. He also noted that the country was not as hot as people generally imagined if one travelled in winter and also that a number of tourists visited there from the UK and USA every year. He found it unreasonable that the Japanese paid little attention to India, imagining it as the country of ‘fierce animals and poisonous snakes’. He thus decided, he wrote in the travelogue, to see this country for himself (Ueda, 23 March 1929: 4). During their one-month visit, he and his wife visited Madurai, Madras, Bombay, Ajanta, Gwalior, Agra, Delhi, Benares, Calcutta, and Darjeeling, before sailing from Calcutta for Singapore on 27 January 1929. He published 15 essays entitled ‘Indo Manyu Ki’ (Records of Wandering around in India) in Tokyo Asahi Shinbun (Tokyo Asahi Newspaper) between 23 March 1929 and 12 April 1929. He was well-connected to the network of Japanese business people in India and actively met with Indian elites in different fields during his stay.
It is evident from the three authors’ travel writing that issues of food constantly drew their attention. In the case of Amanuma and Izumi, who travelled extensively in India and Sri Lanka by themselves (though Amanuma travelled with an Indian servant, it was Amanuma himself who decided where to visit, the form of transport, and where to stay), they had to make conscious efforts to secure food that was safe and edible. Izumi once took a night train from Calcutta to Gaya. At some point the next morning, he realised that there would be no station where he could take meals before reaching Gaya (that means no station with a refreshment room) (Izumi 1928: 54; Izumi 1931: 245). He had to manage with only biscuits and the hot water in his bottle throughout the long journey. As soon as the train reached Gaya station at 4PM, he rushed to its refreshment room and took a meal, feeling that human beings are, after all, helpless without food (Izumi 1928: 56). He could not help comparing this experience with his travel experiences in Japan, where passengers could easily find ‘something to fill their stomach’ at stations. He observed that ‘native people (dojin)’ in India all carried food and water on their train journeys and imagined that they did so due to the caste system (Izumi 1928: 55). In his two travelogues, Izumi repeatedly stressed the problem of eating that travellers faced in India.
Such experiences reflected the situation of public dining in colonial India. As Frank Conlon pointed out, India did not develop an ‘enduring tradition of restaurants or public dining’ before the modern age (Conlon 1995: 92).5 This is generally associated with the prevalent notions of purity and pollution and the various food taboos and habits held by caste and religious communities. In this environment, the development of commercial establishments for public dining or of shared dining space open to people belonging to different communities was largely inhibited.
The situation slowly began to change with the beginning of colonisation and ‘modernisation’. In large cities, hotels, clubs with dining facilities, and European-style restaurants, mainly with British and other European customers in mind, began to emerge in the nineteenth century (Conlon 1995; Sen 2006: 392-3). An industrial city like Bombay also saw the rise of eating houses for migrant labourers, and tea stalls and cafes that became social gathering places for different classes and communities (Conlon 1995: 98-103). Nevertheless, facilities for public dining that were accessible to a variety of people continued to be limited even in urban areas. Even where such facilities did exist, there were often separate sections within them for people from different social groups based on, for instance, race, caste, religion, and gender.
