Food Culture Studies in India: Consumption, Representation and Mediation 9811552533, 9789811552533

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I: Food Fads: Food and Public Culture
Part II: Narrating Nourriture: Food in Literature
Part III: Visual Victuals: Food in Film, Animation and Comic Strips
Part IV: Of the Colonial and the Culinary: Food, the Folk and Registers of Resistance
Contents
Editors and Contributors
Part IFood Fads: Food and Public Culture
1 Food Substitutes, Health Supplements and the Geist of Fitness
Introduction
Theorizing the Consumptive Body
Fitness, Gyms and Health Supplements
Conclusion
References
2 Fast Food and Fatness in Popular Media: Interrogating the Link
Fast Food as a Convenient Target
“You Can’t Deny These Links”: Super Size Me and American Anxiety
“Burger Kids” Versus Traditional Diets: Fast Food and Nostalgia in News Media About India
Conclusion
References
Part IINarrating Nourriture: Food in Literature
3 Accio FOOD!: Food and Its Magical Properties in Cartoons and Fantasy Literature
References
4 Who Eats Whom?: Transcending the Real Purpose Behind Food Events in Children’s Literature (If Any!) Through Nonsense Literature
Literary Nonsense: Beginnings, Content and Intent
(Literary) Nonsense and India
Reading the Texts
Conclusion
References
5 What Do You Want for Dinner, Honey?: The Subversive Power of Food
References
6 Food, Love and the Self in Indian Women’s Poetry in English
References
7 Food for Thought-Feeling: Studying Taste’s Affective Function in Bulbul Sharma’s The Anger of Aubergines
References
Part IIIVisual Victuals: Food in Film, Animation and Comic Strips
8 “Luca Brasi Sleeps with the Fishes”: The Gastromythology of The Godfather Trilogy
The Rasas We Cannot Refuse
The History and Hermeneutics of Gastromythology
Fasts and Fratricides
Conclusion
References
9 Chocolate and the Holly Factory: Analysing the “Role” of Chocolate in Select Films from Hollywood
Introduction
Chocolate and Advertising: The Indian Context
The Relationship Between Chocolate and Hollywood
Conclusion: The Journey of Chocolate and Its Image in India
References
10 The Anatomy of Obesity: Cartman and the Economy of Consumption in South Park
References
11 Eat, Sleep and Dream Trilogy in Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes
References
Part IVOf the Colonial and the Culinary: Food, the Folk and Registers of Resistance
12 Feeding Workers in Colonial India 1919–1947
Work in Nutrition Discourse in India: The Question of Efficiency and Gender
The Perception of Food Problems in Industrial Setting: The Example of Tata Iron and Steel Company
The Idea of Workers’ Welfare and Its Discontents
Consequences During World War II
Conclusion
References
13 Of Khaar, Pithaa and Aitaa’r Posola: Exploring the Folk Aesthetics and the Erotic in Assamese Food
References
14 Hunger Games: Politics of the Ema Market, the Kitchen and Protest in Manipur
Ema Keithel and the Women’s War
Hunger Strike to Live
Women’s Role in the Kitchen Politics
Conclusion
References
15 Food for Soul, “Soul” for Food: The Tale of Blacks Told Through Soul Food
Introduction
Food and Kitchen
Soul Food
Conclusion
References

Citation preview

Simi Malhotra Kanika Sharma Sakshi Dogra   Editors

Food Culture Studies in India Consumption, Representation and Mediation

Food Culture Studies in India

Simi Malhotra Kanika Sharma Sakshi Dogra •

•

Editors

Food Culture Studies in India Consumption, Representation and Mediation

123

Editors Simi Malhotra Department of English Jamia Millia Islamia New Delhi, Delhi, India Sakshi Dogra Department of English Gargi College University of Delhi New Delhi, Delhi, India

Kanika Sharma Department of English Shyama Prasad Mukherji College For Women University of Delhi New Delhi, Delhi, India

ISBN 978-981-15-5253-3 ISBN 978-981-15-5254-0 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5254-0

(eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Acknowledgements

Food Culture in India began more than four years ago with the conceptualization of a young researcher’s conference which endeavoured to understand the sociocultural presence of Food Studies in Indian Academia. We invited papers that critically looked at various strands of a burgeoning and ever-expanding culture of gastronomy, culinary skills and alimentary cousins. The papers we received underscored how food cultures across the globe were pregnant with possibilities as their study stood at the crossroads of economics, biology, history, culture and literary studies. In these papers, discourses around identity, gender, class and globalization were being looked at from the prism of food cultures. While drafting paper panels and assessing these research essays, we realized that the purview of these theoretical discussions went beyond that of a conference, and we decided to work on a book project. We had a set of young scholars discussing food and making up an eclectic mix of voices with varying theoretical frameworks. This was the starting point in our journey to nourish this fruit of our collective labour. We shared our interest with the editorial team at Springer Nature and especially Satvinder Kaur who helped us to cook these stimulating ideas and present it in its current form. We owe a great debt to the institutions we are affiliated to, i.e. Jamia Millia Islamia, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee College and Gargi College for their constant support. We thank all who in one way or another aided in the completion of this project.

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The interdisciplinary study of food has been dominated by “structuralist, culturalist and Gramscian approaches” (Ashley et al. 2004, p. 2). Within this tradition, notions of health and taste are conceptualized not as simple trans-historical choices, shaped in isolation, but ones with immense political and sociocultural import. To elucidate, Roland Barthes in his seminal essay “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption” writes “For what is food? It is not only a collection of products that can be used for statistical or nutritional studies. It is also, and at the same time, a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and behaviour” (2013, p. 24). Thus, Barthes situates food at the crossroads of multiple disciplines such as visual culture, semiology, history, sociology and anthropology. It is no surprise then that the discussions on food have found such a vast expression in cultural studies which is conceptualized and defined by Toby Miller as a “tendency across disciplines, rather than a discipline in itself” (2001, p. 1). Continuing the emphasis on the cultural and political import of food, Slavoj Žižek critiques the increasing phenomenon of “healthy lifestyle” (vis-à-vis organic food) calling its manifestation a symptom of “cultural capital”. Similarly, Pierre Bourdieu in his work Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984) argues that taste is determined by the class one belongs to and when “embodied, helps to shape the class body” (34). Ben Highmore, on the other hand, breaks with this mould of analysis and in his study on taste revises both these positions. He rejects Bourdieu, who he says “was not actually interested in taste and rarely addressed its particular qualities” (Highmore 2016, p. 547) and also questions Zizek’s claim by stating that taste is “more than cultural capital, it is cultural power played out on a violently affective plane” (Highmore 2010, p. 125). For Highmore, it is the affective plane orchestrated by food and taste that reveals the most about any culture and society. Taking a cue from these theorists, this edited collection of essays seeks to chart many meanings that are generated by the preparation, consumption, representation and mediation of food. Since the study of food lies at the cross section of communication theory, media studies, affect theory, popular culture

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and identity politics, its multidisciplinary nature has the potential to lead to creative research pathways in the area of food culture studies. The interconnection of food and culture is marked by an interesting dualism. Bob Ashley, Joanne Hollows, Steve Jones and Ben Taylor hint towards this very dualism in their comprehensive study on Food and Cultural Studies when they go on to suggest that it is “the complex relationship between power structures of various kinds and human agency” (2004, p. 1) that marks the central node in any kind of cultural study, including on food. According to this dualism, where on the one hand “cultures are formed around the meaning people construct and share” (Lewis 1), meanings that are irrevocably shaped by power structures and social orders, on the other hand, it is these very power structures that make resistance and subversion possible. John Fiske in his essay “Cultural Studies and the Culture of Everyday Life” too reiterates the aforementioned impulse when he says, “The social order constrains and oppresses the people, but at the same time offers them resources to fight against those constraints” (1992, p. 157). Food then, in the deliberations in this volume, is conceptualized as both constitutive of power structures and subjects in some articulations, and subversive of those very power structures and identity in some others. In order to provide a representative collection of essays on food and culture in/from India, we have undertaken a twofold approach in this volume. Firstly, several of the papers in this volume engage with local and topical issues around food and food culture in India to look at how it becomes a source of contestation, coercion, resistance, subversion and negotiation. In a culturally heterogeneous country such as India, tastes and taboos are plural and varied. An examination of the bearing of these diverse tastes and taboos on questions of identity, both individual and collective, is one of the central concerns of this collection of essays. A foray into what is deemed sacred food and what is believed to be polluted promises to bring to the fore the sociocultural dimension of food. So does a discussion on fasting, fatness and episodes of collective consummation in India that this volume tries to showcase. Secondly, the volume situates many meanings of food and food culture in India by locating it in the matrix of dominant global food cultures that frame the debates in India. Tony Bennet’s essay “Texts, Readers, Reading Formations” is an important entry point into the second set of issues the volume wishes to engage with and provides some significant insights. Bennett critiques the idea rampant in critical analysis that a text is complete in itself and meaning is always already present in the text. He instead privileges the act of reading which takes “account of ‘the historical and social variability of the person of the reader’”. For Bennett, “meaning is a transitive phenomenon. It is not a thing that texts can have, but is something that can only be produced, and always differently, within the reading formations that regulate the encounters between texts and readers” (Bennet 1983, p. 8). The book acknowledges this very thesis by Bennett as the authors of the essays in this volume go on to study popular cultural global texts such as Garfield comics and The Godfather trilogy. An analysis of these texts included in this volume attests to the editors’ intention of investigating the reading formations of popular cultural global texts such as Garfield and The Godfather in the Indian context. The authors and their papers

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collected in this volume thus undertake a “productive activation” or “continuous reproduction” of texts, be they literary, visual or cultural, to produce compelling conjectures on food cultures that have become part of everyday reality in India, especially in the wake of economic and cultural globalization. The reading formation or the overlapping relationship between production and reception makes any notion of a concluded text suspect, making reading formation around global cultures a crucial and necessitous terrain on which meaning is contested and negotiated. In Bennett’s articulation, the process of reading is primary and it needs to be contextualized and historicized. Thus, any study of food culture in India would be incomplete if it doesn’t account for the meanings that are produced in our post-colonial and globalized sociocultural Indian landscape today. Where it is important to highlight what this book attempts to do, it is equally important to underscore what this book doesn’t pretend to do. The book doesn’t promise to provide a complete listing of thematic concerns on food. The book instead tries to provide a glimpse of food cultures in contemporary and India of yore, by blurring obsolete binaries between the local and the global especially in our current times. The papers in this volume are thus committed to looking at the pungent transactions between the local and the global, and the simultaneous cultivation of ideas, subjectivities and becomings that come into being because of that interaction. In a lot of ways, this intention then attracts attention to the planetary turn in humanities and social sciences. Keeping the sentiment of approximating a sense of totality, clarity and thoroughness in mind, we have divided the book into four distinct sections. This fourfold division of the book seeks to foreground key areas that have animated discussions on crucial concerns while engaging in a cultural study of food. The book opens with a section on “Food Fads: Food and Public Culture down History” which looks at public culture and discourses around food through time and goes on in the second section to address the question of narratives and representation of food in literature in “Narrating Nourriture: Food in Literature”. The third section of the book titled “Visual Victuals: Food in Film, Animation and Comic Strips” engages with the many meanings that food produces chiefly in visual culture. Lastly, the fourth section titled “Of the Colonial and the Culinary: Food, the Folk and Registers of Resistance” engages with the diverse forms of resistance that food is able to mobilize.

Part I: Food Fads: Food and Public Culture Food fads are produced, circulated and regulated because they are ultimately profitable. Ranging from the resonance of exotic virgin olive oil to the commonplace whole wheat brown bread, food fads are ubiquitous and dot our horizon today. Food festivals have become a recent fad, and they promise to evoke a community-oriented experience of consumption and ingestion. Food fads commonly last for a short period of time and are soon replaced by newer, more

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persuasive fads. Microwave popcorns, for example, were a food fad which gained popularity with the technological shift towards microwaves in middle-class households. Microwaves in initial days were often accompanied with CDs and cookbooks that were meant to teach the buyer how to cook elaborate meals in a microwave. However, today microwaves are rarely used for purposes other than reheating (Allen and Albala 2007, p. 177). Food fads related to health and nutrition have become a phenomenon of sorts in recent times. What is healthy and what is not has become an imperative question, and the entire food industry has off late geared around addressing this issue. Whether it is diet regimes endorsed by celebrities (from low carb to keto) or the mushrooming of gyms and health clubs across the country, ideas of calorie measurement and physical fitness have permeated the public culture and have gripped the national consciousness as it were. The paper titled “Food Substitutes, Health Supplements and the Geist of Fitness” by Anubhav Pradhan addresses this very issue in the paper and tries to uncloak it. He posits that the fitness industry first “fashions that which is desirable” and then produces means to satiate it, rendering any notion of enlightened and free choice of consumers “suspect”. He concludes by remarking how advertising of supplements and other products accentuates further consumption of these health and fitness fads in India. The nexus of morality and health becomes an overarching question for Margaret Hass who opens an array of interesting questions concerning fast food, the criticism of which is invariably predicated in the moral panic over obesity. In her paper “Fast Food and Fatness in Popular Media: Interrogating the Link”, she debunks the idea of a naturalized causal relationship between fast food consumption and obesity to suggest that the fat body is not “inherently ‘unhealthy’”. She argues that the consumption of fast food doesn’t necessarily engender obesity but the reverberance of this idea in public consciousness attests to “cultural anxieties rather than actual concern for health”. If what food is consumed has such an enormous bearing on public discourse, where food is consumed and with whom becomes equally important to assess. Many such concerns are articulated in the representation of food in literature.

Part II: Narrating Nourriture: Food in Literature The representation of food in literature provides a window into the complicated networks of affection and agitation related to food and its depiction. John Thieme and Ira Raja in their Introduction to The Table is Laid: The Oxford Anthology of South Asian Food Writing emphasize on “the communicative dimension of food and its importance as a signifying system” (2007, p. xvii). Their introductory essay comments on the frequency with which the subjects of spice, space, hunger, appetite, kitchen and restaurant appear in South Asian Food Writing. The editors contend that an “anti-essentialist attitude towards food discourses” promises to reveal how food functions as an “indicator”, “marker”, “bearer”, “trope”,

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“reflection”, “signifier” of sociocultural meanings. For instance, in Bulbul Sharma’s short story titled “The Anger of Aubergines”, food is locked in a complex synesthetic relationship with feelings and perceptions. Food’s proximity to the body and its omnipresence in everyday life makes it an important marker of sociocultural identity. Often food is employed in/through literature to suggest and construct collective identities. For example, Aatreyee Ghosh in her paper “Accio FOOD!: Food and Its Magical Properties in Cartoons and Fantasy Literature” analyses fantasy literature such as the Harry Potter series, to propose how the world of food conjures a distinctly and exclusively British identity. Food in literature performs the function of a “silent chorus” and plays an active role in the production of meaning. She unravels how the material conditions of food production and circulation in the magical world are strongly linked to unequal class and ethnic relations. Her paper provides us an insight into the poetics and politics of food in literature. She highlights how the Potter series have spurred a new fandom in India around food. Where food plays a significant role in identity formation in and through literature, it is also possible to imagine a politics of subversion through the register of food. What is prohibited and for whom and by whom? Where prohibition of certain foods can be symbolic of the prohibition of one’s identity, the injunction to consume can be equally autocratic. In fact, the command to consume and ingest can be a disciplinary mechanism to regulate and control individuals/communities. Anurima Chanda in her paper, “Who Eats Whom?: Transcending the Real Purpose Behind Food Events in Children’s Literature (If Any!) Through Nonsense Literature”, argues that food events in children’s fiction are often marked by repetitive injunction to eat right, act civil and observe table etiquettes, which are all reflective of the adult regimenting programmes to indoctrinate children into “the social mores of consumption”. This moral policing and social ordering around food is undercut by a parodied and trivial treatment of food in nonsense literature, written by both Lear and Carroll. She also discusses how the representation of food in select Indian English nonsense writing can be subversive and thus assertive. For instance, the use of local names to refer to indigenous foods facilitates the affirmation of one’s cultural identity. Similarly, the linguistic play that abounds in Indian English nonsense writing seeks to mock the authority of standard English: the colonizer’s language. Subversion plays a key role in the representation of food in writings by women. Food is central to the appetitive and affective conditioning of women. At what point of time in the meal are women permitted to eat? Are the rules of eating different for married women and widowed women? A case in point is Githa Hariharan’s “The Remains of the Feast” which talks about a grandmother who has lived most part of her life as a widowed Brahmin woman. Although she is in the habit of consuming only home-made vegetarian food, as she nears her death, she develops a taste for “unexpected inappropriate” food (Hariharan 2004, p. 58). On her deathbed, she demands a “red sari”, “peanuts with chilli powder from the corner shop. Onion and Green chilli bondas deep fried in oil” (Hariharan 2004, p. 59). The story discusses the willing sensual realignment/attunement that taste accords. This realignment can best be described as a silent protest against the pedagogy of distaste that she has

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been schooled into. Thus, Hariharan’s story portrays a sensual realignment that mobilizes the grandmother to exercise a life of taste as she nears her death. As John Thieme and Ira Raja maintain, “Contemporary work in literary criticism and the social sciences has demonstrated the literal and symbolic importance of food in women’s lives…” wherein eating and indulgence can become a form of resistance (Thieme and Raja 2007, p. xxxvi). Sananda Roy in “What Do You Want for Dinner, Honey?: The Subversive Power of Food” focuses mainly on two short stories, namely “Chocolate” by Manju Kapur and “Lamb to the Slaughter” by Roald Dahl to reveal how spaces of cozy domesticity, connotative of female passivity, are revitalized by female protagonists to reject patriarchal norms and social codes. Tara and Mary are estranged wives who take recourse to food to exact revenge on their respective cheating husbands. Shruti Sareen in “Food, Love and the Self in Indian Women’s Poetry in English” traces the transition that has occurred in the representation of “self” in relation to food, memory and spaces. She argues that in the poetry of later and contemporary poets such as Sumana Roy, Sujata Bhatt, Imtiaz Dharkar and Nabina Das one finds an unabashed engagement with the body, which is increasingly depicted in terms of food imagery, thus architecting an identity which is located in the overflow of the body instead of its exclusion. She conjectures that this change of representation occurs when women poets move from being depicted as food that is consumed by others to themselves consuming food and becoming active agents of consumption. Sakshi Dogra, in “Food for Thought-Feeling: Studying Taste’s Affective Function in Bulbul Sharma’s The Anger of Aubergines”, argues that food is locked in a complex synesthetic relationship with feelings and perception. She argues that food is not only symbolic in writing on food by women, but simultaneously also tasteful and material and, thus, sensual and affective. This affective function of food coupled with recipe sharing in Sharma’s writing contributes to the production of a social context of feminine activity.

Part III: Visual Victuals: Food in Film, Animation and Comic Strips The critically acclaimed movie The Lunchbox, written and directed by Ritesh Batra, narrates the story of a relationship that brews between Ila, a young housewife whose husband is having an affair, and Saajan, an old man on the brink of retirement. This unlikely association is established when a lunchbox that was meant for Ila’s husband finds its way to Saajan’s office. The following exchange of letters that this switching of lunchbox facilitates provides both Ila and Saajan with an opportunity to communicate and make meaning of their respective lives. The Lunchbox is thus portrayed as a vehicle through which communication is established. The lunchbox is not just a prop or medium in the film but the very contents of this lunchbox acquire a language of their own. For example, when Ila is angry with

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Saajan for having complained about the amount of salt in her food instead of praising her for her cooking skills, she deliberately sprinkles chillies in order to punish him. Similarly, when Saajan breaks his promise of meeting Ila, she sends an empty lunchbox next day to convey her displeasure. Commenting on the centrality of representation of food in movies, Anne Bower harks to Gaye Poole, who writes “it is possible to say things with food—resentment, love, compensation, anger, rebellion, withdrawal. This makes it a perfect conveyor of subtext; messages which are often implicit rather than explicit but surprisingly varied, strong, and sometimes violent or subversive” (2004, p. 3). The representation of food, as she rightly points out, contributes towards the production of meaning, making the presence of activities around food in a text, a connotative process (instead of food being seen as just a prop). Arup K. Chatterjee in his paper “‘Luca Brasi Sleeps with the Fishes’: The Gastromythology of The Godfather Trilogy” reads in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Trilogy nuances of the Christian tradition of the Eucharist. He employs Abhinavagupta’s aesthetic concept of “rasadhvani” to do the same. He argues that liturgical symbolism flourishes in the movies and there is a gastromythology (or a representation of food rituals) at play. In The Godfather movies, this discourse of food rituals clubs “killing and culinary consumption” in a dialectical bind. Arup closes his paper by attributing Michael’s alienated status to the protagonist’s “inability to follow the mysterious gastromythology of the Corleones”. According to the author, it is not until we have unpacked the culinary symbolism latent in The Godfather trilogy that we can discern the movies in totality. The question of consumption and symbolism of food also becomes a point of discussion for Deepti Razdan and Jyoti Arora, who in their paper “Chocolate and the Holly Factory: Analysing the ‘Role’ of Chocolate in Select Films from Hollywood” look at the variety of ways in which Hollywood movies represent chocolate. They maintain that the movies about chocolate serve as an advertisement for chocolates and help in their promotion. They look at some movies such as Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Chocolate and Chocolate Wars to suggest that the box office success of these movies depends on the way in which these movies go on to represent chocolate. They conclude by suggesting that the portrayal of chocolate in these movies fashions certain myths about chocolate and as a consequence the cultural significance that chocolate goes on to acquire helps create a demand for chocolates, not just as a commodity but also as a cultural signifier. They suggest that a similar trend can be seen in the myth-making around chocolate in India. This symbolic valence of food is not just limited to movies but can be evidenced in other visual forms such as graphic novels, comic strips and animated sitcoms among others. Concerns of eating, ingestion and consumption are inseparably tied to the concern for appetite and a desire to satisfy bodily needs. However, appetite is not merely restricted to a yearning for food, but is available as a category for multiple kinds of metaphorical and symbolic purposes and needs. It is this figurative and consequently extended meaning of appetite that the paper titled “The Anatomy of Obesity: Cartman and the Economy of Consumption in South Park” by

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Ishaan Mital and Safwan Amir explores. The authors retell the story of Eric Cartman, from the hit American animated sitcom South Park, as a story of a child’s attempt to gain agency and authority. The authors open their argument by situating obesity as an excess to appetite where appetite connotes a desire for not just for food but also for material objects and power. The authors undertake a comparative analysis of consumption in USA and India. For instance, they argue that where the discourse of obesity is spun to marginalize the illegal migrant’s body in USA, in India it’s the Brahmin who is conceived of as obese. They employ caste as an analytical tool and imagine a local version of South Park to understand the power dynamics that are inherent in consumption of foods. The connotative and signifying system of food in visual culture finds depiction in Shaheen Saba’s essay titled “Eat, Sleep and Dream Trilogy in Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes” (comic strips) who juxtaposes the food habits of Calvin and Garfield (eponymous) to elucidate the contrary messages underlined by the two comic strips. She argues that where Garfield is portrayed as an obese lazy cat who loves to devour lasagne, Calvin’s overt dislike for food stands in direct contrast to the former. She dwells on how these depictions can impact readers, especially children, who are avid consumers of comic strips everywhere, as also in India. Connecting television viewing to daydreaming in the two comic strips, Shaheen elaborates on various sequences in the comic strips where food and daydreaming contribute to how meaning is produced by the reader/spectator.

Part IV: Of the Colonial and the Culinary: Food, the Folk and Registers of Resistance As the title of this section suggests, the essays collected in this section initiate a discussion on the various modes and manners of resistance which are articulated in/by/through food. This section is devoted to suggesting how resistance can be couched in the ingestion or rejection of food. The slow food movement is an example of resistance that has been mounted to challenge acceptable norms of eating. The papers in this section attract attention to how food acts as an agent of political and cultural resistance against the dominant social order. Where sometimes this resistance takes the form of a demand for better access to food, at other times it is conveyed by refusing to consume food and go on as fast as in the case of Irom Sharmila. At yet other times, the preparation and consumption of food fosters cultural memory and effect resistance. For instance, Róbert Balogh in “Feeding Workers in Colonial India 1919–1947” argues that the discourse concerning the relationship between nutrition and work in Colonial India was marked by heterogeneous conceptualization. So, initially where there was discrimination in the dietary requirements of British troops as opposed to Indian troops, gradually in the 1930s there was a change in British governmentality with an emphasis on citizenship and trusteeship and a simultaneous demand was

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made for “increased nutrition levels” for the Indians. The first part of his essay argues that the rationale of nutrition science, scientific management and welfare programmes and social services were brought in to ostensibly address the needs of industrial labour in India. Balogh also elaborates how this discourse on nutrition often marginalized women as workers in the labour force. Women’s dietary needs were considered far less than men. Another section of people who could not lay any claim to class or nation was “coolies”. It was the “coolies” against whom a “reconstruction of racial and national boundaries and hierarchies in the age of emancipation” could take place. In the closing part of the essay, Robert shows how industrial labour gradually “internalized” the rationale of “scientific management” to ask for better access to food. Where the discourse of nutrition science became central to industrial labour and provided a language for articulation of resistance as shown above, folk practices surrounding food are fundamental for the constitution of community identity per se. In “Of Khaar, Pithaa and Aitaa’r Posola: Exploring the Folk Aesthetics and the Erotic in Assamese Food”, Prerana Choudhury and Rini Barman comment on the use of food, both edible and inedible, in Assamese poetry, festivals and folk songs. They examine the centrality of food at the festival of Magh Bihu, on the occasion of Uruka, in the poetry of Nitoo Das and Uddipana Goswami, to argue that food is not just about “taste” and its pleasures but it also provides an entire range of “tactile” and “olfactory” experience which needs to be focused upon as well. The authors go on to suggest that where sometimes food engenders cultural memory at other times it carries nuances of sexual expressiveness, both of which have immense bearing on formation of identities, especially Assamese identity. They conclude by critiquing the derogatory attitude that north-east invites from others for its folk practices (in this particular case those associated with food) which are an inherent part of Assamese identity and which remain un-understood by others. Where folk practices which involve consumption of food are an act of assertion of one’s identity, the very act of refusing to ingest food is also an act of asserting one’s self-hood and a means to resist the dominant social order. Fasting has been and continues to be a powerful articulation of non-violent resistance. “Hunger Games: Politics of the Ema Market, the Kitchen and Protest in Manipur” by Samurailatpam Tarun Sharma and Sumitra Thoidingjam highlights the 10 years-long fast by Irom Sharmila as part of her protest against the state. The authors begin by contrasting the relationship between women and food in the public sphere and the private sphere and argue that where Ema Market in Manipur becomes a space of economic independence, political activism, everyday interaction and formation of collective identities for women, the domestic set-up poses several challenges for these very women. In the private sphere of the kitchen, often women find themselves tied to regressive and archaic notions of purity and other moral codes. Notions of purity are central to the question of race, caste and food. Ved Prakash opens his argument by highlighting how in any Indian household, the space of the kitchen is dedicated to segregating food which is considered pure, from food (usually meat) that is considered “abhorrent”. His paper “Food for Soul, ‘Soul’ for

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Food: The Tale of Blacks Told Through Soul Food” extends this argument concerning permissible and impermissible food to trace the trajectory of “soul food” from its origin to it being sold in restaurants. He argues that the genesis of soul food lies in the days of slavery when African Americans were given “throwaways of whites” which were used by the slaves to prepare their meals. It was during the Black Power Movement of the 1960s that the term soul gained currency for defining black culture. The author makes an important differentiation between soul food and southern food, conceptualizing the latter as “food of survival”. Ved Prakash ends his paper by stating that soul food is an integral part of the African American consciousness and a source of pride for the community. Thus, a meal prepared out of discarded food in this case can be seen as a political and cultural form of resistance by the community, much like quilt-making by black women, who took discarded cloth and sewed them into artistic and creative quilts. The volume seeks to be a timely intervention in the interdisciplinary study of food and culture it generates. These essays on food culture studies engage chiefly with tropes which have been pertinent to examine the intersection of food studies with culture studies. Firstly, papers in this volume engage with questions of consumption, representation and mediation of food. The essays look at consumption practices in public culture and ethnic culture. These range from collective consumption of tabooed food at food festivals to an exploration of spaces such as Ema Market as symptomatic of liberty and autonomy. There is also a significant engagement with representation of ingestion and appetite in literary and visual culture. Food functions not merely as a prop, an accessory which is trivial or secondary to the meaning-making exercise in these depictions. Instead, as these diverse papers elucidate, “notions of historicity, locality, or authenticity rest in food” (Ray and Srinivas 2012, p. 6). To continue, the papers in this volume demonstrate that food can be understood in its representational form, as a system of communication, which creates meanings for its consumers. Food can be read as carrying the sensual, the non-representational and non-conceptual content of taste and other senses along with it. As cultural practice that is closely tied to the body, food has the potential to mobilize and catalyse masses. Secondly, keeping in mind the cross-disciplinary nature of the field and the methodological approaches employed here derive from both social sciences and humanities, these papers together can then be most appropriately studied within the rubric of cultural studies. Keeping with the dualism that forms the core of food culture studies, the papers look at food as an important tool of mediation between power structures and human agency. As suggested and articulated in the papers collected here, food cultures participate in a complicated relationship between power structures and human agency. Food is often co-opted and mediated by social structures to garner consent and establish hegemony and various discourses around food come to constitute various subject positions related to food. Where on the one hand food constitutes subjects, it also creates occasions for these subjects to

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articulate their resistance through food. Food thus offers a potential of subversion, and this has implication for questions concerning identity, both individual and collective. Simi Malhotra Kanika Sharma Sakshi Dogra

References Allen, G. J. & Albala, K. (Eds.) (2007). Food fads. In The business of food: Encyclopedia of the food and drink industries (pp. 174–177). Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press. Ashley, B., Taylor, B., Hollows, J. & Jones, S. (2004). Food and cultural studies. New York and London: Routledge. Barthes, R. (2013). Toward a psychosociology of contemporary food consumption. In C. Counihan, & P. Van Esterik (Eds.), Food and culture: A reader (pp. 23–30). New York and London: Routledge. Bennett, T. (1983). Texts, readers, reading formations. The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 16(1), 3–17. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Bower, A. L. (2004). Watching food: The production of food, films, and values. In Reel food: Essays on food and film (pp. 1–16). New York and London: Routledge. Fiske, J. (1992). Cultural studies and the culture of everyday life. In L. Grossberg, C. Nelson & P. Treichler (Eds.) Cultural studies (pp. 154–173). New York and London: Routledge. Hariharan, G. (2004). The remains of the feast. In N. S. Roy (Ed.) A matter of taste: The penguin book of Indian writing on food (pp. 54–61). Mumbai: Penguin Books. Highmore, B. (2010). Bitter after taste: Affect, food and social aesthetics. In M. Gregg & G. J. Seigworth (Eds.) The affect theory reader (pp. 188–137). Durham and London: Duke University Press. Highmore, B. (2016). Taste as feeling. New Literary History, 47(4), 547–566. Miller, T. (2001). What it is and what it isn’t: Introducing... cultural studies. In A companion to cultural studies (pp. 1–20). Massachusetts and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Ray, K., & Srinivas, T. (2012). Introduction. In Curried cultures: Globalization, food, and South Asia (pp. 3–28). California: University of California Press. Theime, J., & Raja, I. (Eds.) (2007). The table is laid: The Oxford anthology of South Asian food writing. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Contents

Part I

Food Fads: Food and Public Culture

1

Food Substitutes, Health Supplements and the Geist of Fitness . . . . Anubhav Pradhan

2

Fast Food and Fatness in Popular Media: Interrogating the Link . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Margaret Hass

Part II 3

4

5

3

11

Narrating Nourriture: Food in Literature

Accio FOOD!: Food and Its Magical Properties in Cartoons and Fantasy Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aatreyee Ghosh Who Eats Whom?: Transcending the Real Purpose Behind Food Events in Children’s Literature (If Any!) Through Nonsense Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anurima Chanda What Do You Want for Dinner, Honey?: The Subversive Power of Food . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sananda Roy

6

Food, Love and the Self in Indian Women’s Poetry in English . . . . Shruti Sareen

7

Food for Thought-Feeling: Studying Taste’s Affective Function in Bulbul Sharma’s The Anger of Aubergines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sakshi Dogra

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Contents

Part III

Visual Victuals: Food in Film, Animation and Comic Strips

“Luca Brasi Sleeps with the Fishes”: The Gastromythology of The Godfather Trilogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Arup K. Chatterjee

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Chocolate and the Holly Factory: Analysing the “Role” of Chocolate in Select Films from Hollywood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Deepti Razdan and Jyoti Arora

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10 The Anatomy of Obesity: Cartman and the Economy of Consumption in South Park . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Safwan Amir and Ishaan Mital

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11 Eat, Sleep and Dream Trilogy in Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Shaheen Saba Part IV

Of the Colonial and the Culinary: Food, the Folk and Registers of Resistance

12 Feeding Workers in Colonial India 1919–1947 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 Róbert Balogh 13 Of Khaar, Pithaa and Aitaa’r Posola: Exploring the Folk Aesthetics and the Erotic in Assamese Food . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Rini Barman and Prerana Choudhury 14 Hunger Games: Politics of the Ema Market, the Kitchen and Protest in Manipur . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Samurailatpam Tarun Sharma and Sumitra Thoidingjam 15 Food for Soul, “Soul” for Food: The Tale of Blacks Told Through Soul Food . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Ved Prakash

Editors and Contributors

About the Editors Simi Malhotra is Professor at Department of English, Jamia Milia Islamia, Delhi. Her research interests include contemporary literary and cultural theory, culture studies, and Indian philosophies and aesthetic practices. She has more than 19 years of teaching and research experience, and has published 5 books and edited volumes, 53 articles and 12 book reviews. She has participated in a host of conferences, seminars, workshops, symposia and panel discussions. Kanika Sharma holds an M.Phil. degree and is currently working as Assistant Professor at the English Department of Shyama Prasad Mukherji College For Women, University of Delhi. Her research interests include cultural studies, memory studies, collective memory, film studies, visual arts and literature. She is closely associated with CATA (Centre for Academic Translation and Archiving) and CSVMT (Centre for Studies in Violence, Memory and Trauma) at the University of Delhi. Sakshi Dogra is currently working as Assistant Professor and teaches English literature and language at Gargi College, University of Delhi. She is simultaneously pursuing her Ph.D. research titled “Food, Feelings and Flavors: A Study of Contemporary Indian Writing in English on Food” from Jamia Millia Islamia.

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Contributors Safwan Amir is Senior Researcher pursuing his Ph.D. in social anthropology at the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS), Chennai. His dissertation focuses on a historical and anthropological understanding of Muslim barbers of South India by exploring the histories of contempt and ethics of possibilities. He was a Fulbright-Nehru doctoral research fellow at Columbia University in the City of New York. He is currently at Krea University as Research Associate for the World Humanities Report, a CHCI initiative funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation and UNESCO. Jyoti Arora is working as Assistant Professor of English at Dyal Singh Evening College. She obtained her M.Phil. in literature from the University of Delhi. Her work exploring early Twentieth-Century British Literature, Postcolonial Theory, Literature of the Diaspora, Victorian Literature and Dalit Studies has appeared in various research journals. Róbert Balogh is Junior Researcher at the Institute for Central Europe, University of Public Service in Budapest, Hungary. He is also part of the research group called “Knowledge, Landscape, Nation and Empire” at the Institute of History of the Center for the Humanities in Budapest. His main areas of research are the history of forestry and the history of the commodification of food items in the Carpathian Basin. Rini Barman is Independent Writer, Essayist and Researcher based in Assam. Her writings have been published in Muse India, The Seven Sisters’ Post, The Four Quarters Magazine, The Eclectic, Enajori.com, the spark magazine online and several other dailies of the north-east. Her poems also appeared in the anthology, Fancy Realm, that was launched during the international poetry festival held at Guntur, Hyderabad, in 2011. Anurima Chanda is currently working as Assistant Professor in the English Department of Birsa Munda College under North Bengal University. Before this, she was with The Heritage College, Kolkata. She has also worked with the Centre for Writing and Communication, Ashoka University, where among other things she has extensively worked with English Second Language (ESL) students and students with learning disabilities, trying to devise teaching modules according to individual needs. She has completed her Ph.D. on Indian English Children’s Literature from JNU. She was a pre-doctoral fellow at the University of Wuerzburg under the DAAD Programme “A New Passage to India” working under Prof. Isabel Karremann. She is also a literary translator (translating from Bengali/Hindi–English–Bengali) and children’s author (published with leading publishers like Scholastic and DK). Arup K. Chatterjee (Ph.D., Jawaharlal Nehru University) is Associate Professor of English, at O.P. Jindal Global University. He is Author of The Purveyors of Destiny: A Cultural Biography of the Indian Railways (2017), The Great Indian Railways (2018) and Indians in London: From the Birth of the East India Company to Independent India (2020).

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Prerana Choudhury has completed her masters in arts and aesthetics from Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her writings have appeared in The Four Quarters Magazine, The Seven Sisters’ Post, The Eclectic, The Sentinel and The Northeast Review and in anthologies like Inklinks and Indus Valley. Aatreyee Ghosh finished her doctorate from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, on the novels of Amitav Ghosh. She did a year-long project on the representation of the Dutch East India Company in South Asian/SouthEast Asian Literature at the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden, Netherlands. She has presented her work at the University of Oxford, Amsterdam University and Leiden University. She is currently working as Creative Manager at Oxford Bookstore under which she curates for the Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival. Margaret Hass earned her M.A. in international literatures at the University of Tübingen and completed her Ph.D. in the Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate Programme “Cultural Studies in Literary Interzones” in 2016, receiving her degree from both Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi) and the University of Bergamo (Italy). Her Ph.D. dissertation, entitled Body Curves and Story Arcs: Weight Loss in Contemporary Television Narratives, examined narrative patterns in television series across three cultures and multiple genres, contributing to the developing field of fat studies. She is currently a continuing lecturer in the Purdue Language and Culture Exchange Programme at Purdue University, where she facilitates the integration of international students through instruction in English and intercultural communication. Ishaan Mital is Journalist with five years’ experience in print and Internet media. He obtained his M.Phil. in English Literature from Jamia Millia Islamia. His research interests include popular media and cultural studies. Anubhav Pradhan currently teaches the urban literature at South Asian University. His doctoral thesis, awaiting examination, was conducted from the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, on colonial ethnography and the British imagination of India. He has also been part of the Researching the Contemporary Programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and the Urban Fellows Programme of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. He is Co-editor of Literature, Language, and the Classroom: Essays for Promodini Varma (forthcoming) and Kipling and Yeats at 150: Retrospectives/Perspectives (2019). He works primarily on questions of belonging and identity in the urban literature, on urban heritage and history, and on land history and rights, all with specific reference to Delhi. Ved Prakash works as Assistant Professor of English at the Department of English, Central University of Rajasthan. He completed his Ph.D. from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His areas of research interest are Life Writing, Ethnomusicology, Film Studies and Post-War Literature. He has also supervised dissertations on “Obituary Writing” and “Gender and Identity in Afghanistan”.

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Deepti Razdan completed her Ph.D. from the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, in 2015. She worked as Assistant Professor of English in colleges across the University of Delhi as well as Jamia Millia Islamia from 2009 to 2013. Having been a writer since the age of 5, she is now pursuing her passion for creative writing and is the published author of several short stories, poems, reviews and articles, among others. She is based in Toronto, Ontario, and continues to work on a variety of projects as a freelance writer. Sananda Roy is working as Assistant Professor of English at the University of Delhi. She is pursuing her Ph.D. from Jamia Millia Islamia, and in her thesis she is trying to explore the idea of filmic adaptation and sexuality in the oeuvre and life of late film-maker Rituparno Ghosh. She is primarily investigating how his sexual identity evolved towards an actualization through the reification of certain sexual/anatomic symbols. Shaheen Saba completed her Ph.D. in translation studies from the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia. She has been a project fellow in DRS-SAP and has worked on the translation of Indo-Persian epic The Adventures of Amir Hamza and Premchand’s fictional pieces. Her areas of interest are children’s literature, translation studies and modern criticism. Shruti Sareen graduated from Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has published around a hundred poems and a handful of short stories in a variety of renowned Indian and South Asian journals. Currently working on her Ph.D. from the University of Delhi, her thesis explores the depiction of urban spaces in the twenty-first-century feminist poetry. She has also taught as Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Germanic and Romance Studies Department at the University of Delhi. Samurailatpam Tarun Sharma is a Ph.D. scholar at the Centre for Northeast Studies and Policy Research. He has completed his M.Phil. from the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia. His areas of interest include film studies, Queer theory, popular culture and anthropology. Sumitra Thoidingjam is Assistant Professor of English at the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia.

Part I

Food Fads: Food and Public Culture

Chapter 1

Food Substitutes, Health Supplements and the Geist of Fitness Anubhav Pradhan

Abstract Commodity fixation generated by contemporary market cultures and consumer practices in capital expenditure is deeply contingent upon simulated realities disseminated through television and other means of advertisement. These may be understood as antecedents to age-specific lifestyles and consumption habits underlying consumer concerns in “product value”. Such mediations upon value, incessant and almost seamless, also produce a new kind of consumer who is smart and aware of product choices but in whom the need for consumption has, for the most, been carefully manufactured by market forces. In rethinking the role of food substitutes and health supplements in bolstering the contemporary discourse of fitness, this paper will comment upon the ontology of consumption patterns within commodity cultures. It will consider marketing strategies of these products and locate consumer practices around the same in the interrelated flux of gyms, spas and fitness centres. In doing so, it will provide a comprehensive study of the health preoccupations of a largely bourgeois consumer base, a class which has to negotiate the baffling proliferation of consumer-based “organic”/“zero cholesterol”/“no trans-fats”, etc., food products to decide “what’s on the table” every day. It will then conclude with comments on the position of the consumer with reference to medico-nutritional needs being facilitated primarily through compulsive consumption as integral to good health and fitness.

Introduction Commodity fixation generated by contemporary market cultures and consumer practices in capital expenditure is deeply contingent upon simulated realities disseminated through television, digital social media and other means of targeted advertising. These may be understood as antecedents to age-specific lifestyles and consumption habits underlying consumer concerns in product value. Value, in turn, is understood in terms of utility, taste, cost or product popularity, influenced by a product’s mass consumption in the market. Such mediations upon value, incessant and almost seamless, also A. Pradhan (B) Adjunct Faculty, School of Global Affairs, Ambedkar University, Delhi, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Malhotra et al. (eds.), Food Culture Studies in India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5254-0_1

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produce a new kind of consumer who is smart and aware of product choices, but in whom the need for consumption has, for the most, been carefully manufactured by market forces. In rethinking the role of food substitutes and health supplements in India’s contemporary market culture, this paper will comment upon the commodification of fitness culture which has generated a pervasive need for consumption of these comparatively new kinds of products. It will locate consumer practices around the same in the interrelated flux of fitness, food substitutes and health supplements, and gyming. In doing so, it will evaluate the agency of India’s largely middle-class consumer base, a diverse segment of the demographic which has to negotiate the baffling proliferation of consumer-based organic/zero cholesterol/no trans-fats, etc., food products to decide what’s on the table every day. It will conclude with comments on the position of the consumer with reference to medico-nutritional needs being facilitated primarily through compulsive consumption as integral to good health and fitness.