From the 1840s, the colonial government began to establish a network of dak bungalows (rest houses for travellers; dak means post) across regions on the subcontinent, making travelling much easier for the British (Burton 1993: 42; Bhandari 2012: 14; Conlon 1995: 94; Leong-Salobir 2011: 108). In many dak bungalows, caretakers called khansamas6 cooked for travellers if the latter wished, though there were also bungalows that did not provide this service. British civil and military officers often travelled extensively in rural regions for transfers, inspections, and for holidays, and they could now use dak bungalows and other kinds of government bungalows during their journeys.7 Those who were not government employees could also stay there. A famous English guidebook for travellers in India, entitled A Handbook for Travellers in India, Burma and Ceylon, which Amanuma constantly referred to during his journey (the one he had was its 10th edition), had detailed descriptions of how these bungalows functioned and a list of hotels and dak bungalows that travellers could use (Amanuma 1929, 5(28): 213; Buckland 1920).8
Besides dak bungalows in small towns and hotels in large cities, there were also dining facilities on trains and at stations that Japanese travellers often used. Yet, as Izumi’s experience during his journey from Calcutta to Gaya shows, careful planning was required when relying upon these. Thus, both Amanuma and Izumi advised the readers of their travelogues to employ a servant who could cook. In fact, Izumi himself did not employ a servant and on Amanuma’s first trip he only employed a servant who could not cook. Their own experiences appear to have convinced them of the necessity of a servant with cooking skills (Amanuma 1930, 6(33): 168; Izumi 1931: 261). Amanuma, during his second trip to India in 1935-6, employed servants who could cook and ordered them to prepare meals or make tea at stations and accommodation where food was not available (Amanuma 1944-5). Even when using dining facilities on railways, the servant was of great help for travellers as will be shown later (Amanuma 1928-9). Ueda employed a servant at Columbo and he and his wife journeyed with this ‘travelling boy’ until he reached Calcutta. This man, Ueda added, had many recommendation letters from Japanese customers who had used his services before (Ueda, 23 March 1929: 4), suggesting that employing a servant from local society was a widely shared practice among Japanese travellers of certain classes.
In the travel writings of Japanese and British visitors in colonial India, memories of dak bungalows are often narrated vividly and in a nostalgic manner (Bhandari 2012). For a room in a dak bungalow, travellers paid one rupee per night, and if they ordered meals and tea, they paid for them in addition. In a dak bungalow at Sanchi, Amanuma paid four annas for chota hazri (an early light breakfast, usually consisting of tea and bread), one rupee for breakfast, two rupees for lunch and dinner, and four annas for afternoon tea (Amanuma 1928, 2(10): 242). Amanuma, during this journey, became accustomed to having chota hazri and afternoon tea, which he considered a ‘bad habit’ of the ijin (Westerners) (Amanuma 1929, 4(19): 54). For lunch and dinner, the choice of food at a dak bungalow was usually limited. Most likely, travellers would be served some chicken dishes, of which the most famous was a dish called ‘country captain’, that is chicken flavoured with spices (Bhandari 2012: 38-48; Collingham 2006: 123-4; Burton 1993: 110). The limited choices of food and frequent use of chicken were presumably governed by the availability of ingredients and the limited skills of the cooks. It should be also noted that these dak bungalows did not have to compete with other facilities to attract customers and thus there was generally little incentive for khansamas to increase the variety of dishes.
According to the well-known English guidebook mentioned above, however, in some cases the khansamas had been ‘in the service of English officers’, and as a result had sufficiently good cooking skills (Buckland 1920: xxv). In Amanuma’s case, he had what he considered as ‘Indian food’ only in two bungalows in his first India trip, and in other bungalows he seems to have had ‘Western food’, or at least what he did not consider as ‘Indian food’. In a dak bungalow at Dalatbad where Amanuma stayed toward the end of his journey, he was told that the only food available was ‘rice curry’ and ‘bread that natives eat’ (which were in fact chapatis, as a photo of the bill of this dak bungalow he inserted in the travelogue shows). In the narratives of Japanese travellers (as well as British travellers), all kinds of dishes cooked with spices and served in gravy were called ‘curry’. Amanuma found ‘curry’ and chapaties at this dak bungalow tasty at first, but after having them for three continuous days, he became bored (Amanuma 1930, 6(32): 90-1, 93; 1930, 6(33): 152).9 Izumi once had to travel without any food and drink for 20 hours until he reached a dak bungalow in Peshawar. There he finally had ‘curry and rice’. He wrote in his travelogue that he could never forget how delicious the food was (Izumi 1928: 358-61).
Amanuma’s travelogue often mentioned how fluently khansamas could speak English, sometimes even better than himself (let alone his servant Siva, who spoke poor English and with whom Amanuma often had communication issues). Sometimes he developed a liking for khansamas who provided a good service and meals. In a dak bungalow in Sasaram, a khansama, who was again good at speaking English, cooked soup and fries, which Amanuma found delicious. He also liked the breakfast in the same place, though its contents- four slices of toast, three fried eggs, and tea - do not seem to be uncommon (Amanuma 1928, 3(18): 429). He jokingly wrote that this khansama ‘seemed to be a good cook in spite of his face’ (438). He even took a photo of him. In view of the cap he was wearing and the fact that he had to cook non-vegetarian food for British travellers, it is likely that this khansama was a Muslim. In fact various writings by British authors who stayed in colonial India show that cooks working for the British and other European households were mostly Muslims, Christians, and low-caste Hindus (for instance, see Riddell 1860: 7; Grant 1862: 106; Burton 1993: 52; Isaka 2019: 92). High-caste Hindus, many of whom were vegetarians, would not touch any kind of meat and were thus generally considered unsuitable for cooks.10
Although Japanese travellers described what they had as ‘Indian food’ or ‘Western food’, according to their understanding of these categories, needless to say, most of these dishes, whether they were soup and fries or ‘curry’, reflected the influence of British recipes and cooking styles as well as those of local society. They were developed in facilities created mainly for the British and therefore emerged from a negotiation between the demands of the British on the one hand and the knowledge, cookery skills, and ingredients available in local society on the other. In this sense they were what food historians of India would call ‘Anglo-Indian food’.11 Dak bungalows and khansamas provided opportunities for Japanese travellers like Amanuma to have a glimpse of the ways in which the colonial ruler and local society interacted with each other in India, to create partially new bodily practices, symbolically represented in food.
Besides taking meals at dak bungalows and hotels, Japanese travellers like Amanuma, Izumi, and Ueda often took meals on trains or at stations. Around 1907, the introduction of dining cars to trains began to be discussed in India (Prasad 2015: 79; Mukhopadhyay 2018: 155). By the time these Japanese travellers visited India, dining cars had become common on express mail trains (Buckland 1920: xxiv).
According to Amanuma’s narratives, he either ordered meals in advance before boarding or on the train. When the food was ready, he was told so by the railway staff. Then he got down at the next station and walked to the dining car via the platform, as it was not connected to the other cars from inside. Meanwhile, Siva, his servant, who was otherwise in a servants’ room, came to sit in his compartment and watched his luggage (Amanuma 1928, 2(10): 232). Sometimes Amanuma had to spend a long time in a dining car after he finished his meal, waiting for the train to stop at the next station so that he could return to his compartment. Izumi, without a servant, found himself unable to use a dining car, and was once prevented from eating and drinking for 20 hours while on a train from Lahore to Peshawar (Izumi 1931: 359).
When the passengers took a train that was not accompanied by a dining car, they were told to go to a station refreshment room when the train stopped. Amanuma did not like this as he felt pressure to finish his meal quickly. For instance, on a train from Madras to Bombay, Amanuma was told to have a breakfast at the refreshment room as late as 11:20AM, when the train stopped at Raichur station. Just as the third dish, bacon and eggs, was served, the conductor came to tell him that the train would leave in five minutes. He gave up the rest of the meal and the moment he returned to his carriage, the train left the station (Amanuma 1930, 6(32): 80).
Refreshment rooms were also used by those travellers who spent the night at station waiting rooms. For instance, at Taxila station (previously known as Sarai Kala station), where Amanuma stayed for three nights while visiting archaeological sites, he had enjoyed breakfast, lunch, and dinner at its refreshment room. ‘I rather enjoyed Western food cooked by an Indian at a restaurant of a chilling station in this rural area’, he recollected（Amanuma 1928, 3(13): 71). A photo of a bill of this restaurant is also inserted in his travelogue and has the name of the restaurant manager at the top: ‘Ghulam Mohammed, Manager, Refreshment Room, N.W. Railway’. A list of the foods available there was also printed on the bill:
The same bill also shows hand-written numbers next to ‘Tiffin, hot’ and ‘Soda, Lemon, Ginger, Tonic and fancy drinks per bot’. They suggest that he had ordered at that time ‘Tiffin, hot’ and a non-alcoholic drink and that these two items cost two rupees and two annas respectively. The caption he added to this photo further tells us that he had chosen soda among ‘Soda, Lemon, Ginger, Tonic and fancy drinks’. In fact, throughout his journey in India, he constantly took soda because he could not drink alcohol and also because he believed that the water in India was too dangerous to drink.