Theorizing the Consumptive Body While ontologies of consumption habits have been variously theorized upon, an essentialist theory on the manner of consumption by individuals is impossible in the light of the fluctuating and varying tastes of consumers, especially with regard to the age and the class that is being studied. However, despite such unpredictability of consumption habits, the so-called spasmodic and ad hoc way of purchasing, there exists a conspicuous pattern that indicates a significant increase in consumption levels (Anderson et al. 2002, p. 5). This is further heightened under a capitalistic world scenario where every engagement between individuals is linked, in some way or the other, to consumerism.1 The deterministic processes which inform and disallow, if not completely eradicate, space and scope for nihilistic ruptures are nearly unstoppable. As Frank Trentman comments on the neutralization of active political engagement entailed by consumerism: Together with patterns of homogenization, contemporary consumer cultures have been associated with the triumph of choice and individualisation and a withdrawal from civic engagement: the more the people buy, the more their individual consumer identity crowds out their civic spirit…Citizenship is no longer directed towards public engagement, but encourages individuals to express themselves as active consumers. (Trentman 2010, p. 16)

In other words, consumption practices may be regarded as age-specific and may safely be attributed to cultures wherein economic exchanges are ossified at the origin point of social interactions due to capitalistic market forces. In the Indian context, the liberalization of the economy from the late 1980s has allowed for strengthening of 1 Consumerism

is a belief and value system in which consumption and acquisition rituals are naturalized as sources of self-identity and meaning in life, goods are avidly desired for non-utilitarian reasons such as envy provocation and status seeking, and consuming replaces producing as a key determinant of social relations (Zhao and Belk 39).

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consumerism as a way of life for the emergent middle class. India’s growth trajectory, however, has defied conventional economic wisdom: as many commentators have observed, “economic growth in India has not led from agriculture to industries but to an expansion of the service sector” (Meyer-Ohlendorf 2019, p. 50). This has been accompanied by top-heavy urbanization at an unprecedented scale in the country, causing rapid spatial expansion and population increase in the region’s mega-cities. While income inequalities have deepened with this transformation, urban dwellers’ aspirations have come to characterize the ethos of Indian cities and their consumption habits over the past few decades: Indian consumers increasingly look to upgrade their lives by consuming products which they feel enhance their status (Sinha 2015, p. 18) and in the process have created steady demand for niche products and services which are seen to deliver customized results (Sinha 2015, p. 140). Furthermore, given the range of information available to an individual in the form of advertising, surveys, and proceedings and bulletins of consumer protection cells, consumers are almost never misinformed or passively accepting of marketing strategies that attempt to govern their choices—“it is now the consumer, not the producer, who is the hunter” (Scammell 2003, p. 120). Consumers may succumb to various fads and trends, and product fetishism may be one of the many logical materialist outcomes of contemporary commodity culture, but consumers also have agency which they exercise despite their susceptibility to influence. Effectively, the concept of consumerism proposed herein resists any homogenizing discursive categorization that threatens to relegate the consumer in victim position vis-à-vis market forces, deride him as an impulsive/compulsive shopper or celebrate him simply as a calculating, “calqualating” buyer for whom shopping is a “cognitive process” (Cochoy 2010, pp. 215–216). He is, instead, a conscious and purposeful shopper, constantly negotiating choice within and never operating in isolation of the dialectics of interpellation and resistance to the “tyranny of the brands” (Klein 2010, p. 213). He is constantly shaped by his engagement with the discursive practices of his subjectivization as a consumer of commodities, but he is also determining the direction which brands take in order to appear more desirable to him. That being said, it may be pointed out that in the given context, the body of the consumer becomes one of the “idée fixes” of the market (Maguire 2010, p. 343). Not surprisingly: …proclamations of health experts and our experiences of exertion, ageing and illness raise worries about how well—and for how long—our bodies function. (Maguire 2010, p. 343)

This centripetal concern with the body mirrors the inward slant of the body politic and, thus, engenders: …a market of affluent and informed consumers who generate and regulate the production and consumption of fitness, and a discourse that represents and constitutes fitness as an esteemed mode of caring for the body. (Maguire 2010, p. 344)

Indeed, organic bodies whose medico-nutritional needs have altered significantly in the face of altered lifestyles and dietary patterns are now an area of acute concern for not just consumer/consuming bodies, but also the industries that bring them their modes of nutrition. Moreover, the food and pharmaceutical companies that

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manufacture edibles also shape the cultural ethos that informs concepts of fitness and health, alongside existing medical discourses on the same. Theoretically speaking, the fitness industry in being closely linked to mass consumption and other aspects of consumerism not only fashions that which is desirable and desired, but also enables its propagation through dissemination of images that influence people’s tastes—in visual forms—through media. Hence, “changing consumption practices are associated with a politics of lifestyle that is the most visible marker of India’s new middle class” (Fernandes 2009, p. 227): the body, in being the source of investment, also becomes the site of investment in terms of consumption, pleasure and gain.

Fitness, Gyms and Health Supplements The domineering polarization of concepts in body aesthetics may be identified as one of the causes for the so-called fitness mania which was one of the trends that led to the emergence of the fitness industry. Fitness in these terms reads not simply as a desire to be healthy: to be fit also means to embody an upwardly mobile urge to be glamorous and fashionable in as little time as possible, underlying thus a score of connected parameters with immense notional utility. Since desire—being manufactured by the forces which also fulfil it—is capable of being realized only on the basis of access to capital, the increasing popularity of gyming, of working-out from and into a commodified market space wherein adequately toned, glamourized bodies exist, indicates and textualizes a need for prestige. Thus, in our age of “time famine/time squeeze” (Southerton 2010, p. 337), gyms, which supposedly quicken the attainment of the desired result, have become preferable sites and means for fitness. Yet, even as the urge or desire for fitness is manufactured by the industries that also create its means of satiation, “the lived culture of fitness training in the gym is intrinsically paradoxical”: gyms draw upon bodily ideals in pervasive circulation in society so as to attract potential clients, but at the same time require the temporary suspension of these ideals so as to make exercise an aim in itself. This tension, between clients’ specific body image goals and gyms’ ethos of egalitarian exercise, leads ultimately to “a positive investment in the strenuous display of a self-challenging commitment to the exercise” (Sassatelli 2010, p. 119). In other words, the motivational discourse of self-improvement which characterizes gym training reciprocally feeds into and is fed by the larger discourse of fitness as an aspirational goal. Each industry functions in interdependency, for with the increasing blurring of differences between needs and wants—the two, of course, intersecting at various points—it is difficult to identify responsible consumption practices. This is important given that the reputational value/utility associated with gym cultures becomes its notional/symbolic functional value and is extremely difficult to

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explode.2 Thus, becoming and being fit may be seen as part of, in Tim Duvall’s words, the “Great Chain of Consumption”, a loop wherein “mystical connections [are fabricated] between consumers and the purveyors of consumer ‘goods’” (Duvall 2010, pp. 149–150). However, this is not to say that the fitness culture is not directly linked with contemporary health and nutritional issues, for issues such as lowered immunity and energy levels have become important areas of concern due to current lifestyles and consumption habits of people. Promotion of dietary supplements is closely allied with the fitness industry. Global health concerns such as epidemics/pandemics also increase apprehensions, concerning the effectivity of prevention/cure which these fitness industries produce. As suggested, their solutions aid the consumption and market matrix. This seems to be the larger rationalizing principle of dietary supplements as well. With increased discursive engagement with health issues, there is a direct increase in the number and scope of pharmaceuticals manufacturing pills, tonics and probiotic foods and drinks that claim to improve health/lessen chances of illness/bring a balance to presumably imbalanced diets. All of this has happened in tandem with the rationalization process entailed by globalization, which brought about standardization in tastes since consumer choices now lean more and more towards ostensibly healthier alternatives in food and drinks. Naturally, then, they are advertised in a way that creates belief systems in support of constant consumption. In the Indian context, while brands like Neulife specifically recommend the consumption of its products alongside working-out in gyms, products like Revital and Yakult function without them—and are yet symbolic of good life. Of course, even as they are notional, such needs are also functional, with marketing rhetoric usually revealing the class/section of the society a particular product aims to find a consumer base in. For instance, the advertisements of Revital depict the middleclass, service-class man exhausted every day after work and in need of a product just like Revital. The centripetal emphasis, again, is on ameliorating the exhaustion of the consumer and not on making working conditions equitable so that such exhaustion is minimized. Thus, as markets give the outward appearance of providing solutions in the form of supplements and pills mentioned above, the larger consumerist/capitalist ethos ensures that there are problems that need such product-ified solutions. At the very specific level of the food sector, it is first done by stressing on the irresistibility of junk foods and then by promoting the commodity to ensure its consumption. Irresistibility therefore becomes a commercial construct, the harmful effects of which are later offered as remedies in the form of other commercial products—the demand of which is in turn dependent on cultures of fitness and calorie consciousness. For instance, the latter necessitates the consumption of special products (sugar-free ice cream/sweets, etc.) that cater to such constructed needs. Moreover, in the light of the spread of this culture of risk, a culture which in this case encourages concern/obsession with safer/healthier food, the food sector has 2 Contemporary micro-economics terms this the Snob effect. This phenomenon refers to a situation

where the demand of a particular good by individuals of higher income increases or is more than the demand of the same product by individuals of lower income levels.

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started bringing out healthier alternatives to hitherto unhealthy/fattening junk food and snacks: “a small segment of urban consumers are becoming more and more aware of health-related issues and are increasingly concerned about the nutritional content and functional value of their food” (Dittrich 2009, p. 277). Indeed, with more and more companies offering better and healthier foods that supposedly lower cholesterol/help reduce weight/keep one active throughout the day/re-energize one/help in digestion, inter-linkages between consumption and reproduction in terms of fitness seem naturalized. Vegetable Maggie, for instance, substitutes atta with maida and gives a sachet of a few cut vegetables in order to surround itself with the facade of healthiness. This argument may be valid also for other processed food products such as edible oils: Saffola, for instance, gives an impression that its benefits are crucial for consumers’ health, and in fact impossible or difficult to obtain otherwise. Such marketing is aimed directly at consumers who feel they are empowered and discerning, consumers who are aware of the embedded issues of quality and safety and the concomitant issues of health and fitness in the consumption of a whole range of edibles. Consumers of this kind are reflective but also ambivalent: data-driven advertising, which has become a norm across this sector, allows them to build “reflective trust” in brands (Boström and Klintman 2008, p. 38).3 Additionally, the emotive appeal of products that appeal to consumers’ sense of righteousness is apparent in the case of dietary and nutritional supplements and health accessories such as milk beverages, high protein/fibre foods and organic products. For instance, milk beverages such as PediaSure/Complan/Horlicks appeal directly to a mother’s or a wife’s love for her child/husband. Older, established brands such as Complan have a nostalgia recall value, while recent entrants like PediaSure advertise themselves as scientifically sound supplements to children’s diet. Such products are able to successfully tap into the aspirations of Indian parents and families to self-improve with each succeeding generation: the marketing is geared to assure parents of a healthy and successful life for their children, with the subtext being that consuming these products is the only way to prevent children from inevitably falling into the mire of everyday mediocrity. In a situation where average is undesirably mediocre and fit is the means to excellence, the conflation of healthy and fit with moral and ethical—and even educational and scholarly—works well to further consolidate consumption as the only available option.

3 The

case of Maggi Noodles is instructive in this regard: the brand got embroiled in a massive scandal in 2015 over allegedly high levels of monosodium glutamate and was banned for a little over four months. Industry estimates suggest that Maggi lost almost 80% of its market share at the time. It did recover and continues to be a market leader, but the scandal and resultant loss of consumer trust allowed other brands to establish themselves.

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Conclusion What is remarkable in all of this is not the marketing strategy per se but the wideranging impact of advertising on the consumer psyche. With foodstuff manufacturers participating in generating a zeal for healthy habits, gyms, dietary supplements and processed foods can present fitness as one of our prime bodily concerns—a concern that is now global in nature—and make it their principal symbolic benefit.4 Individuals who have internalized a culture of commercialization wherein want is natural and consumption in itself exalting may consider consuming such products and goods as desirable and satisfying. The agency of the consumer is therefore suspect: enmeshed in a flux of homogenizing options, the consumer has choice but only such that it guides him to predetermined channels. With aspiration being one of the primary hallmarks of Indian consumers’ purchase behaviour and buying decision, fitness has become a commodity to be bought through a host of readily available aids. To be healthy and fit is, of course, desirable, but then health and fitness themselves are largely predetermined by the networked forces of sports, advertising and celebrity culture. They act, thus, as collapsible and mutually reproducible qualities in our present context, so that dietary and nutritional supplements become corollaries of fitness—needs which are as much functional as notional. The illusion of health is perpetrated, in this fashion, at a mass level under the geist of fitness.

References Anderson, A., Kevin Meethan, R., Miles, S., & Miles, S. (2002). The changing consumer: Markets and meanings. New York, NY: Routledge. Boström, M., & Klintman, M. (2008). Eco standards, product labelling and green consumerism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cochoy, F. (2010). Calculation, qualculation, calqulation: Shopping cart arithmetic, equipped cognition and the clustered consumer. In A. Warde (Ed.), Consumption (Vol. 2, pp. 215–242). London: Sage Publications Ltd. Dittrich, C. (2009). The changing food scenario and the middle classes in the emerging megacity of Hyderabad, India. In H. Lange & L. Meier (Eds.), The new middle classes: Globalizing lifestyles, consumerism and environmental concern (pp. 269–280). London: Springer. Duvall, T. (2010). The new feudalism: Globalization, the market, and the great chain of consumption. In P. James & I. Szeman (Eds.), Globalization and culture (Vol. 4, pp. 142–162). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Ltd. Fernandes, L. (2009). The political economy of lifestyle: Consumption, India’s new middle class and state-led development. In H. Lange & L. Meier (Eds.), The new middle classes: Globalizing lifestyles, consumerism and environmental concern (pp. 219–236). London: Springer. Klein, N. (2010). Between McWorld and Jihad. In P. James & I. Szeman (Eds.), Globalization and culture (Vol. 4, pp. 323–328). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Ltd. 4 This

comment does not take into consideration medico-nutritional reports of such products but merely suggests on how certain products, in being advertised in a certain way, grow to stand for certain benefits that may or may not be entirely accurate.

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Maguire, J. S. (2010). Body lessons: Fitness publishing and cultural production. In A. Warde (Ed.), Consumption (Vol. 2, pp. 343–361). London: Sage Publications Ltd. Meyer-Ohlendorf, L. (2019). The research context: India and the megacity of Hyderabad. In Drivers of climate change in Urban India: Social values, lifestyles, and consumer dynamics in an emerging megacity (pp. 49–80). Cham: Springer Climate. Sassatelli, R. (2010). Framing fitness. In Fitness culture: Gyms and the commercialisation of discipline and fun (pp. 97–119). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Scammell, M. (2003). Citizen consumers: Towards a new marketing of politics? In J. Corner & D. Pels (Eds.), Media and the restyling of politics (pp. 117–136). London: SAGE Publications Ltd. Sinha, D. (2015). India reloaded: Inside India’s resurgent consumer market. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Southerton, D. 2010. ‘Squeezing time’: Allocating practices, coordinating networks and scheduling society. In A. Warde (Ed.), Consumption (Vol. 3, pp. 337–357). London: Sage Publications Ltd. Trentman, F. (2010). Beyond consumerism: New historical perspectives on consumption. In A. Warde (Ed.), Consumption (Vol. 1, pp. 57–86). London: Sage Publications Ltd.

Chapter 2

Fast Food and Fatness in Popular Media: Interrogating the Link Margaret Hass

Abstract Fast food sits at the nexus of a number of complex cultural issues within foodways, including meat consumption, industrial food production, labour relations, globalization and ideas of health. Within critiques of fast food, one common assumption is that there is a causal link between consuming fast food and being “overweight” or “obese”. Fast food thus becomes a prime target for those concerned about the socalled global obesity epidemic. Because this link appears to be obvious, media often rely on easy visual and verbal logics to tell their stories, eliding more complex relations between foodways and bodies. This article examines some well-known examples, including popular documentaries Samsara and Super Size Me, as well as news articles about contemporary India, all of which operate under the assumption that fast food and fat are directly linked. Ultimately, the article argues the construction of this link indicates larger cultural anxieties about globalization and modernity rather than an in-depth understanding of metabolism. In this context, interrogating this link becomes essential to deconstruct the cultural anxieties underpinning fat-phobic responses to larger bodies across cultures.

Samsara, the 2011 documentary made by director Ron Fricke and producer Mark Magidson, claims to draw its title from the Sanskrit word for the “ever-turning wheel of life”. Filmed in twenty-five countries and over five years, Samsara presents itself as a masterful conglomeration of visual spectacles, both natural and cultural, from across the globe. The emphasis on visual spectacle is enhanced by the non-verbal style of the film which, according to its promotional website, enables a particular viewing experience: “By dispensing with dialogue and descriptive text, SAMSARA subverts our expectations of a traditional documentary, instead encouraging our own inner interpretations inspired by images and music that infuses the ancient with the modern” (About Samsara 2011, para 1). Yet this purported interest in the viewer’s “inner interpretations” belies the way in which the film’s linear visual logic creates particular patterns of understanding M. Hass (B) Purdue Language and Cultural Exchange, West Lafayette, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Malhotra et al. (eds.), Food Culture Studies in India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5254-0_2

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that are hard to escape; ostensibly projecting a cosmopolitan, critical gaze onto the spectacles it depicts, the film nevertheless relies on superficial connections to make its points. This is particularly evident in the sequence which takes on global food production and consumption. The sequence goes through a series of shots in different locations, depicting first the industrial processing of chickens and pigs into meat, next the busy checkout lines at a supermarket, then the preparation and consumption of food in a fast food restaurant, until we arrive, finally, at a man’s huge, naked belly being marked by a doctor, presumably in preparation for a gastric bypass surgery. Up to this final image, the activities depicted share a sense of hectic, mechanized modernity; the film heightens this feeling in the viewer by privileging wide, aerial shots of large, busy spaces and accelerating the film so that the movements performed by factory workers and supermarket consumers alike blur into frenzied patterns. The linear movement through the stages of production and consumption would seem to indicate clear causal links; audio continuity, provided by the atmospheric New Age music track aptly titled “Food Chain” which also suggests that these activities are all integrated into one global economic system in which the individual (both human and animal) is swallowed up. It is telling, though, that the acceleration of movement and sound ends at the calm, measured marking of the man’s belly; this sudden switch in tempo, paired with the belly’s dominance of the shot, strengthens the impression that this fat body in its concrete materiality is the end result of the previous activities, the final link in the chain. Industrialized food production begets fast food begets fatness is the message, and the only figure who promises some sort of intervention into this overheated cycle of production and consumption is the doctor, i.e. medical authority, who will forcibly decrease the appetite of this particular consumer by reducing the size of his stomach to that of an apple. Meanwhile, the fat man, with his hands behind his back, willingly submits his body to this medical authority for the promise of weight loss.1 In this shot, the film does not show the man’s face, instead it uses a common but dehumanizing trope in news media that fat activist Charlotte Cooper calls the “headless fatty” (Cooper 2007). The immobility of the man visually echoes the immobility of the huge sow stuck in her pen a few moments earlier; the parallel implies that both are “fat pigs” caught in the chain—consuming and being consumed in turn. It does not take much more than cautious probing, however, to show that the links in this “global food chain” are little more than associative. While the processes depicted in the film are certainly related as parts of a global economic system defined very broadly, the links between them are not natural or organic; it is unlikely, for example, that the chickens being “harvested” in the first part of the sequence are the ones later being swiped across the conveyor belt at a Costco in the USA. Likewise, a more natural consequence of the supermarket scene would be a shot depicting the consumption of this particular food; instead, the film goes next to a fast food 1 This

submission can be read as an example of Foucauldian biopolitics in the sense that in order for this type of surveillance medicine to work, the individual must submit himself to this medical authority.

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restaurant, presenting it as the natural link in the chain between industrialized food production and fatness. Moreover, the film somewhat deceptively chooses to present certain subjects as “producers” and others as “consumers”; the shift from the Asian workers in the chicken factory to the fat white people in the fast food restaurant and hospital suggests a strictly unidirectional movement of goods—produced for the “West” by the “rest”. This pattern, in which fast food and fat bodies are linked in a seemingly natural way, is of course not only to be found in this film. It is a paradigm used in many, if not all, popular discussions of fatness and the “global obesity epidemic”; fast food is consistently named as one of the key reasons for increasing weights in the USA and abroad. Interrogating this link between fast food and fatness is worthwhile, however, particularly when one considers how easily it is assumed to be a scientific truth and how little evidence is presented to support this claim in popular media. In doing so, media stories flatten the understanding of both fast food and fat bodies. Fast food continues to be represented as a monolith, despite the fact that the sector’s landscape has diversified much beyond its most quintessential corporate representatives, the McDonald’s burger and fries. Likewise, the simple equation of fat bodies with excessive caloric consumption persists, despite serious challenges from fat studies and scientific research. The following article will analyse how this link is made in a variety of popular media, using examples depicting both the USA and India, and demonstrate how criticism of fast food is often used as a way to express certain cultural anxieties in both countries. By assessing media of these two different countries, one largely seen as the propagator of fast food ills in the world and the other as a recipient, it becomes clear how ways of approaching the fat body bear similarity and difference across cultures.

Fast Food as a Convenient Target Fast food is a convenient target for cultural critique because it sits at the heart of so many controversial cultural issues and discourses, not the least of which are the ethics of industrial meat production, problematic labour relations in late capitalism, globalization as a threat to local tradition, imbalanced consumption of resources between rich and poor countries, etc. Given this complex nexus of difficult issues, it is perhaps no wonder that cultural anxieties generated by fast food are so prevalent, both in the USA and outside in the wider world, and that a particular reading of globalization features fast food brands as its chief villains. As Meredith Jones notes, globalization is sometimes viewed as “a homogenous Americanizing process that […] suffocates the societies it infiltrates, leaving a wasteland littered with Coca-Cola cans and McDonalds signs where there were once diverse local cultural practices” (Jones 2008, p. 33). British fat studies scholar Charlotte Cooper echoes this reading, going a step further by acknowledging that obesity itself is also seen as an “American” export:

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While critique of fast food companies on the basis of any number of reasons may be perfectly valid, what is striking is that criticism of fast food is nearly always justified with claims about “health”, namely the assertion that fast food is devoid of nutritional value and instead pumps its “victims” full of dangerous fats, sugars and preservatives. Despite evidence that metabolism is a very complex process that depends on a number of factors, including genetic or environmental ones that have little to do with the type of food being consumed, eating too much calorie-rich food is assumed to be the reason for weight gain, and thus fast food is demonized as a chief cause of rising obesity rates (Berreby 2013).2 The tendency to criticize fast food on these grounds has become even more pronounced in recent years as the moral panic over obesity has gained momentum. Fat bodies have now become the terrain on which both the “war on obesity” and the war against fast food are fought, so that arguments about fast food’s health value are intertwined with cultural anxieties. Having a fat body in the present moment would seem to indicate not only a particular embodiment, but also the individual’s consumption of fast food and thus participation in an “unhealthy” global capitalist system that exploits workers, abuses animals and destroys competition from indigenous traditions, ultimately polluting the self and leading to disease. Instead of addressing the systemic issues that arise in fast food production, focus in the media, particularly that of the USA, shifts to the individual fat body, providing what Paul Campos calls “a convenient way of avoiding a more direct engagement with any number of issues regarding America’s size, excessiveness, and out-of-control consumption” (Bailey 2010, p. 443). At this point, a fat studies perspective could be useful as it has the explicit goal of challenging medical authority and disrupting notions of the fat body as inherently “unhealthy”. However, the field of fat studies, for its part, has remained largely silent on the question of fast food. In the definitive Fat Studies Reader, edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay, there are only a few passing mentions of fast food, and no real focused discussion on the perceived link between fast food consumption and fatness (Rothblum and Solovay 2009). Julie Guthman, the only one in the collection to take the “foodscape” explanation for obesity seriously, presents a very convincing argument that the fat body acts as a “spatial fix” for the excess production of food 2 For

a good overview of current research pointing to causes of obesity other than simple consumption of excessive calories, see David Berreby’s “The Obesity Era”. Berreby questions the purely thermodynamic model of metabolism that suggests weight gain or loss is a simple matter of calories expended versus calories consumed, citing new research that suggests much more complex biochemical processes of fat storage. These processes are influenced by a wide range of factors, many of which have nothing to do with food at all; even exposure to certain industrial chemicals may be contributing to weight gain, which has been observed in recent decades not only in humans, but also in laboratory and domestic animals as well. Sander L. Gilman also provides a good survey of contemporary theories of obesity and its causes in his book Fat: A Cultural History of Obesity.

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in the neoliberal economy, but this argument still hinges on the assumption that excessive consumption of [fast] food does in fact make people fat (Guthman 2009, pp. 209–218). The curious reticence of fat studies on the topic of fast food may be understandable and strategic—perhaps it is easier to argue for the social justice concerns of fat people on the basis of genetic difference rather than engaging with a complex and difficult debate about global food production—but it is unfortunate given that fast food and fatness are so clearly linked in the popular imagination.

“You Can’t Deny These Links”3 : Super Size Me and American Anxiety One of the most important works to discuss and indeed propagate the notion that fast food and fatness are intrinsically linked is Morgan Spurlock’s widely successful 2004 documentary Super Size Me.4 In contrast to earlier critiques of fast food, like Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal , which addressed a whole range of issues within fast food production, Spurlock’s documentary focuses on the effects of excessive fast food consumption on the health of his own body. In what Courtney Bailey terms a “reverse makeover”, Spurlock embarks on an experiment, eating nothing but McDonald’s food for 30 days and documenting the changes he feels. The results, as presented by the film, are dramatic. Not only does he gain weight (25.5 lbs/11.6 kg), but his liver suffers damage, his cholesterol levels increase significantly, his energy decreases, and his sexual virility appears to be compromised. Aside from the obvious criticism that Spurlock’s personal results cannot be generalized to the whole population of a country, Bailey also makes a number of key observations indicating how Spurlock’s film betrays the cultural anxieties of the post-9/11 USA. Faced with the fear that American citizens have become complacent and diseased as a result of their own affluence, the film attempts to position its white, male protagonist as the prototypical good citizen willing to sacrifice his own body for the sake of the nation. In addition to its other problematic aspects, Super Size Me, like Samsara, assumes a natural link between fast food and fatness, suggesting that its hero’s bodily degeneration is inevitable. Common sense tells the viewer that of course Spurlock is going to gain weight and feel terrible, and the film’s visual style emphasizes this assumption; in addition to the explicit comments of the Spurlock’s voice-over telling us that he is feeling bad, the film increasingly favours low-angle shots of Spurlock sitting, lying down and/or sleeping rather than walking or standing. The “experts” interviewed in the course of the film also emphasize a link between fast food and fatness. John F. 3 John

Robbins says this in his interview reproduced in Super Size Me. film not only won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, but also made millions of dollars and was shown in a number of countries, spurring debate and generating significant media buzz.

4 The

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Banzhaf III, a law professor who led a lawsuit against fast food companies, argues that the cause of the obesity epidemic, …can’t be the neighborhood restaurant. We’ve had neighborhood restaurants for hundreds of years. It can’t be the food we eat at home. We’ve been eating at home for hundreds of years. Something is very different. (Super Size Me 2004)

Privileging “traditional” food as inherently healthy and fast food as inherently unhealthy, Banzhaf fails to take into account the sweeping changes in food practices that have taken place in all three of the domains he lists, let alone other factors for rising weights. Likewise, another interview partner of Spurlock’s, heir to the BaskinRobbins ice cream fortune turned “health advocate” John Robbins, cites anecdotal evidence of ice cream manufacturers who gained weight and later had health issues like heart disease and diabetes, saying “You can’t deny these links-you just can’t” (Super Size Me 2004). Unlike at other moments, like when he is interviewing lobbyists for the food industry, for example, Spurlock does not critically comment on either of these statements, instead implicitly approving them as part of the film’s message. As Bailey notes, Spurlock presents himself as very critical of corporate authority but places great faith in medical authority, relying on official medical discourse and popular notions of the fat body as inherently pathological. Ultimately, Bailey argues the film fails to convey a truly progressive message and instead “reproduces moralistic notions of health, safety, and normalcy” (2010, p. 444). Interestingly, Spurlock’s film has also inspired dissenting reactions from some film-makers, who have then sought to refute Spurlock’s claims. In Fat Head, for example, film-maker Tom Naughton embarks on a similar fast food diet, but with vastly different results (Fat Head 2009). Naughton explains that his film was inspired by viewing Super Size Me, saying that “the premise and rather large gaps in logic annoyed me so much, I decided I needed to create a reply” (qtd. by Hoffman 2008). These responses to Spurlock’s film indicate that dissenting voices do exist, but the fact remains that this film and others like it have not garnered nearly as much media attention and financial success as Spurlock’s.

“Burger Kids” Versus Traditional Diets: Fast Food and Nostalgia in News Media About India The assumed link between fast food and fatness is not only evident in the documentaries Samsara and Super Size Me, made by US-Americans, nor just in media that is about the USA. Rather, the anxiety about obesity and fast food foodways is frequently projected onto other countries as well. Discussions of fast food and fatness in India, for example, also depend on the basic assumption that increased fatness is directly linked to the rising power of the fast food industry and “burger kids” (Kaul 2009). In this sense, the headline “Western fast food, waistlines surge in India”, written by Adam Plowright and reproduced in a number of publications, is indicative in that it uses a simple comma to correlate the growth of the fast food

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industry and its consumers’ waistlines while eliding the complex relations between them (Plowright 2011). These discussions often invoke cultural anxieties. As in the USA, a key element in the Indian context is a certain nostalgia. Just as Morgan Spurlock lovingly looks back at his childhood in which his mother cooked dinner “every single day”, Nina Martyris, in her 2010 article “Obesity: India’s Affluent Affliction” in The Guardian, waxes poetic when she says: Only a generation ago, families ate out sparingly, children walked or cycled to school with a tiffin-box of homemade lunch and a slab of Cadbury’s milk chocolate was carefully split by the whole family. Affluence and rapid westernisation makes all that sound rather quaint. (Martyris 2010)

At the same time, Martyris’s article also suggests that the growing problem of obesity in India is a result of “outdated” notions of health and nutrition; Dr. Anoop Misra is cited as saying, We may live in the 21st century and have money, but our thinking is so 19th century, that we have come out of a famine, so we should eat whatever is available without thinking of excess food and processed food. […] The affluent may know now about olive oil and gyms but the lower middle class and middle class have little awareness. (Martyris 2010)

Ironically, while Misra criticizes the public for their “nineteenth-century” mentality, he is in fact echoing the nineteenth-century discourse on weight in the USA which argued that fatness represented an inability to “regulate the abundance of the modern world”, meaning that people, particularly “lower” classes and the emergent middle class, had to be educated about nutrition (Farrell 2011, p. 44). Nostalgically looking back on times of relative poverty in one moment (sketching the romantic image of a family lovingly sharing one chocolate bar) and embracing the signs of modern affluence the next (suggesting that the middle class must learn about “olive oil and gyms”), this article indicates two seemingly contradictory anxieties about the social changes produced in Indian society by liberalization: first, that traditional values and habits are being lost as tastes become westernized, and second, that not all Indian citizens are successfully adapting their habits and their bodies to neoliberal conditions. Nostalgia about traditional foods is also evident in Neil Barnard’s writing against the “McDonaldization” of India. Barnard, a US-American doctor and founder of Physicians’ Committee for Responsible Medicine, went on a tour of Indian medical institutions to argue that an Indian traditional diet is key to preventing the “diseases that plague the Western world”, namely heart disease, “obesity” and cancer. In his rhetoric, traditional Indian foods, described as “simple” and “humble”, are pitted against the dangerous “meat, cheese and fast foods” of a Western diet. Even beyond arguing for the protection of “the vegetarian traditions that are in danger of being forgotten” in India,5 Barnard argues that “America and Europe need an Easternization 5 It

is questionable, of course, to what extent traditional Indian diets were necessarily vegetarian. Certainly, this equation of Indian food with vegetarian tradition implies a certain (Hindu) religious and caste position, eliding the traditions of other communities who historically did not adhere to meat taboos.

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of their own diets” (Barnard 2013). Below Barnard’s statement is a supporting statement from Maneka Gandhi, former Minister of Animal Welfare, who pleads for the return to traditional vegetarian diets on the grounds that industrial meat production is harmful to animals. Instead of arguing for structural conditions that better enable animal welfare, however, she makes an appeal to the personal responsibility of the addressees. For example, she deplores the fact that cattle are driven hundreds of miles to be slaughtered because it is illegal in many areas of India and claims that hospitals are “ill-equipped” to deal with increasing levels of heart disease and diabetes, but does not offer solutions to cure these systemic woes; instead, she suggests that Indians simply stop eating meat, for the welfare of animals and the good of the nation (Barnard 2013). Against the current political backdrop of Hindu nationalism, it is significant that a “good” Indian citizen is positioned as one who embraces traditional, presumably vegetarian foodways but also watches their weight, able to compete in a global marketplace. If discourses about health, the body and fast food overlap in important ways in the USA and India, Indian discussions of fatness are always burdened by an additional factor, and that is the large number of malnourished and underfed people in the country. Newspaper articles about “obesity” in India often feel obliged to acknowledge the large percentage of children that are underweight at the same time they deplore fast food consumption. As Martyris says, “Burgers and pastries are beyond the purse of the bulk of the population, who, to put it darkly, are insulated by their poverty in the same way that Burma is insulated from KFC and McDonald’s by sanctions” (Martyris 2010). Instead of mitigating these articles’ alarmism regarding an impending obesity epidemic, however, the spectre of malnutrition adds an extra moral edge to claims about excessive consumption; in this context, affluent overweight seems to be absurd and especially reprehensible. Although food insecurity is also a significant problem in the USA, affecting 11.1% of households in 2018 (according to the United States Department of Agriculture, Coleman-Jensen et al. 2018), discussions of this issue do not often feature prominently in new stories about “obesity” more generally.

Conclusion If the analysis of popular media texts dealing with fast food and fatness teaches us something, it is that claims about fast food’s connection to obesity are often more about attendant cultural anxieties rather than actual concern for health; fatness is viewed as a social, or even moral, problem that indicates deeper cultural issues. Cultural fat-phobia is necessarily intertwined with worries about social change, in both the USA and India, and how individuals regulate their habits and bodies in neoliberal times. But it is perhaps not enough if we as scholars simply read these texts as they relate to their historical moment, teasing out the subtexts and anxieties they betray; we should also interrogate the very heart of the argument, namely the implied link between fast food and fatness. Yet there seems to be a certain anxiety

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about making this point within academia; while scholars like Bailey would certainly criticize how this argument is made in media, they do not necessarily question the premise itself, perhaps because this question would appear to be in the realm of “objective” nutritional science and not the domain of cultural studies. While we are trained to think of scientific knowledge as historically and socially contingent, and we know, in John Fiske’s words, that “objectivity is authority in disguise”, there seems to still be an uneasiness among academics about accepting this particular “fact” as contingent. For this reason, a critical engagement with the basic assumptions of popular media about weight gain and nutrition is necessary. While people like John Robbins would claim that “you can’t deny” the link between fast food and fatness, continuing to interrogate this link is fundamental to understanding and deconstructing the “global obesity epidemic”.

References Bailey, C. (2010). Supersizing America: fatness and post-9/11 cultural anxieties. The Journal of Popular Culture, 43(3), 441–462. Barnard, N. D. (2013). INDIA: Fighting the ‘McDonaldization’ of Asia. pcrm.org. Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. Accessed July 30, 2013. Berreby, D. (2013). The Obesity Era. Aeon Newsletter Psyche. https://aeon.co/essays/blaming-ind ividuals-for-obesity-may-be-altogether-wrong. Accessed July 30, 2013. Coleman-Jensen, A., Rabbitt, M. P., Gregory, C. A., & Singh, A. (2018). Household food security in the United States in 2017, ERR-256 US Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service. https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/90023/err-256.pdf?v=0. Accessed October 19, 2020. Cooper, C. (2007). Headless Fatties. charlottecooper.net. https://charlottecooper.net/fat/fat-writing/ headless-fatties-0107/. Accessed March 8, 2016. Cooper, C. (2009). Maybe it should be called fat American studies. In E. Rothblum & S. Solovay (Eds.), The fat studies reader (pp. 347–353). New York: New York UP. Farrell, A. E. (2011). Fat shame: Stigma and the fat body in American culture. New York: NYU. Gilman, S. L. (2008). Fat: A cultural history of obesity. Cambridge: Polity. Guthman, J. (2009). Neoliberalism and the constitution of contemporary bodies. In E. Rothblum & S. Solovay (Eds.), The fat studies reader (pp. 209–218). New York: New York UP. Fat Head. (2009). Directed by Tom Naughton. Morningstar Entertainment. Hoffman, K. (2008). Ordering up some food for thought. Houston Chronicle. https://www.chron. com/life/hoffman/article/Ordering-up-some-food-for-thought-1627633.php. Accessed July 30, 2013. Jones, M. (2008). Skintight: An anatomy of cosmetic surgery. Oxford: Berg. Kaul, R. (2009). Burger kids putting India on fast track to obesity. Hindustan Times. https:// www.hindustantimes.com/india/burger-kids-putting-india-on-fast-track-to-obesity/story-S4h 82XNEEkT2w6oGzEBXiO.html. Accessed July 30, 2013. Martyris, N. (2010). Obesity: India’s affluent affliction. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian. com/commentifree/2010/nov/23/obesity-india-affluent-affliction. Accessed July 30, 2013. Plowright, A. (2011). Western fast food, waistlines surge in India. Inquirer Lifestyle. Agence FrancePresse. Accessed July 30, 2013. Rothblum, E., & Solovay, S. (Eds.). (2009). The fat studies reader. New York: New York UP. Samsara. (2011). Directed by Ron Fricke. Freestyle Digital Media. Super Size Me. (2004). Directed by Morgan Spurlock. Kathbur Pictures.

Part II

Narrating Nourriture: Food in Literature

Chapter 3

Accio FOOD!: Food and Its Magical Properties in Cartoons and Fantasy Literature Aatreyee Ghosh

Abstract Food in cartoons and fantasy fiction, which includes fairy tales, has always been a vehicle of magical explorations and a touchstone of determining character as well as mettle. Food and its consumption also determine the nature of the hero and how he is perceived within social hierarchies. So, on the one hand, we have Edward Cullen clearly demarcate that he is a “vegetarian” vampire, thereby making him one of the good guys, on the other we have Professor Lupin take the Wolfsvane potion to not completely turn into a monster. So a vampire doesn’t remain a vampire, a man can transform into someone else for some time and someone who can even remember the whole of his own uncharted history (Captain Haddock in “The Secret of the Unicorn”). This paper proposes to look into the different uses of food as a form of magic in cartoon and fantasy. Also, the paper discusses how these foods often become symbolic of excess—excess luck (Felix felicis), excess truth (Verisaterum), excess love and so on. Moreover, through this analysis the paper also wishes to explore if the changing use of different forms of food also suggests a changing form of readership/viewership that is targeted for a certain kind of consumerism.