Amanuma’s other narratives also indicate that the dishes he had in dining cars and refreshment rooms were mostly ‘Western food’. They were presented in a rather ‘authentic’ manner, and thus the set menu was something like ‘a soup, an entrée, a roast, and pudding, which was usually a baked or caramel custard’ (Brennan 2000: 153), served one by one. Amanuma once mentioned having soup, two more dishes, and pudding for lunch in a dining car, though he did not leave any comments on their taste (Amanuma 1929, 5(27): 147).
These Japanese intellectuals, while travelling in the first and second class (Izumi chose the latter and Amanuma and Ueda the former) could not help noting a great difference between their travel experiences and those in the third class. Ueda recorded that the third-class compartment was ‘fully packed’ with people ‘wrapped with cotton clothes’ (Ueda, 26 March 1929: 4). Although Izumi, when he was in Japan, used to travel in the third class at ease, he found the condition of the same in India so awful that he felt he would never be able to travel in it (Izumi 1928: 52). Amanuma, staying at the waiting room for first-class passengers at Taxila station, was taken aback to see the third-class passengers sleeping on the cement floor like ‘tuna in a fish market’ when he tried to go to the refreshment room for dinner (Amanuma 1928, 3(13): 65). He also noted that when he had breakfasted at the refreshment room at Shahjahanpur station, the large dining room was partitioned into two sections, one for first-class passengers and the other for those in the second class (Amanuma 1928, 3(17): 328) As Manu Goswami has pointed out, the ‘internal hierarchies that structured colonial relations were etched into the spatial ordering of railway stations, platforms, and the interior of rail carriages’ (Goswami 2004: 116). The narratives of Japanese travellers reveal that the striking forms of hierarchy that they observed during their railway journeys left a strong impression on them.
Those travelling in the third class, and those in the first and second classes who did not take meals in dining cars or refreshment rooms due to economic reasons or food taboos, could obtain food and drink from vendors at stations (though vendors might not be found at small stations). The railway companies began to give licenses to vendors from the late nineteenth century (Mukhopadhyay 2018: 153). They sold, for instance, fruit, parched grains, nuts, ‘country sweetmeats’, bread, biscuits, tea, coffee, tobacco, cigarettes, and paan (Prasad 2015: 77). At some stations there were ‘separately designated Hindu and Muslim vendors’, who supplied food graded as food for specific social groups, such as Brahmans, non-Brahmans, and Muslims (Prasad 2015: 77-8). Amanuma mentioned having purchased bananas, oranges, and soda from vendors at stations (Amanuma 1928, 3(16): 272; 1929, 4(20): 122; 1929, 4(21): 182). Other travel writings by Japanese authors in colonial India that are not examined here also feature descriptions of vendors who sold paan and food (for instance, Sekino 2009: 382; Kurushima 1939: 57). Siva, Amanuma’s servant, who was paid one rupee per day for both food and accommodation, besides 30 rupees per month (Amanuma 1928, 2(9): 168; 1930, 6(33): 168), might have also purchased some food from such vendors.
Importantly, Ueda noted the existence of separate drinking water facilities set up at stations for Hindus and Muslims (Ueda, 27 March 1929: 4). This description reminds us of the narrative of ‘Hindu water’ in M.K. Gandhi’s autobiography. Soon after the future ‘Father of the Nation’ returned to India from South Africa, he travelled third class across the subcontinent. He was shocked at the sight of ‘orthodox’ Hindus on trains waiting for opportunities to get ‘Hindu water’ even if they were thirsty (Gandhi 2018: 599). It was widely observed in those days that high-caste Hindus were employed as water carriers at stations to provide drinking water for Hindu passengers, while Muslims were employed to do the same for the Muslim passengers (Mukhopadhyay 2018: 145; Prasad 2015: 82).