I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death… (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone 1997, p. 102)

I deliberately begin with this quotation by Severus Snape in the first book of the Harry Potter saga, to point out how the very idea of conquering and conjuring the abstract forces of fame, glory and most importantly death at one’s will, comes not from transfiguration or random spells, but from the art of cooking or brewing. Food and its creation have always been an important part of children’s narratives. Food descriptions in fiction function just like menus in restaurants or the innumerable food shows that pepper our television viewing create a visceral pleasure, a pleasure which interestingly involves both the intellect as well as the material body working in synaesthetic communion. Lynne Vallone describes this food metaphor as “speaking” synaesthetically within literature—we “taste the words with our eyes” (Vallone 2002, A. Ghosh (B) Apeejay Oxford Bookstores Private Limited, Kolkata, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Malhotra et al. (eds.), Food Culture Studies in India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5254-0_3

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p. 47). I remember growing up reading and salivating over the ginger beers, ham sandwiches, puddings and the paraphernalia of different food items that the Famous Five would take on their picnics. They were always more interesting than the actual mysteries they would solve. Or for that matter the midnight feats of Malory Towers which my sister and I tried to recreate with whatever meagre food we would have at home, which resembled the food eaten by the boarding school girls. For most of us, our first brush with the world of exotic and newer food, which seemed far more tempting and interesting than the regular fares of dal and rice that we would be given at home, came not from the cookbooks or even cooking shows, but from the far flung and yet personal worlds of Enid Blyton or Judy Barrett (writer of the famous American children’s book Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) or Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). These long-drawn descriptions of food and feasts helped us not only create alternate worlds of our childhoods, away from the mundane everyday Bengali home as in my case, but also created in us the first ideas of right and wrong, of good and bad because in these stories not everyone is allowed to eat everything. Food differentiates between good and bad people and separates the heroes from the villains. In my research paper, I would be looking into how food in children’s literature, especially fairy tales and fantasy fiction, becomes not merely a mode of celebration or just a prop in the story line, but rather emerges as one of the central characters who is almost like a silent chorus that tells us the mysteries of different characters from what they eat. For the scope of this paper, I will restrict my discussion mainly to the Harry Potter series along with a few examples from Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series and a few cartoon shows like Popeye The Sailor-man and Scooby Doo. This paper will further look into the effect that the Harry Potter series had on the cultural consumption of food in India and its effect on the food industry and the New India millennials. Eating might seem ordinary, everyday and even obvious. But, while it can be a relentlessly mundane activity, merely a way of supplying the body with energy, it can also be one of the most sublime of all bodily experiences. Beyond just eating to produce much needed energy for the biological body, buying, serving and consuming food are acts of signification through which people construct and sustain their identities. At the same time, these acts—and the broad range of cultural representations that support and are supported by them—also serve as vehicles through which ideological expectations about those very identities are circulated, enforced and transgressed (LeBesco and Naccarato 2008, p. 1). Food in literature is always important as the act of eating is not merely for the mundane task of existing, as the characters are already imaginary but the very act of eating and the task of creating these food items become a symbol, a hidden metaphor for the nature of the characters. Children’s and young adults’ fiction serve the crucial role of indoctrinating their minds in the ways of the adult world. So, food and eating thus become the rites of passage into the uncertain and more regimented world of the adults wherein you are what you eat. A good example of this can be seen in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where the process of elimination for Willie Wonka was based on how the children reacted to his sweets. So, in The Philosopher’s Stone, we see the Dursleys showing their biases against their nephew Harry by denying him food or in other cases buying

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him cheaper food than what they would give to their son Dudley. In one of the first scenes in the book where Rowling is trying to describe the position of Harry within the Dursley household, she takes recourse to the act of cooking to deliver her point. We see Harry being forced out of his slumber and asked to cook by his aunt “Well, get a move on, I want you to look after the bacon. And don’t you dare let it burn, I want everything perfect on Duddy’s birthday” (Rowling 1997, p. 20). This dialogue coupled with the action of Harry frying bacon and eggs and putting it on the table for the others while Dudley opens his presents shows Harry’s position as the outsider within the household. It is interesting how Rowling subverts this exact situation to show Harry’s inclusion in the wizarding world when Hagrid visits him in the middle of the night and now he is the only one who can share the sausages with Hagrid while Dudley, who is now the outsider can only look and salivate. One of the many reasons why “Harry missed Hogwarts so much like it was having a constant stomach ache” is because his summers with the Dursleys are marked by acute food depravation. Moreover, on the way to Hogwarts, it is through food that Harry furnishes a bond with Ronald Weasley who then goes on to become his compatriot and friend throughout the series. Food is thus the token of familial as well as filial bonding whose sharing creates everlasting bonds of friendships and brotherhood. Food also acts as an identity creating device. On the train to Hogwarts, Harry for the first time has money enough to buy whatever food that he pleases and more importantly however much he pleases. However, he shows restraint and orders something of everything so that there is some food left for others not as blessed as him financially. Through this act of his, Rowling portrays him as big-hearted and yet very British in his frugality hero, something that quite mystified her American editors. What is interesting is this isn’t something novel to the Harry Potter series but can be traced back to as early as the fairy tales of Grimm brothers where we have Goldilocks eating the porridge of the three Bears or even Snow White who wanders into the hut of the seven dwarves and eats their meals. While mystifying American audiences, Harry’s frugality as well as willingness to share his food with his new friend Ron was seen as a point of commonality with his South Asian fans. The sharing of food, the parents sending goodies for the friend along with the child, are intrinsic to the growing up experiences in India and Harry’s actions mirrored the famed idea of the “Good Boy” in the Indian middle-class psyche. It is no doubt that parents indulged their kids in not only reading the books but also taking part in cosplays, going for the movies, buying Potter inspired goodies. Bookstores like Oxford Bookstore in Kolkata organized a Triwizard tournament where kids came dressed as their favourite Potter characters and the bookstore café introduced a whole new Potter inspired menu in 2016. Rowling creates a further distinction within her food and feasts creations in order to present the differences between the muggle and the wizard world. There are two levels of food that operate throughout the series—every day British food that symbolizes the world of the muggles and magical food that differentiates the wizards from the muggles. Harry’s first indoctrination about the new world that he is going to enter is through food. While Harry now has money and wishes to buy Mars Bars, all that is available to him are wizarding Bertie Botts’ Every Flavoured Beans and Chocolate Frogs. It is while he is eating the Chocolate Frogs that Harry gets his first

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glimpse of the world that he is going to be a part of, through the cards of Famous wizards that come with the Frogs where photographs are not stationary and people move in and out of them according to their wish. It also contains one of the main clues that help Harry, Ron and Hermione to find out what Voldemort is looking for in Hogwarts—the name of Nicholas Flamel and what he is famous for. Food becomes the great signifier that differentiates between the very British muggle and the wizard. So, while muggles eat Sherbet lemons and mint humbugs, wizards choose to have cauldron cakes and Fizzing Whizzbees. Rowling evokes this sense of the “other” through exoticizing the names and nature of the food eaten by wizards. Thus, their candy shop, Honeydukes doesn’t have the usual fare of Snickers and toffees but rather the more exotic and sometimes even dangerous “Fizzing Whizzbees, pepper imps and cockroach clusters”. Butterbeer, pumpkin juice, Fire Whiskys, the different varieties of chocolates and lozenges from Honeydukes all rival with the sumptuous roasts and turkeys and treacle puddings in order to be taken as the more important food item within the world of the wizards. In stark contrast to his life in Little Whinging with his uncle and aunt, the wizarding community with respect to food represents a world of excess, through which the wizarding world is shown as vastly better than its muggle counterpart. However, this excess of food is again subject to certain limitations. Food isn’t something which is completely under the power of the wizard or witch. It is something which is only available to those who can afford it. Magic cannot create or make food appear according to anyone’s whim and fancy. ‘My mother,’ said Ron one night, as they sat in the tent on a riverbank in Wales, ‘can make good food appear out of thin air.’ ‘Your mother can’t produce food out of thin air,’ said Hermione. ‘No one can. Food is the first of the five Principal Exceptions to Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration’ – ‘Oh, speak English, can’t you?’ Ron said. (Rowling 2007, pp. 239–240)

Thus, while ample food is available at Hogwarts during the feasts, one has to remember that it is not magic which brings it there, but rather the hard work of the oppressed house elves. The power to own food thus becomes a matter of class and position, not very unlike the muggle world. This class distinction of food perpetuates in the fandom as well where the magical Potter world of food is available only to those who have the economic agency to avail it. A good example would be the Harry Potter feast that was arranged at Courtyard Marriott in Mumbai in 2016. Creating a vista quite similar to the Hogwarts hall during dinner, the buffet had everything that a Harry Potter fan can dream of, if only one had INR 2045 plus taxes per person to shell out. Therefore, even if magical food does act as the boundary between the world of the muggles and the wizards, it is a boundary which works with the same ideas of economics, access and class distinction. Food doesn’t merely mark a dividing line between muggles and wizards but also within the community of wizards. Rowling’s wizarding world is one which runs parallel to its muggle counterpart even in terms of differences within it. One way how cultures determine who belongs where in an “us versus them” paradigm is through the rituals of food and a strict rule as to what is eatable and what is

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not. All cultures are highly selective about their definitions of food and non-food, and these definitions are often not based on nutritional value but cultural ones. In “Negation” Freud stated that, expressed in the language of the “oral, instinctual impulses”, the decision to eat or not to eat—that is taking something inside oneself or keeping something outside—is the basis of all future decisions. This dualism of the inside/outside, edible/inedible becomes the foundation of the structure of Western philosophical thought where everything that is inside/edible is aligned with the nature of the self while everything that is outside/inedible is associated with the “other”. In “Self-Evidence”, Mary Douglas espouses about rituals of purity versus taboo and how that plays out based on a system of classifications which are unique to different social groups (Douglas 1972, p. 30). So, we have Edward Cullen in the Twilight series emphasizing that he is a vegetarian vampire—ones who subsist on animal blood rather than humans. This allows them to remain in human company and thus be considered comparatively “pure” than their human blood-drinking counterparts. This vegetarianism also makes them create social units like the family and thus puts them within the boundaries of civilized human world as opposed to the demonic space that they are supposed to inhabit. This idea however gets subverted in the Potter series where attacking defenceless animals is seen as a crime that is only possible by someone who is evil incarnate. So, in The Philosopher’s Stone, we have Firenze, the centaur, telling Harry, …it is a monstrous thing, to slay a unicorn…Only one who has nothing to lose, and everything to gain, would commit such a crime. The blood of a unicorn will keep you alive…but at a terrible price. You have slain something pure and defenceless to save yourself and you will have but a half life, a cursed life, from the moment the blood touches your lips. (Rowling 1997, p. 188)

However, this idea of good and bad based on food habits continues in other ways throughout the text. So, in The Prisoner of Azkaban, we have Professor Lupin (the good werewolf) taking the Wolfsvane potion to keep himself away from attacking while Fenrir Greyback, the Voldemort supporter and also the one who is responsible for Lupin’s condition takes great pleasure in giving in to his werewolf desires for human blood (it is mentioned, specially, that Fenrir likes to prey on young children, further cementing his characterization as the “bad” werewolf against the goodness of Lupin). Even in The Goblet of Fire, this idea of “us versus them” is played out when Ron refuses to eat the bouillabaisse that had been prepared for the French girls of Beauxbaton, legitimizing the idea that even in the topsy-turvy world of the wizards, ethnocentricity runs deep and is as divisive as it is in the world of the muggles. While the everyday affairs of the magical food do rival the more mundane world of food of the non-wizards, it is the selective and more intriguing world of potion brewing that marks the actual difference between these two colliding worlds. Magical food, since their inception during the time of fairy tales, has always been associated with powers of excess. So, one has the poisoned apple of Snow White that induces a sleep which is death like—it might well be the “Draught of Living Death” that Slughorn makes the potions class brew. Similarly, popular cartoons like Popeye also further this idea through the concept of “Spinach power” wherein a can of spinach

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is enough to create a hulk out of a seemingly non-descript guy and make him the hero. This idea of the excess is examined throughout the Potter series by questioning the extent of good in this. The series starts off with the story of one excess—the Philosopher’s Stone, one that gives an excess of wealth as it turns whatever it touches into gold. The Stone also produces the more intoxicating and thus, dangerous, excess of life as in the Elixir of life. Both represent excesses which promise a win over the greatest enemies of human life—poverty and death. Yet the Stone needs to be destroyed at the end as such a power just like in the muggle world can only spell doom and devastation and not an idyllic celebration of life. The world of Potter mirrors not only the economic divisions in middle-class Britain, but also aspirations of climbing the social order, where the world of the magical food is also a way of showing one’s new position in the social and economic platform. This has been interestingly represented in the consumption patterns of the series as well as goodies related to it even in developing societies like India. The series led to a number of eateries themed around the books, like Hogwartz Café in Delhi, Leaky Cauldron in Kolkata and many more, each of which curated specialized Potter themed food items for their menu. Unlike the Marriott feast which much like the excess of the Christmas feast in the books is a once in a blue moon treat, these restaurants were aimed at the “fans” for whom the books were not merely stories, but rather an affirmation of their new found position in the English-speaking world of New India. The food at most of these cafes has been kept at prices which are easily suited to the pockets of the middle-class reading public who cherish these visits as not only an outing with their kids or friends but rather as a token of acceptance and belonging—a world which gives a tacit nod to their neoglobalization—it is not surprising that many of them came to the books only after watching the films and realizing its potential to be a ticket to English-speaking gentrification. Much of the Potter saga is a debate on the power of love and what it can do to people. It is a power that Voldemort never understood or paid heed to and one that ironically turns into his nemesis at the end. Even though Rowling maintains throughout the course of the books that love is the most powerful of magic and cannot be created at will, yet, she confers a solution for those who cannot awaken it in others. How apt is it that it is again through food that this great power can be tapped? In The Half Blood Prince, Slughorn tells Harry and his class about Amortentia, the most powerful love potion in the world. “Amortentia doesn’t create actual love, of course. That’s impossible. But it does cause a powerful infatuation or obsession. For that reason, it is probably the most dangerous potion in this room… [Do] not underestimate the power of obsessive love” (Rowling 2005, p. 177). It is this potion that Merope uses to snare the love of her life Tom Riddle Sr. This potion has imitative powers whereby it adjusts and changes itself to feed the desires of the one whom it enslaves. However, it is an excess which ensnares not only its victim but also its master. Thus, the witch using it will always be wrecked with the doubt that whether she or the potion is the real mistress. Therefore, “she made the choice to stop giving him the potion… she had convinced herself that he would by now have fallen in love with her in return. Perhaps she thought he would stay for the baby’s sake. If so, she was wrong on both counts” (Rowling 2005, p. 203). Just like the poisoned apple

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is more poisonous for the Queen than Snow White herself, each of these potions become more looming than the characters who believe that they master them and, in each case, consume these characters into a nothingness that they cannot escape other than completely surrendering themselves to their powers. This brings me to the final question of my paper, that is, what does this changing nature of food used in these stories and cartoons entail in terms of readership? Like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory which spawned a whole industry of chocolates copied from the book, the Harry Potter series also has created a franchise of cookbooks, cooking websites, chocolate companies which are cashing on the hype and trying to create the fictional world of the books into real through the gateway of food and cooking. In a world of globalization, where the local and the exclusive have now vanished into the shadows of the chains of “multicuisine” restaurants, where paneer makhani pizza is the flavour of the day, the Potter series creates a local identity strictly in terms of food. It is the food that makes Harry Potter a British boy, one who cannot be confused with just anyone living anywhere. Throughout the series, Rowling creates a world of food which is distinctly British and one which cannot be confused with anywhere else. Even the magical foods are all in some way germinating from the British cuisine and yet one which now aims to create a new niche for itself, marking itself as “exclusive”. There is almost a deliberate movement towards recreating a new brand of colonization—colonizing the mind with the very British boarding school stories, creating an aura of the unachievable and yet so tempting life beyond the rules of the simple household. Even though the Potter series is cinematically the playground of the Americans, yet Rowling makes sure that her books refuse to give in to this Americanizing project. Thus, each of the magical food items reminds one of those foods from the Enid Blytons and the Roald Dahls whose beauty lay in their exclusiveness. Just like one grew thirsty thinking about a “ginger beer” or a “root beer” creating these fantastical lands of the imaginary, every time a child today hears Butterbeer or Chocolate Frogs, they create that same exclusive nonetheless “British” haven which is only available to those who know about it. It is like the platform 9 and ¾, one that resides along with the normative and yet one that can be accessed only by those worthy. This Britishness of the food had been a problem with the Indian consumers of the series, especially for those trying to create a world of the magical food aimed at the parents, children as well as the teens who form the bulk of the fandom. The “jugaad” (the Indian form of flexible problem solving) came in naming “multicuisine” fare with a magical name from the Potterverse. So, while Leaky Cauldron in Kolkata boasts of a cuisine which is “North Indian, Chinese, Continental”,1 Hogwarts Café in Delhi goes with the simple Italian. “Unicorn’s Tears” is a boiled chicken dish cooked with Chinese spices, “Dobby’s Fishy Business” is a tandoori fish—the Britishness of the names contrasted to the local tastes of the fandom. A new green pit viper, found in the Himalayas, was named in 2020 as Trimeresurus salazar, or the Salazar’s pit viper, after Salazar Slytherin, a character from J. K. Rowling’s epic Harry Potter series. “I am a Potterhead, and so are two other authors 1 Leaky Cauldron Menu on Zomato App. https://www.zomato.com/kolkata/leaky-cauldron-1-garia.

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on the paper,” lead researcher Zeeshan A. Mirza from National Centre for Biological Science in Bengaluru, India, told Mongabay in an email. “This was a tribute to the most fascinating story I have ever read or even heard that colored my childhood. By naming it after Salazar Slytherin, we wanted to thank J. K. Rowling for introducing the world to the Harry Potter universe.” (Kimborough 2020, para. 3). The Potter series in India has had a diverse fandom—from merchandise to university courses on popular culture to vipers. However, its most potent effect has been in the consumption culture of a New India which spends its time in cafes, participates in global fandom and projects a new confidence in creating its own version of the magic. This New India invests in creating a niche for itself by not only adapting the Potter verse in its regional languages, but also through the most basic metaphor of the magical world— its food. Creating Indian versions of the inherently British world, making tikkas out of pot roasts and Sirius’ sandwich with peri peri paneer, food in the Potter series has been the initiation point of a new kind of fandom—of access and subversion.

References Douglas, M. (1972). Self-evidence. Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1972, 27–43. https://doi.org/10.2307/3031731 Douglas, M. (1984). External boundaries. In Purity and danger: An analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo (pp. 115–129). London and New York: Routledge. Kimborough, L. (2020). One point for Slytherin: New Indian pit viper named after Harry Potter character Mongabay news and inspiration from Nature’s Frontline. https://news.mongabay.com/2020/ 04/one-point-for-slytherin-new-indian-pit-viper-named-after-harry-potter-character/. Accessed May 30, 2020. LeBesco, K., & Naccarato, P. (2008). Introduction. In K. LeBesco & P. Naccarato (Eds.), Edible ideologies: Representing food and meaning (pp. 1–12). Albany: SUNY Press. Rowling, J. K. (1997). Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Rowling, J. K. (2005). Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Rowling, J. K. (2007). Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Vallone, L. (2002). ‘What is the meaning of all this gluttony?’: Edgeworth, the Victorians, C.S. Lewis and a taste for fantasy. Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature, 12(1), 47–54.

Chapter 4

Who Eats Whom?: Transcending the Real Purpose Behind Food Events in Children’s Literature (If Any!) Through Nonsense Literature Anurima Chanda Abstract Within children’s literature, food becomes the easiest way for adults to induct young readers into the existing social world order. This entire scheme of things gets overturned, when Nonsense Literature enters into the picture. Nonsense—with its penchant for reversing hierarchies—succeeds in breaking down existing power structures in order to create imaginations of an alternative world order. While this is true for most Nonsense, the case of Indian English Nonsense gets even doubly subversive as here the aspect of language also gets involved. Through a close reading of well-known children’s writers like Sampurna Chattarji and Anushka Ravishankar’s select works of Nonsense which dabbles with food and eating, this paper will try to show how Indian English Nonsense Literature appropriates the genre to play a dual function. Within its fold, food transcends its literariness not just to challenge the adult–child hierarchical structure but also the centre–periphery divide through which such hierarchies filter in. In that, this paper will argue that food events in Indian English Nonsense Literature transcend beyond a simple level of ridicule/criticism of the centre to debunking all kinds of centres altogether by giving a lot of agency to the child.

Rightly has Wendy R. Katz noted, “Understand the relations between the labourer and the means of production, says Marx, and you understand the workings of society; understand the relations between the child and food, I suggest – and only half facetiously – and you understand the workings of the world of the young” (Katz 1980). It is no wonder then that food experiences abound as a constant recurring motif in literature written for children. In fact, it has also been suggested that “in classic children’s literature food replaces sex as the principal source of excitement and sensual pleasure…it might even be said that when food in children’s books is inedible or unavailable, it is the emotional equivalent of bad or denied sex in an adult novel” (Lurie 2003, p. 176). An examination of what’s eaten, by whom, how, when and where gives one a portrait of children’s manners, problems and preoccupations, but A. Chanda (B) Department of English, Birsa Munda College, North Bengal University, Siliguri, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Malhotra et al. (eds.), Food Culture Studies in India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5254-0_4

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also a correct use of it can tap the children’s market successfully. Be it the elaborate picnic spreads found in most of the Enid Blyton books, or Alice’s “Eat Me” cakes, “Drink Me” bottles and the reference to the treacle-well at the Mad Tea-Party, or Charlie’s Chocolates in his Chocolate Factory, or the food house in Hansel and Gretel, or the poisonous apple that Snow White bites into, food has always been deliciously attractive and a source to fantastical daydreams for days afterwards in children’s literature. Coming closer to home, the references to Custard Apples (Anta Ganch) or Pomegranates (Dalim Ganch) in Bengali rhymes, the excessive gluttony of Tagore’s Damodar Seth or Upendrakishore Ray’s Goopy-Bagha’s access to lipsmacking food through a boon granted to them by the king of ghosts have never declined in its popularity. The idea and concept, along with the use of “food”, is taken to a whole different level in Nonsense Literature or the genre of Literary Nonsense, which though not exclusively for children, has found a suitable home within children’s literature since long. Given Nonsense’s inherent potential for subversion, food does not just remain limited to being objectified/utilized for gastronomical fantastical delights, but takes on a different function altogether. Tapping into the fact of how power relationships get entwined with food, Nonsense Literature—with its penchant for reversing hierarchies—seeks to break down existing structures in order to create imaginations of an alternative world order. While this is true for most Nonsense, the case of Indian English Nonsense gets even more complicated when the aspect of language also gets involved. Through a close-reading of Sampurna Chattarji and Anushka Ravishankar’s select works of Nonsense which dabbles with food and eating, this paper will try to show how Indian English Nonsense Literature appropriates the genre to play a double-edged function. Within its fold, food transcends its literariness not just to challenge the adult–child hierarchical structure but also the centre–periphery divide through which such hierarchies filter in. In that, this paper will argue that food events in Indian English Nonsense Literature transcend beyond a simple level of ridicule/criticism of the centre to debunking all kinds of centres altogether by giving a lot of agency to the child.

Literary Nonsense: Beginnings, Content and Intent Though Nonsense in some form or the other has always existed in literature, the cultural and sociological impetus of the Victorian Age caused it to evolve into a formal literary genre, initially through the writings of Edward Lear, soon to be followed by that of Lewis Carroll. This written form of Nonsense was preceded and aided by two branches, one that can be traced back to the folk tradition and the other which had its origin in the intellectual adult literary tradition. Through the writings of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, it found wider recognition, ceased to remain merely as an aesthetic stylistic “device” or “mode” and developed into a full-fledged genre. Beginning as a reaction to certain rigid practices of the age, mainly in terms of the way childhood was perceived, it drastically changed the face of children’s literature at that time.

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Before this, the discourse on childhood was dominated by the theories forwarded by John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Lockean views held childhood as a stage of error that needed to be corrected through proper instructions and disciplining techniques used by the adults to adhere to the “standard norms” of adult life. Inspired by Locke, much of the education that was popular during the nineteenth century remained utilitarian, practising a “programmatic treatment of children” (Heyman 1999, p. 26) and being considered as “progressive” children’s literature. All of it was aimed at informing the child’s mind with effective rationality that was considered necessary for it to rise to the level of the adult world. This was achieved through literature that was “alternatively viciously or blandly didactic, representing unrealistic children, in a world reduced to the size of what was perceived as the child’s mind” (Heyman 1999, p. 25) or morally charged as in the writings of Evangelical writers aimed at saving the “little sinful creatures from damnation” (Heyman 1999, p. 25) or the “awful warning” books (Heyman 1999, p. 44) of those times. Leave alone a freedom to imagination, all these writings only aimed at fulfilling the rigid edifying convention of children’s literature. Rousseau, on the other hand, saw the child as inherently innocent, like a “young plant” (Richardson 1992, p. 122) that was untainted by the corrupt adult world and therefore should be allowed to stay in that manner for as long as possible. The child acquired the status of an “individual” with unique and valuable qualities. From the mass-distributed image of the generalized unreal child, the subject now seemed more relatable. This idea was further elaborated upon by the Romantics, as evident in the writings of Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge among others. That any wildness of the child should be met with immediate castigatory consequences changed with the acceptance that a child can be mischievous while still remaining innocent, and this was treated as a virtue. Thus, as per the Romantic conception, the child became an individual, with the wildness of innocent mischief and closeness with nature, along with a divine imagination that elevated it to heights not comprehendible by adults. This is where Lear intervened, further exploiting this “child” in Nonsense’s most characteristic way of having “insistence on complete individuality and disdain for convention” (Heyman 1999, p. 113). Lear’s work is often seen as a parody of the previously existing forms within children’s literature, be it in his alphabets or cautionary tales, which also “moved beyond parody to the creation of a new children’s genre: literary nonsense” (Heyman 1999, p. 27). Lear’s upbringing is cited as being one of the main reasons behind his transgression. Being educated at home by his sisters, Lear was scornful of prescriptive schooling right from the very start and sought to bring about a revolution in the way didacticism was imparted through children’s literature. Not only did Lear baffle adult reasoning with his Nonsense, but also created an alternative of the conventional moral and pedagogic models by transgressing them. In Carroll’s work too, one can find a similar trajectory. He created child characters by taking a cue from the didactic verses of his time and parodied them by eventually painting his characters with viciousness, as opposed to the conventional absurdly good children, who committed wrong without being punished or being repentant. With the success of the Alice books, he also ended up creating a new type of girls’ books of his time (Khasawneh 2010, p. 24). As Harvey Darton, noted historian

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of children’s literature stated in his Children’s Books in England, the Alice books created the first unapologetic, undocumented appearance in print, for readers who sorely needed it, of liberty of thought in children’s books. Henceforth fear had gone, and with it shy disquiet. There was to be in hours of pleasure no more dread about the moral value, the ponderable, measured quality and extent, of the pleasure itself. (2011, p. 268)

Apart from parodying the already existing formats within children’s literature, what is common to both Lear and Carroll is the way they flout conventions—something that became a standard practice with Nonsense writers. Instead of treating the child as a blank slate that needs to conform by emulating the adult norms, Nonsense shows how it is in fact the adult who has “fallen” from childhood, making them realize how childhood has not been properly preserved in them. It also punctures the sanctity with which certain topics are held by adults (like death, violence, sexuality, drugs, etc.), especially ones that are deemed unsuitable for children. These grave issues get trivialized within Nonsense to the extent that it loses all its seriousness and starts appearing as funny. Through the subversive use of laughter, Nonsense manages to break down taboos that become symbolic ways of one exerting power over the other through the manipulation of knowledge. One could look up the depiction of “death” within this genre to understand this point better. Death has always been a controversial topic within children’s literature, considered inappropriate to be discussed with children in its literary sense but appropriate to be used for moral policing them through the fear of damnation after death. In Nonsense, on the contrary, deaths get treated with a certain triviality reducing it to an object of joke, however serious the undertones. Such cases can be found aplenty in many of Lear’s limericks. The same is true for other components of conventional children’s literature as well that tries to instruct the child into the ways of the adult world, be it in acting right, talking right and eating right. Within Nonsense, all of this gets undercut to become nothing more than a silly expectation. By doing so, the space of Literary Nonsense seems to provide children the agency to transgress their dependence on adults, thus becoming independent individuals with their own power to decide what is appropriate knowledge and what is not. By breaking down all moralizing didactic intrusions of the adult world, the child readers emerge as equals with adults. Taking a cue from here, if as Carolyn Daniel says “[f]ood events in children’s literature are clearly intended to teach children how to be human” (2006, p. 12), thus emerging as a lesson of civility of eating right and adjusting to the social order of learning/maintaining table manners, in Nonsense it takes a completely different turn. The “Mad Tea-Party” in Wonderland is a classic casepoint to further this argument. In the Mad Hatter’s large table cluttered with tea things, where one just has to move from one chair to the next for a clean cup rather than washing up and where Alice is constantly offended by the lack of civility of table manners, we find a total deconstruction of socially acceptable table norms. This is a mad party, where the conversation does not lead anywhere, where diners fall asleep in between conversations or suddenly fall silent or simply walk away without excusing oneself, where

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one does not think twice after upsetting the milk jug onto one’s plate or where a Dormouse is stuffed into a teapot. A greater level of subversion can be found in texts like Lear’s “The History of the Seven Families of the Lake Pipple-Popple”, where death and food get conjoined as dead bodies become sources of food, almost in a cannibalistic fashion. Within the text, all the young of the respective seven families fight among themselves over their respective food of other animals or plants, contrary to a warning by their parents, eventually resulting in their own deaths. The animals which were about to become their food, rejoice over the death of their hunters which saves their lives, while the parents of the deceased jump into bottles and committ suicide, pickling themselves in the process so that they could be put in a museum and immortalized. The moral of the tale seems to be extremely insignificant over such matter-of-fact absurdity of this tale. Contrary to the moral tale, where death and disobedience are supposed to arouse terror in the reader forcing him to comply, this story totally undoes and nullifies any kind of expectations through the absurd representations of such a morbid situation. This tale, which retains strong echoes of the “awful warning” books typified by the Janeway and the Taylors (Heyman 1999, p. 47), efficiently crushes and transgresses all models of moralistic children’s literature, by parodying them and reducing its seriousness to nothing but laughter. A similar occurrence is seen in “The Story of the Four Little Children who went Round the World”, again by Lear, where tea kettles become beds, islands are made of veal cutlets and chocolate drops, orange falls become life-threatening, testimonies are made of Gingerbread and Raspberries, white mice are seen eating Custard Pudding, and Cauliflowers are able to walk without the hassle of having to wear shoes and stockings. While the etiquettes of food eating and manners become the signifier reflecting the larger ideological adult structure of the society, it also inevitably gets linked up with the overbearing presence of patriarchy which singly becomes the representative of the social order. As such food also gets gendered. From food being the domain of the female (since the kitchen has always been seen as the woman’s space), to she herself becoming the food (say, in erotica), to women themselves becoming voracious eaters (the classic example would be Eve, who brought about the downfall of entire mankind just because she gave in to her temptation to eat off the Tree of Knowledge), food moves from giving definitions to women as the nurturer, the object or the transgressor. This too gets undone within the sphere of Literary Nonsense. Here, she becomes an outsider to the symbolic order of food. For example, in Alice’s Mad Tea-Party, Alice is very much the outsider who must negotiate for food, something she doesn’t quite manage even till the end of her adventures in the looking-glass world. Food, as is evident from the above cited examples, emerges as much more than what we put in our mouths. It becomes a cultural signifier, not just reflecting a particular culture but also shaping the imagination of future generations in carrying on the same traditions within its culture. While individual groups consolidate themselves based on their food habits, the dominant among them also tries to project the appropriateness of certain food habits over others. This politics of mainstreaming certain food habits and eating cultures uncover a lot of powerplay underlying the literal functionality of “food”. Given how food could be used as a tool of control, identity

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making and social integration, it occupies a special significance within the field of children’s literature where a powerplay between the adult creators, the disseminators and distributors, and the child consumers has been inevitably and eternally present. Nonsense with its inherent potential to overturn power structures has been able to dismantle this very structure. Within this emancipatory space, food can be separated from its functional intent to become tools of change. Here, the food can talk, yell or even run away. Here, the inability to eat does not lead to pain, hunger and death, but rather an elevation to a whole new spiritual level where food is not just a utilitarian concept. In some ways, the foodness of food becomes much larger in the Nonsense world than the real world. This act of subversion becomes all the more intensified within Indian English Children’s Literature. Here, food does not merely transcend its functionality but also the centre that decides its functionality. The impact is twofold— not just as a challenge to the adult–child hierarchy but also the centre–periphery divide through which such hierarchies filter in. This is what the next two sections of the paper will try to demonstrate.

(Literary) Nonsense and India The Indian subcontinent has always been rich in nonsensical elements, although its dominance has been mainly in the spiritual plane and the country’s rich folk culture. However, what we understand as Literary Nonsense came to India more as a postcolonial phenomenon, influenced by works of its Victorian forefathers. Modern Indian Nonsense is a hybrid of its indigenous influence of the spiritual and the folk with its English counterpart. In the mystic domain, the “thorn” texts which can be traced back to the early medieval period have been conjectured to be one of the earliest examples of Nonsense that was used in Indian mysticism, apart from having existed, albeit intermittently, from the time of the Vedas and the Upanishads, the earliest known Indian religious texts. Later it was highly popularized by Kabir, in his upside-down language or ulat bansi, which he borrowed from the sandhabhasa which was used in Tantric yoga and by the Nathas. It is believed by a majority of critics that this language was used by the spiritual leaders to mask answers to grave philosophical questions in a child-like humour. By evoking the child-like state of the mind, it sought to break habitual thought patterns in philosophical mysticism aiming towards enlightenment. However, its simple and easy nature, easy to grasp and fun to hear or chant, made it popular among the common people and helped spread spiritual messages with greater ease. Traces of it are also found in medieval Indian poetry from around the sixteenth century as used in the kingly courts, where the poets would have contests to test their skills of literary analysis of complex poetic forms. The winners would be the ones who could challenge the others with their nonsensical wordplay, all of it maintained in perfect formal style. This is almost similar to English Literary Nonsense which plays with language, all the time maintaining a strict formal outer structure. The folk tradition of India was also rich in their use of Nonsense, much more irreverential

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in nature. Various other kinds of Nonsense also existed, but owing to the diverse languages, were known by different names in different languages. However, the techniques used were more or less the same as its English counterpart, although the themes were sometimes culturally related to the region that it was conceived in. Finally, with the colonial impact since the mid-nineteenth century or maybe even before that and the exposure to English education, English works of Nonsense found their way into the subcontinent. It particularly affected areas like West Bengal and Maharashtra, where the influence of English was the greatest. The neighbouring states of Bengal, like Orissa and Assam, were influenced as well, but more from the Bangla influence rather than the original English. It was first popularized in Bengali by Sukumar Ray, Rabindranath Tagore and the others and thereafter spread to the rest of the country. Oriya author Brajanath Badajena’s Chatura Binoda is often seen as another pioneering work in this field. However, since most of these writers chose to write in the indigenous Indian languages, almost nothing was written in Indian English. In the last few years, however, the genre of Literary Nonsense has been finding new audiences through the work of Anushka Ravishankar and Sampurna Chattarji in Indian English. In all these works, the obsession with Indian domesticity, in addition to all things Indian, creates a distinct brand of Nonsense.

Reading the Texts Food becomes an important factor through which the Indian domesticity is exerted. At the same time, it also becomes a way of marking one’s own territory in a genre that has largely been seen as being exported from the west. Sampurna Chattarji’s “The Food Finagle: A Capricious Culinary Caper” published as part of The Fried Frog and Other Funny, Freaky Foodie Feisty Poems (2009) is one such example. This collection of verses veers more towards macaronic language while attempting syncretism, giving rise to a sense of nonsensicality that is typical to this genre. She plays with the names of Indian food with similar English words that result in a sort of khichdi. For the poem “Very Fishy”, she writes There was a fish who called himself THANKYOUBHERYMAACH Till the fishermen caught and salted him And ate him with boiled starch. (2009)

A Bengali herself, Chattarji, plays with typical Bengali pronunciation on a typically Bengali object, the fish (known in Bengali as “maach”), which is considered to be their staple diet. There is a constant wordplay with Bengali pronunciation of English words creating homophones with Bengali. As a footnote points out Since the Bengali alphabet does not have a ‘v’, v-sounds in English and other languages get softened into ‘bh’. Hence ‘very’ becomes ‘bhery’. In addition, Bengalis have a habit of prolonging vowel sounds which turns English words like ‘much’ into ‘maach’. Significant to the wordplay here, ‘maach’ in Bengali means ‘fish’. (Heyman et al. 2007, p. 64)

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There is an undeniable mockery of the Bengali pronouncing English words that leads to a wordplay which is funny. Eating it with starch also has an indication of panta-bhaat, a lightly fermented rice-based dish especially popular in rural areas of Assam, Bangladesh and Bengal and subtly hints at the poverty-ridden rural conditions. The same collection has another poem “Explained” which plays with names of South Indian food. As the footnote here mentions, the initial inspiration for this poem was the menu in South Indian restaurants, which lists their food items in the Roman script. Despite being truly culture specific, their written form seems to have a lurking presence of English words with which Chattarji rhymes and creates the poetic rhythm in this poem: Idiyappam keeps yapping Puttu plays golf Utthapam’s my girlfriend Mutthu’s real name is Rolf. (2009)

In this case “-yappam” reminds us of yapping, the idea of the “putter” club (used in golf) leads to Puttu playing golf, the lurking presence of “Pam” in “Utthapam” is what is played upon to get to the “girlfriend”, finishing in a completely unconnected (except for rhyming purposes) and hence nonsensical last line. Thus, food here becomes a way of exerting one’s own cultural identity, Indianizing the genre through the use of food that is peculiar to the Indian culture. In both the poems mentioned above, the nonsensification of food is used to destabilize established power relations in a multifaceted manner. It mainly operates at two levels—one at the level of language and the other at the level of nomenclature. The linguistic play, that is an essential feature of any Nonsense, shows a reluctance to conform to the colonizer’s language in a way that is considered correct. Instead, it chooses to bend the same language in a way that it can be used to suit the Indian culture, thus dismantling the centre’s dominance. This very language, used to override indigenous knowledge systems by renaming an alien culture to make it more Euro-friendly, is now no longer capable of retaining the power of granting names. Instead, it is the alien culture which is ready to take the reins in its own hands by unleashing its own system of nomenclature on the English language. It is no longer English being used to name an indigenous food item, but the name of the original food item used to make fun of the language. Anushka Ravishankar’s “The Story of Samarpreet Sood” from This Book Makes No Sense: Nonsense Poems and Worse (2012) takes the Nonsense one notch higher by completely doing away with what is legitimately sanctioned as food and replacing it with the inedible. Samarpreet suddenly vows to give up on all food “one day”. However, the things that she gives up eating comprise nothing more than a plethora of incongruous objects and ideas. It starts with “anything that was written” to the “quiet, songless bird” and from “sodium monoglutamate” to “all phosphate compounds”. In the first place, these are objects which are not really considered edible, so the giving up of eating these is not really considered as giving up food. What we tend

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to overlook is that Samarpreet has not just given up on food, but on “all” food and the poet plays with this all-ness and evokes much laughter by bringing together the edible with the inedible and forming an absurd mess. Understandably, as Samarpreet cries that “Food is the bane of the great human race” and proceeds to throw away the “cactus” and runs to debug the room for fear that she might consume the bugs with cabbages and beans, the readers let go off their rational sense to enjoy the play with the rhyme and sound rather than the rationality of the content. However, hunger soon returns in personification and “attack[s] young Sood with its sudden sharp pangs” and “rip[s] at her insides with rude ruthless fangs”. Like a fierce animal, it claws her, disturbs her and troubles her so much that she starts dreaming of food acting as humans in her Nonsense world of inversions. Not able to restrain any longer she gives in to her hunger, but like her eccentric Nonsense counterparts, her food comprises her “TV”, “lamp”, “door”, an empty “bottle”, their “staircase”, “walls”, “sofa”, “cushions”, “table”, “chair”, “stool”, “the bags”, “the bins”, “the dishes”, “the pictures of birds, bees and fishes”, and finally in an autocannibalistic fashion she eats “up her house” with her inside. From being a renouncer to an all-devourer, Ravishankar’s poem seems to forward a complete rejection of the food chain to return back to the zero state of existence. Since food consumption, governed by a rigorous set of rules and regulations which adults try to impress upon children, gets directly related to subject formation (a point that Keeling and Pollard stress upon in their introductory essay in Approaches to food in children’s literature), the only way that a child can rebel is by inverting the process (Keeling and Pollard 2009, pp. 3–18). In this poem, the rebellion is not simple. It is exaggerated to the point that it appears unrealistic. The binaries of food and non-food, eating and non-eating, all come crashing down till all boundaries have been transgressed to achieve a complete subversion of adult expectations.

Conclusion The origins of food as a part of children’s literature may be seen as an assertion of adult/parental programming of children into the social mores of consumption, with an ultimate utilitarian end in nutrition along with adapting/adjusting oneself to the entire social code of eating. The child, having been taken away from the mother as a source of nourishment, and also realizing the separateness of itself as an individual, rebels against the regime of food as a direct everyday manifestation of the primal loss (of the mother). The regime of feeding (along with eating manners associated with it) and often forced feeding is in turn enforced through an aggrandizement of food as a pleasurable consumable in children’s literature which supports the adult construction of food as an essential commodity. In Nonsense Literature, this is totally overturned. With food being parodied and dislocated from its utilitarian ends, it finds an innate resonance with the child who too would like to see the innate acceptance and moralizing of children’s literature as regards the conventions of food and feeding to be an intrusion into her/his own

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individuality. By distancing itself from such depictions, Nonsense Literature also opens up a critique of the morality of nourishment, feeding and manners that the adult world regiments on the child. Thus, there is a complete dismantling of the adult centre that ends up controlling the movements in a child’s life. Within Indian English Nonsense, the linguistic play takes the subversion to a different level. By amalgamating English with the indigenous languages, it further leads to a dismantling of the larger centre which holds all these hierarchies in place. Ultimately, the child is left free to find pleasure in seeing food being represented not only as an end, but as a thing with a life of its own. She/he rejoices to find that food is not only something that has to be consumed irrespective of liking, but that it can be enjoyed independent of its discourse of nourishment. Food becomes an extension not of the choices of adults imposed on the child, but as an expression of the child’s fantasy and imagination. Hunger and death no longer remain the painful results of excluding food, but emerge as elements of life which are not so much threatening as they are experienced, which must be felt by all the living. The deflation of food as some necessary evil which must be engaged with to keep worse pains of hunger and death at bay leads to a reengagement not only with food as something which may be fun for children, but also provides a space where we can interrogate the links of food with psychology, sexuality, culture, language, power and society. Therefore, Nonsense becomes an important part of creating, quite literally some food for thought.

References Chattarji, S. (2009). The fried frog and other funny freaky foodie feisty poems. New Delhi: Scholastic India Pvt. Ltd. Daniel, C. (2006). Voracious children: Who eats whom in children’s literature. New York and London: Routledge. Darton, F. J. H. (2011). Children’s books in England: Five centuries of social life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heyman, M. (1999). Isles of Boshen: Edward Lear’s literary nonsense in context (Dissertation), University of Glasgow. https://theses.gla.ac.uk/2822/1/1999heymanphd.pdf. Accessed May 15, 2012. Heyman, M., Satpathy, S., & Ravishankar, A. (Eds.). (2007). The Tenth Rasa. Delhi: Penguin Books India. Katz, W. R. (1980). Some uses of food in children’s literature. Children’s Literature in Education, 11(4), 192–199. Keeling, K. K., & Pollard, S. T. (2009) eds. Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature. New York and London: Routledge. Khasawneh, H. F. (2010). The Poetics of Literary Nonsense: Victorian Nonsense and its Resurgence in The Irish Modernist Literature. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller. Lear, E. (1994). Complete nonsense. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited. Lurie, A. (2003). Boys and girls forever: Children’s classics from Cinderella to Harry Potter. New York: Penguin. Ravishankar, A. (2012). The story of Samarpreet Sood. In M. Heyman (Ed.), This book makes no sense nonsense poems and worse (pp. 25–26). New Delhi: Scholastic India Pvt Ltd.

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Richardson, A. (1992). Childhood and romanticism. In G. E. Sadler (Ed.), Teaching children’s literature: Issues, pedagogy, resources (pp. 121–130). New York: Modern Language Association of America.

Chapter 5

What Do You Want for Dinner, Honey?: The Subversive Power of Food Sananda Roy

Abstract Virginia Woolf by her famous articulation, “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in”, (Woolf 1977) initiates discussions on subversion and the feminine space. Therefore, when food comes to mind, a relatively pertinent question of it being linked to the kitchen, again conventionally viewed as the domain of the woman, is raised. However, if the “cult of domesticity”: the kitchen, and in extension, food, ceases to be associated with passive femininity and rather becomes the tool used by women to subvert patriarchal norms, then it raises questions anew. This paper proposes to examine the above stated possibility, where the limited resources available to a woman become her gateway to empowerment by looking at two texts, “Chocolate” by Manju Kapur and “Lamb to the Slaughter” by Roald Dahl that explore food and feminine space and locate it as an element of transvaluation. Food as a subject of research has created a stir among scholars who have found the idea striking, because food which is supposedly a domestic performance gets politicized on the international platform, related to food security, health, materiality, economic access, hunger and the politics of domination.

Virginia Woolf by her famous articulation, “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in”, (1977, p. 29) subverts the concept of the feminine space and sparks off debates that help us view the topic afresh. Therefore, when food comes to our mind, a relatively pertinent question of it being linked to the kitchen, again conventionally viewed as the domain of the woman, is raised. Burdened with the social expectations of cooking, cleaning, nourishing, women for ages have been “locked out” from the public sphere and “locked in” the domestic sphere of the household and kitchen. However, if the “cult of domesticity”: the kitchen, and in extension, food, ceases to be associated with passive femininity and rather becomes the tool used by women to subvert patriarchal norms, then it would raise questions anew.

S. Roy (B) Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Malhotra et al. (eds.), Food Culture Studies in India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5254-0_5

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This paper proposes to examine the above stated possibility, where the limited resources available to a woman become her gateway to empowerment. By looking at two texts, short stories to be precise, the first “Chocolate” by Manju Kapur and the other, “Lamb to the Slaughter” by Roald Dahl, I would like to dwell on the notion that explores food as a metaphor only to locate it as an element of subversion. Thus, an attempt would be to draw parallels between these two stories and to analyse how the two women, the protagonists, Tara of “Chocolate” and Mary Maloney of “Lamb to the Slaughter”, use food to exact revenge on their cheating husbands. In “Chocolate”, it focuses on how the woman’s culinary creations literally alter consequences and in “Lamb to the Slaughter”, how food, meant to nourish, brings about death. Food as a subject of research has created a stir among scholars who have found the idea striking, because food which is supposedly a domestic performance gets politicized on the international platform, related to matters of food security, health, materiality, economic access, hunger and the politics of domination. For feminist scholars, it is a potential field of enquiry. Malashri Lal talks about Sneja Gunew who articulates ideas related to “conjunction of multiculturalism and food”. Also, she gives a foray into the arguments ranging from Levi Strauss to M. Douglas, and goes on to discuss Sau Ling Wong too. Lal mentions; Gunew cites Uma Narayan’s work, who theorises how ‘for the British, eating curry was in a sense eating India--- at least… the imaginary India whose allure was necessary to provoke an imperial interest in incorporating this jewel in the British Crown.’ Narayan then goes on to write about the ‘agency’ acquired by immigrant populations in promoting ethnic cuisines. (2004, p. 163)

However, in a globalized world, new food habits acquired by the wealthy class, in a fashion conscious and urban India, the other side of the picture is painted. An apt example is Manju Kapur’s “Chocolate”. Chocolate becomes both a problem and a solution for Tara, the protagonist. She is gifted bar after bar of “seductively” wrapped Swiss chocolates by her globetrotting husband. Epitomizing sensuality, chocolate, is surely one of the most widely represented desserts in the literature. Chocolate has had its symbolic associations too. “In Mesoamerican society it entered as a metaphor or surrogate item for blood. It was for its significance in fertility celebrations” (Norton 2008, p. 35). It is also used to work in the service of defining social relationships. In Joanne Harris’ Chocolat, chocolate represents temptation offered by Satan, something evil, treacherous and threatening to disrupt the conventional way of life, to the dwellers of Lansquenet, who are offered chocolate by the protagonist Vivianne Rocher. The Bible appeals for temperance, to abstain from tasting the forbidden fruit, “thus Christianity opposed the values of the spirit to the natural and sensual; the erotic, the aphrodisiac became the forbidden fruit” (Jackson 1996, p. 42), and chocolate has gradually come to symbolize sin and indulgence, and in a way, the forbidden fruit. Kapur begins her narrative by mentioning Tara, the protagonist, and her obesity, her husband’s consequent disgust, made clear through his barbed jibes at her body. To him, having her “waddling around”, with “jiggling rolls of flesh” affected his image (2001, p. 71). This deeply hurt Tara’s feelings but so far as words were concerned it was an established pattern

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that he had the last one. Her silent tears, flabby cheeks and plump hands, all pointed to her agony over wanting to be slim and svelte, but life without food, especially chocolate, was not worth living. He is like Satan, offering her temptation in the form of chocolate. On the other hand, he hypocritically admonishes her for being too plump and out of shape. He expects her to conform to modern standards and become a slim and narrow-waisted woman. This brings to mind, Bridget Jones’ Diary, a novel by Helen Fielding, where the eponymous heroine, is a plump girl who longs for a slim figure, constantly counting calories, but keeps eating greedily at home. As a result, she feels guilty about it. Tara too feels guilty, but is unable to give up chocolate. The guilt is generated from social pressure exerted on every woman’s appearance. Patriarchal codes probably ascertain the cult of beauty. The “ancient interactions between men’s sexual response to visual cues” together with “the high value women place on relationships… there exists a contemporary tendency in women’s search for a new inner image and also body image is often mistaken for self-image” (Jackson 1996, pp. 115–116). Therefore, when Tara grants overdue importance to the patriarchal codes and abides by traditional gender roles, the story moves into the predictable arena of souring of marital relationships, infidelity being a cause, but most importantly by her lack of self-worth stemming from deeply entrenched patriarchal conditioning. Chocolate acts as a substitute, making up for the lack of marital bliss. Food can serve as a substitute to compensate our emotional, psychical, psychological and social desires, imperfections and ambitions. Initially, it served as exactly this for Tara. However, when she finds out about her husband’s infidelity, the narrative takes on a marvelous ironical twist. She defies stereotype and instead of dissolving into tears or resort to a divorce starts taking special cooking lessons. Tara rustles up entirely new range of cuisines for her husband and serves him delectable meals. Cooking symbolizes emancipation for Tara. She begins to discover herself anew through cooking, thereby turning the process of passive femininity on its head. “Tara dived into the experience of cooking like a duck into water”. She discovered its endless creativity that manifested its scope as infinitely multiple on the site of the dining table. She experienced the joys of offering her husband food, however errant but irresistible, increasing his greed and demand, making him entertain a “small number of friends more often at home” (Kapur 2001, p. 78). He gradually fattens into an obese, unsightly, unhealthy man. She ultimately exacts revenge by entering into an alliance with her husband’s friend and conceiving a child as a consequence. Thus, food that initially was her weakness, transforms into her weapon. Misty M. Hill in his essay, “The Relevance of Food to Representation of Gender in the Awakening and Goblin Market” states, “Carole Counihan argues that ‘men’s and women’s ability to produce, provide and consume food is a key measure of their power,’ while Jack Goody has argued, ‘gender hierarchies are maintained, in part, though differential control over and access to food,’”. This argument goes to show that if in denying access to food, power can be exercised, then so can be in giving (Hill 2010). Tara’s dishing out generous portions to her husband, being a case in point.

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If Tara fattens up her husband for a figurative slaughter, Dahl’s “Lamb to the Slaughter” evokes similar images of a victor/victim binary through its title. Here, the protagonist Mary Maloney avenges herself, by employing the very mode that attempted to restrict her, i.e. her domesticity. Dahl starts off by describing a middleclass household setting. Mary Maloney, pregnant with child, intermittently watches the clock, “a slow smiling air” about her as she waits in tranquility for her policeman husband Patrick Maloney to return home. The scene emphasizes homeliness, almost a “static coziness” as is reflected: “The room was warm and clean, the curtains drawn” (1991, p. 452). Mary is perceived as comfortable carrying out her “wifely duties”, fixing a drink for her husband and hanging his coat for him once he arrives, basking in his warmth. She’s aware of her husband’s disinclination towards conversation until after the first drink. However, she notices Patrick’s urgent draining of the first drink in a single swallow and subsequently proceeding to pour himself a stronger one. She then offers to prepare dinner and serve it to him. He refuses, she insists, he refuses again and appears to be preoccupied. It is only then that she begins to doubt. Gradually, Patrick breaks the news of an impending separation, which leaves her in a state of shock. Similar to “Chocolate”, the story, here too food takes on such an unexpected twist that it leaves the readers agape. Bent on fixing supper, Mary fetches a frozen leg of lamb for her husband and instead of feeding it to him bludgeons him to death with that leg of lamb. She then lets it cook in the oven, while she goes out to the grocer to acquire an alibi and places a call to the police. By the time they arrive, her evidence is half baked, literally, but this time to her advantage. By a sheer stroke of brilliance, she convinces the men, friends of Patrick Maloney to eat up the now fully cooked leg of lamb and in turn the evidence. The initial lamb in the narrative would be Mary, representing the weak and helpless housewife, slaving for her husband and waiting on him. She is eventually able to emerge out of the stereotype and seek revenge. Food is both, metaphorical in function as it empowers her and frees her and literal, because she uses it as a weapon. Meant to nourish, food in this story, serves the exact opposite end. Dahl also plays with the notion of identity both at the level of popular psychology and at a somewhat more philosophical level. At the level of popular psychology, Dahl makes it clear through his description of the Maloney household that Mary has internalized the bourgeois, or middle class, ideal of a young mid-twentieth-century housewife, of maintaining a tidy home and catering to her husband, of pouring drinks when the man finishes his day. All this is a gesture that probably comes from movies and magazines of the day. Mary’s sudden murderous action subverts the popular image. She, by killing her husband, kills her status as a lamb and by feeding the evidence to the policemen, ensures her changed status remains irreversible. Victim turns victor, and her submissive self finds a voice. Though the story borders on the macabre and is laced with dark humour, it raises questions about and challenges accepted gender roles. Traditional gender roles are built upon the idea of the man as the provider, which also is the case with Tara and Mary initially. This concept is explored by Misty M. Hill whose essay discusses Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening and Christina Rosetti’s long poem Goblin Market. She also goes on to consider food consumption

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in relation to gender identity and discovery. She argues that Rossetti and Chopin act to reject this by presenting female characters, who can provide for themselves and in a position to reject the offer of provision from men. Similarly, for Tara and Mary, emancipation comes their way when they are able to provide for themselves, albeit “locked in” the gendered space which they successfully transform into their victory tool, once they are mentally able to extricate themselves from the yoke of passivity. Both the stories disguise the subversive message, by centering the plots on a recognizably female space, the home and the kitchen only to perform a re-evaluation of established norms. Kapur’s and Dahl’s narratives are only few of the many social texts that perform a transvaluation of patriarchal system of codes by showing cooking as an empowering tool for the woman. Given joint family practices in India, the kitchen is the shared female space. As already mentioned, kitchen and food have been emblematic of restrictive and non-intellectual female domains—in almost all cultures. It is particularly a female mode of power with its material and economic trappings and visible impact. Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate is a piece, where Hispanic women use the space of the kitchen to creatively engage in cooking to forge a solidarity among themselves, not at all considering it restrictive, subverting female social norms and defying the notion of submission Even Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman, uses food and eating disorders like anorexia to address issues of gender, language and sexual politics, as well as social dislocation and to explore women’s strategies to develop alternative languages. One example of a movie of the Czechoslovak New Wave is Vera Chytilova’s 1966 film, Daisies. Chytilova’s antiheroines literally devour their world (indeed, the film is replete with images of food and eating), leaving nothing but leftovers, trash and general destruction in their wake. They devour so as not to be devoured themselves; they eat as a means of partaking in a world that ignores them unless they are displayed as objects of male sexual desire (Soukup 1998). All such narratives shed light on the theoretical constructs that challenge the stereotype about women’s writing as limited social critique. In the evolving postulations of feminist literary theory, such articulations are resonant with meaning. Malashri Lal opines, Food is linked to memory, to the legacy of foremothers whose oral texts of recipes and hands-on teaching of a complex skill have kept family traditions alive and rich. If a woman is the repository of such cultural knowledge and the potential disseminator of this wisdom, can she be treated by patriarchy as marginal and unimportant? Manju Kapur says much of this in a quiet subtext. Hers is one of the many examples of women’s writing which explores the implications of feminist power precisely in the arena where the woman is deemed to have been powerless. (2004, p. 164)

By examining how these women use the “female space” as well as their relationships with food, it becomes evident that the gender/spatial politics engages with a more accessible kind of feminist postulation, where the kitchen and cooking is not representative of a woman’s passive submission, but rather a deviant female behaviour that aims to challenge assumed social codes.

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References Dahl, R. (1991). Lamb to the slaughter. In Someone like you: The collected stories of Roald Dahl (Omnibus Volume, pp. 452–462). New Delhi: Penguin Books. Jackson, E. (1996). Food and transformation. Toronto: Inner City Books. Kapur, M. (2001). Chocolate. In J. Warsi (Ed.), A storehouse of tales: Contemporary Indian women writers (pp. 71–80). New Delhi: Srishti Publishers. Lal, M., Panja, S., & Satpathy, S. (Eds.). (2004). Signifying the self: Women and literature. New Delhi: Macmillan India Ltd. Norton, M. (2008). Sacred gifts, profane pleasures: A history of tobacco and chocolate in the Atlantic World. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Woolf, V. (1977). A Room of One’s Own. London: Grafton. Soukup, K. (1998) Banquet of Profanities: Food and Subversion in Vera Chytilová’s ’Daisies’. Tessera. https://tessera.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/tessera/article/download/25123/ 23317/. Accessed 14 April 2013. Hill, Misty M. (2010). "The Relevance of Food to Representations of Gender in The Awakening and Goblin Market." Inquiries Journal/Student Pulse 2.02. http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/art icles/152/the-relevance-of-food-to-representations-of-gender-in-the-awakening-and-goblin-mar ket. Accessed 22 October 2020.

Chapter 6

Food, Love and the Self in Indian Women’s Poetry in English Shruti Sareen

Abstract This paper aims to examine how the question of identity develops in the poetry of Indian women’s writing in English from the post-independence era to the present day. It intends to show that identity in the poetry of Kamala Das, Eunice de Souza, Mamta Kalia and so on is largely derived from the social roles that the community expects them to play or to adhere to. The paper then traces how identity in the work of more contemporary poets such as Sujata Bhatt, Imtiaz Dharker, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Sumana Roy, Sharanya Manivannan, Anindita Sengupta, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Anjum Hasan, Athena Kashyap, Tishani Doshi, Nitoo Das, Nabina Das, Annie Zaidi and so on. Food images in their poems help in articulating identity at three levels: the individual, the interpersonal and the social. They assert bodily hunger, desire, belching, tasting, pregnancy cravings and menstruation, thus locating identity within the physical body rather than outside it. The poetry I intend to study seems to change this relationship between women and food, between women and their own bodies, women and love by viewing women not merely as producers, but as consumers of food who revel in satisfying their own physical hunger as well as erotic desires instead of serving those of others. This change in women’s relationship to food somehow seems to encapsulate the larger change in the way identity is viewed and articulated which my paper attempts to trace.

The paper aims to look at the centrality of the issue of food to the question of identity in contemporary women’s poetry. It intends to show that identity in the poetry of Kamala Das, Eunice de Souza, Mamta Kalia and so on is largely derived from the social roles that the community expects them to play or to adhere to. The paper then traces how identity in the work of more contemporary poets such as Sujata Bhatt, Imtiaz Dharker, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Sumana Roy, Sharanya Manivannan, Anindita Sengupta, Tishani Doshi, Nitoo Das, Nabina Das, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Anjum Hasan, Athena Kashyap and Annie Zaidi which seems to show identity as being derived from one’s physical body, from the self. S. Sareen (B) Department of English, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Malhotra et al. (eds.), Food Culture Studies in India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5254-0_6

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Food images in these poems help in articulating identity at three levels: the social, the interpersonal and the individual. Food is a marker of a social and cultural identity as certain foods and food habits are particular to specific places. The availability or absence of food may also indicate a class or gendered identity. Food also facilitates love and camaraderie and helps form interpersonal relationships. Thus, food is often a prerequisite for sexual desires, erotic love and the process of discovery of the self as well as the other. Food imagery in the poems which assert bodily hunger, desire, belching, tasting, pregnancy cravings thus locates identity within the physical body rather than outside it. In older Indian fiction, women are primarily seen as responsible for cooking and serving the food. They constantly strive to satisfy other people’s desires. The poetry I intend to study seems to change this relationship women have with food, love and their own bodies by viewing women not merely as producers, but as consumers of food who revel in satisfying their own physical hunger as well as erotic desires. This change in women’s relationship to food somehow seems to encapsulate the larger change in the way identity is viewed and articulated which my paper attempts to trace. Kamala Das in “An Introduction” to Nine Indian Women Poets shows us how identities are constructed by society, moulds, which one is expected to fit in and conform to. My womanliness. Dress in sarees, be girl Be wife, they said. Be embroiderer, be cook, Be a quarreller with servants. Fit in. Oh, Belong, cried the categorizers. Don’t sit On walls or peep in through our lace-draped windows. Be Amy, or be Kamala. Or, better Still, be Madhavikutty. It is time to Choose a name, a role. Don’t play pretending games. (2011, pp. 10–11).

Shruti Singh (2013), an English lecturer in Lucknow, in “Quest for an Identity in the poems of Mamta Kalia” notes Kalia’s constant rebellion against the normative social roles and identities. This is perhaps best seen in “Anonymous” I no longer feel I’m Mamta Kalia. I’m Kamla or Vimla or Kanta or Shanta I cook, I wash, I bear, I rear, I nag, I wag, I sulk, I sag. (In de Souza 2011, p. 26)

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This association of women with traditional activities such as cooking, washing and rearing is again seen in Eunice de Souza’s “Eunice” where she riles against the Sister who is reproving her for the “elephant” seams she has stitched in the petticoat, calling her a “silly bra-less bitch” (2009, p. 53). She writes about how she tries to sew limbs onto her body and confine things within that but “the sawdust keeps popping/out of the gaps/sister” (2009, p. 53). Debarshi Nath, writing about the Assamese novel Under the Shadow of Kamakhya by Indira Goswami, shows Goswami’s view of women as food or meat in themselves which is hunted upon by men as creatures of prey. She attempts to envisage ways in which women can use their bodies as sites of resistance (Nath 2013). The change in women’s relationship with food and with their own bodies is when women become consumers of food and stop being the food that is consumed by others. Since the 1990s, the body itself seems to emerge as a strong marker of identity, though locality and place still continue to determine identity especially in the work of poets such as Anjum Hasan and Tishani Doshi. Food is an important marker of a larger social or collective identity because food patterns and habits vary from one place to another, and so do the agricultural practices and products available. Sumana Roy in “Chocolate” shows us how as kids, they did not know the appropriate name for this most favourite of foods that they used to look forward to. “We called it ‘Cadbury’ and ‘toffee’ in Bengali,/not knowing one from the other,/that it was only ‘chocolate’ that we wanted to eat.” (Roy 2011). Perhaps this is because chocolate is not an Indian sweet, so the kids could not find the exact term for it in Bengali. And yet, even though their signifiers are mixed up, they intimately know the sweet for which they used to yearn. In “Walnut”, she writes how walnuts were unknown to them in Siliguri, and how her only access to walnuts was through Uncle Pradhan who used to send them from Kashmir for his children. She writes about the anticipation for these walnuts, the delight in crushing them and the nostalgia for these walnuts once she gets married (Roy 2011). In “Avocado”, she writes about the man who cannot believe that people in Bengal have never seen an avocado. She writes that the Mexican wanted it to be cut from the middle, through its stomach, the South African wanted it to be cut from the middle through its head. She however didn’t want it to be cut at all, she didn’t “want to be surprised”. She likes to stick to what is familiar, she has no curiosity for the exotic fruit, she does not want it to be cut at all (Roy 2011). In her essay “Flowers You Can Chew”, Roy writes about the time they stayed in Europe and how they took dried leaves and chillies to be “mementoes for the tongue in an unfamiliar land”. And yet, she realized that it was the flowers that she missed, the flowers that you can chew and eat, a common part of the Bengali diet, the lack of which she sorely misses in Europe. She goes on to describe the pumpkin flower, the bawk phool (crane flower), the chalkumro (white gourd) flower, the sajne (drumstick) flower, the water lily, the bamboo flower and the banana flower (Roy 2012). Nitoo Das, a poet from Assam based in Delhi, similarly in her essay “Consuming Home” writes about a never-ending series of poems, that she has been writing by the same name, only three of which are published, suggesting that whereas for other places she writes travelogues, for her home, it is food that most intimately forms her connection and sense of belonging (Das 2017, pp. 50–51). Words that now

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remain half-forgotten in some corner of her mind with their own sounds and their own specific associations, words like khorisa, tengamora, bhedai lota, bhut jolokia, thekera, posola, sitol maas or kulothi bring out a primitive response and instinct within her (Das 2016). She writes of the king sized hot chili, bhut jolokia which “splits open hands,/Implodes eyes (Das 2017, pp. 50–51)” The smells of the fart plant, Bhedai Lota, seemed to climb the very walls of the house, but “we excused old stinks and/quietly announced/our approval”. (Das 2017, pp. 50–51) Tengamora is a flower and fruit eaten together which is magenta in colour but which looks like blood. She describes the intimate taste in the mouth when this is eaten. (Das 2016, 2017) How food is an integral part of places and of memory is again seen in Nabanita Kanungo’s “What I’ll Take with Me When I’ll Leave Shillong” I am preparing for a day when oranges will be a memoir. To clear this room, incorrigibly strewn with tastes: the sohs (fruit), waiting to salivate time’s mouth elsewhere, the smoked-khtung (dried fish) of my origins, some nei-lieh (a kind of sesame) in the heart’s sagging pouch, a handful of red sticky rice, maybe. This room scattered with sights: sylvan myths only waiting for my flesh elsewhere with the lances of firs, the claws of pines (Kanungo 2013, bracketed translations inserted by me)

Memories of taste and smell are actually the only things from Shillong that will stay with her, that she can take away, that will help her recreate “home” within her imagination, and help her deal with the grief of leaving. Food, thus, carries associations of certain places and through memory, becomes an inextricable part of us. Imtiaz Dharker in “Minority” shows us how food can constantly remind one of one’s status as an outsider. She describes the alienation she feels between her relatives in the fields where tubers, maize and sugarcane are the staple crops that are grown. “I don’t fit/ like a clumsy translated poem” (In de Souza 2011, pp. 58–59) she writes. In contrast to this, in her poem “At the Lahore Karhai”, which is a complete belonging, community and identification shows through lines such as “no beer, we’re Muslim”. Even though their ways are all separate, they are all coming together for a Sunday lunch family reunion. This is an image of communion, togetherness and harmony: Yes, a great day. A feast! We swoop on a whole family of dishes. The tarka dal is Auntie Hameeda the karhai ghosht is Khala Ameena

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the gajjar halva is Appa Rasheeda. The warm naan is you. (Dharker 2003)

The scarcity or absence of food reveals a different kind of identity, one associated with poverty and lack. Sukrita Paul Kumar in “Traffic Signals” shows us the beggar at traffic signals, the translucent, almost incorporeal presence which hovers like a corpse asking for money for its own shroud. With ants crawling all over the boy, and his limbs all limp, Kumar writes Do I see a flicker of life in that corpse, a shiver in his hand, a quiver on his lip, a twitch on his nose? Does the eye tremble, savouring the taste of zafrani biryani in a dream? Is that corpse real? (Kumar 2013)

Nabina Das in “Uru Habba for the Red Soil” describes the festival where people are sitting with laughter and well fed stomachs, and the lone woman who sits apart and tells them stories of another reality that she knows: field rats among dry crop stalks, those who till the earth and live in eternal pain and have no dreams: “those that pine for rice and rhyme” (Das 2013). Sumana Roy in “When your father comes” describes a situation that is often found in North-East India and other conflict zones. She tells the child that when the father comes home from the war, he will break the walnuts and make the gourds grow big, he will tell them not to decrease the ration for rice, and he will cook jackfruit curry with garlic and ginger. The threat of impending doom and the ephemerality of “normal” life is evident in her last line “IF your father comes home from the war” (Roy 2011, my capitals). In “Samosa”, she writes of how a Samosa reminds them of the days of Tebhaga when food was scarce and how she ate one ear of the samosa, and her love ate the other, and the third was always kept for a stranger. People used to say that her lover was a Naxalite, the way he came in barefooted, asking for no more than a cup of sugarless black tea (Roy 2011). Food is also often seen as a prerequisite for making love. Sutapa Chaudhuri’s writing about the poetry of Sujata Bhatt shows us how Bhatt is perhaps the first Indian woman poet to write erotically and sensuously about “the comforting smell of tomatoes and garlic and the warm, desirous touch of bodies” (Chaudhuri 2013). Writing about birth, blood, female jouissance and using phallic symbols in her poetry, Bhatt seems to be emphasizing the “is-ness” of the body and its corporeal materiality (Chaudhuri 2013). The love of food and body may also be linked to Alice Walker’s concept of womanism: “Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the folk. Loves herself. Regardless.” (2012, p. 45). The love of women’s bodies and selves and food and

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the sense of plenty that accompanies love and roundness indicates an acceptance by women of their own selves and identities, without feeling the need to adhere to a normative ideal. Sharanya Manivannan in “I will come bearing mangoes” uses the bright, sunshiny colour yellow and the erotic sensuous mango to offer herself to her lover. The yellow of the fiery flowers spilling nectar and the sun flooded verandah and the approaching rains serve to create the effect of love and ripeness (2011). In her article, “Idli and a Screaming Orgasm (or Spicing Up the Menu)”, she writes how names can create desire and curiosity within us such as the drink called Screaming Orgasm, the idli called Chubby Marriage Pillow and the menu in China which lists “chicken with no sexual life” and “husband and wife lung slice” as food items on the menu (Manivannan 2008). In “Onions”, Sumana Roy describes how her lover, out of care, asked her not to peel onions so that she may not spoil her hands and eyes. However, she sees onions as the spice of all food, so she continues to peel them and cook them every day, in order to please her husband. Until, one day he has had more than enough of onions “For Heaven’s Sake, an onion is not Jesus Christ!”. Wondering whether she has not cooked it properly enough to please him, she naively asks “Was it that bad, my onion cake?” Perhaps this poem is saturated with love, it shows us how we express our love through food and through eating, even to excess (Roy 2011). In “Caffeine”, parodying SMS language, she shows us the artificial worlds we make within coffee shops which are spaces that are often used by the youth for rendezvous with their beloveds (Roy 2011). In “Sweet Home”, she describes how they go to the fair with the ferry rides and the sugarcane juice and the fried food and the car ride back. Upon their return home, she notes they had shared among them food, a car ride and a lot of love, and yet they were each alone in their own private worlds, inescapably trapped within their thoughts and their aloneness (Roy 2011). In “Plagiarising”, she compares love to ice; hard and cold, and how it turns to watery illusion, which although necessary, flows away. And then, the lingering vapours of memory are all that remain, through which you can go back right to the start of the journey (Roy 2011). If ice and water are substances we consume, then Roy seems to be trying to explain the process of love through food metaphors. In “Deepor Beel”, she writes about a picnic where much food, love and gossip are shared ranging from labour trouble and tea gardens to family stories (Roy 2012). Between bird watching and orange pips, Roy constantly uses images of sexuality such as breasts and thighs, bra hooks and menstruation. In “Tea”, Roy perhaps seems to be showing us a relationship with another woman as she writes of two women sharing tea together. She writes that the other woman seeks wetness: milk, orange, moon dew and shows us beads of hemlock between her legs. Even the leaves in the teapot are shown to be flirting (Roy 2016). Tea can then become a metaphor for shared secrets and wetness and can act as a medium that enables exchange, erotic or otherwise. In “Spit Feast”, she again links sexuality with water and with the spit from one’s mouth as “thhoo” occurs repeatedly within the poem. The sea is seen as the receptacle of all intimate bodily demands such as blood flowing, clotting, spit and making love. We come to sea, she writes, for soliloquy, for ululation, to confront what we have feared most in our lives: “the privacy of spit in our marriage” (Roy 2013).

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If Roy uses ice and water as metaphors for love, Abha Iyengar seems to be using ice cream as a metaphor in “Ice Cream”. She writes that love in an air-conditioned space, with muted lights, bathrobes and moisturizers is slick, “sweet smelling, smooth like ice cream” (2010, p. 56). However, love in small, sweaty rooms loses everything but the hot intensity of passion. Love is quick here; one does not revel in it and prolong it as in an air-conditioned room. She compares this love to an ice cream that melts into an uncomfortable heap on the floor (2010, p. 56). Arundhathi Subramaniam in “You and Marmalade” writes that she needs the comfort of marmalade and the beloved to combat the stories of daily horror that appear in the newspaper. However, she says that she forgets in the process what marmalade and the newspaper could do to balance the beloved. She creates a larger than life image of him, he becomes the centre, and she forgets the rest of the world. One day, she writes, “I’ll cut you down to size” (2010, pp. 49–50). Sharanya Manivannan in “Benediction for the feast” calls people “empty of palm, open of heart, eager of belly” to come to the feast: Here’s to the sweetness, here’s to the sting and here’s to the saltwater sacrament. Here’s to the dreaming, here’s to the dead and here’s to the sacred delusion. Take the hollow at the centre of your being and prise it open to be savaged by grace, to be alchemized by love. (Manivannan 2013)

Here, she shows how food provides that comfort and security to fill us up which is so necessary for us all. Food fills us up with love and dreams and allows us to indulge in the warmth of our own delusions. She ends on a note of plentiful contentment: “Drink/deep and without qualm. There’s/enough for us all” (Manivannan 2013). Shikha Malviya in “Feasting, Fasting” sensuously describes how the whistle of the pressure cooker forms a “ball of saliva/dancing on the centre/of our tongues” (Malaviya 2013). The rice and potatoes, the touch of paprika, the colour yellow are shown to add warmth to the heart and hearth. Sliced tomatoes arranged in empty white plates invite them, and he slides his turmeric stained fingers over her breasts and hips. The ambience is so conducive to the expression of passion that they do not realize when the water boils over, the pot blackens and the smell of burning fills the room. In “Feasts”, Rukmini Bhaya Nair shows us how spices add charm to romantic love and make the other a little more subtle and mysterious. She writes about the different spices they taste within each other’s mouth, asafetida, garlic, coriander and the memory of this that lingers afterwards. She writes that sweets such as Bangla mishti, Varanasi rabri, Mysore pak and jalebies can support affection, but only spices such as paprika, turmeric, cumin, basil, rosemary, cinnamon and ginger can speak of love (Nair 2010, p. 169). Anjum Hasan in “To the Chinese Restaurant” shows us how

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the emptiness and monotony of the small town is relieved by the restaurant. “We eat more than we need to. We eat/ so that our boredom’s no longer dangerous” (Hasan 2008, pp. 23–24). She adds later that here with the smells of eternally frying onions, we are “plucked from sadness” (Hasan 2008, pp. 23–24). Annie Zaidi in “Chicken Claws at Midnight” tells us that this is not a night to be sad. She writes that even if one is no longer young, one has the fugue of a remembered time (Zaidi 2013). Zaidi’s poem seems to be about trying to be happy while dealing with despair, about trying to smile even if life only offers you leftover chicken claws at midnight. Athena Kashyap in “Fruits” eroticizes the mango and the fig. She makes love with a man, while sucking a mango. She sees the curved mango as her lesbian lover. She links the seed of the mango with their seed which will give birth to a beautiful girl. Then, she sees the entire world as a sensuous, erotic orange. The figs on the tree outside are compared to testicles. These are the sites of love making as wasps grow in these wombs, the males sucking on the nectar, while the females leave, full of male pollen and eggs to seek another fig tree (Athena 2013). Lastly, food because of its association with physical, bodily activities such as hunger, eating, belching helps to locate our identity within the body itself. The body is its own testimony, we need not look outwards to the social and the interpersonal for giving us our sense of self. Sumana Roy in “Coleslaw” seems to be stressing fundamental aspects of our bodies which we are all intimately acquainted with and yet generally keep hushed in conversation. She writes that the taste of mother’s milk, fingernails and sweat is the same everywhere and of coleslaw too. She adds that she has, of course, never tasted them anywhere else except her own body (Roy 2011). In “Hunger”, she writes about things that induce hunger and desire within us, such as the steam over fat white rice, the taste of cumin caught between the last two teeth, the belch from the last meal’s indigestible ginger and the smell of the neighbour’s oranges flooding her mouth. She ends by showing the similarity between all living creatures: her hunger is the same as the dog’s barking (Roy 2011). In typically Swiftian terms, she shows us the body in its grotesque, unpleasant form in “Belch”. She calls a belch “a taste without a memory”, where we wait for the next burp to come, yet do not recollect the taste at all. The second one, she writes, always fails the expectations of taste (Roy 2011). If identity is inscribed on our body itself, it is a validation of everything that the body is, not a preconceived notion of it. An Afro-American woman poet, Grace Nicholls, celebrates the “fat, black woman” in her poems, thus overturning stereotypical ideas of the kind of body you must have in order to be accepted. In “Aniseed”, Sumana Roy writes that the spice makes all the juices in our body flow and paves the way for the erotic (Roy 2011). In “Eating”, she writes that eating forms a common topic of conversation: the length of rice grains, the tenderness of the meat, the smoothness of the sauce or even the cost of baby food (Roy 2011). Eating here seems to be linked to tenderness and maternal feelings, and to mundane and practical costs at the same time. Perhaps talking about food and eating too gives a sense of fulfilment and contentment. Sharanya Manivannan in “Bananaflower” writes, unwrapping this purplish flower with her bare hands that there are those who cannot touch it without desire, yet she plucks them the brutal way, ripping, tearing, butchering them without sparing a thought for their beauty, cooking

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them until each becomes a shrunken bulb, “delicious in its diminution”. The pangs of the body are here uppermost. As in Sumana Roy’s food flowers, flowers here are seen as food and not merely as things of decorative beauty. Aimee Nezhukumatathil in “Orange Popsicle” once again emphasizes the physicality of the body which may even be seen as verging on the grotesque as she shows a mother with a new born child and her cravings for orange popsicle. The nurse bids her only to sleep and eat broth thinned with water. The orange popsicle for dessert is the only thing she craves and looks forward to (Sen 2012, p. 31). Women’s changing relationship with food then whether as producers or consumers seems to encapsulate the way women see their own selves and bodies. Here, we see identity in more contemporary times slowly being centred more in the self than in the community outside. Food, however, as shown in the paper is an important marker of identity at three levels: the social, the interpersonal and the individual.

References Ahluwalia, A. (Ed.). (2010). Writing love. Delhi: Rupa. Athena, K. (2013). ‘Fruits’, prairie schooner. https://prairieschooner.unl.edu/fusion/feast/fruits. Accessed 7 March 2020. Chaudhuri, S. (2013). The poems of Sujata Bhatt Muse India. In: Surya Rao (Ed.) 47. http://musein dia.com/Home/ViewContentData?arttype=articles&issid=47&menuid=3924. Accessed 7 March 2020. Das, N. (2013). Uru Habba For The Red Soil (Nrityagram) Prairie Schooner. https://prairieschoo ner.unl.edu/fusion/feast/uru-habba-red-soil-nrityagram. Accessed 7 March 2020. Das, N. (2016). Consuming home The Hindu Business Line. https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/ blink/read/consuming-home/article9163460.ece. Accessed 7 March 2020. Das, N. (2017). Cyborg Proverbs. Mumbai: Poetrywala. de Souza, E. (Ed.). (2009). A necklace of skulls. New Delhi: Penguin India. de Souza, E. (Ed.). (2011). Nine Indian women poets. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Dharker, I. (2003). ‘Minority’, ‘At the Lahore Karhai’ Poetry International. In Subramaniam, A. (Ed.). https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/poem/2818/auto/0/0/Imtiaz-Dharker/AT-THELAHORE-KARHAI/en/nocache. Accessed 7 March 2020. Hasan, A. (2006). To the chinese restaurant poetry international. https://www.poetryinternational. org/pi/poem/10574/auto/0/0/Anjum-Hasan/To-The-Chinese-Restaurant/en/nocache. Accessed 7 March 2020. Iyengar, A. (2010). Yearnings. Delhi: Serene Woods. Kanungo, N. (2013). What I’ll take with when i leave shillong prairie schooner. https://prairieschoo ner.unl.edu/fusion/feast/what-i’ll-take-me-when-i-leave-shillong. Accessed 7 March 2020. Kumar, P. S. (2013). ‘Traffic signal’,prairie schooner. https://prairieschooner.unl.edu/fusion/feast/ traffic-signals. Accessed 7 March 2020. Malaviya, S. (2013). Feasting fasting prairie schooner. https://prairieschooner.unl.edu/fusion/feast/ feasting-fasting. Accessed 07 March 2020. Manivannan, S. (2008). Idli and a screaming orgasm (or spicing up the menu). https://sharanyamani vannan.in/2008/07/12/the-venus-flytrap-idli-and-a-screaming-orgasm-or-spicing-up-the-menu/. Accessed 17 March 2020. Manivannan, S. (2011). I will come bearing mangoes Rougarou! An Online Literary Journal. https://english-archive.louisiana.edu/rougarou/archive/2011/Fall/Content/p-Manivannan_IWil lCome.html. Accessed 7 March 2020.

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Manivannan, S. (2013). ‘Benediction for the Feast’, prairie schooner. https://prairieschooner.unl. edu/fusion/feast/benediction-feast. Accessed 07 March 2020. Nair, R. B. (2010). Feasts. In E. V. Ramakrishnan & A. Makhija (Eds.), We speak in changing languages (pp. 169–170). Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. Nath, D. P. (2013). Indira Goswami’s. In Surya Rao (Ed.) Under the Shadow of Kamakhya. Muse India. 47. http://www.museindia.com/Home/ViewContentData?arttype=feature&issid=47&men uid=3899. Accessed 7 March 2020. Roy, S. (2011). Poems. In Surya Rao (Ed.), Muse India. Number 37. http://www.museindia.com/ Home/ViewContentData?arttype=feature&issid=37&menuid=2633. Accessed 7 March, 2020. Roy, S (2012). ‘Deepor beel’ northeast review. https://northeastreview.wordpress.com/2012/11/01/ deepor-beel/. Accessed 7 March 2020. Roy, S. (2012). ‘Flowers you can chew: A thing of beauty also offers food for the palate’, Forbes India. https://www.forbesindia.com/article/recliner/flowers-you-can-chew/33056/1. Roy, S. (2016). ‘Tea’, open space India Akash’s University Misadventure in America. http://opensp aceindia.org/express/talkingpoetry/item/tea.html. Accessed 28 August 2016. Sen, S. (2012). Harper collins book of english poetry. New Delhi: Harper Collins. Sen, S. (2013). Feast| Feast[ing]| Thirst[ing]| Text[ing] Prairie Schooner. https://prairieschooner. unl.edu/fusion/feast/feast-feasting-thirsting-texting. Accessed Feb 2013 Singh, S. (2013). Quest for an identity in the poems of Mamta Kalia The Criterion. In Bite, V. (Ed.), 12. http://www.the-criterion.com/V4/n1/Shruti.pdf. Accessed 6 March 2020. Subramaniam, A. (2010). You and marmalade. In A. Ahluwalia (Ed.), Writing love: An anthology of Indian-english poetry. New Delhi: Rupa. Walker, A. (2012). Womanist. Buddhist-Christian Studies, 32, 45–45. Zaidi A (2013). Chicken claws at midnight prairie schooner. https://prairieschooner.unl.edu/fusion/ feast/chicken-claws-midnight. Accessed 7 March 2020.

Chapter 7

Food for Thought-Feeling: Studying Taste’s Affective Function in Bulbul Sharma’s The Anger of Aubergines Sakshi Dogra

Abstract Social conventions and conditioning require women to be fastened in bonds of care and nurture. Food plays an important role in the articulation of the latter. For example, planning and preparation of everyday meals is one of the most manifest unpaid labour activities performed by women. Some of the research questions that this chapter tries to pose are: what is the relationship between the appetitive and affective conditioning of women and subsequent gender relations? Is food only symbolic in writing on food by women or is it also tasteful and material; thus, sensual and affective? If the latter is true, what function does the narration of recipe sharing perform? Does it reproduce a social context of feminine activity? Is this realm of the social always already affective first? An attempt has been made to answer the aforementioned questions by studying Bulbul Sharma’s The Anger of Aubergines: Stories of Women and Food through the prism of Ben Highmore’s reflections and his theory of taste as feeling. This chapter tries to shift the focus of enquiry from “what food is” to “what food can do”.