In his travel writing, Ueda also recollected finding signboards which said ‘Hindu restaurants’ in different urban areas (Ueda, 26 March 1929: 4). It is not evident from his accounts where exactly he found them. If he had seen some of them at stations, these must have been refreshment rooms set up for Indians, especially for Hindu passengers (or more precisely, high-caste Hindus). While refreshment rooms were initially built with British and other European travellers in mind, by the late 1910s, some stations began to provide facilities serving Indian passengers. However, the railway companies had to attend to different preferences and food restrictions among the Indian passengers. For instance, in an article of The Times of India dated 18 January 1915, the words of the General Secretary of the Passenger Protecting Society of India were quoted. He complained about the lack of food supplied for Muslim passengers; according to him, the Muslims had to be ‘contented with the Hindu food – puri and sweets – which are supplied on railways or at some big stations with the Roti-Tarkari [a kind of curry] that is sold for Mussalman passengers’ (The Times of India, 18 January 1915: 5). The same secretary, however, also noted that the North Western Railway had set up refreshment rooms for both Hindu and Muslim passengers, in addition to those for European passengers. The same society equally welcomed the instruction issued by the Great Indian Peninsula Railway to provide ‘Chupaties, Parathas, Rice Pulao, Korma and Tarkari gosht at all stations wherever there are Mahomedan food vendors’ and to set up Muslim and Hindu refreshment rooms separately for all new waiting rooms at stations. It seems that other railway companies followed these examples. In a letter to the editor of The Times of India, a reader narrated how different railway companies, one after the other, began to open refreshment rooms for upper-class Hindu and Muslim passengers (The Times of India, 23 August 1919: 16).13
Ueda, having found the signboards for a ‘Hindu restaurant’, asked his ‘travelling boy’ (travelling servant) what this meant. The latter, seemingly a Muslim, explained that it was a vegetarian restaurant exclusively for the Hindus. Then the same ‘boy’ started to criticise the exclusive attitude of the Hindus, arguing that they strictly forbade members of other religious communities to enter their temples while Muslims allowed anyone to enter mosques (Ueda, 26 March 1929: 4). Ueda found this reply extremely interesting and this dialogue seems to have strengthened his view that the conflict between Muslims and Hindus was one of the main elements preventing the ‘peace and unity of India’.14
In addition to these eating experiences at railways and dak bungalows (and hotels in the case of large cities), our travellers narrated episodes relating to their experiences of dining with people from local society, or dining at their places without necessarily eating with them.
Izumi, staying in Mysore and Bangalore as the guest of a member of a royal family of Mysore (though the details of their relationship are not written in his travel writings) was struck by the fact that he was always served a meal separately from the host, despite the fact that they met and talked to each other almost every day. His meals were prepared by a servant especially assigned to him (Izumi 1928: 39-42; Izumi 1931: 102-5). Izumi compared this with the situation in Japan, where people from different families would frequently dine together. He tried to understand the reason for this and argued that for Indians, especially for the orthodox Hindus, food was important for keeping them as they were. ‘If food were impure’, he asked, ‘how could one maintain a pure body?’ (Izumi 1931: 104). While narrating his eating experience in Mysore and Bangalore, he linked this experience with what he called the ‘hierarchical system of the castes’ (Izumi 1928: 40; 1931:101).