In his essay “Taste as Feeling”, Ben Highmore starts out by critiquing Bourdieu’s aforementioned seminal work. He writes, Bourdieu was only interested in taste as a function of something else, and that something else was the generation and maintenance of social distinctions. This meant that tastes (particular choices, specific likings and dis-likings) were only ever relevant or worthy of note if they were already marked as having some sort of social distinction and value. (Highmore 2016, p. 547)

An approach to taste such as the one undertaken by Bourdieu obscures the “new liberating possibilities” (ibid. p. 548) that taste can accord when it’s understood vis-à-vis “the whole conative-affective aspects of life” or feeling (ibid. p. 549). For Highmore, the register of taste as feeling connects taste to “experiential meaning” (ibid. p. 548). Thus, instead of looking at taste as a constructed concept, Highmore S. Dogra (B) Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Malhotra et al. (eds.), Food Culture Studies in India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5254-0_7

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addresses what taste can prefigure when interlaced with “that animated realm of life (all our volition, propulsion, attraction and repulsion) that is not governed by rationalized thought” (ibid. p. 549). In another essay titled “Bitter after Taste: Affect, Food and Social Aesthetics”, he continues to maintain the centrality of taste as feeling in the analysis of any culture and society. Culture, after all, he states is “a peculiar admix of affect, sensual perception and bio power instanced by taste”(Highmore 2010, p. 126). Highmore begins by highlighting the condition of “sensual interconnection” where the worlds of touch, sound, sight and smell overlap to produce taste (ibid, p. 120). The “senses and affect” further “bleed into one another” to produce “cross modal networks that register links between perception, affect, the senses and emotions” (ibid, p. 120). For Highmore, food is located at the intersection of this cross modality. He writes, “The strong relationship between food and taste is not simply based on the metaphoric association of taste with discernment rather food is the sine qua non of taste’s affective function” (ibid, p. 126). The significance of food is further accentuated as it is essentially what constitutes the day to day and as Highmore suggests in his essay “Taste as Feeling”, there is a “need to attend to other feelings that are concerned with less intense flavours … (that) recognize much more work-a-day versions of feeling” (Highmore 2016, p. 561). Bulbul Sharma’s collection of short stories entitled The Anger of Aubergines: Stories of Women and food are pungent expressions of the “work-a-day versions of feeling” (1997). The stories explore the inextricable links between gender relations and concomitant appetitive and affective habituation of women. The collection invites the readers to savour the twelve short stories which are all followed by recipes. It is a tour de force of intertwined flavours and emotions and brings out the centrality of food in the everyday life of women. Whether it’s through the portrayal of a widow’s craving for “khatte choley” in the story titled “Constant Craving” or an unending culinary competition between a daughter-in-law and her mother-in-law for the attention and affection of their husband/son in “Sandwiched!” or a grandmother’s desire to overfeed the priest at her husband’s shraad ceremony in “Dead Man’s Feast”. The Anger of Aubergines is an exploration of not just the symbolic and metaphorical significance of food in the literature but instead an investigation of the sensorial and sensual experience of food. The consequent suggestion is that food in The Anger of Aubergines has an appetitive and affective function and thus shapes perception. Instead of dwelling on the circuitous question of what food is? I try to answer the question, what food does. I seek to study the agential nature of food through these stories. Consequently, I try to argue that food is not just symbolic or metaphorical but instead sensual, sensorial and thus mobilizing. To begin, the very title of the collection is an eponymous reference to one of the featured short stories. Both the title and story “The Anger of Aubergine” foreground the intermingling of taste, feelings and food. The narrative is about a separated couple, Mr. and Mrs. Kumar. Having been separated for seven years after a long forgettable marriage, Mr. Kumar visits Mrs. Kumar’s house ever Sunday to indulge in a meal cooked by her. Mr. Kumar is described as a man with an “occasional frown which sometimes appeared to show an intense, deep felt agitation” (Sharma 1997, p. 54). It is

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also mentioned how he and his ex-wife never spoke to each other during these visits. On this particular Sunday, she had prepared aubergine bharta and Kashmiri meat curry called yakhni. He devoured the food, complemented it with “satiated burping” and “under the table his knees moved in joyful contended rhythm” (Sharma 1997, p. 58). The readers are told that he had been asked by his doctor to avoid “rich, spicy food”. Where Mr. Kumar abstained from consuming rich spicy food throughout the week, it was this abstention that “made this white meat curry, prepared with a fine blend of ginger and aniseed, as smooth as butter with an extra dash of red chilies burnt in pure ghee, so delicious” (Sharma 1997, p. 59). Thus, if taste is multimodal in nature, abstinence is also a modality that accentuates taste producing a feeling of contentment and happiness which leads him to set his knees to a merry rhythm. During the meal, Mrs. Kumar uncharacteristically asked him “is the salt alright?”, and he “with a stab of irritation” thought that Mrs. Kumar was “going to start nattering away at meal times and ruin the food”. His fears were proven baseless as there was no further sound than the “occasional clink of spoon touching the plate” (Sharma 1997, p. 58). The author tells us that after indulging in the meal like on all Sundays, Mr. Kumar “lay awake at night tossing and turning in agony chewing antacid tablets”. As he writhed in pain, “he felt justified in leaving his wife” (Sharma 1997, p. 59). The story is charged with the convergence of senses and affect. Perhaps, it could be argued that the ingestion of irritable flavours such as “red chillies burnt in pure ghee” releases the same gastric response and invokes a form of sensual perception. Elaborating on the same idea, Ben Highmore writes “When emotions are described by flavors, though, are these simply metaphorical conventions? Or does the emotional condition of bitterness, for instance, release the same gastric response as the ingestion of bitter flavors? How do we make our way from one modality to another?” (2010, p. 120). Mr. Kumar feels he was justified in his irritation and consequent separation from his wife. The story attests to the interweaving of taste, feelings, sense and perception. The aforementioned example goes on to exemplify that an approach to food that seeks to accord the multimodality of taste does not just locate food as a symbol or metaphor of the vengeance that Mr. Kumar’s wife feels and exacts on him. The food is also sensual as it mobilizes his body and thereby perception by producing feeling of vengeance and alienation from his wife. Its power exacted on a deeply affective plain. Food is thus not just symbolic but also tasteful and material; thus, sensual and affective. The short story “Sweet Nothings” is the dessert in the collection. It features last and represents a middle-class woman’s inability to resist sweets. The fiction articulates Reshma’s desire to strive for and conform to culturally defined standards of beauty which leads to constant anxiety and perpetual angst. The story begins with the protagonist dreaming about chocolate sauce and imagining-tasting its velvety texture. However, she wakes up “coughing” as she finds herself licking the distasteful ponds cream that she must have applied on her face the night before (Sharma 1997, p. 132). From the very beginning, thus a taste for sweetness is cancelled out by a dis-taste and consequent anxiety that conforming to beauty standards initiates. In the story, the taste for sweets fails to compensate for the lack of sweetness in marriage. Thus, the story is appropriately named “Sweet Nothings”. There are no words of

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affection or sweetness exchanged between the husband and wife as the latter is having a love affair outside of marriage. The story is about the lack of affection and failure of sweets. One could argue that Reshma’s relationship with sweets is born out of a pathological drive for conspicuous consumption which then transmutes into a maddening desire for sweets and leftover food at the end of the story. However, I align with Arlene Voski Avakian and Barbara Haber, who in Feminist Food Studies: A Brief History register that “feminist scholars (have) focused only on women’s food pathologies. While work on anorexia, bulimia, and other eating disorders among women is vitally important, other aspects of women’s relationship to food are at least equally significant” (Avakian and Haber 2005, p. 2). There is a sensorial and affective aspect in Reshma’s relationship with food that any analysis which huddles women’s desire for food as pathological risks dismissing. Sweets act like comfort food for Reshma. The narrator recounts how a young Reshma was often accompanied to the sweetshop with her father who used to let her choose the sweets of her desire. As a child Reshma’s father would take her to the mithai shops and allow her to pick out all the sweets she wanted. She would stand on tiptoe and peer into the glass case which was filled with sparkling range of white, pink, orange, green and golden-yellow mithai. There was burfi made with cashew nuts and pistachios, pale orange laddos, slim, golden brown malpua floating in syrup, delicate and feathery balushahi, rubbery, sweet Karachi halwa, heart shaped dil bahar … tiny, white, dripping with sweetness rasbhari and solid, chewy kalakand. (Sharma 1997, p. 141)

Sharma emphasizes the material properties of the sweets which play a fundamental role in aiding the mobilizing function of comfort food. Testifying to the same Rick Flowers and Elaine Swan write “Comfort foods … are particularly catalytic because of its soothing material properties” (Flowers and Swan 2016, p. 68). The portrayal of Reshma’s reaction as she devours a burfi in a sweetshop highlights the affective function that comfort foods initiate. Sharma writes “As the familiar sweetness of solid, creamy milk cooked with cardamoms and almonds flooded her mouth and travelled like lightening down to her toes, she plunged her hands greedily into the tray of soft, fresh, burfi” (Sharma 1997, p. 145). Thus, the taste of sweets is familiar, satiating perhaps overflowing; the very satisfaction, sweetness, care and comfort of her childhood that she misses in her marriage. Carrying on with their proposition concerning comfort food, Flowers and Swan add, “But comfort foods are affective, often being nostalgic and remind us of being cared for; we eat them to connect us to other” (2016, p. 69). Thus, Reshma who is completely swept by the sensorial experience of consuming sweets cannot seem to listen to rational dictates of health magazines and gym instructors. However, the sweetness and the food she indulges in is a weak compensation for heartache. A subplot in the fictional piece has constant commentary by Reshma’s house help who cannot fathom why Reshma would want to go through the distasteful pedagogy of resisting sweets and running like a mad dog to lose weight. She believes that her mistress looks like a goddess. Amah, the help can only look on helplessly as Reshma

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devours sweets she bought for Diwali as well as all the leftover food in the fridge like a mad woman. Amah’s intervention comes in the shape of Hot Ginger-Honey Drink. “As the tea begins to boil Reshma stops crying” anticipating a change in perception, a sensual perception put into effect by the taste of tea” (Sharma 1997, p. 150). There is thus an attempt at sensual realignment. The drink provides an opportunity for the knotting of flavours and feelings. The conflation of flavours and feelings is further affected by the use of phrase “for heartaches” in the recipe of Hot Ginger-Honey Drink that is shared at the close of the story. Every fictional narrative in The Anger of Aubergines is followed by a recipe of the dish that is responsible for bringing about a sensual perception and affective habituation in the story. For example, the aforementioned story “Constant Craving” ends with a recipe of khatte choley. Similarly, “Sweet Nothings” is closed by a recipe of Orange Kheer, the “sweet nothing” of the story and immediately followed by Hot Ginger-Honey Drink. Thus, the book doubles up as a recipe book, a form of women’s literature, a community. Susan Leonardi is her 1989 article “Recipes for Reading” argues that by introducing recipes, a narrative. Reproduces the social context of recipe sharing-a loose community of women that crosses the social barriers of class, race, and generation. Many women can attest to the usefulness and importance of this discourse: mothers and daughters even those who don’t get along well otherwise-old friends who now have little in common, mistresses and their “help,” lawyers and their secretaries-all can participate in this almost prototypical feminine activity. (Leonardi 1989, p. 343)

Thus, Leonardi proposes that the social context of the recipe renders it far more significant than as a mere rulebook for cooking. Recipes are not just guidelines but instead their significance lies in their ability to produce a social context of feminine activity. It is important here to note that the social context is always affectively charged as feelings and flavours are knotted together in inextricable ways. For instance, Amah’s recipe of Hot Ginger-Honey Drink is a cure for heartache. What is reproduced is a social context of feminine activity, a context that is made of sensual realignment and affective attunement.

References Avakian, A. V., & Haber, B. (2005). Feminist food studies: A brief history. In From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food (pp. 1–28). Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Flowers, R., & Swan, E. (2016). Potatoes in the rice cooker: Family food pedagogies, bodily memories, meal-time senses and racial practices. In R. Flowers & E. Swan (Eds.), Food pedagogies (pp. 49–74). Routledge. Highmore, B. (2010). Bitter after taste: Affect, food and social aesthetics. In M. Gregg & G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 118–137). Durham and London: Duke University Press.

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Highmore, B. (2016a). Taste after Bourdieu.New Formations, 87, 159–163. Highmore, B. (2016b). Taste as feeling. New Literary. History, 47(4), 547–566. Leonardi, S. J. (1989). Recipes for reading: Summer pasta, lobster à la Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie. PMLA, 104, 340–347. Sharma, B. (1997). The anger of aubergines. New Delhi: Kali for Women.

Part III

Visual Victuals: Food in Film, Animation and Comic Strips

Chapter 8

“Luca Brasi Sleeps with the Fishes”: The Gastromythology of The Godfather Trilogy Arup K. Chatterjee

Abstract Taking the founding principles of Abhinavagupta’s concept, rasadhvani, this paper defines the mysterious gastromythological code of The Godfather trilogy. I argue that, through an underlying Eucharistic code, gastromythology determines the rationale of ritualistic killings, and how they are represented in the mafia plotline of an otherwise conventional tragedy of an American family. Like The Godfather trilogy is critically taken as a constitutive whole, the gastromythological code of the series not only adds to symbolic value to the film but is, in fact, indispensable to understanding the psychology of the Corleone family and its associates. From the symbolism of the fishes in the message sent by Solozzo with Luca Brasi’s dead body, to the ominous oranges that precede the films’ tragic turning points, to the anorexia of Kay and Connie, to the dietary abstemiousness of Vito and Michael Corleone, to the several banquet scenes and the deadly cannoli, The Godfather trilogy and its hermeneutics are ruled by aesthetic rhythms and attitudes (rasadhvani) evoked by gastronomical metaphors.

Ever since James Cagney smashed a grapefruit into Mae Clarke’s face in The Public Enemy, food has been an integral part of mobster movies. (Anastasia and Macnow 2011, p. 187) [Clemenza teaches Michael how to cook] You see; you start out with a little bit of oil. Then you fry some garlic; then you throw in some tomatoes, tomato paste, you fry it, you make sure it doesn’t stick. You got it to a boil, you shove in all your sausage and your meat balls … [Al Pacino’s voice in the background] Imagine a film that had these gangsters, feeding children, and cooking! This was unheard of. It put your right in the kitchen, right in the living room. These people were us. (Al Pacino, in Burns dir. The Godfather Legacy) Rasa is something that one cannot dream of expressing by the literal sense. It does not fall within workaday expression. It is, rather, of a form that must be tasted by an act of blissful relishing on the part of a delicate mind through the stimulation of previously deposited memory elements … The suggesting of such a sense is called rasadhvani … This, in the strict sense of the word, is the soul of poetry. (The Dhvanyaloka of Anandavardhana with the Locana of Abhinavagupta 1990)

A. K. Chatterjee (B) Associate Professor, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Malhotra et al. (eds.), Food Culture Studies in India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5254-0_8

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People look for mafia myths as the yardstick of authenticity in a gangster film, writes George S. Larke-Walsh. Films without such allusions run the gauntlet of being “viewed as unsubstantiated glorification of gangster violence” (2010, p. 220). In my experience of supervising young Indian legal scholars—on cultural matters— I frequently witness the anxieties of several minds that fear how even these myths of the celluloid and television mafia glorify violence. Undoubtedly, The Godfather (1972) pioneered a new mythology—of mafia mannerisms, how they spoke, what they wore, their family codes, and, perhaps most prominently, what they ate, how they ate and when they ate it. Gianni Russo, who played Michael Corleone’s brother-inlaw, Carlo Rizzi—one of the casualties of the almost Eucharistic gangland killings— in The Godfather, summarized the gastronomy of the Great American Trilogy in a memorable tribute to director Francis Ford Coppola: “he really gave it the flavour— the oil and garlic as we call it—of the movie” (Burns 2012). In the first Godfather film, when the message “Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes” is sent to the Corleone family by Virgil Solozzo, we are certain that the hitherto “very scary man”, just murdered, shall have an ominous afterlife. Luca lives on in our minds not necessarily only because of the vintage choice he was known for offering his antagonists— between their brains or signature on the contract—or the dead fish wrapped with his bullet-proof jacket with which a beleaguered Solozzo intends to appeal for ceasefire before the Corleone Empire. Luca Brasi also lives on as the first authoritative sign we receive from Coppola of what the worlds of the successive Godfathers would constitute—where human flesh will transmogrify as tastes in aesthetics and victuals. Solozzo’s cryptic message overlies a life-affirming principle that resembles Ariel’s song heard by Ferdinand in William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest.1 Ariel suggests to Ferdinand that the metempsychosis of the body of his supposedly dead father has made it worthier— even edible (Shakespeare 88). The allusion to the Darwinian food chain in Solozzo’s message emphasizes the vulnerability of even a bullet-proof jacket and a seemingly invincible Luca, both exposed to have been only as secure as fish-scales. Like mythical fishes and Ferdinand’s father, Luca turns into an edible fantasy and the promise of reinvigoration for the Corleones. His death inaugurates the theme: killing is normative to consumption. The missive that Luca sleeps with the fishes is a constant reminder that the fishes—metaphorically those elements that make up The Godfather trilogy’s victuals—themselves never sleep.

1 In

Act I, Sc II of The Tempest, Ariel sings the famous song to Ferdinand, while the latter is wandering in Prospero’s island, frantically looking for his father. The song is considered to be the source of the oft-used phrase “sea-change”. Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade. But doth suffer a sea-change. (Shakespeare 88)

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The Rasas We Cannot Refuse Gastronomy is inseparable from the Italian American Mafiosi and their growing mythologies of cosa nostra. As Chris Messenger, author of The Godfather and American Culture (2002), remarks, “as a reader I had gone to their children’s weddings, watched them cook pasta, and suffered the repeated injustices inflicted on them”. (2002, p. 2). Forty years after The Godfather, Coppola, would call it “a metaphor for capitalism in its purest form” (Burns 2012). When anti-capitalist Chinese protestors damaged KFC and McDonald’s franchises in Beijing, in 1999, they spared Pizza Hut outlets thinking that, being Italian, there was something essentially moral and disestablishmentarianist about them (Schlosser 2012, p. 243). The multilayered symbolism of The Godfather franchise has percolated into the popular American and global consciousness as a moralizing force. The modern mythology of the Italian American family that the film espoused—familial and gangland communions, weddings and banquets, conversations and interfamilial conspiracies—was galvanized around victuals. The visual gastronomy is enhanced by optical rhythms in the cinematography of Dean Tavoularis. “There is an overwhelming sense of warmth to what we see onscreen”, writes Katerina Marovich, “the general palette holds soft tones of orange, sienna, and mahogany—colours that draw in the viewer and make them feel like one of the family, cozily perched in the Don’s snug office or falling in love with Apollonia alongside Michael in Sicily” (2018, para 1). Elements of sacred murder (Clarens 2007, p. 114) and “coup d’revenge” (Mallin 2019, p. 32) that shape the Godfathers’ worlds are said to have come from Shakespeare, while an overstated symbolism links The Godfather III (1990) with King Lear. Although all modern tragedy goes back to Shakespeare, not all aesthetics of taste were pioneered in the Western canon. Among well-known works of aesthetic taste are David Hume’s essay “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757) and John Ruskin’s The True and the Beautiful in Nature, Art, Morals and Religion (1859)—grounded in the principles of the European Enlightenment and Utilitarianism, respectively. However, in the Indian subcontinent, treatises on aesthetic taste and dramatic performance are at least as old as Bharata’s Natyashastra (circa 500–200 BC), Anandavardhana’s Dhvanyaloka (circa ninth century AD) and some major exponents of Kashmir Shaivism, including Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta (circa 900–1000 AD). Known by a gustatory metaphor—Rasas—Indian aesthetic categories were deeply enriched by Kashmir Shaivism. At the risk of paraphrasing Kay Adams-Corleone, somewhat frivolously, “there would be no way, we could ever forgive watching The Godfather series without referring to its rasas. Not with this Indian thing that’s been going on for two thousand years”. The Sanskrit word “rasa” at once connotes taste, flavour, savouring, syrup, sap, resin, nectar. In Indian aesthetics, it loosely implies aesthetic mood. Bharata recognized spectators of dramatic art as consumers. He considered it imperative, therefore, for poets, artists, players and spectators—a rasika, who could taste artistic rasas—to be cultivated in the science of aesthetic appreciation, generally acknowledged to be condensed as the Indian Rasa Theory. Controversies like

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whether Bharata believed rasa was embedded in the performance of a dramatic act itself or also in the spectator, and whether one was indeed born with rasas or could also be trained, still linger (Pollock 2016, p. 9 and p. 34). Utpaladeva, in his Shivastotravali, studied rasas in devotional songs to Shiva (Bailly 1987, pp. 8–9). Later, his disciple’s disciple, Abhinavagupta—in his Locana on Anandavardhana’s Dhvanyaloka—formally introduced the concept of rasadhvani (“rhythms of taste”). It is a complex aesthetic category which amalgamated taste with the effects of spectatorial mood, emotion and sentiment based on the rhythms of suggestiveness in art. Rasadhvani is a unique articulation of the complex sensual apparatus that is invoked in dramatic art.2 Rasadhvani cannot be accurately and theoretically defined, but understood as a series of aesthetic associations whose suggestions or evocations stir “a particular rasa, a particular flavour of sentiment”, or invoke an aesthetical intent, attitude or rhythms (Hogan 1996, p. 169). When we assume today that The Godfather altered the hermeneutics of the history of the Italian American Mafia, we unconsciously assume, then, that its gastronomical metaphors offered us a new ground of aesthetical attitudes and rhythms (rasadhvani) in which to appreciate its criminology. Coppola’s Godfather series would have fallen short of its aesthetic achievement without its gastronomical metaphors. The Godfather transformed not only the American dream and how Hollywood perceived the Italian American mafia—from Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) to Kelly Makin’s Mickey Blue Eyes (1999)—but also how Bollywood came to represented its underworld. As The Godfather approaches its golden jubilee, its last seen adaptation on Indian celluloid—Anurag Kashyap’s two-part crime saga Gangs of Wasseypur (2012)—has stepped into its second decade. Glimpses of the Indian fantasy for Coppola’s brand of churchy chiaroscuro criminology can be seen in films like Agneepath (1990), Satya (1998), Vaastav (1999) and Company (2002). While all paid oblique homages to Coppola, the most recognizable Indian adaptation of The Godfather series was Ram Gopal Varma’s three-part Sarkar (2005, 2008, 2017). In numerous examples from regional Indian cinema, the aura of the Don Corleone continues to rule the imagination of filmmakers. However, the relationship of The Godfather to global cinema far outweighs the relatively modest impact of all its Indian adaptations put together. More than being a comment on the success of The Godfather franchise, this paves the way for examining what makes the rasas of Coppola’s work so enduring, and what Indian eyes and aesthetics have to offer beyond its cinematic reprisals. In all Indian adaptations of The Godfather, the aesthetic discourse of food and victuals—so deeply enmeshed in Coppola’s films— appears conspicuous by its sheer absence (except a few table scenes from the Sarkar series). This is indeed surprising, especially considering the centrality of Indian food 2 As

example of this can be found in Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhava, where the poetic effect on the listener or spectator is not on account of any one particular image but reverberations or rhythms caused by an amalgam of sounds, imagery, olfactory, gustatory and tactile effects: “These glances of the long-eyed maid that tremble like water lilies in the wind: did she borrow them from the does of the wood, or did the does borrow them from her? (Kumarasambhava 1.46)”. See Ingalls (1990, p. 155).

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and Indian restaurants—along with Bollywood music and motifs of the “Big Fat Indian Wedding”—in cosmopolitan American and European cities today. As a larger sociological question, it would be challenging, by itself, to ask what Indian spectators really look for when they view The Godfather films or its Indian adaptations. Borrowing from Abhinavagupta’s formulation of rasadhvani, this paper argues that The Godfather trilogy is encrypted with gastronomical metaphors that steer our aesthetic rhythms in a way that the Godfathers and their victuals are meant to be remembered mnemonically—a dialectical bind where the consumer must kill honourably to consume, to be remembered by virtue of the sacrality of what he consumes. The trilogy idealizes good taste and spiritual refinement, where social and family morals are redefined by—and not in contravention of—refined tastes in victuals, banquetry and ethnic family traditions, that otherwise seem to camouflage gangland killings. Gastronomical rituals in The Godfather invite us into the noblesse of the Italian American family—softening the cut and simmering the braise as it were—against the backdrop of crime. The aesthetic rhythms pervading The Godfather trilogy usher a mythology around gastronomical rituals, that I shall call gastromythology. It shows how a gastromythological code, that mimes Eucharistic ritualism, is fiercely observed and guarded in the world of the Italian American Mafia. It has been previously observed that The Godfather trilogy constitutes a unified whole (Poon 2010). I argue that it is this gastromythology that wounds the trilogy as an indivisible work of dramatic and cinematic art. If rasadhvani is the soul of poetry, gastromythology is the soul of the Godfathers. The word “gastromyth” refers to a ventriloquist or someone who is able to speak from the stomach. Taking “gastronomy” and “gastromyth” as the portmanteau ’gastromythology’, we can take it to mean a system of aesthetic rhythms governed by food rituals that belie the volatility and insignificance of human life in the trilogy. The underlying rasadhvani strung around food ventriloquizes the more conventional plotline of the tragedy of an American family when faced with the corruptions and confusions of modernity. The gastromythological code implies that killing and gastronomy are dialectical processes—one clumsily completes the other—while both are means of imbibing a Catholic refinement. For instance, the cannoli that appear in The Godfather I and III are far from being an arbitrary prop. The appearances of the Italian confectionary delicacy are works of dramatic irony—they inaugurate acts of retribution and human execution. As Sarah Vowell writes in Take the Cannoli (2000), the film offers “a three-hour peep into world with clear and definable moral guidelines; where you know where you stand and you know who you love; where honour was everything; and the greatest sin wasn’t murder but betrayal” (2000, p. 57). For the Godfathers, gastromythology is the aesthetic fulcrum around which Catholic sacraments, survival, justice, business, or familial, ethnic and non-ethnic boundaries are negotiated. Rhythms of black humour and intrigue within the gastromythology of the Corleones underscore their ethnic fantasies, “with a kind of feudal fervour, in patriarchy, patronage and protection” (Santos 2004, p. 215). The code expects of the Corleones and their associates to safeguard ethnic purity above every other concern, including gangland killings, insomuch as every murder, assassination or gastronomical act must abide by the code. Gastromythology commands that killing be made

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honourable in the possibility of the flesh of the dead being able to transubstantiate as the flesh of the divine, and that consumptive acts must strictly occur within ethnic boundaries, for the Italian American patriarch to be apotheosized. If viewed within this reformulated aesthetic framework—one that the film should be viewed in—The Godfather and its successors do not glorify violence and killing as literal episodes of human conflict. In dramatizing the battles of the Corleones against dormant forms of social and state violence, they awaken our sleeping rasas.

The History and Hermeneutics of Gastromythology Coppola’s nostalgia for the gastronomical lessons he learned as a child by his “mother’s elbow” are well known (Zimmerman 2010, p. 166). Mario Puzo also acknowledged the deep influence of the “smell of supper cooking” on his imagination of the Italian American family that, even in penury, dreamed of “imported olive oil, the best Italian cheeses” (Viscusi 2006, p. 60).3 Culturally, the changes that Coppola and Puzo wrought on our consciousness of the Mafiosi are comparable to Shakespeare’s impact on English history (Cantor 2019, p. 167). Meanwhile, the history of the Italian American olive oil industry and its cancerous corruption are also well documented (Mueller 2013). In many ways, Vito Corleone was modelled on Joseph Profaci, the twentieth-century American Mafia boss, also known as the “Olive Oil King”, after his import business. More recently, Riolio owner, Domenico Ribatti, after amassing real estate and property out of a corrupt and adulterated olive oil business, served thirteen years of imprisonment. It was no accident that Puzo and Coppola saw Vito Corleone as the head of the Genco Oilve Oil Company. If Michael Corleone’s ambition to turn his father’s mafia background into a legitimate industry seems too idealistic and flawed, one simply needs to turn to the Profacis. In 1978, four years after The Godfather II, Joe’s son, John J. Profaci became a partner in the famous Colavita Olive Oil Company. In 2009, he was honoured with a place in the Hall of Fame of the Culinary Institute of America (Cantor 2019, p. 167). Given the associations with the underworld that rival the aura of Catholic aesthetics surrounding the Italian American culture, The Godfather trilogy is unswerving in its commitment to the ideal of aesthetic refinement despite corruption—be it cultural, economic, moral or even hermeneutic. Since the hermeneutics of the films are staunchly guided by their gastromythology, rather than being representations of crime and corruption, the trilogy actually tells the story of the wars that the Corleones wage against their mythologies and codes being misinterpreted—a holy war against lack of aesthetic refinement, lack of moral judgement and a bureaucratised cosmopolitanism that plague American Congressmen, musical bands, filmmakers and business tycoons alike. The gastromythology of The Godfather goes 3 Similar

accounts of construction of the Italian American family and ethnicity around food can be found in DeSalvo (2004), where she connects food with the ancestral hunger located in the history of her family’s migration.

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back to the origins of opera gastronomica—the genre of classical Italian theatre which largely revolved around musical banquets. Histories of the operatic tradition reveal pre-operatic affinities of musical theatre with the dining hall and ballroom, which were seen as sacred spaces. Gastronomy was amalgamated with dining etiquettes, religion, music, poetry and architecture, personifying and sensualizing the web of power relations that tied the host with the hosted. Widely prevalent in fifteenth-century Mediterranean cultures, a surfeit of gastronomical rituals characterized musical banquets during the Renaissance in Italy and France ( Nevile 1988, p. 128; Pont 1988, p. 117; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2007, pp. 72–73). Owing to this gastromythological tradition, the interconnectedness of food rituals in The Godfather trilogy transformed the flavour and scale of representing and perceiving Italian American mafia families. To begin articulating the tale of the immigrant Mafiosi or the Italian American family, henceforth, would be to articulate it in a gastronomical narrative. Coppola’s vision of macabre justice, played against the backdrop of Nino Rota’s melancholy intermezzos, emulates Eucharistic rites. The bloodbaths and cleansing operations which the Corleone family monitors are another face of what the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls the “sharing in the divine nature” of Christ. In various stages of the trilogy, musical scores undergirding notions of justice coincide with “vendetta by assassination” (Sciannameo 2010, p. 87). Such a face of justice is predictably preceded or followed by gastromythological scenes. While reconstituting traditional American family values in the face of Civil Rights and Feminist movements, The Godfather hoped to preserve Italian those food rituals around which the early Italian American ethnicity, identity and group ideologies had been structured, and which suffered a major jolt with the “Americanization of immigrants and their children” (Cinotto 2013, p. 12).The Godfather comes ominously close to valorising gastromythology—depicted through Sicilian altars like St Joseph’s Table and the ecclesiastical aesthetic of filming organized crime—as a derivative of orthodox Catholic liturgy. The mainstreaming of Sicilian food altar traditions has been seen as a daring attempt to decriminalize the Italian American mafia in popular representation and public consciousness (Del Giudice 2009, p. 4). Underlying the Catholic liturgy of The Godfather films is the notion of the American Adam. R. W. B. Lewis’ famous analogy, meant for heroes from nineteenthcentury American literary tradition, sees the American Adam as a typical figure “emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race: an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling” (Lewis 1995, p. 5). Jonathan Mitchell, in his Revisions of the American Adam (2011), reconciles Lewis’ concept with the twentieth-century crises in American modernity. Accordingly, violence in American society and the indispensability of the gun to the American hero acquire allegorical dimensions as the American Adam’s quest to protect the nation and the home from the inherent violence of a capitalist society, that camouflages its corruption as a “utopian longing” for hierarchies and purities (Mitchell 2011, p. 19 and p. 60). Italian American heroes themselves have been subject to allegorical destinies, even a certain apotheosis or elevation to godhood (Gardaphé 2004, p. 24). It is within that discourse then, that Vito

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Corleone, an Italian American picaresque hero, plays out the post-World War American Adam, an assailable Christ of sorts. Simultaneously, there were several Italian American Adams roaming the streets of Little Italy, in Ellis Island, New York—the chief haven for America’s earliest Italian immigrants.4 In The Godfather II, when we encounter Don Fanucci in the crowd during the Feast of San Gennaro (the patron saint of Naples), he comes across as an unmistakably corrupt villain, chomping a cigar and tossing and ominous orange between his hands (Coppola 1974). For Vito, Fanucci is a fallen or failed American Adam who must be honourably sacrificed. Fanucci seems to be catapulted to his death by his stinking arrogance, but howsoever honourable, his murder is fratricidal. The assassination by Vito is one of the most dramatic murder sequences in American film history, while it is perhaps equally dramatic that the younger Adam has gone into prolonged fasting before he can execute the liturgical sacrifice of the older Adam. Just before losing his job at Abbandando’s grocery store to Fanucci’s nephew, Vito is shown eating for the first and only time before he becomes a Don. It is an unfinished meal, cut short by the sudden news of Vito’s redundancy. As Vito walks away from the store, Abbandando comes after him with a basket of vividly assorted grocery and vegetables. Vito refuses the offering, instead bringing home to his wife a solitary pear. The liturgical symbolism of the pear is not lost on Catholic consciousness. “In the Douay Rheims Bible”, writes Joan Morgan, “a rustling in the pear trees served as an omen for King David to take up arms and free his people”. “The Twelve Days of Christmas”, a carol published in 1780, rings with the refrain “a partridge in a pear tree”. It has been speculated that the carol was a “mnemonic used by English Catholics to secretly teach their faith to their children during the period when Catholic faith was illegal in England … the partridge symbolized Christ and the pear tree the cross”. The pear was a very prominent fruit in Mediterranean cultures during the Italian Renaissance (2015, pp. 70–76). Pear is also a symbol of chastity and death. The fruit is commonly associated with Roman mosaics and fruit wreaths sculpted for the sarcophagi (Janick 2013, p. 10). For the young Corleone couple, the pear signifies a Sicilian mourning for the loss of their Jerusalem—the Italian township of Corleone where Vito’s parents lie buried. Vito Corleone’s early life in Little Italy shows his contentedness during a sombre phase of his and his people’s history. With his abstinence, his fortunes also change. Clearly, the pear that he fetches for his wife is less a source of food than of reminiscences and Catholic resolutions. At the dinner table with Clemenza and Tessio, Vito serves them spaghetti, assuming indirect patriarchal authority over the kitchen space, which will henceforth be the touchstone for principles of la famiglia and cosa nostra. All subsequent domestic scenes revolving around food are meant to project a new Italian American patriarchy, although the real foundations of the national culinary tradition lay in the matriarchal kitchens of Little Italy.5 While Clemenza and Tessio eat, Vito does not even touch his food, as if to starve his faculties to carve up the 4 See

Riccio (2006, pp. 19–34), Bergquist (2008, p. 136). Others that discuss the Italian experience of migration, and early years in USA are: Gesualdi (2012), LaGumina et al. (2000), Romeo (2011). 5 For writings by women authors on Italian American food culture see DeSalvo and Giunta (2002).

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offer he is going to make Fanucci. Before killing the Don, Vito strikes a fraternal chord with him. Back in his apartment, Fanucci has none of the powers that he has on the street. He looks gullible and powerless, falling an easy prey to Vito’s double standard, projected as an honour killing. Assassinating Fanucci is for Vito an act that manifests the secret Eucharistic code of the “partridge in the pear tree”, where the pear is the fruit of Vito’s fast and the dead Don, a body that could possibly transubstantiate as Christ’s flesh. As Vito replaces Fanucci in Little Italy, the new Don’s solitary pear appears to have multiplied when a fruit-vendor offers fruits to him refusing any money for the offering. The scene ushers—when seen in the historically linear chronology—a series of gastromythological fruit scenes in the trilogy. It marks our introduction to a new hero in the neighbourhood to protect the honestly toiling sowers and reapers, and “The Godfather is born” (Cantor 2019, p. 56). Following Vito’s elevation to a Don, during his tour of Corleone in Sicily, with his wife and children, he visits the Genco Olive Oil Factory, whose proprietor he is now. Here, Don Corleone is seen breaking his long fast as he eats the olives of his native soil, which he also feeds his son. As apparent by now, gastronomical sequences in The Godfather films are seasonings on what would have otherwise been a simple play of food and drink. The olives anoint Vito as a holy ghost to avenge the death of his father, Antonio Andolini, probably an Adam-like figure in his own generation. Vito visits the killer of his father, Don Ciccio, to seek his blessings for a partnership with Don Tommasino and the expansion of his Olive Oil Company to Sicily. Ciccio is now seen as absolutely benign and helpless, dozing in his garden where his men had earlier shot down young Vito’s mother, while her son narrowly escaped to America. Although Vito’s pretext of meeting the retired Don is a ruse for another assassination, a Eucharistic code lurks here as well. The scene where Don Corleone stabs Ciccio is the first time when the full name of Corleone company’s is screened: “Genco Pura Olive Oil Company”. Ciccio carefully peruses the writing on the oil tin moments before he bleeds to death beside it. It was an olive garden called Gethsemani where Christ was captured during his prayers. At the twilight of his life, the retired Ciccio is also caught unguarded in his garden veranda, sniffing the recipe of his own murder by olives. The olives have been imported, not just into the scene from outside Ciccio’s garden, but from a foreign country, America. His blood consecrates Vito’s mission and the olive oil tin as though by transubstantiating into its very contents. The aura of holiness that envelops the old Don Corleone in his dark chamber, in the opening scene of The Godfather, is constituted by a series of such transubstantiations in the guise of gangland killings. It is not unlikely that even those Dons or mobsters who appear as villains when seen from the vantage of the Corleone family are otherwise the fallen or fallible figures of a holily longed for Italian American Adam.

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Fasts and Fratricides The Godfather, which chronologically slices The Godfather II into two juxtaposed cinematic narratives, is an even more robust concatenation of table scenes. The first of these is the scene featuring Michael Corleone and Kay Adams, at Michael’s sister Connie’s wedding. The “endless supply of food and drink” one sees at the beginning of the film distances the Corleone family from the average Sicilian immigrant in America. The wealth that the Don has acquired enables him to recreate his namesake town, Corleone, in New York (Cantor 2019, p. 59). The fecundity of the immigrant Italian family masquerades as a new interpretation of the American dream. During the wedding, Michael tells Kay about his family business. He casually throws in the occasional “you like your lasagne?”, while recounting the family legend about Luca Brasi making offers that adversaries of the Corleone family “couldn’t refuse”. The lasagne, here, is as important as the legend of Luca Brasi. Richly layered with cheddars, ricottas, mozzarellas, meats, pastas, spinach and sauces, lasagne and spaghetti make up the main courses of the Italian Thanksgiving in America and similar rituals (Santos 2004, p. 211). The table scene between Michael and Kay unfolds moments after we see Luca Brasi for the first time, ironically foretelling the bloody fate that awaits him. Solozzo’s deceit would later ensure that Luca is turned into something equal to the fish served at the Connie Corleone’s wedding. The gory background of the Corleone family is cloaked in an urbane gastromythology of food items made of cheese—the culinary metaphor for civility, suavity, success and the tightly glued lattices of the Corleone family. The subtle entry of cheese preparations into the discourses of the American dream and the American family signifies the intermeshed identities of the Corleone brothers and Don Corleone. Here, the bliss of family relations is fetishized as if it was edible (Zimmerman 2010, p. 288). They are especially meant for our vicarious consumption and in some ways also vulnerable to the gaze of the outsider. The cigarette in the hand of a slender-looking Kay clearly differentiates her physiognomy from the Corleone women, such as Vito’s wife Carmela Corleone, Sonny’s wife Sandra Corleone, or his mistress Lucia Mancini, who are all far from being trim. Connie, on the other hand, who shall cease to be part of the Corleone family after her wedding, belongs in the same league as Kay. Since the beginning of television advertisements in the late 1920s, American women were encouraged to smoke in popular culture order to maintain weight balance. By the 1940s, many American women took to cigarettes, a practice that continued into the 50s (Segrave 2005, p. 186), the decade in which we meet Kay and Connie. Connie too is seen smoking in The Godfather II (Coppola 1974). Smoking foretells the socially perceived lack of strong maternal values in Kay and Connie—the former who would later abort her and Michael’s child and the latter who would be held guilty of neglecting her children while seeking lovers after her first husband is murdered by Michael Corleone. Not only Kay’s American lineage, but also what is seemingly her lack of affection for gastronomy, makes her better suited as a second wife to Michael, after the native Italian Apollonia.

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What is glorified as a renunciation of daily food in the Italian American Adam— the two generations of Don Corleones—is eschewed as a regrettable case of anorexia when seen in women of the Corleone household, or the American Eves, so to speak. Back from the World War II, Michael is still in a phase of dietary abstemiousness when we see him with Kay. Like Kay, he is shown only touching his plate very sparingly at the wedding or later at her apartment. In either of his table scenes with Kay, if he eats or drinks at all, the scenes are shot from behind the subject. Throughout these scenes, Michael is seen fiddling with the knife or the wine glass without any visible movement towards consumption. When he leaves Kay at the table, in her apartment, his plateful of Kay’s offerings remains uneaten. Just as he leaves, we are shown a glimpse of his leftover steak. Besides re-establishing the onset of Michael’s abstinence, the scene also establishes the gastronomical differences between Italian and American households, notwithstanding their natural blending as a supermarket variety of packaged foods, as is advertised to the world at large. Meatballs, sausages and pasta dishes in onions, peppers and tomato sauces are the typical Italian dishes in America, while steaks are mostly taken as being native to Midwest and Western America (Shortridge and Shortridge 1998, p. 153). The cultural difference appears almost insurmountable when the gastromythology of The Godfather is seen in familial and communal settings, ideologically geared to project solidarities of the Italian American family as opposed to the nuclearized apartment in which Kay lives, as a single woman without a partner or her parents. The steak and vegetables at Kay’s house are at sharp odds with the pepper sausages and meat balls that Clemenza teaches Michael to cook in the Corleone kitchen. These foods are different not merely in their ingredients and recipes but in the qualitative and quantitative distinction in their domestic processes of production. The former was possibly cooked by Kay, alone in her kitchen or, worse still, ordered from a store. The latter is cooked before a domestic audience, and before our eyes, in a home where cooking and inter-dining are a mode of survival in a world of macabre machinations and murders, where bloodletting and banqueting are imperfect without—or appear to fulfil—each other. After Kay calls Michael to ask about his father, who is in the hospital recovering from Solozzo’s attempt on his life, Clemenza teases Michael about her. As Michael fills a glass of water, Clemenza invites him to Sicilian gastronomy. You never know, you might have to cook for too many guys someday. You see, you start out with a little bit of oil. Then you fry some garlic; then you throw in some tomatoes, tomato paste, you fry it, you make sure it doesn’t stick. You got it to a boil, you shove in all your sausage and your meat balls, and a little bit of wine, and a little bit if sugar, and it’s my drink. (Coppola 1972)

Although Michael abstains from any real involvement, he visually consumes the scene, until Sonny intervenes, tearing off a piece of bread with which to taste the gravy, after throwing in a well-disguised query about Paulie (soon to be dead). The water—that Michael drinks so patiently—and Clemeza’s culinary precepts stage the anointment of Michael into the family. It is a much-awaited reterritorialization after having given up on its customs when he went to join the US Marine Corps.

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Clemenza, already seen as the culinary enthusiast at Connie’s wedding, is also the one to deliver one of the oft-quoted lines from The Godfather series, after the shooting of Paulie: “Leave the gun, take the cannoli”. The cannoli, laid right beside the dead and bleeding Paulie, are a reminder of what is to come in The Godfather II and the foretelling of what follows in The Godfather III—the bleeding of Don Ciccio beside the olive oil tin in an older time and Don Altobello dying in the opera after eating the poisoned cannoli given by Connie. There is a “poetic parallelism” between the gun and the cannoli owing to the barrel-shaped structure of both, bringing them together in ironic congruity and interconnectedness of roles (Sutton and Wogan 2009, pp. 35– 36). The equal importance given to Clemenza’s wife’s instructions of bringing home the dessert as to a dead body reflects the already established religious sanctity of a world of criminal business that is equally saturated with gastromythology in its births, baptisms, weddings, deaths and funerals (Santos 2004, p. 215). Don Altobello’s murder by cannoli, which comes during the climactic sequence of violent gangland killings in The Godfather III, is juxtaposed with scenes from Pietro Mascagni’s operatic masterpiece, Cavalleria Rusticana, in a theatre in Palermo. This is one of the most classical representations of the dialectical relation between gastronomic and murdering sensibilities in the trilogy. Connie famously tells Altobello before offering the pastry: “the nuns who made these cannoli took a vow of silence”. If lasagne signified the tight-knit Italian American family, the cannoli are a synecdoche for the climactic “montage of violence and death” (Phillips 2004, p. 139). The poisoned cannoli that silence Altobello only reflect his and the Vatican’s poisonous designs which had plotted the killings of Don Tommasino and Michael Corleone. Paulie’s death beside the packet of cannoli thus ironically inaugurates that dialectical place of gastronomy in ritual killings, and somewhat explains the dietary abstemiousness of the successive Godfathers. Dining means to be thrown off the scent or off guard. The Godfather must therefore be the last to dine, if at all. Before the assassination of Solozzo and Captain McCluskey, Michael has imbibed this gastromythological code. The encounter occurs at Louis restaurant, whose veal “is the best in the city”. The eerie calm of the place just before the shooting is instantly rattled by a splurge of tomato sauces no sooner than the first shot is fired. The veal and the wine stage a theatre of distraction—and death—for Solozzo and Mcluskey. As Marcia J. Citron observes, “the dinner cannot be rushed—food is a major theme in the saga—and so events come to a dead halt as the camera watches the waiter slowly uncork and pour a bottle of wine … the only event is the sound of wine poured in a glass, in real time”. The affected detailing of the sounds of food items and cutlery is analogous to the musical detail, “a cadenza, an instrumental gesture, or a parenthetical progression” in an opera (2010, p. 29). Once again, Michael does not touch his dinner, as instructed by Clemenza (contrary to Michael’s initial suggestion of finishing the dinner). For a large part of The Godfather, Michael is the “quintessential outsider” even in his own family (Burns 2012). He must, therefore, pass a tougher test of adversity in abstention and subsequent exile to Sicily. One of Michael’s biggest tragic flaws is his invulnerability—emotional and physical. In The Godfather III, he becomes deeply vulnerable from within, being also

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a diabetic by now. However, in the banquet scene, at the beginning of the film, where Altobello had planned to kill Michael and the heads of the other families, the Godfather still manages to escape, guarded by Victor Mancini. The scene is also a testimony to the shielding mechanisms and machinery that Michael has cunningly devised around him. While he uses all his power to insulate his family from the threats of the mafia world, the police and the government, Michael’s own plummeting insulin levels suggest how much he has starved himself of familial bonding and culinary rites. The code of austerity, that the Godfather is supposed to obey, discriminates between the ethnic and the non-ethnic culinary sources. After the phase of a pious fasting, he must therefore resume consumption with all the attendant ethnic purities. However, in his own fasting, Michael goes too far. In The Godfather II, after Vito breaks his fast in Sicily, at the Genco Olive Oil Factory, the morning sequences of Little Italy in New York change from the erstwhile crowded streets, greedy landlords and the early morning squalor of immigrant makeshift-vendors to picturesque locales around the Corleones’ American home, as though the Don has brought Italy back from Sicily and reterritorialized or transplanted it in America. Earlier, Vito’s turn of fortune with the reward of an opulent carpet from the young Clemenza is simulated with Michael’s solo meal in the train to Miami. Even here he is shown swallowing a tablet. Although he refuses the tuna sandwich offered to him at the Jew, Hyman Roth’s house, ironically, he gets down to eating Roth’s birthday cake, even while he is suspicious of the man. It is in Miami that Michael finally breaks his fast, most inopportunely, in a non-ethnic and unsafe environment, by the standards of the Corleones. The first time we see him consume anything except water in the trilogy is while he is with Fredo at a restaurant in Miami, where the latter orders for banana daiquiri. When he sucks off an orange while planning the murder of Roth—reminding the audience of the orange that Roth had earlier sent from Miami or the crate of oranges beside which his father fell after being shot by Solozzo’s mean—Michael commits a grave error of judgement which would culminate in him eating from the enemy’s hand. Engrossed in his designs to protect the family, he defiles the Eucharistic sanctity of the food that the Godfather is supposed to consume. The nourishment that Michael draws from these foreign intakes is alienating for the Corleone family, while his own inner space collapses alongside these consumptions. The fallen Adam that he finally hunts down is his own brother, caught like Christ at prayer, while the latter is out fishing. From his living room, Michael watches the unfolding of the fratricidal act he has prepared, as Fredo is put to sleep with the fishes with a shot on his back that silences his murmuring voice at prayer: “Hail Mary, full of grace…” Both the Godfathers have by now committed acts of fratricide, obliquely or directly. While Vito’s assasination of Fanucci would come to be hailed as honourable, Michael’s outsourced killing of Fredo marks the beginning of his moral death notwithstanding his physical invincibility. In fact, killing Fredo somewhat resembles the killing of Carlo Rizzi, Connie’s husband, in that Carlo is Michael’s brother-in-law. However, Fredo comes at the top in a hierarchy of brotherhood, beginning with Fanucci. Killing Fredo is therefore the worst kind of fratricide, which, far from cleansing the sins of the Corleones, draws Michael deeper into them.