Izumi, however, also noticed that in recent years there were Hindus who took a more relaxed attitude to the prohibition of co-dining with people outside their caste communities (Izumi 1928: 42). In fact, he himself met such people during his journey. When he visited the archaeological sites at Nalanda, he met a ‘Bengali gentleman’, whose name was Ghosh. He and his son, evidently belonging to the highly educated middle class, had been supervising the excavation work there. They welcomed Izumi, a scholar from Japan, and invited him for tea and dinner at their tent besides letting him stay at another tent (Izumi 1931: 332-5). Izumi recollected his feeling at that time:
I wonder whether they could be Indians. In my understanding, Indians are difficult people who have strict food regulations – and they are in fact – and yet, there are this kind of people too. This is puzzling. (Izumi 1931: 335)
Izumi also expressed his views elsewhere that the Muslims had more freedom than the Hindus in the matters of food and that ‘boys and cooks’ (here ‘boys’ mean servants) employed by foreigners were ‘mostly Mohammedans’ (Izumi 1931: 379). At Rajgir, Izumi was treated to dinner by a Muslim lawyer from Patna, whose name was Haq and whom Izumi had met on the train. He had a relaxed time with Haq and others at a place known for hot springs, and in the evening enjoyed ‘rice and curry’ (according to Izumi, the rice was shiny and green peas and other ingredients were mixed into it). Izumi found the dish extremely appetising (Izumi 1931: 311-18).
Ueda formed a strong impression through his journey that people in India strictly observed food taboos. The third of his series of travel essays for Tokyo Asahi newspaper was entitled ‘Vegetarianism in India’.15 In it he narrated several episodes related to food, including the conversation he had with his servant on ‘Hindu restaurants’ mentioned above. Another episode he introduced here concerns a tea party organised by a housewife of a ‘Western’ family, to which he was invited. There he saw a few Hindu ladies and noticed that they took neither meat sandwiches nor sweets made of eggs (Ueda, 26 March 1929: 4). He further introduced the following information he had heard again in relation to food (though he did not mention who gave him this information). Japanese businessmen in India, he was told, had to prepare vegetarian dishes for Hindus and dishes that did not include pork for Muslims when they invited their business partners for dinner. Ueda was also informed that servants working for Japanese households in India mostly did not eat the left-over non-vegetarian dishes of their employers, and that even those who ate them would hide the fact from others. He even heard that the servants following vegetarianism threw away left-over meat dishes and obtained vegetarian food with their own money.
Ueda analysed that vegetarianism among the Hindus was not based on the sympathy for animals; it was, in his opinion, based on their fear that the consumption of animals would pollute both their body and spirit. According to him, they believed such pollution would affect the form in which they would be reborn in the next life (Ueda, 27 March 1929: 4). He further imagined that this fear made them not only observe vegetarianism but also feel displeased even to sit with the people ‘polluted by meat-eating’. Like Izumi, Ueda too took a great interest in these food-related practices and notions among the people in local society and often linked them with what he knew about caste and religious communities in India. It seems that their food experiences encouraged these Japanese travellers to emphasise the notion of India as a deeply split society, based on class, caste, and religious communities, while sometimes comparing it with Japan.
The travel writings of the three Japanese intellectuals explored here show how they utilised ‘modern’ facilities for dining that had been developed for the British and other Europeans in colonial India and how they experienced specific features of these facilities. They tasted ‘Western food’ as well as ‘curry’ at dak bungalows, hotels, and railways, prepared by ‘native’ cooks and khansama, which reflected various elements of British and ‘native’ cooking as well as the ways in which ‘coloniser’ and the ‘colonised’ interacted and negotiated with each other. These travellers thus experienced the ‘taste of the Indian Empire’.16 They also glimpsed the food habits of ‘native people’ from different classes, castes, and religious communities. As the examples introduced in this paper showed, their observation of food culture often strengthened their perception of India as a sharply divided society.
There are many more Japanese travelogues written about colonial India during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by authors from various fields and across different periods. Further analyses of these writings will enable us to deepen our understanding of the important role that food-related experiences played in forming travellers’ conceptions of Indian society, its people, and the difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’.
* Department of Area Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo.
This paper is part of my current research on travelogues on India by Japanese intellectuals in the early twentieth century, funded by the LIXIL Ushioda East Asian Humanities Initiative. I would like to thank Prof. Kaoru Amanuma and Prof. Atsushi Kanazawa for their information and advice, and Jessica Robinson for her help with English editing.
1 These writings were often published as books and in journals (Matsumoto 2006; Adachi 2006), though there are unpublished materials too. For instance, a famous architect, Chuta Ito (1867-1954), who travelled in India in 1903-4, published a series of essays on his journeying in Yomiuri Shinbun (Yomiuri Newspaper), which was later included in a collection of his travel writings (Ito 1903-4; Ito 1935), while his diaries and sketchbooks remain unpublished.
2 For details of his life and works, see Amanuma 1982.
3 For these essays, he used his pen name, ‘Yattoimagoro’, which literally means ‘now, at last’. He adopted this pen name to express his feelings when he finally obtained his Ph.D. in 1919 at the age of 43 (Amanuma 1982: 181).
4 For details of Izumi’s work, see, for instance, Kanazawa 2011.
5 Certain forms of public dining did exist, however. For instance, during the Mughal period, a limited facility for public dining was available to travellers in the caravanserai, though in many cases travellers had to have their own servants cook there (Conlon 1995: 92). Hindu temples often served vegetarian meals to pilgrims and other worshippers (Sen 2006: 391).
6 The word ‘khansama’ was also used outside dak bungalows to mean a house steward or chief table-servant (Yule and Burnell 1886: 190).
7 The size of such bungalows was generally small and travellers sometimes found them already occupied by other travellers. After occupying a room for 24 hours, the travellers had to give their places, if required, to the next comers (Buckland 1920: xxv). There were also other kinds of bungalows, such as Public Works Department Bungalows and Inspection Bungalows, but travellers generally needed to obtain permission from the officer-in-charge to stay there.
8 Handbooks for travellers in different parts of the world, published by John Murray in London, were widely known not only in Europe but also in Asia (Dutta 2020; Mukhopadhyay 2013).
9 The experience of having ‘rice curry’ repeatedly at this dak bungalow remained in Amanuma’s memory for a long time. Even in his travelogue on his second trip to India, he recollected this experience from his first trip and commented that the curry there was not as good as that of Nakamuraya (Amanuma 1944, I: 122). Nakamuraya was a famous restaurant in Tokyo, which was known to serve ‘pure Indian curry’ based on the recipe of Rash Behari Bose (1886-1945), an Indian revolutionary who had escaped to Japan and eventually married a daughter of Nakamuraya’s owner (Kosuge 2013: 155, 164-9; Morieda 1989: 212; Nakajima 2005).
10 According to Rajika Bandari, even today many cooks at dak bungalows are Muslims, often the direct descendants of Muslim khansamas who served during the Raj (Bhandari 2012: 51).
11 On the way in which ‘hybrid’ cuisine/Anglo-Indian cuisine developed and spread across regions in the colonial period, see, for instance, Leong-Salobir 2011; Collingham 2006; Appadurai 1988. The use of the term ‘Anglo-Indian food’ does not assume any fixed border or definition of this category; it is used as a term to describe the food that had been developed through various forms of interaction and negotiation between the British (and other Europeans) and the people in local society.
12 The usage of capital letters and punctuations is not consistent in the bill, which I retain as it is.
13 For details of the development of refreshment rooms at stations in India, see Mukhopadhyay 2018: 151-2; Prasad 2015: 81.
14 It should be stressed here, however, that not all Hindu and Muslim elites observed food restrictions associated with their communities all the time. Even among those who were from ‘strictly orthodox’ vegetarian Brahman families, there were ‘non-conformists’ who happily tried non-vegetarian dishes at station refreshment rooms set up for Muslim passengers (Conlon 1995: 102).
15 On the discussions among the colonial elites on vegetarianism/meat-eating, see, for instance, Ray 2015; Sengupta 2010. The idea that vegetarianism has been dominant in India or among the Hindus as a whole can be challenged if we look closely at a wide variety of food habits among different social groups and within the groups (see, for instance, Natrajan and Jacob 2018).
16 Similar expressions, such as ‘a taste of empire’ and ‘the taste of empire’, are used effectively in the titles of books that show the ways in which the British Empire developed new cuisines or initiated changes in food habits around the world (Leong-Salobir 2011; Collingham 2017).