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Michael confesses to Cardinal Lamberto, in The Godfather III, lamenting his ungodly ways and the fact that he could never be respected and apotheosized like his father. While Don Vito Corleone was a migrant who struck familial roots in and around Little Italy, Michael is a perpetual nomad in his own territory, left to grow old and die like a dog, a remarkably non-Catholic death, leaving behind an unholy flesh that cannot transubstantiate in the way his father’s could. Vito and Michael Corleone both die of old age; the former passes on in his home garden in New York while playing with his grandchildren, while the latter has only a frightened dog to witness his death, which occurs, ironically, in his native Corleone. Perhaps Michael’s final chance of redemption comes in the penultimate scene from The Godfather II, when the Corleone family leaves to celebrate the birthday of Don Vito Corleone, who is absent from the scene. Although the scene appears at the end of The Godfather II, it is set in a time before the first scene of The Godfather. Michael, here, sits alone at the table, drinking quitely his glass of wine carefully guarded inside his palm. He has just announced that he is joining the US Marine. In a juxtaposed intercut sequence, Don Vito Corleone and his family are shown leaving Sicily for America, aboard a train, coming closer to his adopted homeland. Michael, by sharp contrast, is driven psychologically and culturally farther away from the home where he was born, owing to his inability to follow the mysterious gastromythology of the Corleones.

Conclusion To say that food and gastronomy are the real heroes in The Godfather series is bound to cause a kneejerk reaction of utter dismissal. Indeed, we cannot go so far as to suggest that if all the food elements disappeared from world of the Corleones, they themselves would. Like many unplanned creative interventions, food too may have played its role, at times even inadvertently. Apparently, Francis Ford Coppola, himself, had not given such serious consideration to the symbolism of the oranges in The Godfather trilogy, until their presence began appearing deeply consequential (Burns 2012). Coppola’s admission does not, however, undermine the gastromythological code. If anything, it reaffirms the rasadhvani that was deeply embedded in the aesthetics of the narrative that the director and the author conceived. Far from being a written or literal doctrine, gastromythology is a spectral code that runs through the lives of the successive Godfathers. The nonlinear movement of the trilogy also reflects a complex emotional and affective growth of the mind of the viewer, that is gradually sensitized to the causal and symbolic patterns that diegetic elements like music, clothing, architecture, décor and food play in the three films. In that psychological journey, the trilogy’s gastronomy transcends its material purpose, that of tempting the audience into a deeper aesthetic experience of films’ characters. As this paper has argued, gastromythology determines and redefines the hermeneutics within which we ought to view The Godfather and its portrayal of ritualistic killing. Its human bloodbaths are not prescriptive stereotypes of criminal reality but symbolic representations of Eucharistic rites. As long as the piety of

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Michael’s dietary abstemiousness runs parallel to the fasting principles observed by Vito, his respectability and powers are on the upsurge. His internal conflicts reach an apogee and continue to plateau, after the awkward drink he shares with Fredo and the fatal cake he consumes at Roth’s birthday lunch. It is after his return from the visit to Miami that Kay gives him the news of their son’s abortion. Domestic conflict leads to the separation of the couple, and Michael is hit by a maelstrom of familial tragedies. The relationships that characters in The Godfather trilogy make with the gastromythological code determine who is to be killed, condemned, spared or apotheosized. Their respective degrees of obedience towards aesthetic refinement within that code causally determines the quality of their future. The absence of evidence for one thing cannot be taken for the presence of evidence for another. It is highly facetious to claim that The Godfather franchise breeds crime in our societies on grounds that there is no evidence to prove that it reduces crime and helps criminology. Rather, if Coppola’s films are seen for what they are—their attendant rasadhvani around gastronomical codes—even the criminal would turn against crime. There is perhaps no obvious logical explanation behind so many adaptations of The Godfather in Indian cinema, nor is there one for why we ought to have a lengthy defence for the film based supposedly based on classical Indian aesthetics. The fact, however, is that by now both exist. To ignore either would may well be a sin of gastronomical proportions.

References Anastasia, G., & Macnow, G. (2011). The ultimate book of gangster movies. Philadelphia: Running Press. Bailly, C.R. (1987). Shaiva devotional songs of Kashmir: A translation and study of Utpaladeva’s Shivastotravali. Albany: State University of New York Press. Bergquist, J. M. (2008). Daily Life in Immigrant America, 1820–1870. Connecticut: Greenwood Press. Burns, K. (2012). The Godfather Legacy. The History Channel & Prometheus Entertainment. Cantor, P. A. (2019). Pop culture and the dark side of the American dream: Con men, gangsters, drug lords, and Zombies. Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky. Cinotto, S. (2013). The Italian American table: Food, family and community in New York City. Illinois: University of Illinois Press. Citron, M. J. (2010). Operatic style in Coppola’s Godfather trilogy. In When Opera Meets Film (pp. 19–57). New York: Cambridge University Press. Clarens, C. (2007). All in the family: The Godfather Saga. In A. Silver & J. Ursini (Eds.), Gangster film reader (pp. 107–115). Pompton Plains: Limelight Editions. De Stefano, G. (2006). An offer we can’t refuse: The mafia in the mind of America. New York: Faber and Faber Inc. Del Giudice, L. (Ed.). (2009). Oral history, oral culture, and Italian Americans. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DeSalvo, L. (2004). Crazy in the kitchen: Food, feuds, and forgiveness in an Italian American family. New York: Bloomsbury. DeSalvo, L. A., & Giunta, E. (2002). The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York.

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Gardaphé, F. L. (2004). Leaving little Italy: Essaying Italian American culture. Albany: State University of New York Press. Gesualdi, L. J. (2012). The Italian/American experience: A collection of writings. Maryland: University of America Press. Hogan, P. C. (1996). On interpretation: Meaning and inference in law, psychoanalysis, and literature. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press. Ingalls, H. H. D. (Ed.). (1990). The Dhvanyaloka of Anandavardhana with the Locana of Abhinavagupta (J. M. Masson & M. V. Patwardhan, Trans.). Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Janick, J. (2013). The Pear in History, Literature, Popular Culture, and Art Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture Purdue University. https://hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/pearin history.pdf. Accessed October 16, 2013. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (2007). Making sense of food in performance. In S. Banes & A. Lepecki (Eds.), The senses in performance (pp. 71–90). Oxon: Routledge. LaGumina, S. J., Cavaioli, F. J., Primeggia, S., & Varacalli, J. A. (2000). The Italian American experience: An encyclopedia. New York: Garland Publishing. Larke-Walsh, G. S. (2010). Screening the Mafia: Masculinity, ethnicity and mobsters from The Godfather to The Sopranos. Jefferson: McFarland. Lewis, R. W. B. (1955). The American Adam: Innocence, tragedy and tradition in the nineteenth century. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Mallin, E. S. (2019). Reading Shakespeare in the movies: Non-adaptations and their meaning. New York and London: Palgrave MacMillan. Marovich, K. (2018). Pop, flash, bang: Color accents in The Godfather in the craft of The Godfather anatomy of a film university of California at Berkeley. https://theseventies.berkeley.edu/godfat her/2018/06/05/pop-flash-bang-color-accents-in-the-godfather/. Accessed April 19, 2020. Mitchell, J. (2011). Revisions of the American Adam: Innocence, identity and masculinity in twentieth century America. London & New York: Continuum. Morgan, J. (2015). The book of pears: The definitive history and guide to over 500 varieties. London: Ebury Publishing. Mueller, T. (2013). Extra virginity: The sublime and scandalous world of olive oil. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Nevile, J. (1988). The musical banquet in Italian quattrocento festivities. In A. Corones, G. Pont, & B. Santich (Eds.),Food in festivity: Proceedings of the fourth symposium of Australian gastronomy (pp. 125–135). Sydney: Symposium of Australian Gastronomy. Part Two: The Celebration of the Christian Mystery The Catechism of the Catholic Church. The official website of the Vatican Church, Vatican: The Holy. https://www.vatican.va. Accessed October 16, 2013. Phillips, G. D. (2004). Godfather: The Intimate Francis Ford Coppola. The University Press of Kentucky. Pollock, S. (2016). A rasa reader: Classical Indian aesthetics. New York: Columbia University Press. Pont, G. (1988). In search of the opera gastronomica. In A. Corones, G. Pont, & B. Santich (Eds.), Food in festivity: Proceedings of the fourth symposium of Australian gastronomy (pp. 115–124). Sydney: Symposium of Australian Gastronomy. Poon, P. (2010). The Corleone Chronicles: Revisiting The Godfather films as trilogy. Journal of Popular Film and Television, 33, 187–195. https://doi.org/10.3200/JPFT.33.4.187-195 Riccio, A. V. (2006). The Italian American experience in New Haven. Albany: State University of New York Press. Romeo, V. (2011). Behind the store: Stories of a first-generation Italian American childhood. Bloomington: iUniverse. Santos, M. (2004). “Leave the Gun; Take the Cannoli”: Food and family in the modern American Mafia film. In A. Bowler (Ed.), Reel food: Essays on food and film. London and New York: Routledge.

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Schlosser, E. (2012). Fast food Nation: The dark side of the All-American meal. New York: Mariner Books. Sciannameo, F. (2010). Nino Rota’s The Godfather trilogy: A film score guide. Maryland: Scarecrow Press. Segrave, K. (2005). Women and smoking in America, 1880–1950. Jefferson: McFarland & Co. Shakespeare, W. (2012). G. Tiffany (Ed.), The tempest: Evans Shakespeare editions. Boston: Wadsworth. Shortridge, B. G., & Shortridge, J. R. (Eds.). (1998). The taste of American place: A reader on regional and ethnic foods. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc. Sutton, D., & Wogan, P. (2009). Hollywood blockbusters: The anthropology of popular movies. New York: Berg. The Godfather. (1972). Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. Paramount Pictures, 1972. Film. The Godfather Part II. (1974). Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. Paramount Pictures, 1974. Film. The Godfather Part III. (1990). Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. Paramount Pictures, 1990. Film. The Godfather Legacy. (2012). Dir. Kevin Burns. The History Channel & Prometheus Entertainment, 2012. Viscusi, R. (2006). Buried Caesars, and other secrets of Italian American writing. Albany: State University of New York. Vowell, S. (2000). Take the Cannoli: Stories from the new world. New York: Simon & Schuster. Zimmerman, S. (2010). Food in the movies (p. 2010). Jefferson: McFarland & Company Inc.

Chapter 9

Chocolate and the Holly Factory: Analysing the “Role” of Chocolate in Select Films from Hollywood Deepti Razdan and Jyoti Arora

Abstract This paper attempts to study chocolate as a full-fledged character in four Hollywood films. In Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, chocolate is depicted as a powerful touchstone of values that change the fortune of Charlie and his family. The film highlights the commercial aspect of the God-like power that chocolate enjoys in the film and contrasts the oppressive tendencies of the factory with the overwhelming beauty of chocolate. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, on the other hand, creates a visual spectacle out of chocolate to create a carnivalesque dream world that Charlie wouldn’t need to come out of. This film doesn’t obviously critique the capitalist framework of the factory, which, paradoxically, is perhaps one of the major reasons why it did better at the box office than the previous film. Chocolat presents chocolate as a sensuous, sacrilegious temptress in a town submerged in its religious beliefs. It arouses hitherto unexplored feelings in marginalized characters, opening a door through which new ideas flow in and sabotage obsolete value systems. The Chocolate War, too, presents chocolate as a subversive agent for a lonely first-year student at a Catholic school. This film makes the least use of chocolate’s sensory appeal and was declared a box office flop.

Introduction Chocolate and Advertising: The Indian Context Richelle E. Goodrich, in Of Woman and Chocolate, asserts, “Chocolate shares both the bitter and sweet. Chocolate melts away all cares, coating the heart, smothering every last ache. Chocolate brings a smile to the lips on contact, leaving a dark kiss behind. Chocolate never disappoints, only leaving its lover wanting more. Chocolate D. Razdan (B) Freelance Writer/Editor, Toronto, Canada e-mail: [email protected] J. Arora Department of English, Dyal Singh Evening College, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Malhotra et al. (eds.), Food Culture Studies in India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5254-0_9

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is the ultimate satisfaction, synonymous with perfection…Chocolate is a true friend, a trusted confidant, and faithful lover…Chocolate holds power over depression, victory over disappointment…Simply put, chocolate is paradise”.1 This is the exact picture of chocolate painted by advertising beginning from 1980s and ‘90s, especially in the Indian context. Nimish Dubey and Akriti Rana, in the article “Indian Ad-Age: How Cadbury ‘Adulted’ Chocolate”, published on Indianexpress.com, articulate how Cadbury advertisements successfully achieved something that most advertisements aspire towards, which is to promote a product in a way that it can “change the way the target audience sees and perceives it” (Dubey and Rana 2019). The article aptly points out how, for decades, ad makers faced the rather challenging question of how to redefine the image of chocolate as a product that’s meant for children alone and create a place for the product in the grown-up market, as well. Dubey and Rana go on to affirm that the answer to this question was offered by the popular tagline from the Cadbury advertisement, which is remembered fondly till date. The line “Asli Swaad Zindagi Ka” [the real taste of life] took the global appeal of chocolate and subtly, yet soundly, assimilated it in the local sociocultural context. Over the years, this skilful characterization of chocolate in Indian advertising has, in fact, had quite a significant impact on the chocolate industry. Research conducted by Mintel.com, a market intelligence agency, for a November 2019 report, reflected that the “total value of the chocolate market will reach an estimated INR 172 billion in 2019 and is pegged to grow at a CAGR of close to 10% between 2019–2023”.2 The report also highlights that consumers eat chocolate for a wide variety of reasons, ranging from emotional to functional. According to the report, “Mintel research also reveals that many consumers have chocolate for emotional reasons. In fact, almost half (47%) of Indians eat chocolate to boost their mood and nearly a quarter (24%) eat chocolate to reward themselves. Along with emotional reasons, functional benefits are gaining prominence. Indeed, almost a quarter (24%) of consumers say they have chocolate to boost energy levels”. It is, therefore, no surprise that the chocolate market presents an ever-growing, ever-changing scene in India, which continues to attract special appearances from new and old national and international brands, as well as constant edits based on consumer needs and lifestyles. After all, through the process of myth-making initiated by creative and intelligent advertising, countless portraits of chocolate have been created and embedded in people’s psyche. Advertising has progressively created layers of connotative meaning associated with the word “chocolate”, to an extent where chocolate has become everything except a commodity. It has progressively ensured that chocolate is, in no way, “just” a thing or a product, at least not in the minds of the Indian consumers. It

1 Goodrich,

Richelle E., Of Woman and Chocolate. Chocolate quotes in www.goodreads.com. Accessed on 10 April 2013. 2 Mintel Press Team. Serious Chocolate Business: India’s Chocolate Confectionery Market is Forecast yo Reach Inr 172 Billion in 2019. In mintel.com. https://www.mintel.com/press-centre/foodand-drink/indias-chocolate-market-reached-inr-156-billion. Accessed 27 May 2020.

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can be anything one wants it to be, whether it is a source of uninterrupted joy for a sad heart or a quick snack for a hungry stomach. It seems pertinent here to mention the chapter, “Absolute Advertising, GroundZero Advertising”, in which Baudrillard claims that, “[t]oday what we are experiencing is the absorption of all virtual modes of expression into that of advertising…All current forms of activity tend toward advertising and most exhaust themselves therein. Not necessarily advertising itself, the kind that is produced as such but the form of advertising, that of a simplified operational mode, vaguely seductive, vaguely consensual” (Baudrillard 1994, p. 87). This assertion is important because it reflects that advertising pervades all forms of expression and hints at the agency of other forms of mass media such as newspapers, magazines, television, Internet and cinema in constructing a certain “image” of chocolate in the popular imagination.

The Relationship Between Chocolate and Hollywood This brings us to the next section of the paper, which discusses how Hollywood has, in fact, on a number of occasions utilized the different “roles” usually attributed to chocolate and characterized it in their films in a way that either corroborates or contradicts its image perpetuated by other varieties of advertising. The section attempts to study the “role” of chocolate in four Hollywood films—Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Chocolate and The Chocolate War—to study how Hollywood either supports or resists the process of myth-making prompted by advertising and what it achieves (or does not achieve) through it. The first film under scrutiny, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Dir. Mel Stuart 1971), is an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It opens with a visual emphasis on the image of chocolate in its most celebrated avatar of the Wonka bars. At this point, in the film, chocolate seems to be the most celebrated “ingredient”, and the factory is almost invisible. However, the moment the film begins, we find that the role of chocolate is overshadowed by the role of its creator Willy Wonka. Chocolate, in the film’s world, is associated with creativity, imagination and relief and is projected as the solution to all of life’s problems. The flip side of this world is presented through the character of Charlie Bucket, a little child, who admires this world from a distance, but cannot access it due to lack of money. The chocolate factory, in this section of the film, appears to be a place that is more scary than fascinating, a mysterious place that is accessible to no one but Willy Wonka. It is thus that when Wonka decides to grant access of the chocolate factory to five fortunate children who win the five golden tickets placed in Wonka bars all over the world, it propels a mass fetish for chocolate in children and their parents alike. This takes the form of a celebrated madness, described in the film as “Wonkamania” (Stuart 1971). Charlie’s fortune is overturned by what seems to be an act of divine intervention when he discovers one of the five golden tickets. For him, chocolate

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represents a ray of hope in his otherwise miserable life, granting him access not only to the chocolate factory, but also to the hitherto unattainable world that it represents— a world where children are happy and where problems have solutions. A review posted on thehumanfiction.wordpress.com titled “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory Analysis: Post-War Consumerism” makes a detailed commentary on the dominant attitude of the times. The author quotes Todd Gitlin’s book, The Sixties, that emphasized the importance of material comfort during the 1950s and 1960s as a postwar defence mechanism. Children’s indulgence in chocolate and nervousness about being able to visit Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory were a welcome change to people who had lived and experienced the dreadful realities of the war. “Consequently, we see them indulging their children and letting them go wild in these pursuits, but not Charlie. He’s quite literally on the outside looking in”.3 That being said, Charlie, too, is not untouched by—rather seems to be caught under the spell cast by—chocolate, in general, and Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, in particular. Willy Wonka is finally introduced in the film as “the legendary magician” (Stuart 1971), with chocolate as his magic wand. In the chocolate room, chocolate takes centre stage visually as we are presented with overwhelming images of chocolate and candy. It is like a house of illusions, where “dreams become realities, realities become dreams” (Ibid), and which represents a world of “pure imagination” (Ibid.). The beauty, organicity and visual appeal of the creatively presented images of the chocolate fall, the river of chocolate, the entire chocolate room for that matter, present a contrast to, rather hide the rigidity, eccentricity and imposed authority of Wonka, which lends a formidable air to the factory. The chocolate, here, enjoys the status of a sacred relic, as Wonka keeps on warning the children, “My chocolate must never be touched by human hands” (Ibid.). The chocolate is also shown to possess the power to “correct” the excesses of all the children competing for the grand prize. Augustus’ gluttony, Violet’s rude and endless gum-chewing, Veruca’s bratness, Mike Teevee’s obsession with television and action films, are all cured (at least temporarily) through the punishments that they get through chocolate and candy inside the factory. The oompa loompas give a short musical performance, each time a child has been punished, pointing out their individual “sins” through a song. While most reviews of the film focus on the religious implications contained in the paradisiacal space of the factory,4 the capitalist framework, that it is part of, is presented by the film, in fairly obvious terms (Connor 1998). No matter how 3 The Human Fiction. 2011. https://thehumanfiction.wordpress.com/2011/12/16/willy-wonka-andthe-chocolate-factory-analysis-post-war-consumerism/. Accessed 30 May 2020. 4 Jeremy Connor in “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as Judeo-Christian Allegory” writes, “Described by Wm. Humphrey of Film.com, “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is a grand example of cinematic confectionery – disguising the dark message at its center with a sweet, chocolatey exterior.” The film’s equivalencies of repentance, redemption, paradise, sin, the wages thereof, and even the Godlike qualities of Wonka himself undeniably present a moral content to adults that is as strong if not stronger than that presented to children”. Connor sees the “dark message” as one that has a religious tone and the “moral content” as a lesson to be learned by the viewers in tune with Judeo-Christian principles.

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fascinating, absurd or pure it might be, the chocolate factory is still a factory and Willy Wonka is an entrepreneur, who controls it and the world, through it. Though the whole world is obsessed with his chocolate, Wonka is obsessed with himself, which is why everything in his factory is named after him, like the Wonkavision and the Wonkavator. One can observe, while watching the film, that Wonka is not God, even though he sees himself in that image. The tremendous power exerted by him (through the factory) over everyone around him, however, is also not disguised. Even though Charlie and Grandpa Joe also violate the rules of the space by drinking the fizzy lifting drink secretly, the surveillance of the “system” (not the omniscience of Wonka as many have pointed out) ensures that Wonka does not miss this detail denying them the grand prize. He does not give in to Grandpa Joe’s indignation and accusations of Wonka being a “cheat”, a “swindler” and “an inhuman monster” (Ibid.). They receive his “mercy” only when Charlie shows compassion and regret and returns the everlasting gobstopper to him, even though Grandpa Joe wants to sell it to Slugworth. He says, “So shines a good deed”, hugs Charlie and reveals that the man posing as Slugworth earlier is actually one of his employees, Mr. Wilkinson, who had been sent to test Charlie’s honesty. As a result of his honesty, read loyalty for Wonka and love for chocolate (the other children did not love chocolate in itself but what it stood for in their world), Charlie is able to rise above the world, quite literally, through the Wonkavator. Wonka asks him to be his heir and move to the factory, with his family. He also illustrates his need for control when he tells Charlie that he needs an heir but “cannot have an adult because an adult would do everything his own way, not mine” (Ibid.). He chooses Charlie because he is honest and loving. After he has given Charlie the news of his life, he tries to instil consciousness in him of the power that comes with it. He says, “Don’t forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he wanted. He lived happily ever after” (Ibid.). Even though Charlie’s love for chocolate is pure, the transfer of power is made only when Charlie passes Wonka’s “loyalty” test and agrees to do things the Wonka way. Thus, though in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, chocolate does become a life-changing miracle worker for Charlie, yet it gets caught in the imperialist and oppressive tendencies of the commercial set-up and power relations implied by the space of the factory. This pollution of “the pure image” of chocolate is perhaps the major reason why the film was rejected by Dahl (who was dissatisfied with the overarching presence of Willy Wonka in the film) and despite good reviews did not fare too well at the box office. This brings us to the next film that forms part of our analysis—Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Dir. Tim Burton 2005). This film is closer to the novel and remarkably different from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, primarily in its “presentation” of chocolate. Unlike Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, it opens with a rather bleak and formidable presence of the factory and then moves on to the making and packaging of the chocolate bars. Nonetheless, the monotony and repressive drift of the working conditions of a factory are conveyed through the toothpaste factory that Charlie’s father works in and not through the chocolate factory. The film seems to have a more “globalized approach” (in the “true spirit” of Hollywood) in its inclusion of different countries in the plot, all connected through

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their love of chocolate, expressed in rather unique, highly stereotypical ways. The Prince of Pondicherry, for instance, gets a palace of chocolate built by Wonka, which melts over him and his paramour on a hot Indian day. Even the oompa loompas (played by Deep Roy) have an Asian look and are brought in from Loompaland, whose description matches that of an African jungle, through the temptation of cocoa beans, which they worship. Here, “the amazing factory” (Burton 2005) is like a myth that is narrated to Charlie long before he enters it. The commercial set-up and the economic aspect of the factory are clearly concealed by the simulated5 world created by the chocolate. Furthermore, the character of Willy Wonka, as also his physical appearance, is demystified, strengthening the mysticism of the factory and the myths around chocolate. The images of chocolate in this film (the fudge mountain, the chocolate fall, the river) are more graphic (thanks to the 34 year time gap between the two films), more naturalized than Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and ironically create a picture of a world that celebrates its artificiality and does not even pretend to be real. The factory is full of visual spectacles, from its flowery, colourful, pastoral imagery (in contrast to the gloominess of the outside world) to the almost regimental and robotic dance of the oompa loompas, and creates a carnivalesque dream world that one would not like to come out of. Charlie is the only one among the five children who shares Wonka’s admiration for this magical world of chocolate. For him, like for Wonka (whose only dream since childhood was to become a chocolateur, for which he even left his father), “Candy doesn’t have to have a point. That’s why it’s candy” (Ibid.). Their love for chocolate is untainted by rationality or logic, as a result of which Charlie is directly made the offer of becoming Wonka’s heir, without having to pass any other test. Even though he rejects the offer as Wonka wants him to leave his family for it, yet the life of the Bucket family is altered after Charlie’s visit to the chocolate factory. Charlie’s father gets his job at the toothpaste factory back, and the family now has sumptuous meals to eat. As the supremacy of the chocolate, (this time as the magician and not the wand), is established over the authority of the factory (as opposed to the 1971 adaptation), Wonka revisits Charlie with the offer, who accepts it this time after the balance between family values and the chocolate factory has been achieved, both for Charlie and Wonka. For him, Charlie is not just an heir who will follow orders, but a creative partner, too. The 2005 film is much more subtle in terms of its inclusion of the capitalist framework and closer to the image of chocolate that most people can probably relate to, which is perhaps one of the major reasons why it churned remarkably better box office returns than its predecessor. The most celebratory representation of the mass appeal of chocolate is, however, articulated in the 2000 film Chocolat (Dir. Lasse Hallström) based on Joanne Harris’ book. The film relates the story of Vianne Rocher, a woman of Mayan ancestry6 5 In

“The Precession of Simulacra”, Baudrillard defines simulation as “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (Baudrillard, p. 1). 6 She is an expert in ancient cocoa remedies, travels from town to town with her illegitimate daughter and opens a chocolaterie everywhere she stays.

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who opens a Chocolaterie in a small Catholic French town. The act of opening a Chocolaterie during Lent makes her appear as a Satanic figure in the eyes of the mayor of the town, Comte de Reynaud,7 as it tempts his parishioners away from the paths of righteousness during a time of abstinence and self-denial. Moreover, her decision to arrange a “Chocolate festival” on Easter Sunday is seen as a threat by Reynaud and is consequently followed by Father Henri’s sermon about sweets being the devil and indulging in them during Lent being a grave sin. The town is described by the narrator as a tranquil village, defined by its aversion to change and a sense of abstinence, which influences its residents’ sense of morality. Vianne is labelled as “some kind of radical” (Hallström 2000) and “an atheist” (Ibid.) by the people of the town because of her refusal to attend the church. It is in this rigid atmosphere that the Chocolaterie becomes a potent tool to change the lives of the villagers and a harbinger of positivity in people’s lives and relationships. Not only does it symbolize the sensual liberation and passion which menaces with the sanctimonious and puritanical elements of their culture, but also attempts to change the very fabric of their extremely rigid value system. Vianne and her Chocolaterie instantly make a deep impact on the villagers, and the film is replete with scenes in which chocolate is depicted in sensual terms and is treated akin to an unveiled, forbidden and sinful pleasure possessing transcendental power. It rekindles the erstwhile suppressed feelings of love (at times passion) in people of all ages and helps the characters to heal strained relationships (as in the case of Armande and her grandson). The hedonistic aspect of chocolate is reinforced in the way chocolate is prepared, served and savoured and more so in its effect on those who consume it. Vianne seems to possess an uncanny perception of people’s personal hopes and fears. Her confections, especially Nipples of Venus, Eastern journey, white rum truffle, lead people away from their sacred Lenten sacrifices and their orthodox ways of thinking and have a highly symbolic and mythical significance.8 The association of the spinning wheel with the selection of chocolate, the image of a woman riding a white horse on the spinning wheel for Yvette and the awakening of Serge’s passions after consuming Vianne’s cocoa nips are all symbolic of Vianne’s Mayan ancestry. The transforming effect of the chocolate is expressed even more sharply after Armande drinks the “hot chocolate” made from a 2000-year-old recipe and immediately becomes a softer and livelier person as opposed to her fastidious personality before drinking the chocolate. In fact, all the villagers, except Reynaud, find ultimate tranquility in the spontaneous dance in the moonlit village square in

7A

self-appointed moral authority for the whole community. a Research paper titled “Chocolate: More Than A Wonderful Indulgence”, posted on the website glencoe.com, the author highlights the role of chocolate as a healer and nurturer in the following manner: “South American cultures first used the cocoa bean for spiritual and physical nourishment. Cocoa trees were Mayan symbols of strength and wealth. Named for the Greek word for “food of the gods,” the obroma cocoa trees produce seeds that contain cocoa beans. The ancient Mayans valued the food so much, they used cocoa beans as currency”. (https://www.glencoe.com/sites/common_assets/literature/iwm-hs/center.php? fileName=G9-12_IWM_Research%20Paper_1.xml&toPrint=Research%20Paper).

8 In

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the wake of the realization that the gratification of our earthly senses is holy if God has graced us with the ability to enjoy earthly delights. However, the most significant transformation—of Father Reynaud—takes place towards the end of the film. When he feels lost and returns to the Chocolaterie under “God’s ordination” to destroy it with a dagger, Reynaud accidentally tastes one and finally succumbs to his passions and gorges upon all the chocolates in the display window. He walks, in the end, with a free approach to life, fulfilling Vianne’s words, “One taste is all it takes” (Ibid.) to fall in love with chocolate. Chocolate, then, like almost all the other characters in the film, liberates him from the web he had been caught in throughout his life and enables him to see things in a more balanced light. It is possibly a result of its close adherence to some of the popular myths created around chocolate that this film (along with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) is the most successful among the films discussed in this paper. Moving on to The Chocolate War (Dir. Keith Gordon 1988), based on the novel by Robert Cormier, one finds an approach towards the representation of chocolate that is diametrically opposed to its treatment in Chocolat. This film diverges from the pattern of presenting chocolate as an envoy of hope and change discussed in the paper so far, and instead, associates the word “war” with it. It incorporates a rather demystified and deglamourized connotation of chocolate that is missing from the other three films. The movie explores “war” within the context of the power games prevalent in Trinity High School, fought using chocolate as a weapon. The real “Chocolate War” starts when Brother Leon announces the Annual Event of the chocolate sale. He uses chocolate as a tool partaking in the power struggle of commerce and finance that operates in the world of the school. As opposed to the characters of the other three films analysed in this paper, Brother Leon plays a vital role in exposing chocolate as a source of profit-making, even though he achieves this in subtle ways, by projecting chocolate as a “Saviour” to the students who are supposed to sell them. It is interesting to see how power is exercised through the depiction of the chocolate sale in the film, appropriately termed as “the Crusade” by Brother Leon. Janet Maslin, in her review of the film, titled, “Chocolate as Capital”, reinstates this point. According to her, “Brother Leon goads his students into turning the selling of chocolates, an annual fund-raising event, into a metaphor for commerce and corruption” (Maslin 1989, para. 1). The chocolate sale is a relatively new concept for Jerry, the protagonist of the film, as he has recently joined the school, and is still struggling with the loss of his mother, which has instilled in him the urge to assert his identity and individuality. A review of the film, “Literary Significance through Symbolism in the Chocolate War” highlights this point through the following lines. The chocolates in The Chocolate War symbolize loss of motherly protection the protagonist experiences when his mom dies. They are symbolic in this way because, just like Jerry the protagonist, the chocolates have had ‘mother’ removed from them. Brother Leon says in

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a private conversation, ‘…these [were] Mother’s Day chocolates… All we have to do is remove the purple ribbon that says Mother and we’re in business.’9

This association of Jerry with chocolate continues as both are commodified and exploited by Brother Leon and Archie (the leader of the student group “Vigils” that controls the school like the Mafia) for serving their own purposes. As soon as he joins, he is given a forced “assignment” by the Vigils to defy Trinity’s traditions by refusing to participate in the annual chocolate sale for a period of ten days. However, Jerry does not sell the chocolates even after the set period, withstanding the increasing pressure from the Vigils and Brother Leon. It is interesting to note how Jerry, by severing himself from chocolate, is able to resist the authoritarian grip of the “system”. In his persistent defiance of the pressure to participate in the sale, he becomes “the carrier of infection” (Gordon 1988), likely to spread “the terrible disease” (Ibid.), leading the chocolate sale into a “jeopardy” (Ibid.). However, the nexus of power shifts soon after when Archie transforms the abominable act of selling “lousy chocolates” (Ibid.) into “the ultimate thing to do” (Ibid.), and the entire school becomes like a battleground where Jerry has to fight a lone battle. What ensues is a terrible battle of power and will, waged from four fronts: Brother Leon, the school, the Vigils and Jerry, resulting in the literal “boxing match”, denoting the price he had to pay for not selling the chocolates. Eventually, Jerry emerges as the winner (winning the boxing match against Archie) while the chocolates that he refused to sell are left deserted till the end. It is the only film analysed in the paper, where chocolate is dealt with solely as a commodity, devoid of any emotional attribute, and seizes to be anything but chocolate. Interestingly, it is also the only film out of the four that was declared a box office flop. Thus, an analysis of the four films points towards the varied responses of Hollywood to the “phenomenon” of chocolate and how it affects their reception in turn. Nonetheless, before we conclude, it is important to clarify that Hollywood does not, in any way, “exploit” the popular image of chocolate in people’s minds. If Hollywood, as an industry, relies at times on the “chocolate metaphor” for success, the chocolate industry benefits from it too, indicating a veiled nexus between the two. Whether it is the production of Wonka bars at the time of release of both Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or a detailed reference to films using the symbol of chocolate on websites selling chocolate products or recipes, we can discern the mutual dependence of the two industries, each exerting an influence on the other.10 However, we cannot deny that this aspect of the dialogue between Hollywood and Chocolate is more often than not masked under the myths fashioned in the process.

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https://www.studymode.com/essays/Literary-Significance-Through-Symbolism-In-The1405427.html. 10 We can observe the synchronization in ideas of “hope, dream fulfilment, importance of human relationships”, etc., promoted by both the industries, which adds to their quintessential appeal and strengthens the illusions around them.

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Conclusion: The Journey of Chocolate and Its Image in India As discussed in the introduction, advertising in India, just like Hollywood, has always furthered the consumption of chocolate and its resonance in the consumer’s psyche as a well-deserved indulgence and an undeniable source of joy and pleasure. Adverts have done so, time and again, through taglines such as “Asli swaad zindagi ka” and by focusing more on the human dimension encapsulating chocolate rather than the product itself. Moreover, chocolate advertising has adapted itself and continued to redefine the way people think about chocolate and add to the varied experiences associated with the product, all the while erasing its entity as a commodity meant to be consumed. Strategic advertising is, to a certain extent, one of the primary reasons why chocolate in India could said to have come a long way since the time Gandhi discouraged its consumption. In 1911, Mahatma Gandhi wrote, “I see death in chocolates”. According to him, there were “few substances so heating as the abominable chocolate” (Quoted in Mehta 2019, para 1). Since this statement was recorded, chocolate has gone through multiple negotiations whether in media or through time, to a point where “death by chocolate” is seen as a term promoting indulgent chocolate creations and not a word of caution. Chocolate, like the texts endorsing it, has undergone several appropriations (such as chocolate barfi and chocolate-covered almonds). It is now perceived as any other Indian sweet meant to be enjoyed and gifted during Indian festivals such as Diwali, Holi and Rakshabandhan.11 As a result, chocolate is now considered—rightly so—a legitimate part of the cultural scenario in India. In the light of the consistent myth-making associated with chocolate, it seems pertinent to conclude the paper with a variation of a quote from Barthes’ “Myth Today”, which helps reinstate the argument put forth by the paper through examples from advertising in India and Hollywood (Barthes 1993, pp. 93–149). A chocolate is a chocolate. But a chocolate as expressed by Hollywood and Indian advertising is no longer quite a chocolate, it is a chocolate which is decorated, adapted to a certain type of consumption, laden with literary self-indulgence, revolt, images, in short with a type of social usage which is added to pure matter.12

11 The tagline Kuchh Meeetha Ho Jaaye created under Cadbury’s first celebrity ambassadorship with Amitabh Bachchan and its series of ads positioned the chocolate brand as a substitute for traditional sweets and successfully included chocolate in the age-long tradition of distributing and exchanging mithaai with friends and family on special occasions. 12 Barthes in “Myth Today”, writes, “Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society…A tree is a tree. Yes, of course. But a tree as expressed by Minou Drouet is no longer quite a tree, it is a tree which is decorated, adapted to a certain type of consumption, laden with literary self-indulgence, revolt, images, in short with a type of social usage which is added to pure matter” (Barthes, p. 94).

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References Barthes, R. (1993). Myth today. In S. Sontag (Ed.), A Barthes reader (pp. 93–149). London: Vintage. Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation (Simulacre et Simulation, Paris: Editions Galilee, 1981) (S. F. Glaser, Trans.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. (2005). Directed by Tim Burton. Paramount Pictures. Chocolat. 2000. Directed by Lasse Hallström. Miramax. Chocolate: More Than A Wonderful Indulgence. In www.glencoe.com. www.glencoe.com/sites/ common_assets/literature/iwm-hs/center.php?fileName=G9-12_IWM_Research%20Paper_1. xml&toPrint=Research%20Paper. Accessed on April 5, 2013. Connor, J. (1998). Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as Judeo–Christian Allegory. www.roa lddahlfans.com. www.roalddahlfans.com/movies/willpaper.php. Accessed on April 11, 2013. Dubey, N., & Rana, A. (2019). Indian Ad-Age: How Cadbury ‘Adulted’ Chocolate Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/opinion-entertainment/indian-ad-agehow-cadbury-adulted-chocolate-6038214/. Accessed May 27, 2020. Study Mode Research. (2013). Literary significance through symbolism in the chocolate war. https://www.studymode.com/essays/Literary-Significance-Through-Symbolism-InThe-1405427.html. Accessed April 6, 2013. Maslin, J. (1989). Chocolate as Capital. movies.nytimes.com. https://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/ 27/movies/review-film-chocolate-as-capital.html. Accessed on April 6, 2013. Mehta, A. (2019). Mahatma Gandhi and Food: From Shunning ‘Abominable Chocolate’ to Advocating Fruitarian Diet, a Journey of the Culinary Cosmopolitan Firstpost. https://www. firstpost.com/india/mahatma-gandhi-gandhi-jayanti-gandhian-experiments-with-food-from-shu nning-abominable-chocolate-to-advocating-fruitarian-diet-a-journey-of-the-culinary-cosmopoli tan-7437661.html. Accessed May 27, 2020. The Chocolate War. (1988). Directed by Keith Gordon. MGM. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. (1971). Directed by Mel Stuart. Paramount Pictures.

Chapter 10

The Anatomy of Obesity: Cartman and the Economy of Consumption in South Park Safwan Amir and Ishaan Mital

Abstract Drawing on parallels between the US and South Asian contexts around food, this paper utilizes South Park as a way to discuss stratification, commensality and caste. Framing an imagined desi version of South Park as a tool to engage with the reverse phenomenon of “theorising from the West”, the attempt has been to look at alternative genealogies to the concept of hygiene. Caste, as an analytical tool, frees itself from its academic specificities and enters into global dialogues where first-world multinational companies are forced to speak the language of purity and pollution in order to survive in a highly stratified urban society. While the focus has been on introducing the larger audience to the atrocities of caste, the paper also pushes forward the idea that the present situation need not be read as a continuation of the premodern. Rather, diverse and more severe dispositions and practices are now in place. To recognize the full potential of such urban stratificatory discourses, it is important to be able to draw connections from larger popular culture. South Park helps take up a seemingly specific issue and highlight the global nature of discourses like caste that needs to be given primacy just like other universal tropes like gender or race.

It has been increasingly noticed in America that obesity and junk food chains are more prominent in lower income group households. With increasing fears of America going brown, the immigrant populations—especially Latinos—constitute this income group in a dominant way. Illegal immigration remains a reality given the clear offer of cheap and supplementary labour that this immigrant population has to offer (Julier 2013, p. 550). When we began our research on South Park based on our love for the series (Mital and Amir 2013), we had limited access to it in India. We must confess that our research S. Amir (B) Krea University, Sri City, India e-mail: [email protected] I. Mital HT Mint, New Delhi, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Malhotra et al. (eds.), Food Culture Studies in India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5254-0_10

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and viewing of the animated series was not guided by academic reasons to begin with. We were awestruck by the show and how it could extend a conversation with the most political of matters in the pettiest of ways. Our initial plan was to introduce a South Asian or desi version of South Park to an Indian audience. While the plan never succeeded, we do believe that this idea can be extended as a framing tool to enter into the intricacies of worlds around, beyond and within South Park. The Internet was still catching up with higher bandwidths and Netflix was a distant dream. While penning this article, we believe that globalization is too tiny a term to capture the kind of interactions we have seen. Food and South Park are just two nodes through which we try to make sense of larger happenings in and around the world. “Theory from the West” has been continuously criticized, and we don’t believe adding to that vast literature serves any immediate purpose. At the same time, we have also started witnessing a reverse approach to such theorizing. Provincializing the West has been spoken of in varied ways (Chakrabarty 2000). It helps to think of ways in which we can also conceptualize larger events. We would like to draw on a particular parallel, in practice, that connects disparate traditions around the idea of stratification and commensality. Food, in its varying propensities and proportions, offers us a unique way to enter multiple narratives around how people relate to it and the various actors involved in its creation and production. The anatomy of obesity is then an attempt to delve deep into institutional structures and everyday structures of food consumption and habits in two different settings. One, the original setting of the animated series South Park in the USA, and the other in the context of India where we place an imagined desi version of South Park. The economies of labour and migration drive an uneven economy in the USA, while the economies of caste go unnoticed in an already disproportionate economy of a third world nation like India. Consumption patterns and the place of food in production within these disparate economies are the products of particular cultural and historical forces (Appadurai 2005). Discourses across these regions around food and popular culture allow us spaces to analyze and better understand economic conditions in both worlds. Concerns around obesity in the USA and an ever-increasing concern with calories even among fit and healthy people need not be seen as an active measure towards lifestyle. These are couched in particular patterns of consumption and bodily images that work alongside consumerist forces. Obesity further allows us to articulate issues around food in the USA as a metaphor of irony. While on the one hand, obesity is targeted onto specific ethnicities from recent migrant narratives, it is also an issue faced by most individuals within the country. While the larger discourse around obesity obsesses itself with illegal labour and their food habits, it tries to selectively distance itself from the average American who are also as prone to obesity as any other so-called illegal migrant. However, while one is tagged under obesity as an end-scenario, the other is seen to be on the move to a healthy and positive attitude towards life that takes fitness as its unique scale of measurement. Obesity is also relevant in this article for it symbolizes the Brahmin in the Indian setting. Pictorial representations and popular culture have given Indians this usual face of a Brahmin. Rather than studying merely “from the bottom”, we push forward the idea that to take caste as an issue is primarily to unsettle and show the rampant ways in which

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stratification lies within an appetite for power and the powerful. Both, the obeseprone Caucasian and the fat Brahmin symbolize powerful economies and economies of power. Much of this article will try to weave connections between these two settings and seemingly distinct narratives by taking caste as an analytical tool in unearthing the intricacies of power. Caste, usually taken as a South Asian prerogative, needs to be rethought in the light of easy dispersion of ideas in an era of heightened connectivity and information sharing. While discourses around race or gender or class effortlessly enter universal tropes and are a public mainstay, caste is often shed away as a particular and regional enterprise. The ontological position of race and gender is never a source of worry while it is this very aspect that limits caste to be acknowledged as a deeply problematic force that has made inroads into all possible ways of thinking and being. Diaspora South Asian communities are studied by anthropologists, and caste makes an in-road once again. But, beyond such frameworks, caste isn’t really an analytical marker or system for various other ways in which people engage with the everyday. A notable exception is Isabel Wilkerson’s fresh attempt to study world history and race through the lens of caste (2020). Food, with the wide range of sensations that it has to offer— touch, smell, sight and auditory, apart from taste—makes up for experiences, and also partakes in the very beingness in which humans participate on an ordinary or extraordinary basis. Very little has been theorized around food, gastro-politics and ingestion-al aesthetics have only been able to make a tiny mark in disciplines unrelated to economics. We address this lacuna by picking food as an object of investigation. Further, we make use of popular media because representation-wise it is an apt approach, apart from ethnography, in trying to read the ordinary ontologies between food and the people who come in contact with it. South Park, the animated series, might seem like an odd choice for engaging with such matters. But it is in the show’s numerous oddities and juxtaposition of that which seems weird or incomparable that we often found avenues to think and connect caste to global frontiers. The series, currently in its 23rd season, has been a huge hit since late ’90s. Based around a bunch of fourth-grade school kids, in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado in the USA, South Park boasts over 300 episodes till date. The genre covers comedy, satire and severe subversion. The idea is to shock viewers to the extent where they gradually accept that almost anything is possible in the 20-odd minute duration of an episode. The audience has grown along with the show to the extent that it relates with the characters on a daily basis. Contemporary issues, political affairs, celebrity gossip, aliens, former Iraq leader Saddam Hussein, food chains and a lot of food, all enter the everyday lives of the town of South Park. The four kid protagonists tackle and negotiate their way through these upheavals, cussing continuously, with no end to their miseries and adventures. They remain in the fourth grade of elementary schooling throughout the show, as if mirroring a Sisyphean repetitiveness of life. Coming to India, the show has been a success and ever since the ease of high-speed Internet access and Netflix subscriptions, South Park has been able to gain a considerable Indian viewership.

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South Park is not necessarily a children’s show. The issues tackled by the protagonists of the show are anything but childish. In their cussing, interpersonal interactions and relationship to archetypal characters and even food, the children reveal the deeper dynamics of race, (im)migration, labour and food choices. In the USA, food and labour are deeply interconnected at an institutional structural level and in an everyday setting. Cheap labour has always been a concern for American debates around policies that govern not just migration and immigrants, but around consumption of food as well. Dangerous food habits are always linked to cheap, illegal labour. While debates might go on around calories and obesity in prime TV shows and channels, the everyday provides us with better access to the dynamics of these various overlapping processes. Labourers, who make their living by selling their work at the cheapest rates—and these are exceedingly low in comparison to labour rates in the USA that protect both monetary and work hours—are usually illegal migrants and similarly marginalized classes in the USA. What connects them to our immediate concern around food is the ease in access to fast food and what has now been labelled "junk" food. It is to be understood that ease in access to food is also around an easyon-the-wallet basis. The Indian context outshines these ideas around cheap labour with readily available labour predestined and ordained by caste. To give a larger picture, labour has always been necessary for running the US economy. There are jobs—menial as it may be—that Americans do not necessarily prefer. Yet, such jobs can also not be undone even with heightened technological advancements. Migrant labour is one way in which the USA has overcome this distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ work. While most US policymakers are at a loss to acknowledge this inherent nature and irony in its capitalistic modes of production, they try to make sure that this class of working non-citizens and similar groups are always distinct from mainstream America and Americans. While race might be an issue that can enter into such domains, it can still be surpassed if you are able to prove your Americanness via work and labour. This is not to undermine race in the context of USA but to show how illegal immigrants and labour are caught in particular structural borders even after crossing global boundaries (and walls in the future). Their precarious situation of being a necessary aspect of production then leaves American mainstream to criticize and object few of their consumption patterns even if it was helping a consumerist economy. US President Donald Trump, who is set to contest for a second term in 2020, played on these insecurities about immigration by declaring that the country will build a wall along its southern border (Rodgers and Bailey 2019). The cost of such an endeavor notwithstanding, US authorities began separating children from their families after the Trump administration introduced a “zero tolerance” policy for illegal immigration. While immigration is an issue that is gaining commonplace in India, once again we find that there are imaginary walls around people when it comes to caste. These are usually made sense of in terms of social taboos around food and marriage among many others. In a significant shift in geography and culture, the Indian subcontinent has a lot to offer in our take on larger global discourses and the American situation of illegal migrants and their relationship with food. Food habits are also characterized not by what people eat alone, but by how people consider what they eat. For instance,

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beef might be a global product. However, within the national context of India, beef is seen as an illegitimate food product. Further, it is vilified and eating it is seen as a breach of conduct. This comes from a particular section of adherents of the modern-day religion of Hinduism. While many under the tag of Hinduism, today, are perfectly fine with consuming beef, it becomes an issue because it is caught within the interstices of power. To simplify the formula, one could say, those in power play on the power of the cow. The Holy Cow becomes a figure not merely of reverence but an act of political action as we will discuss later in the article. Poverty in the USA is not necessarily similar to the picture of poverty across the world. Hunger might not be the common characteristic that unites poverty across different regions. Rather, the ways in which individual states and governments have addressed (or rather not addressed) issues related to destitution and impoverishment might actually be points of departure for any serious study on poverty. Authority is then key to figuring various kinds of desires and consumption patterns. Further, to think around the idea of desire, while the desire to stay fit and healthy might be pointed as a case for all, in the US setting, we find that intervention has always been proposed and pushed in rather inordinate ways. The state’s desire to control two sets of bodies based on legality and class through a scientific approach to calories needs to be seen as tackling two separate issues (Poppendieck 2013). However, desires do not always transcend the state of affairs. This impulse is almost always mediated by a particular kind of power that grows into blind interstices and negligent attitudes. Hunger and obesity have been a way to parade the idea of class. This is muddled when we consider hunger pangs of dieting upper class or obese lower classes that are forced into structural consumption patterns. Desire actively works in both cases and precludes the question of true or false consciousness because the question is no more of mere agential preferences, but leading trends and structural behaviors that are destined through capitalist-modern self-making or rather moulding. Caste, in its paradigmatic model, works primarily on the concept of purity and pollution. While historicizing caste in its various geopolitical and temporal settings, premodern caste can be seen as uniquely a South Asian trait. The modern context needs to be read as one where ideas are dissipated in the widest possible way and practices are seen to be making inroads into the intricate ways in which people arrange their food habits. Be it the notion of hygiene, especially around dietary habits, or the ways in which culinary practices are put into use, purity and pollution can be read as having engulfed the entire world. While the history of hygienic conditioning can be traced to other sources in the European setting, we believe that the colonial encounter has also left an unintended mark on the colonizer and, by extension, the world that we have come to take as modern. Only recently has caste been thought of as an analytical tool that can help us understand other issues like race and gender. While usually the frame has been to derive from other lenses, caste is now being gradually acknowledged as a lens that is beyond South Asia (Wilkerson 2020). While, caste means thinking through and around upper castes and what they propagate, hunger needs to be thought through in the case of US government interventions in consumption patterns for the rich as well. While signboards on popular restaurants cry out the calories in their products, the government takes it for granted that

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these are spaces that will be visited by normal individuals. Calories are utilized as a measure to showcase and control the body. By doing so, they produce not just propensities and dispositions towards food consumption but also produces what a typical human being ought to be like. Self-induced vomiting, for instance, is one of the most dangerous activities that children in the USA are highly prone to. Consistent body shaming throughout high school leaves the body almost intact, but the mind scarred beyond measure. Self-induced hunger or dieting is another such practice that is on the rise. Against these discourses of hunger and obesity, Eric Cartman—one of the central characters in South Park—becomes key to realizing the various ways in which such tropes go together. Caucasian, middle-class, and Christian, Cartman’s origins are always kept unclear by the writers of the show. His mother is termed a "crack whore" and at times a "hermaphrodite". He is portrayed as an obese kid who defends the forces of consumption throughout the series. He hides his obese appearance by saying that he is merely “big bones”. This couching is quite symbolic of the state’s intervention and dual attitude towards the issues of obesity that we have pointed earlier. The four characters in the series—Eric Cartman, Kyle Broflovski, Stan Marsh and Kenny McCormick—represent various social groups. Kyle is Jewish, Stan is portrayed as a regular American kid, while Kenny is conspicuously poor. To give our desi version of South Park some life, our initial character sketches for what that might have looked like needs mention here. The equivalent for Eric Cartman was a Brahmin boy, a minority Muslim for Kyle and a humble Dalit household for Kenny. A fat Brahmin represented abundance, acquired over years of oppressing lower castes. The other character, as a minority, was always in constant crisis with his identity, and Kenny’s counterpart would be one at the receiving end but never really dying as the character does in the original in various episodes throughout the series. The fat Brahmin, in particular, has been the mainstay for most pictorial representations of the particular community. Amar Chitra Katha, the famous publishing house for graphic novels and comics, have shaped and influenced most minds around such representations. The skinny, skeleton figure of the Dalit has been another mainstay in Indian minds with almost all newspapers and magazines capturing malnourished pictures of people from the lowest sections of the caste order. It is necessary to also recognize the politics with which such representation work. While that happens to be out of scope for this current article, we would like to note that our attempt is not to re-inscribe such images and politics. However, the sad fact of caste and articulation is that we are devoid of a language that can speak out the vilified nature of caste atrocities and oppressive regimes at hand. Acknowledging our own shortcomings, we tread on this sensitive terrain by asking our readers to take these matters into consideration while thinking of caste, representation and power. While chances are that they could all be part of the same Indian school, the idea was also to bring them together to showcase a similar representation. The same can be said for the original South Park series. Parents living in particular neighbourhoods alone can apply to specific schools in that neighbourhood in the case of USA. That these four protagonists seem to be together in the same school is almost an impossibility. The larger point we want to derive, and perhaps so do Matt Stone and Trey Parker

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as well, is that even by comparative standards this was the possibility, though acute, with which any social criticism could be thought of in terms of visual representation and everyday power dynamics. Further, we believe that schools are essentially spaces for inculcation into various means of public life. These do not necessarily have to be via rigged or rigorous textbooks or profound teachers and can be found in those quick interactions during classes—showing off a new Spiderman lunchbox—or those daily adventures while returning from school—involving a detour to devour the latest snack or chocolate. School as a space is vital for sharing information, discussing it and taking in the process of consumption by heart (and in our case, stomach). Cartman is the kind of kid at school who can go on and on about his experiences around the fanciest restaurant or product that’s popular or trending. His classmates, even though they try to maintain distance and know he’s trouble are lured time and again through these fancy gadgets and food choices (KFC, iPad, etc.) Cartman plays a peculiar role in that he embodies consumerism and is at best the perfect archetype for capitalism driven market forces. We find in the episode titled “Casa Bonita” that, Cartman does not merely take a trip to the multichain theme restaurant but also one down the road of nostalgia. Memory plays a different role from being an individualistic one to shared memories across a larger spectrum of consumers. Cartman lives out nostalgia rather than enter into it through one’s own personal experience. This is given a meta-nostalgic turn when we learn through various interviews that the show’s creators had themselves frequented the restaurant as children. Returning to the episode’s plot, in order to receive an invite, Cartman ends up kidnapping one of the original invitees to a classmate’s birthday party. The element of shock and surprise, however, is not in these actions. Nor are the shocking scenes the ones that fans remember. Cartman is expected to do such an act. When he is confronted about the kidnapping and learns that the police is about to pick him for his actions, he gets into a mad frenzy of sampling all the attractions—food and fancy—that the restaurant has to offer. It is in these few minutes that he satiates his desires around consumption. This comical singsong rollercoaster of events that take place remains etched in the memories of the episode’s viewers. What sets this frenzy different from other easy categories of hedonism and vices like gluttony is that he does not eat to his fill, nor is he actually interested in eating (it) all. Rather, Cartman samples each and everything available and enjoys the vivid and vibrant experiences that the theme restaurant has in stock. Time is perhaps one way of thinking about this frenzy. What does consumption do to time? Can experiences—even the ones that a famous restaurant could boast of—be captured and ingested in quick successions? For our foot soldier of consumerism, Cartman, it definitely seems so. In his own words, at the end of the episode, when asked if all the elaborate kidnapping rituals and ordeals that he had made people go through was worth it, he gives a smacking reply in quintessential Cartman style: “Totally!”. Time and nostalgia are also at work in our Indian context. A case in point might be to think of some of the ways in which tradition has been packaged for marketing purposes. Patanjali Ayurved Ltd, a couple of billion-dollar worth company, is one such chain which deals with an assortment of food and daily products. Its lead figure, Baba Ramdev, has made use of tradition taking us back in time and nostalgia to push

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forward multiple products ranging from facial creams to instant noodles. This can be said to be etched in another example we find when the citizens of South Park are enamored by Walmart. The multinational giant is anthropomorphized, made into a monster while in competition with local shops, and finally allows its spirit to live in every resident’s heart. Interestingly, consumption takes a new form later in the series in its 19th season when the mayor of South park announces a redevelopment proposal called “Sodosopa”, in a an attempt to get a Whole Foods to open in the town and restore its ‘PC’ or politically correct image, which has been dented by former South Park schoolteacher Mr. Garrison’s bid for American presidency. That Garrison, a former trans-woman, who is gay, gradually begins to resemble Trump in his looks and mannerisms, including ballistic speech, is hardly a coincidence. The show’s creators are known to have irreverence for authority and to show a creative streak in morphing their characters into larger-than-life images for comic relief. Interestingly, the Whole Foods project is accompanied by the refrain “we are gentrifying”. Interestingly, this gentrification is expected to take place in the part where poor Kenny stays with his family. But in a twist of fate, Whole Foods chooses to establish itself in another part of town, after seeing the town’s “exaggerated attempt to display social consciousness”. Towards the end of the episode, Cartman asks Kyle in whispers whether the Mexicans plan to stay back, and is aptly hushed by his friend, even as the theme video for the Whole Foods inauguration plays out. Whole Foods tries to wear its vegan, socially conscious ethic as a badge, even as its regular shoppers hail from upmarket neighbourhoods. So, this socially conscious consumerism gets a change of face (and heart?), but remains a preserve of the upper class. Veganism in India has by and large been criticized for being another form of vegetarianism which has its roots in Brahmanism. Without delving into its nittygritties, it can be expanded to show how a Brahmin Cartman might have tried to make the best out of a Dalit Kenny. Authority and respect go hand in hand in such scenarios. In an episode titled “Scott Tenorman Must Die”, Cartman plots one of the most horrific revenge plans possible. A school senior plays a prank on Cartman. As part of his revenge, Cartman plans in detail, (better than a psychopathic serial killer), the death of his senior’s parents and later coerces him to eat the entrails of the dead. While we had shortly alluded to the Holy Cow earlier, let us illustrate the same. Some of the most horrible events in the previous decade were around how lower castes and Muslims were cruelly attacked for transporting cows (even when done legally) by vigilante forces set up by upper caste groups in villages and towns across various states in North India. These were further recorded on videos and uploaded on YouTube to instill fear among common masses and consumers of beef. Vigilante groups can also be found among Americans in the USA. These are usually around ‘protecting’ borders. With gun and rifle licenses on the rise in the USA, many far right leaning people have taken it up on themselves to protect not just their own personal and private spaces, but to extend the notion to a large bounded nation. Groups like the Ku Klux Klan are just the more noticeable vigilante gatherings in the US. The reality is that many individuals are on the rise, even without forming collectives, to take up protection of boundaries from illegal immigrants. Killing for hunt and killing

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for protection seem to go hand in hand in such bizarre cases of inhuman activities that often go unnoticed and unrecorded. In the episode “Ass Burgers”, Cartman turns out to be the producer (and consumer), quite literally. The success of the new burger joint puts other restaurants in severe loss. The taste enhancer that he utilizes are burgers stuffed in his ass and he believes that he is right in doing so. He turns out to be a leader in the market and does not care about his methods or what his partner has to say. Earlier, Cartman’s words on religion give us our next major link with caste and modern forces. While the Weberian model of charismatic authority is being played out by Cartman, it is impossible not to make the connection between modern-day Gurus who have been doing a lot more than mere spirituality. Baba Ramdev, a saint who does aerobics and yoga to usher in crowds from as far as the USA, comes up again as an immediate parallel. While not making bold statements, Cartman’s, “I know enough to exploit it [religion]” somehow shadows the kind of swindlers we are forced to face in trade and temple. Moreover, Cartman’s burger ‘taste enhancers’ could have a parallel in cow urine. Cow urine is definitely seen as a coveted product that can change the very dimension of the food to be consumed. A recurring character throughout the series is Colonel Sanders of KFC. Cartman even enters into deals with the iconic face of the multifood chain. One of the best examples for the trope around food is offered by the US-based food chain KFC— Kentucky Fried Chicken. With its introduction in India, the first problem that it sought to overcome was that it wanted to target the entire market, and this meant a large proportion of vegetarians. Chicken, the core of KFC, was then not the only possible tangent with which they could work. With the introduction of vegetarian burgers and similar meals, outreach was still minimal. It is during such crisis that they introduced a campaign projecting that the utensils and employees working on non-vegetarian products and vegetarian products were different. One of the advertisements that they came up with called “KFC’s Great Divide” was a comical (or tragic?) animated video of two burgers (a non-veg male and veg female) falling in love, but unable to be with each other given KFC’s policy of separating utensils and spaces that deal with these two genres of food. The genre in itself is interesting because vegetarian and non-vegetarian does a couple of things. It centers around that which is "vegetarian" so that all that is outside its purview now becomes the other. The "non-vegetarian" per se does not have a classification that was available in other parts of the world like red meat or other meat. This increasing trajectory to center things around the vegetarian can be read as an increasing global phenomenon. Caste lies at the heart of such vegetarianisms in the South Asian context, and we can only say that there is an increasing trend to direct food taxonomies in this direction. The KFC example is best representative of how a first world company tries to accommodate market demands, but in the long run ends up transforming its own core characteristics. Is it religious respect that we ought to measure in such instances? Or are there certain other parameters to be taken into consideration? We can find similar tactics being employed by another food chain in a similar segment—McDonalds and their famous McBurger. While the international McBurger is made of beef, the ones in India are made of chicken. We come to the point

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of religious tolerance and respect here. If Hinduism represents the length and breadth of castes available, then it should also be known that beef is generally consumed by lower caste Dalits. We find that this selective tolerance doing two things—one, it allows us to define Hinduism through the dictums of the upper caste (not that that has changed over the centuries), and second it ascertains how capitalism itself can modify according to the verities of caste. Authority is key here. Market demand in itself is not the only player. The attempt throughout the article has been to show how a seemingly regionspecific analytical marker like caste can actually help make sense of various foodrelated ideas that we see in the contemporary. While there are few shortcomings to the idea beyond certain parameters, food and its vibrant affair can clearly be theorized through the lens of caste in most situations. Cartman is the most popular character throughout the show and is its most complex one as well. Power mirrors these very features, and while the show is a powerful critique to existing structures, one can always point an ethical finger to the direction in which Cartman has moved throughout his years in South Park. A desi version might be picked up by future fans and while this article could be roasted by them, we believe we are in sync with the potential of animated series as a serious way of engaging and disengaging themes and discourses that may seem as simple as food. For the rest, this might be an allude to watching or not watching both versions. Nevertheless, the vicious nature of power vis a vis caste cannot be denied. Do we have a CR Park in the making?

References Appadurai, A. (2005). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalisation. London: University of Minnesota Press. Ass Burgers. South Park. Directed by Trey Parker, Matt Stone. Comedy Central. Cartman’s Mom is a Dirty Slut. South Park. Directed by Trey Parker, Matt Stone. Comedy Central. Casa Bonita. South Park. Directed by Trey Parker, Matt Stone. Comedy Central. Bonita et al., Casa Bonita. South Park. Directed by Trey Parker, Matt Stone. Comedy Central. Chakrabarty, D. (2000). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference. Oxford: Princeton University Press. Christian Rock Hard. South Park. Directed by Trey Parker, Matt Stone. Comedy Central. Julier, A. (2013). The political economy of obesity: The fat pay all. In C. Counihan & P. Van Esterik (Eds.), Food and culture: A reader (pp. 546–560). New York: Routledge. Le Petite Tourette. South Park. Directed by Trey Parker, Matt Stone. Comedy Central. Medicinal Fried Chicken. South Park. Directed by Trey Parker, Matt Stone. Comedy Central. Mital, I., & Amir, S. (2013). I’m Not Fat! I’m Big Bones: Cartman’s Diet and Appetite for Authority. In Literophile, Issue 3, Volume 6. Nanny 911. South Park. Directed by Trey Parker, Matt Stone. Comedy Central. Poppendieck, J. (2013). Want amid plenty: From hunger to inequality. In C. Counihan & P. Van Esterik (Eds.), Food and culture: A reader (pp. 563–571). New York: Routledge. Press, Associated. 2020. Watchdog: Data on children separated at border may be flawed. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/03/05/us/politics/ap-us-immigrationseparating-families-.html. Accessed 15 March 2020. Probably. South Park. Directed by Trey Parker, Matt Stone. Comedy Central.

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Rodgers, L., & Bailey, D. (2019). Trump wall—all you need to know about US border in seven charts. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46824649. Accessed 16 March 2020. Scott Tenorman Must Die. South Park. Directed by Trey Parker, Matt Stone. Comedy Central. The City Part of Town. South Park. Directed by Trey Parker, Matt Stone. Comedy Central. The Passion of the Jew. South Park. Directed by Trey Parker, Matt Stone. Comedy Central. WalMart. South Park. Directed by Trey Parker, Matt Stone. Comedy Central. Wilkerson, Isabel. (2020). Caste: The Lies That Divide Us. Penguin Books Limited.

Chapter 11

Eat, Sleep and Dream Trilogy in Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes Shaheen Saba

Abstract This paper revolves around the eat, sleep and dream trilogy by assessing two of the most lovable and popular comics of all times, Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes. Known for their far-fetched witty lines to mind blowing exaggerated imagination of these characters, these two comics have kept us hooked through decades. Eating is one of the basics rituals of our day-to-day activities in our life. But with these comic strip characters, food occupies a larger semantic, symbolic and psychological role. This is evident in the multiple adventures they have with their food, literal as well as in dreams. Food serves as a major channel through which the lighter nuances of their life and their issues are projected. The paper also deliberates on the politics of eating patterns that are due to various underlying factors in these comic strips. Both these characters have a unique relationship with food best manifest in their attitude towards eating and dreaming about the same. Like eating dreaming (both day and night) provide us with a window in their versatile imagination that fills up the panels. They try to achieve the impossible in their dreams, like going to the outer space or creating bizzare formulas and solving puzzles in outrageous ways. But the interesting part is that they can even sleep over it. This paper is a footnote to the endless readings that such comic strips will provide in future over food.

Comic strip is a sequential art juxtaposing verbal and the visual to communicate. The illustrations in the panel go side by side to create the desired effect on the readers. Playing, talking, actions, dreams, emotions, all have to be drawn within panels with a minimum disposal of words. Calvin is a kid and Garfield a plump cat. Their environment and day-to-day activities go on to inform these strips. This paper would venture around the eat, dream, sleep trilogy in these two comic characters coupled with other compulsive habits that bring out the distinctiveness. Throughout the comics panels of eating, dreaming (night and day) and sleeping occupy major portion of the thematic and humorous content. Not that the content is uniformly divided or so. While we often hear the trilogy of eat, pray, love or eat, drink and S. Saba (B) Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Malhotra et al. (eds.), Food Culture Studies in India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5254-0_11

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be merry as the mantra for being happy in life, this particular trilogy of eat, dream and sleep is a hyper-lazy, luxurious and unhealthy zone on the surface level but for Calvin and Garfield is the episteme of their existence. These factors will be exploited through the paper bearing the trilogy in mind. What do they eat? And why do they eat? The basic answer would be because they need to survive. But we have food for thought. Calvin, like other kids, occasionally needs something to eat. He is not always thrilled with what his mother serves him though. His taste for the food isn’t relevant, because he has often decided not to eat it long before it is being served. Often Calvin lets out an awe-inspiring scream when his mother tells him what’s for dinner. Even if he isn’t aware of the sort of food that is going to be served, his skepticism takes control, and he refuses to eat it. His parents often have to force him to eat his food. This fear of eating on the part of child and feeding on the part of the parents seems to be a ritual—monumental—obligatory task. In case of Calvin also, this two-way pull is best manifested as he devises all strategies fictitious and imaginary to avoid it and his parents are constantly on the run. They try to teach him not to be so fastidious when it comes to food. Even when his face is turned inside out in pain and fear of food poisoning, he is told to eat up. Calvin loves barbecue, but one has to wait long for the coals to get hot. Therefore, he tries to make his parents take him to McDonalds instead. One cannot assume that Bill Watterson was advertising for McDonalds, but owing to the sheer volume of child-targeted marketing, one can pause to think so because tie-ins like these are designed to lure children into selecting foods associated with their favourite TV character or comic character.1 Procrastinating and dreaming about lasagna is the most divinely pleasurable job of Garfield; trying to wake up is a death knell for him, and even though he does nothing, he hates Mondays like office goers. The trilogy of eat, dream and sleep operates in both the strips, while on one hand Calvin avoids, Garfield devours but food forms a central part in their conscious day dreaming.2 It can be said so because it is at times deliberate on the part of the characters. While they dream at night as well, whatever their unconscious desire they are displaced and presented in the form of food. Calvin constantly thinks of preventing his growing hunger unlike Garfield who cannot stop thinking of his growing appetite. However, cereal is Calvin’s favourite food; especially the one called “chocolate frosted sugar bombs” which he gets mostly on Sunday mornings. So, these two characters act as foil to each other. For the former, hunger is a monster that must be overcome by whatever tactics, for the later it is the sole reason to survive. Does he suffer from fear for food? It is Calvin’s anxiety (episodes of choking and throwing up food, food that he hates) that leads him to 1 Food

advertising permeates television viewing for children, and a huge amount of money is spent for this purpose. Nickeloden’s hit program, Rugrats-Cucky, Angelica and other Rugrats tykes now grace packages of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, as well as Farley’s Fruit Rolls, a peanut-butter-andand-jelly flavoured Good Humor ice cream sandwich, and Amurol bubble gum with comics printed on the gum itself. Nickeloden itself has a line of fruit snacks featuring Nicktoons characters. 2 Garfield Daydreaming, Comic dated Sunday, June 15, 1997. https://www.gocomics.com/garfield/ 1997/06/15.

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this uncomfortable relationship with food. He loves to sit in front of the TV and eat sugar bombs, and because much of his day is spent here, he consumes a considerable amount of this cereal. As this is far from the healthiest food around, his parents are naturally not so thrilled about his love for this cereal. The fact that he likes it even better after pouring half of their sugar supply over it doesn’t make it any more nutritious. Interestingly, both these characters love to eat glued to the TV which has become a common phenomenon today. While watching T.V., the body is essentially disconnected from the mind thus being incapable of paying attention to body’s signal. People eat without realizing the amount of food they are consuming. Marshall Macluhan in Understanding Media remarks “Our children are striving to carry over to the printed page the all-involving sensory mandate of the TV image…This is what they had learned to do in the cool iconography of the comic-book medium” (1964). This explains Calvin’s flight from the class-work pages.3 Bill Watterson also provides the readers with the bewilderment and some smart answers to the weird questions that children have through Calvin who has an active imagination and prefers to live in his subjective reality, for instance, wind is caused by sneezing trees, babies are made from assembly kits bought at Sears, and ice floats because it wants to get warm so it moves up to the surface where its closer to the sun. Like kids, we too have some unfathomable and hidden dreams and desires that we like to slip into. The temporal disappearance in the illusionary world comforts us in our own corporeal trap of apartments today and our mental strings of bondage of all kinds. The less visited world of imagination is being frequented more often leading us to reflect, correct and plan things. Calvin often has a predatory approach to food, while Garfield has a very welcoming approach. They both contrast each other also in choices, while Garfield likes more spicy and presentable meals (although when hungry he can even devour pets, birds and greens as well). The least popular food Calvin’s mother can possibly serve him is oatmeal. Because of its colour, it does not look very delicate, and it doesn’t smell too good either. Calvin is also convinced that the oatmeal is alive, and will try to escape from his plate. Calvin makes brave attempts to sabotage this escape by killing it with his fork and thus ending up in a mess. Contentment is another driving factor as a full meal results in good sleep. Both, Calvin and Garfield are already always discontent with the food and this equals to their life. For Garfield, happiness and contentment means Life = lasagna (n) + Dreaming of eating + Sleeping, here (n) stands for infinite. For Calvin, Life = monstrocizing food + realizing its full manifestation in dream + Sleeping. Having a meal for Calvin is an arduous task whether in school or home. He often shares his lunch with Susie and is successful in frightening her up with phantamorphizing food usually a sandwich of some kind. This is a repeated motif throughout the strips. Garfield portrays the striped orange eponymous cat as a gluttonous being. His sole purpose of existence is to have unlimited lasagna, pizza and coffee. The cynical cat is not an enthusiast and represents the epitome of lethargy. Nobody could be 3 Calvin

& Hobbes. Calvin’s Adventures with green blob, comic dated Sunday, 21 April, 1991. https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1991/04/21.

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more disgusted and offended for being woken up to a new day as Garfield. On one hand, his behaviour could be seen as the excesses that many among us have and try to substitute by eating, while on the other hand, he is a narcissist and seems to fit in Shakespeare’s Duke Orsino’s famous dialogue “If music be the food of love, play on”; For Garfield, food is the music of life that he likes to play on. It is his sole mantra for existence. Both these comics stand in contrast with Chota Bheem4 (8-year-old) popular cartoon character who loves to eat laddoos and for him it is a treat whether prepared by his mother or stolen. Although not very nutritious, the act reflects the Indian’s love for sweet meats and delicacies above everything. So, here the laddoos are representative of the Indian food culture, as we tend to celebrate/prepare with sweets on the slightest happy occasions. Unlike lasagna that is a luxurious indulgence for Garfield, laddoos are very commonly used in celebrations. It is a sweet basic to all major and minor festivities and celebration. But had it been Calvin he would have ended it imagining it as sugar coated rounded monster balls to ward off eating it. Therefore, food habits vary from culture to culture as well besides being a personal choice. Garfield remains to be one of the most lovable characters for newspaper readers over the years. The celebration of running successfully for quarter a century was celebrated with I’m In The Mood For Food: In The Kitchen With Garfield (2003). This cookbook presents a variety of recipes including snacks and desserts. It features some uniquely delicious recipes like Lazy Cat’s Lasagna, Color Me Hungry Red Pepper Potato Frittata, Royal Roasted Lemon-Herb Chicken and I’d Rather Be Happy Than Thin Chocolate-Chunk Cookies. But what is more appealing about the book is that it is hilariously composed like the rest. The subtitle says “In the Kitchen with Garfield”. But the colourful vignettes, comic strips and full-page illustrations by cartoonist Jim Davis, Garfield’s creator, show his feisty feline outside the kitchen much of the time—goofing around, eating a lot, of course, and entertaining pals and, true to type, obsessing and dreaming of food.5 This forms a central part of the narrative. It’s a sort of infotainment. Both Garfield and Calvin dream of food, awake or asleep. Whereas Calvin has an active imagination and prefers to live in his own subjective reality because he is bullied by everyone, Garfield is quite a hero-demanding and dictating, doing whatever he likes. However, he generously shares with his readers (smitten fans) some seventy recipes. Some of these are real workable recipes too—it’s just the labels that pun around. The Fundamentals chapter include “When in Doubt Pig Out Breaded PanFried Pork Chops”. “Lazy Cat’s Lasagna” features in the pasta section; “Life’s a Party Havarti Shrimp Dip With Garlic Toasts” is among ideas for party days. Food acts as an alarm, a trigger, that brings the characters out of their slumberous despondency. For Calvin and Garfield, it’s a source of happiness or doom. Sometimes food tastes good though, especially when it comes on a tray, just like in a fancy 4 Chota

Bheem (literary translated “Little Bheem” created by Rajiv Chilaka is an Indian animated television series. First premiered in 2008 on Pogo TV. 5 Garfield Dreaming, comic dated Sunday 31 October, 1999. https://www.gocomics.com/garfield/ 1999/10/31.

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restaurant. Even if Calvin is deep inside one of his imaginations, he can always be brought back with a nicely served sandwich and a cup of hot chocolate. Garfield often springs to his feet and is always on time for his meals but never quite satisfied. Jon Arbuckle, his owner, uses food as a means to control Garfield’s weight often landing himself in disastrous situations. Even though Garfield is a cat, it is no ordinary cat. Here, we can draw a line with another popular Indian cartoon character pair, Motu Patlu (first premiered in 16 October, 2012) created by Harvind Makkad. Motu and Patlu are the literal names of the characters defined by their body structure, Motu (fat), Patlu (skinny). But Motu loves to eat samosas like Chota Bheem who loves laddoos. Motu is already always in a food crisis in the most urgent situations, and his mind doesn’t work if not fed on samosas. The names are based on their physical appearance that depends on the food they eat. Samosa acts as fuel to the overweight and bald Motu who is always trapped for the wrong choices. The cartoon series is driven by food, samosa like laddoo, is not a very healthy choice yet it has a magnetic impact on the activities of the characters. Being always bullied at school and performing badly, Calvin seeks an escape from Miss Woodworm and his boredom. People often seek refuge in food, overeating or eating too less are also ways in which our body reacts to the environment or situation. While for Calvin, it is also a means of escape, a relief, for Garfield, it is a narcissist fulfilment and his technique for surviving the existential crisis that he goes through in the absence of a morsel. Children love to eat, daydream and sleep. Calvin’s flight from the real world is accompanied by Hobbes, the toy, which comes live only in Calvin’s imagination. There has been much debate on the relationship between Calvin and Hobbes. Though Calvin saw Hobbes as a tiger and ventured on all sorts of mischievous and fantastical adventures with him, the rest saw it as a boy playing stupid games with his doll. “The so-called gimmick of my strip—the two versions of Hobbes—is sometimes understood”, Watterson made it clear in his essay for the Tenth Anniversary collection. I don’t think of Hobbes as a doll that miraculously comes to life when Calvin’s around. Neither do I think of Hobbes as the product of Calvin’s imagination. Calvin sees Hobbes one way, and everyone else sees Hobbes another way. I show two versions of reality, and each makes complete sense to the participant who sees it”. (Watterson 1995)

Besides fulfilling the vacuum in the character’s life, food becomes a means of restoring confidence and relief to the dwindling confidence of the characters. Calvin often plays with his food. For instance, when his parents are looking elsewhere, he pretends his meal is attacking him, much like during lunch at school. In a sense food is the only object with which he can take liberties and by assuming the food to be a potentially threatening monster and entering into a duel in which he wins, he feels a sense of confidence and relief. When his parents return, the food is scattered over the table, walls and floor and smothered on Calvin’s face. When Calvin is in a less rambunctious state of mind, he may simply stir his food to idle the time away before eating it. Once, he fashioned a grotesque head-shaped sculpture out of various food items, much to his father’s outrage. Throughout the strip, Calvin uses this strategy.

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In one of the strips, he writes an imaginative story claiming that the illustrations are by Hobbes and hands it to his father to teach him a moral lesson on what happens to mean parents.6 George H. Thomson charts out the categories of experience essential to the story form of comic strips and other art forms into two categories—the subjective mode, pleasure principle and the objective mode, reality principle (Thomson 1975, pp. 265– 280). For comic strips, the subjective mode includes daydreaming (self-viewed as omnipotent subject), and the objective mode comprises glimpsed action (others viewed as glimpsed subject). The daydream portrays the self or those who are intimate projections of the self as omnipotent subject. It is a narrative of fulfilled desires, with minimal accommodation to the reality principle. It is not concerned with details, unless they are gratifying. It cannot afford to insist on careful development such as is found in the action of drama. Instead it is a sequence of highlights with stereotyped characters (Garfield is a plump cat who loves to eat, Calvin is a sleek kid who hates eating). In other words, the comic strip does not attempt continuous passage. This allows it to portray daydreams more aptly. As evident, both Calvin and Garfield daydream more than dreaming at night. Taking its cue from daydreams, the strip creates a series of highlights. It is the spectator’s own mind that moves or at least projects motion within the individual panel, but between panels, the reader is as immobile as a spectator in the theatre. Pictures in comics tend to be more symbolic. The vocabulary of the language of comics is pictogrammatical as these pictures of eating, sleeping and dreaming convey. We can eat with them, dream with them and be a part of them for few moments without any extensive prose reading or exerting our brains. Unlike other texts, the trajectory of language and narrative in comic strips operates in a linked and in a multilevel and multimedial fashion. The ideogrammatical and pictogrammatical go hand in hand to build up the entire structure of comic strips. I would briefly sum up by sharing Richard J, Watts opinion While discussing the types of communication in comic strips, he indicates that “in the comic strip, where the amount of language provided is generally less than the amount of visual information, the latter will serve as the basis on which the relevance of the former (i.e. its possible implicatures) may be inferred” (qtd in Baronä 2001, p. 23). Therefore, the eat–dream–sleep trilogy is exploited and played upon by Jim Davis and Bill Watterson that invite heterogeneous readings and speculations that can be deliberated to a great extent. The edible and psychological communicate through square and rectangular panels lifting us from the mundane and showcasing the imaginative gymnastic of the characters through this trilogy.

6 Man-eating

Food this is a food prepared by Calvin’s mother. Appearing in one of Sunday strips, Calvin is instead eaten up by the food. At the culmination, the sequence is revealed to be part of Calvin’s imagination. Comic dated, Sunday 2 May, 1993. https://www.gocomics.com/calvinand hobbes/1993/05/02.

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References Baronä, D. A. (2001). Pictures Speak in comics without words: Pictorial principles in the work of Milt Gross, Hendrik Dorgathen, Eric Drooker, and Peter Kuper. In R. Varnum & C. T. Gibbons (Eds.), The language of comics: Word and image (pp. 19–39). Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Davis, J. (2003). Garfield. Treasury 4. Ravette Publishing: Malta. Macluhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man—Part I. London: Routledge. Thomson, G. H. (1975). The four story forms: Drama/film/Comic strip/narrative. College English, 37(3), 265–280. https://www.jstor.org/stable/375657. Accessed April 12, 2013. Thomson, G. H. (n.d.). Calvin and Hobbes Go Comics. https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhob bes/2010/03/19/. Accessed March 8, 2020. Watterson, B. (1995) The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book. Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel.

Part IV

Of the Colonial and the Culinary: Food, the Folk and Registers of Resistance

Chapter 12

Feeding Workers in Colonial India 1919–1947 Róbert Balogh

Abstract This paper contributes to the growing body of studies about the links between governmentality, rights and food in colonial and post-colonial India. It first draws attention to the rich body of literature on the link between work and food between 1919 and 1947 in order show the diversity of the ways in which modernity was envisioned and to situate the centre of contemporary nutrition research, the laboratories at Coonoor in this production of ideas. The second part of the paper offers a case study for understanding how contemporary ideas became embodied locally. Jamshedpur, the location that the paper discusses was the major hub of industry and capital, and, due to the extent of control the management of Tata Iron and Steel Company exercised over it, it was also a unique political–social–economic space in late colonial India. It will be evident that it was the notion of coolie work that played a major part in limiting the introduction of food welfare and related aspects of scientific management at TISCO. Moreover, the paper highlights the role of gender in theorizing the link between food and work and in the related policy-making process.

In this paper, I take the issue of the link between ideas about nutrition and about industrial workers in India to show the scope and limitations of interaction between India, empire and global contexts in the period between the end of World War I and the declaration of independence in 1947.1 I wish to make two arguments. First, I argue that the intellectual history of the reception of the idea of scientific nutrition was one of the intertwined histories of the period. The discourse that emerged in India was at the juncture of various brands of nationalism and shifting colonial policies. One of the defining features of this discourse was the linkage it established between ideas about work and nutrition. In the second part of the paper, I will argue that the notion of coolie work prevented entitlement and welfare from becoming the fundaments of 1 I acknowledge that Radha Kapuria was kind enough to help me in drafting the arguments of this paper in 2013. EFOP-3.6.1-16-2016-00022, a project co-financed by the European Union and the European Social Fund, provided financial support during the time of writing.

R. Balogh (B) Institute for Central Europe, University of Public Service, Budapest, Hungary e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Malhotra et al. (eds.), Food Culture Studies in India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5254-0_12

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food policies in industrial centres of contemporary India. Arguably, the longevity of the concept of “coolie” labor is one of the factors that have limited citizenship in India. As many of the recent studies on the social and political impact of World War I show, repressive state practices aimed at accumulating food, labor and fuel and the experience of severe shortage damaged state-society relations in many of the empires that took part in the war (Judson 2016). As Rachel Berger has shown, in the 1920s food was one of the issues that became the subject of governance and, thus, it reflects the interaction between colonial governmentality and developments in political and social attitudes in India. During the Second World War, the disaster of the famine of 1943 indicated the failure of the colonial state to establish a link between food and citizenship, and the imperative that there needs to be a connection. Regarding the second half of the twentieth century, Benjamin Siegel demonstrated that food had a central role in negotiating citizenship in independent India (Siegel 2018). This paper contributes to this body of research by focusing on the ideas about the relationship between work and nutrition as these manifested in contemporary thought, and in industrial setting. My method for doing so is a combination of discourse analysis and the study of local-level empirical evidence. In the first section of this paper, I look at the place that work and industrial labor had in the discourse on nutrition in late colonial India. In the second section, the analysis shifts to the Tata Steel and Coal Company located at Jamshedpur, which was the largest industrial complex of contemporary India.

Work in Nutrition Discourse in India: The Question of Efficiency and Gender Food and ideas about eating had complex paths within the circuits of the British Empire by 1918. In his pathbreaking study, through the example of sugar, Sidney Mintz showed that changes in imperial consumption patterns and circuits might have had negative impact on the quality of food intake, and thus on quality of life, of working-class families even in the age of science (1986, p. 116). Elizabeth M. Collingham emphasized that food consumption reflected and determined social position in British India. It was not only true in terms of caste taboos, but also for the racial divide between whites and non-whites (2001, pp. 156–162). At the same time, as Rachel Berger argues, food was a key to imagining the nation in early twentieth-century India.2 In the interwar period institutions, research and researchers tied Global South and Global North together in new ways. During the 1930s, nutrition science, engaged with the projects of designing ideal diet for humankind and fight diseases linked to malnutrition, discovered and synthesized the universe of vitamins. Soon after the worst years of the Great Depression, major international organizations like the League of Nations and the International Labor Office called on experts to 2 Berger

(2013), Berger (2018).

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establish nutrition standards that would serve as norms for new welfare legislation and food policy both at national and international levels (Barona 2008, pp. 87–105; Scrinis 2013). Several researchers of the colonies of the early twentieth-century state that from the 1920s the belief that, on the basis of the germs theory, tropical bodies came to be seen as infected and weakened. Thus, by the 1930s, the concept of tropics and inherently diseased tropical working bodies merged and produced the discourse on the inefficiency of the Indian worker. In this narrative, the notion that native bodies were diseased would have informed the conceptual framework about Indian labor. However, the picture that emerges from an overview of the contemporary literature is heterogeneous. It is true that in 1929, the management of the largest industrial complex of contemporary India, Tata Iron and Steel Company assessed Indian workers’ efficiency in the following terms: “The climatic conditions operate to the disadvantage of the Indian workmen and the education, health, physique and standard of living generally are lower than are to be found in the western countries. These adversely affect the local workers in judging his comparative efficiency with the westerner” (1929, p. 161). However, for many contemporaries it was not the end of the story. For one of the outstanding economists of the time, D. R. Gadgil, nutrition science opened new prospects to improve the capacity of workers under tropical climate: “The science of nutrition has…made great advance and it is possible to indicate the various contributions of foods together with their quantities…in order to maintain the body in proper state of repair… according to the age and sex of the person and also according to climate…” (1943, p. 83). In fact, during the 1930s scientists in India linked nutrition and work in various ways. In 1938, in his Food Planning for Hundred Millions, Radakamal Mukerjee argued that instead of applying a global standard, a varied rate of metabolism shall be taken as a measurement of Indian food requirements. He treated metabolism and efficiency as interdependent factors; therefore, Mukerjee attributed a key role to the worker and his efficiency (1938, pp. 55–66, pp. 82–86 and p. 189). He suggested that factory rhythm should be adjusted to seasonal and regional variation of natural rate of metabolism in order to reach optimum output. In 1939, in a thick volume bearing the title Health and Nutrition in India Narendranath Gangulee stated that the food situation in India was not acceptable; it was in a state of crisis. Then, he systematically assessed existing cooking practices and available food items according to their nutritional value and proposed that the way out of food crisis was a more rational utilization of knowledge and resources. These three works were in conversation with the published output of the Coonoor Research laboratories, which was the centre of nutrition research in colonial India. Research at Coonoor dominated mainstream discourse on nutrition and work during the 1930s. Scientists identified low efficiency as the main problem, stressed the specificities of India and called on science for improvements. The Nutrition Research laboratories were not only site of data production and of scientific facts but their agenda reflected as well as shaped colonial governance. The point to be emphasized here is that the agenda of research shifted over the decades as a result of developments

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in what empire meant for colonial administration, changes in the way researchers interacted with the Indian elites and population and how they interpreted and reacted to their own experiences in India. The origins of the institution date to 1918 when a Beri-beri Enquiry Unit was accommodated within the premises of the Southern Indian branch of the Pasteur Institute.3 The nineteenth and early twentieth-century mystery of beri-beri fever played an important role in framing India as tropical (Arnold 2010, pp. 295–314). Until 1935, the research agenda of the laboratories were determined by its founding director, Robert McCarrison. His main objective was to design good or ideal diet based on the one typical of “martial races”. The three interwar and wartime editions of the Hygiene Field Manual show that Royal Indian Forces were also increasingly nutrition conscious. While the first edition does not contain specific provisions, the 1940 edition devoted an entire chapter to the issue of nutrition, and in 1945, this chapter was significantly expanded and restructured.4 The ration tables published in the 1927 series of Field Service Manuals show the difference between the ration given to Indian and British troops. British troops did not only receive a much wider variety of items, several times more meat and eggs and fish, but also more vegetables and even tea. Indian troops were kept at significantly lower nutritional and calorific standards eating rice, dahl, some vegetables and milk as protective food. In 1936, the arrival of Wallace Aykroyd, the new director of the Nutrition Research laboratories, marked a new era of colonial governmentality. The Development Act of 1940 was the first that allowed large-scale investment in social services over a longer period of time. Frederick Cooper argued that the use of welfare and development meant that labor and class questions could be avoided. Yet, “…the symbolism of the act was even more important than its authors envisaged…The discussion had moved the meaning of the imperial mission beyond…concepts like civilization and trusteeship…” (1996, p. 72). Aykroyd abandoned racial terminology and started new projects including statistical survey of student and industrial populations (1937, pp. 1008–10). He also connected Indian nutrition research to work within international organizations such as the League of Nations and the International Labor Office (Carpenter 2007, pp. 873–878). Aykroyd also played a key role in the preparation of a landmark report, that of the Bengal Famine Inquiry Commission of 1945. The text of the report contained large sections calling for increased nutrition levels as means of protection against famine situations. Nico Slate has recently reiterated that in M. K. Gandhi’s message; thus, in his politics, food had played a vital role since his years in London. Vegetarianism is the perhaps the best-known example of this. Leela Gandhi showed that the London Vegetarian Society was a circle where anti-colonial gestures were frequent (Gandhi 2006, p. 86). She posited that “Gandhian ahimsa obtains at least some of its semantic density from the self-definition of late Victorian zoophilia precisely as a resistance to what we have learned, after Foucault, to call “governmentality”. Analysing specific moments, Slate argued that

3 Report 4 Field

of the Commission of Health Survey and Development (1946). Service Hygienie Notes India, 19191 , 19402 , 19453 .

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Despite the occasional run-in with a carnivorous mother, Gandhi’s vegetarianism enriched his social life. The practice of abstaining from meat spanned nations, religions, and cultures. Indeed, Gandhi’s vegetarianism challenged the very idea of distinct cultures by bridging his Gujarati Vaishnavite upbringing and the world of genteel British society. In his vegetarianism, as in so many facets of his diet, Gandhi rejected the divide between East and West. (Slate 2019, p. 64)

Thus, for Gandhi, being a dietary reformer was a key role. As a consequence, he did not endorse contemporary western science wholeheartedly but he closely followed developments in nutrition science. In the course of 1929, he exchanged personal letters with Robert McCarrison in which they debated over the role of milk in healthy diet. The debate about milk is important in two contexts. As Slate points out, milk was one of the trickiest issues for Gandhi as he continued to drink goat milk out of medical necessity, despite his intention to become vegan. Thus, milk required Gandhi to put forward a balanced argument and he did so when he agreed that many children might need cow milk. Second, milk was a commodity that became associated with increasing men’s ability to do industrial work, besides the health of children, during the 1920s just as the general perception of the liquid improved considerably in the Global North. Gandhi responded to this latter challenge confirming that work and food were related but published a recipe for a lunch in view of cost and nutritional value that avoided any foodstuff of animal origin (Gandhi 1949, pp. 23–25). Gandhi welcomed scientific food research and demanded more efforts in this direction; however, he felt that the remedy to Indian undernourishment was to be found by experimenting with different schools of Indian cooking practices used for making plant-based dishes, and not by adopting meat, milk and egg that science identified as “protective foods”. There were contributions to the issue of nutrition and Indian labour that did not take the Coonoor laboratories as a point of departure. In 1936, a retired surgeon, Rai Bahadur Choudhury published a small volume titled The Ideal Diet for Perfect Health. The book condemned English practices, recommends traditional exercise. It holds that bacilli are unimportant, secondary causes of disease while real maladies are bad air, bad blood and lack of prevention that can be done mainly by following cooking wisdom. In his Planned Diet for India published in 1946, Gopal Chandra Pattanayak, a professor from the Prince of Wales’ Medical College of Patna, merged the agenda of rational diet management with a discourse on Nature Cure. Pattanayak proposed the rediscovery of Nature’s voice in the functioning of the human body (1946, p. 58). His work tried to find a middle ground between rationality, Congress’s endorsement of Ayurvedic practices and a radical nationalist political agenda. He wrote that “A strong individuality, an active life, an advanced society and a militant nationalism are impossible without animal food…With all possible self-sufficiency we have to increase the earning capacity of our countrymen, remove their economic backwardness and give them the means to provide themselves with an animal diet, although it is a little more costly then vegetable diet”.5 5 The question of promoting Ayurvedic practices had a firm place on the agenda at the time when the

Second World War broke out. The Health Section was called upon to answer several questions that

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At this point, it is important to note that the issue of vegetarianism was not the main axis of nutrition discourse in late colonial India. In his book Bloodless Revolution, Tristram Stuart, who is also known as an activist campaigning for the reduction of food waste, showed that European encounter with Indian diet was a key in the history of the vegetarian movement throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and also in the early nineteenth. Later in the nineteenth century, besides the issue of morality, rational demonstrations about the number of people that plant-based diet can supply compared to reliance on animal husbandry gradually gained prevalence in arguments for vegetarian diet. India was the prime example (Stuart 2006). However, in the post-World War I years, nutritionism and the focus on physical efficiency changed the object of the Western gaze. While, as Gandhi’s example show, examples and perception of India continued to play an important role in the vegetarian movement globally, it was no longer the main subject to study about India diet. The search for remedies to weakened bodies became the main element of the agenda. Pattanayak’s example shows that this colonial view was internalized to some extent in the interwar period. We shall return to this problem in the local context in the next section. Rajani Kanta Das did not quote Ayurveda, but he differed from mainstream literature in another respect. He argued that, due to ill-health and “weakness arising from insufficient nutrition or starvation”, India wasted the bulk of its human resources. His book stands out with his sensitivity to gender. In the opening pages, he breaks with the masculine associations dominating discourse on industry. He defines efficiency using the metaphor of the women managing the household “getting the highest amount of satisfaction out of the stock of goods and services at her disposal” (1930, p. 3). While discussing existing data on industries, he rejects contemporary statistics regarding employment on the basis that “…household workers are classed as dependants, although they are as active in the production of social wealth as any other class…It must be remembered that most of the gainfully employed women workers are also household workers, and women begin household work much earlier than 15” (1930, p. 21). He asserted that the growing self-expression and self-realization of women will help in growing industrial efficiency. He called for all round psychological–physiological rationalization that would have to include household consumption since rationalization begins at home (1930, pp. 163–164). The discourse on nutrition and work in India was a gendered one. In 1947, D. N. Chatterjee as “an Indian Dietarian” gave the following scientific argument to the question why women needed less food: “Women naturally require less amount of food than men owing to their delicate organism, their smaller bulk and weight with decreased basal metabolism, and also owing to the nature of duties at home, members of the Legislative Council raised regarding the Ayurvedic and Tibbi College, homeopathic treatment, usage of medical titles and presence of various traditions. By the 1930s Ayurvedic versus scientific controversy had a long history. Indigenous practitioners had been mobilizing public opinion and lobby power available to them since the government introduced compulsory registration for medical practitioners in 1911. They did not only join the Swadeshi movement and adapt by setting up their own training institutions and exams. Technologies of advertisement also played a vital role in reorienting public opinion through consumption. See Sharma (2012).

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which do not involve much muscular work”. In the same chapter, he stressed that qualitatively women need more protective food then men in connection with their biological role as mothers (1947, p. 118). Chatterjee refers to data published by the Coonoor laboratories and reminds that expectant mother’s need 50% more proteins, 25% more calories and 100% more calcium since “They are custodians of the health and vigour of the future citizens of the world. A healthy mother usually assures a healthy child (1947, p. 125)”. He considered the possibility that women might work outdoor, but would not like to see them in factories. In his article, Mukerjee argued that women are not relevant as earners: “While in the actual labor situation the earnings of the wife or daughter are hardly significant, in a proper interpretation…the wife and daughters of the working-class family are not to be regarded as adding to its income by work away from home but as contributing towards happiness and comfort of the family by their household duties in the house where meals have to prepared, clothing washed and the little ones cared for by them”.6 Mukerjee’s argument leads to the logical conclusion that the integrity of the family may only be secured by defining minimum wages, but it also suggests that women are at best marginal actors of the labor market. How labor history relates to this discourse? Studying the textile industry of Bombay and the jute industry of Calcutta, respectively, Radha Kumar and Samila Sen show that the proportion and number of women gradually decreased after the 1920s (1999). Sen argues that the discourse on motherhood and the dangers threatening the life of small babies was a useful one in justifying retrenchments. In its final report, the sub-committee on Women’s Role in Planned Economy of the Planning Commission only addressed the question of equal pay marginally and instead it focused on women’s role in marriages and within the family trying to find common ground for religious customs and modernity. In line with the above picture, in 1946, the family budget survey for the industrial city of Jamshedpur suggested that women labor was marginal. The number of adult women exceeded that of men for several income categories at the lower end, but remained inferior in households with Rs. 90 monthly incomes and above. Disregarding this distinction, the report states that, “There appears to be little employment of women and children because on average family consists only of 0.09 adult women and 0.02 child earners” (1946, p. 8). Women sexuality and women as mothers were central to racial anxieties of the first part of the twentieth-century worldwide (Bender 2009). However, the idea that women needed less food was not in tune with documents intended to lay down international standards even if they also pointed to the special needs of mothers.7 The scientific measurement of metabolism and differential nutritional values for working bodies reflected and corroborated the marginalization of women as workers. Expanding post-colonial education played a role in statistical and scientific “facts” regarding women work

6 Mukerjee

(1944). as the report of the Technical Committee of the Health Committee of League of Nations: The problem of nutrition volume II: Report on the physiological bases of nutrition, Geneva, 1936.

7 Such

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becoming norms as textbooks provided information on nutrition emphasizing gender differences.8 In view of what was to come in 1943, it is important to stress that famine policies are an important site where gendered contradictions become visible. The near contemporary Loveday (1914, pp. 90–92) and historical works equally emphasize that the main concerns about relief work were efficiency of work and economy of resources spent (Hall-Matthews 2005, pp. 170–211). Hence, women and children were expected to work. Being “dependant” meant further marginalization in terms of resources, especially food within relief camps, since the piecework pay, harsh tests and the system of family gangs were perceived as more viable and economic than more sophisticated form of resource allocation the pattern of intra-household discrimination continued at the works (Kynch and Sibbons 1998, pp. 128–57). Moreover, women were seen as weaker; therefore, less efficient workers, and they were gradually pushed off. Although 1930 Bihar provincial authorities claimed that the institution of relief works had lost its relevance in famine situation due to internal migration, the Famine Code published in that year included detailed guidelines for it and left the system of payment and classification unchanged.9 Relief works failed to take into account the impact of “cold violence” in famine situations. In such periods, as in 1943, “marked intra-household distinctions in food allocations become more overt…leading to the starvation of some and the continued subsistence of others…” (Greenough 2009, pp. 27–41). The next section turns to the question of how diversity of opinions that ranged from focusing on insufficient food intake in India, cultural exceptionalism, nationalist politics to military ethos, international scientific research agendas and to ideas of colonial development became embodied in ground level policies and practices?

The Perception of Food Problems in Industrial Setting: The Example of Tata Iron and Steel Company The Idea of Workers’ Welfare and Its Discontents There are several contexts that we need to take into account while analysing the local embodiment of the discourse on nutrition and workers’ efficiency in Jamshedpur. The city was a deliberately multicultural one with large communities recruited from nearby Bengal and Orissa and distant Madras Presidency, Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province apart from coolie labourers from Chotanagpur that

8 Nutrition 9 Bihar

Notes, Madras, 1948. and Orissa Famine Code. Patna: 1930.

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was the larger administrative unit that Jamshedpur was part of.10 In British colonial ethnographic/administrative representations Chotanagpur and the immediate vicinity, Singhbhum were known as non-Hindu tribal areas rich in mineral resources and fuel. Cooking routines and food culture must have been visible markers of cultural difference even if there are few archival traces to demonstrate this. The most prominent examples are from the last years of the period discussed here: in the 1940s, TISCO provided the Health and Development Survey with important details about what eating meant in the works. According to the answers, that management prepared for the uniform questionnaire there were two canteens in 1943 that provided food to Hindu vegetarians, non-vegetarians and Muslims separately.11 In 1944, a memorandum about amenities provided to workers mentioned eight restaurants within the works. This means that a fourth community acquired the right to have separate menu. Therefore, the space where lunch and dinner hours were spent re-enacted the communal logic of the day hence reinforced the culture of communal separation. It was not only the case within the factory area. A document produced by town administration knows of 24 eating places in May 1940. These were characterized as Bengali, Punjabi and Muslim. The document, however, is mainly concerned with the needs of the middle-class visitor “who is not properly catered for”.12 In 2015, journalist Anurag Mallick report for Outlook India found four food shops that were started before 1947.13 According to this account, Bhola Ram Gautam, a person from Vrindavan set up his sweet shop all the way back in 1909. L. N. Krishna Iyer’s dosa and idli hotel dates to 1935. Remarkably, and paradoxically most longlasting ventures came about during World War 2, just before the famine. These include the Bauwaji tea stall, a Bengali restaurant and Chopstick, an Anglo-Indian restaurant. Notably, there is no mention of tribal food culture here. The settlement operations of the early twentieth century, the Chotanagpur Tenency Act, and its implementation is Singhbhum meant that, due to reserved and protected areas, forest food resources became much more limited and rice gained more importance in the diet of tribal communities. This shift made the local food economy more vulnerable to weather anomalies and more dependent on food trade.14 Therefore, in terms of food culture, the gap between tribals that became coolies and workers from mainstream Hindu or Muslim communities must have become narrower compared how things would have looked like around the turn of the century. The archival document referred to above shows that vegetarianism was one of the key aspects and dividing lines. In his study of the relationship between nationalism and local market structures of Bihar, Anand Yang pointed to bazaars of the 1920s and 1930s as places where solid institutions of power were most visible. At the same time, marketplaces emerged as major sites 10 For detailed arguments on relationship between diversity of identities and large-scale industry see Sanchez (2016). 11 Tata Steel Archives Box no. 315 File no. 179 part II n. 230. 12 Tata Steel Archive Box no. 312 File no. 174 Part I n. 15–16. 13 Anurag Mallick: When you are in Steel City, also known as Jampot, be ready to be bowled over by food culture and quirky lingo, www.outlookindia.com, 7 April 2015. 14 For details on the impact of settlement on the food economy see Das Gupta (2011).

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of confrontation.15 Market places were as much about politics and governmentality as about economic rationality. In October 1940, “Hindu vegetarians” opposed plans about the establishment of a new mutton and fish market claiming that the area is mainly Hindu and the market would give rise to violence and conflict between Muslims and Hindus. The reply signed by the General Manager partially accepted the application and withdrew the plan about fish market but insisted on having the beef market since in his opinion Daktidih was indeed “predominantly Mahommedan”.16 There is no direct archival trace for assessing how TISCO management and the government officials, whom we will hear in this section, saw the issue of meat eating. In fact, we do know that they did not discuss the issue as they argued over eating arrangements of workers. As we have seen in the section above, although the encounter between European travellers and colonial actors and food culture in India was a major source of the discourse vegetarianism in the Global North, an emerging obsession with efficiency and nutritionism overshadowed this in the minds of European actors in the early decades of the twentieth century. That is why the issue of meat eating went without saying in the debate below. Apparently, neither Gandhi’s politics nor Hindu–Muslim tension penetrated deep enough to politicize the issue of vegetarianism in the minds of decision makers as of the early 1920s in Jamshedpur. TISCO’s welfare policies constitute another context for looking into the relationship between industrial work and food. Since the 1990s, research on the history of Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO) has revealed that entrepreneurial success and innovations of the managers of the House of Tata conglomerate did not produce admirable social relations and quality of life for workers in Jamshedpur and in mining towns linked to TISCO.17 In his recent monographic study, Chikayoshi Nomura attempted to close the gap between histories of business and a history of labor conflict, oppression and deprivation on the ground. He explained the gap by pointing out the failure of the company to set up a functioning recruitment system that would have ensured smooth organizational relations. Moreover, Nomura came to the conclusion that management was not aware of the changes in price and wage patterns of the region throughout the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, thus conflict recurred for largely similar reasons in these decades (Nomura 2018). As for this latter point, Nomura may be right regarding the situation in the late 1920 and mid-1930s; however, at the start of operation, there was a relative wealth of data regarding living conditions, costs and market conditions. Indeed, the management launched several initiatives to produce such data. Among contemporaries reporting on welfare in Jamshedpur, it was mainly Harold Mann who took the issue of food seriously. In one of the final chapters of his report, he sketched a budget survey in which he gave data for what he saw as typical Uttar Pradesh Hindu, Bengali, Aboriginal and Muslim working men. He only included food items and fuel in his calculations. Instead of talking of families, he expressed the need of women and 15 For

details on the impact of settlement on the food economy see Das Gupta (2011). Steel Archive Box no. 311. File no. 172 part II. n. 166. 17 See for example Pati (2016), Pandey (2019). 16 Tata

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children as function of men. He counted women’s dietary needs as four-fifths of that of men. Mann concluded that salaries were insufficient for the maintenance of the families of aboriginal coolies unless the price of rice and dal become regulated and subsidized in the markets of the industrial settlement. The necessity of canteens was an issue that welfare reports about Jamshedpur discussed. In 1918, the London Welfare Committee gave recommendations about welfare work at Sakchi that would be rebranded as Jamshedpur in 1919. The group consisted of Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Professors Edward J. Urwick and L. T. Hobhouse, Captain E. G. Culpin and Prabhashankar Pattani. However, it was one of the managers of TISCO, B. J. Padshah who set the agenda. It contained several items related to food: diaries, fisheries, vegetable gardens and tea shops were included among welfare work out of the works, while “Meals during work hours and recreation arrangements” were listed among tasks for welfare work within the works. Yet, references to food were few in the report. Speaking of fatigue Urwick noted that an increase of energy is obtained when supplying workmen on heavy work with oatmeal water or barley water at frequent intervals. In some firms cocoa is taken round on trolleys in the middle of the morning for the benefit of the women employees. Probably some such provision of a suitable kind might be discovered in India. The provision of food of the right kind during the dinner hour belongs to the subject of canteens.18

B. J. Padshah was in favor of setting up “places of eating in comfort at the Works for all grades of men so as to prevent the necessity of walk in the hot Sun during the interval given”.19 In 1921, TISCO management invited Gladys Mary Broughton, the advisor to the Government of India on women and child welfare, to report on ways to improve welfare work at Jamshedpur. She was born to an English family in India in 1883 and was a barrister by training. In 1924, she published a book; thus, she was one of the first authors to publish an academic work on Indian labour (Broughton 1924). Later, she would become member of the Order of the British Empire. As a government employee, she worked on the report under the supervision of Atul Chandra Chatterjee. Chatterjee was an ICS Officer with two decades of experience in the United Provinces. By the 1920s, Chatterjee was an established labour expert and diplomat. He represented India at the International Labor Conference of 1919 and 1921 that were milestones for international regulation of labour conditions. (Chatterjee and Broughton were not simply colleagues. By the time Chatterjee was appointed High Commissioner to Britain in 1924, they were a married couple). In her report on TISCO, Broughton’s report pointed out that on most areas of welfare there are some activities, but she urged intensification and extension of efforts regarding accident prevention, medical care including ambulance room within the works, a larger hospital outside and women doctors. She also stressed that there is too little space between huts of unskilled labourers, and that these had no sanitary arrangements. Many of these problems pointed to the paradox in the structure of governance, i.e. a company overtook municipal tasks. Broughton also argued that “The provision of 18 Tata 19 See

Steel Archive Box no. 554 Padshah to A.J. Bilamoria 25 March 1919. Footnote 18.

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satisfactory arrangements for the taking of meals contributes very considerably to the health and well-being of the employees. The erection of canteens has been sanctioned but is ‘kept pending due to urgent present needs of bungalow construction’”. In the copy of the report at Tata Steel Archives, Atul Chandra Chatterjee’s comments are also visible. He generally agreed to the points, but he remarked at some sections that “I doubt whether this is possible in India”.20 The tone of this comment foreshadows the content of the responses that the report provoked from members of the TISCO management.21 Although Thomas Holland, former president of the Indian Munitions Board, recommended the report, T. W. Tutwiler general manager effectively rejected all ten recommendations. He did so on the ground that Broughton misunderstood the nature of the labour force at Jamshedpur. He stated that “We have a very much larger variety of classes employed in the Works than those enumerated by Miss Broughton”. Related to food provision, he stated that “…so far no great demand has been made for such canteens. The habits of the Indian worker are entirely different from those of western countries…” Then, he emphasized that the nature of coolie labour renders new institutions that Broughton recommended impracticable and useless. “The Cooly labor is at all times of a floating nature and so, for the that matter is all Indian labor, but a cooly comes when he likes and goes when he likes. The maintenance of a record of each cooly employed would be not only useless, but impracticable”. In contrast, he saw records about skilled labour necessary. In Tutwiler’s opinion, Broughton’s suggestions about Women Inspectors lacked the necessary knowledge about the place of female employees within the work process since “Our female cooly labour is distributed over a very large area of the Plant”.22 The gap between the importance that Broughton and Tutwiler attributed to classification of Indian labour is not as wide as Tutwiler’s response suggests. Broughton started her report by asserting that in line with the trend and colonial classification Sikhs, Pathans and Punjabi Muslims do skilled manual work that requires physical fitness, Bengalis and Tamils are in the offices while Santals do unskilled work. However, she wished to combine this “social fact” with the scientific approach to industrial welfare that would lead to general improvement.23 In her paper on “The Scope of Welfare, its contribution and scientific value”, Broughton highlighted that in India “Scientific stress does not yet appear to have been laid on the fact that its utility…is considerably increased when the data so obtained are subjected to scientific analysis”. She propagated both the introduction of motion studies in order to lessen fatigue and increase efficiency and aptitude testing for selection. She saw the latter desirable because of “…the marked differences between 20 Tata

Steel Archive Welfare Box no. 512 The Scope of Welfare, its contribution and scientific value. 21 Portrait of Lady Gladys Mary Chatterjee (née Broughton) on whole plate glass negative. 21 June, 1927, Bassano and Vandyk Studios. https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw74908/ Lady-Gladys-Mary-Chatterjee-ne-Broughton?LinkID=mp65938&role=sit&rNo=4. 22 Tata Steel Archive Box no. 554 Tutwiler to A.C Chatterjee 1–2 June 1921. 23 The landing page of the Digital Canteen Management System of Tata Steel, https://webapp02.tat asteel.com.in/canteen/.

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the aptitudes of different castes and races” that need to be scientifically specified since “…a rough and ready idea that certain classes of labor are the most suitable may be very well for small factories, but it is far from economic for a really large industrial undertaking”.24 The context of Broughton’s report is a complex racial and gendered space, where the white Tutwiler judged her incompetent. Moreover, her supervisor who commented on the text was an (Indian) male in high-ranking government position, and a person she was to marry. In other words, the report had complex politics in the background: gender at work, and, possibly, the internal logic of romantic relationships. Yet, if we ask the question why Tutwiler rejected welfare-oriented recommendations in such a manner, the answer is simple: the recommendations targeted workers who coolies in the General Manager’s eyes were. What might have been the references for Tutwiler as he formulated his idea about who coolies are? There is no synthesis of coolie labour from a global history perspective; however, as the result of the extensive research during the last decades, a number of aspects have become clear regarding this labour regime in various regions across the globe. In his recent work on seamen as labour force, Gopalan Balachandran made a serious attempt to define the term. First, he stated that it was “an altogether modern, distinctly non-western category of general purpose industrial laborer” (Balachandran 2012, p. 28). Later in his book, he added that “The ‘coolie’ was a quintessential mobile worker, believed to be stable neither with respect to location nor employment…The assertion that ‘coolies’ had no claim to class, nation, or any other form of modern selfhood was also made with reference to Chinese…” (Balachandran 2012, pp. 248–249). In his study of the context of a colonial report that exposed miserable human conditions, Jan Breman, a leading expert on Asian labour condition, pointed out that the two determining factors of coolie labour were its forced nature and numerous unfreedoms and that “The relationship of superior boss and inferior coolie was based on racist ideology which permeated colonial society”.25 Moon-Ho-Jung made a poststructural analysis of the coolie phenomenon in American plantations. In his view, “Coolies were never a people or a legal category. Rather, coolies were a conglomeration of racial imaginings that emerged worldwide in the era of slave emancipation, a product of the imaginers rather than the imagined…their evolving definitions…rendered coolies pivotal in the reconstruction of racial and national boundaries and hierarchies in the age of emancipation” (Jung 2006, p. 5). Kaushik Ghosh argued that in the colonial imagination Chota Nagpur produced ideal coolies that withstand all hardships, adopt to all situation, food and climate and do all kinds of plantation work replacing slaves. Ghosh argues that Chotanagpur mine owners disliked adivasis of Chotanagpur because it was difficult to establish complete control over them if they had their resources in nearby villages. In Ghosh’s argument, the essence of coolie labour system was control (Ghosh 1999, pp. 8–48). The question of tribal origins was an important constituent of coolieness. Verrier Elwin made steps towards closing the gap between the craft of indigenous people and market conditions of British India. 24 See

Footnote 20. (1989). See Preface.

25 Breman

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In the Agaria, he summarized his research on tribes involved in traditional methods of iron smelting. In the chapter that describes the method of smelting, he defined coolies as the worker whom the tribal family employs when family members are not available for the smelting job. Coolies might appear among indigenous people; it was their status as unskilled worker doing “menial” tasks that identified them. In the chapter on industry that Francis Bradley-Birt added to his Chotanagpur. A Little-Known Province of the Empire in 1910, the author implicitly suggested that when he talks of coolie he often, if not mostly, means women. In the text, he tells that “The coolies always work in gangs, often the whole family, men, women, and children…” but one of his photos in the chapter show three women on the way to Assam. Bradley-Birt emphasized the impact of modern work rhythm on primitive sense of time with a reference to family level gender relations: “Haste is foreign to a native’s composition—‘no one runs unless he has a daughter to dispose of,’ says the Eastern proverb—but here there is continual movement everywhere, and relays of coolies carry on the work without a pause, urged to the utmost by the knowledge that their pay depends upon results” (Bradley-Birt 1910, p. 191). Broughton’s assertion that “Scientific stress does not yet appear to have been laid on the fact that its utility…is considerably increased when the data so obtained are subjected to scientific analysis” calls attention to the fact that besides ideas about welfare, there was another brand of thinking that had a major influence on the way management of industrial enterprises related to workers in the first half of the twentieth century: scientific management. Talking of the history of the metaphor of the body as motor Anson Rabinbach argues that the emergence of nutritional science overlapped with the age of scientific management that redefined the human body as a site of convergence turning energy into product (Rabinbach 1998, pp. 29–44). In 1932, Gilbert J. Fowler, a biochemist we had experience from Jamshedpur, put equation in a concise form: “…for every intake of food there is a definite output of energy, either in the form of physical or mental work or of heat”.26 As Nomura pointed out, scientific labour management was not among the strengths of TISCO (Nomura 2018, p. 249). In terms of food provisions, there is hardly anything to write about in this regard. In July 1938, surveyors working for the diet and nutrition survey sanctioned by the Government of Bihar found that those workers in Jamshedpur who receive salaries cannot afford a nutritionally balanced diet.27 On the surface, TISCO management grew increasingly conscious about nutrition. In 1943, an article in the newsletter of Rotarians mentioned JRD Tata’s plan to nutrition research unit at Jamshedpur; in 1944, the management reported to the Health Advisory Committee that it was planning to appoint a nutrition expert who would be in consultation with

26 Fowler

(1932): 26. In the article Fowler talked about the Energy-Nitrogen, the ENR, as a virtual currency that could replace gold as standard for currency. 27 Indian Council of Medical Research (1951).

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the Coonoor laboratories.28 However, this plan did not materialize. All that happened is that a temporary nutrition committee held a couple of meetings in 1946.29 Nutrition discourse overshadowed the issue of the controversy between vegetarianism and non-vegetarianism—or it remained understated. The relationship between health and strength—a potentially politicized issued due to Gandhi’s politics.

Consequences During World War II In Jamshedpur, just as in India as a whole, food prices were causes of tension throughout the war years. Attempts to tackle the food crisis of 1942–43 shed light on the way late colonial government perceived citizens. Contemporary studies assessing wartime food policies agreed that the immediate impact of the outbreak of the Second World War was the rise of price levels. The Government of India reacted fairly quickly and delegated powers to provincial governments to fix maximum prices 8 September 1939 (Parvardhan 1949, p. 1). The general policy was to take the price level of 1 September 1939 as base level and allow a 10–20% rise of food prices. Price control was suspended at the end of May 1940, and this stability lasted until Japan’s entry to the war. In December 1941, India’s position in the war altered drastically. The threat of Japanese invasion indirectly caused a serious food crisis throughout 1942 and 1943. The situation was grave in many districts of Bombay, Madras and Travancore, not only in Bengal. The Government reacted by setting up a separate Food Department; however, policies followed a trial and error pattern in 1942. It was the conviction of governments that food shortage is caused by inadequate mobilization of market forces since there is a large potential in production. Government procurement started in December 1942, but 1943 also witnessed the introduction and subsequent withdrawal of the free trade policy (Knight 1954, pp. 167–200). Both Henry Knight and V. S. Parvardhan celebrated rationing as the optimum policy solution that eventually pulled India out of famine by 1944.30 The answer to the question why provincial governments did not introduce rationing at the time when food crisis became grave lies in realizing that during the time of shortage colonial government saw hungry masses instead of citizens that mattered. Besides, government did not trust Indian market actors. Reflecting the strong influence of Wallace Aykroyd, the report of the Bengal Famine Inquire Commission stated that famines may be avoided if peasants have access to better diet. As we have seen, Aykroyd’s agenda at the Coonoor 28 Tata

Steel Archive Box no. 313 File no 176. part 1 n. 147. Steel Archive Box no. 512 Note attached to Survey of the Maternity and Child Welfare Services. 30 In India, Bombay city was the first to introduce rationing in May 1943 and Calcutta followed only in January 1944. The scheme gradually extended to a large number of cities and overall to 60 million people. Rationing was an essentially urban measure and in tune with the spirit of the war effort the schemes gave preference to industrial work: workers received 50% extra rations above the prescribed amounts. 29 Tata

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Nutrition laboratories was a voice of genuine commitment to colonial development (Clarke 2007, pp. 453–480). His views, however, did not diffuse sufficiently. What was the situation at Jamshedpur in this regard? As the price indices of the 1920s and the testimony of the deputy commissioner in 1930 show, Jamshedpur was expensive for food.31 Taking the pre-war level as base the cost of living index stayed at 118 in 1940, hiked from 118 to 145 in 1941 and reached 192 by June 1942. The management of TISCO introduced a scheme of dearness allowance in August 1940 that was initially minimum Rs. 2.8, minimum Rs. 4 in October 1941 and minimum Rs. 9 in October 1942 for those earning less than Rs. 125. Apart from this, there was an Emergency Bonus that meant an extra Rs. 5 for the lower income groups and up to Rs. 50 for the higher ones.32 Regarding rationing, official records are mainly concerned with the limitations posed on petrol supply, but they let us know that food rations were distributed through co-operative shops throughout Jamshedpur.33 Despite considerable archival silence about wartime food shortage, in June 1943, a large workers meeting sent a list of claims to the management that reveals that there was indeed a crisis. They talk of “extreme gravity of the present food position of the industrial workers” caused by “continuous and steep rise in the cost of living” and of “…shortage of supplies leading to the failure to ensure full supplies guaranteed under the Rationing Scheme…”. The document reflects that by the 1940s workers internalized the basic principles of scientific management or at least they were able and willing to use arguments based on energy and efficiency if they believed that it increased the chance of positive response from the side of the management. They declared no less than that they found it “impossible…to continue full pressure work for any length of time due to progressive loss of energy consequent on short rations…”.34 As a result, TATA Steel management and the Bombay TATA central office began communication about securing rations and eventually procured rice from Orissa.35

Conclusion In the period under study, a considerable body of literature related to nutrition and food economy emerged in India. Some of this literature joined the discussion on improving the efficiency of Indian labour; however, it was not all about responding to or receiving colonial notions. There were many ways that Indian modernity talked about food. The issue was at the juncture of developments in intellectual history that 31 Index

numbers showing the rise and fall in the cost of living in Bihar and Orissa 1927–28 and 1932–33, Superintendent Government Printing, Patna, 1928 and 1933 and Royal Commission on labor in India Report (1929), pp. 402–403. 32 Tata Steel Archives Box no. 152 File no. L87 n. 207–209. 33 Tata Steel Archives Box no. 315 File no. 179 part II n. 230. 34 Tata Steel Archives Box no. 152 File no. L87 n. 215. 35 Tata Steel Archives Box no. 152 File no. L87 n. 217.

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ranged from a turn to traditions to modernism, progress, military ethos and nationalism.36 The role of the agenda and scientists of the Coonoor Nutrition laboratories was considerable in this discourse; however, it did not dominate the entire landscape. Yet, the disaster of 1942–43 show that this discourse failed to impact colonial governmentality. The way decision makers interpreted the food economy and food practices in Eastern India prevented a timely introduction of rationing. A closer look at rationing and food policies highlight the importance of local level analysis in assessing the merits of the notion of entitlement in the debate on the causes of the famine (Mukherjee 2015; Tauger 2003; Dyson and Maharatna 1991). The history of proposals regarding food provisions at TISCO point out that management avoided welfare policy measures on the ground that the employees that proposals targeted were coolies. Fact finding initiatives of the government triggered management response, but these partially remained on paper. From the second from the 1930s, concerns about communal identities also emerged as a major concern. The history of management-level decisions regarding welfare unveil the salience of gender and implicit assumptions about labels, hierarchies and differences among humans in policy making. The paper showed that while there are many ways to imagine modernity and the way human societies may have access to enough food, notions triggering exclusions may lead to collapse in times of crisis. I stressed that the notion of “coolie worker” was one of such factors in post-World War I and pre-independence India.

References Arnold, D. (2010). British India and the “Beriberi Problem”: 1798–1942. Medical History, 54(1), 295–314. Aykroyd, W. (1937). The assessment of state of nutrition and the detection of malnutrition. The British Medical Journal, 4011(1937), 1008–1010. Balachandran, G. (2012). Globalizing labor? Delhi: Oxford University. Barona, J. L. (2008). Nutrition and health. The international context during the interwar crisis. Social History of Medicine, 1, 87–105. Bender, D. E. (2009). American abyss. Savagery and civilization in the age of industry. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. Berger, R. (2013). Between digestion and desire: Genealogies of food in nationalist North India. Modern Asian Studies, 47, 1622–1643. Berger, R. (2018). Alimentary affairs: Historicizing food in modern India. History Compass, 16(2). https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12438. Bradley-Birt, F. (1910). Chota Nagpur a little-known province of the empire. London: Smith, Elder, and Company. Breman, J. (1989). Taming the coolie beast. Plantation society and the colonial order in Southeast Asia. Oxford: Oxford University. Carpenter, K. J. (2007). The work of Wallace Aykroyd: International nutritionist and author. Journal of Nutrition, 137, 873–878.

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Chatterjee, D. N. (1947). Food and nutrition in India by an Indian dietarian. Calcutta: Selfpublished. Clarke, S. (2007). A technocratic imperial state? The colonial office and scientific research 1940– 1960. Twentieth Century British History, 4, 453–480. Collingham, E. M. (2001). Imperial bodies. The physical experience of the Raj. London: Polity. Cooper, F. (1996). Decolonization and African society: The labor question in French and British Africa. Cambridge: University of Cambridge. Das, R. K. (1930). The industrial efficiency of India. London: P.S King and Sons. Das Gupta, S. (2011). Adivasis and the Raj: Socio-economic transition of the Hos, 1820–1932. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. Dyson, T., & Maharatna, A. (1991). Excess mortality during the great Bengal famine: A re-evaluation. The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 3(28), 281–297. Field service hygienie notes India (1945). Delhi: Government of India. Fowler, G. (1932). Chemistry and currency. Current Science Association, 1, 26–28. Gadgil, D. R. (1943). Regulation of wages and other problems of industrial labor in India. Pune: Self-published. Gandhi, L. (2006). Affective communities. Anticolonial thought and the politics of friendship. Permanent Black. Gandhi, M. K. (1949). Unfired food. In Diet and diet reform (pp. 23–25). Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House. Gender and class women in Indian industry 1920–1990. Archives of Indian labor. https://www.ind ialaborarchives.org/publications/Samita%20Sen.htm. Accessed November 20, 2012. Ghosh, K. (1999). A market for aboriginality: Primitivism and race classification in the indentured labor market of colonial India. In G. Bhadra, G. Prakash, & S. J. Tharu (Eds.), Subaltern studies X writings on South Asian history and society (pp. 8–48). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Greenough, P. (2009). Asian intra-household survival logics. The Shan Te and Shui Ta options. In H. J. Cook, S. Bhattacharya, & A. Herdy (Eds.), History of the social determinants of health (pp. 27–41). Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. Indian Council of Medical Research. (1951). Results of diet surveys in India 1935–1948. New Delhi. Judson, P. M. (2016). The Habsburg empire: A new history. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Jung, M.-H. (2006). Coolies and cane: Race, labor, and sugar in the age of emancipation. Baltimore: John Hopkins University. Knight, H. (1954). Food administration in India 1939–47. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kynch, J., & Sibbons, M. (1998). Famine relief, piecework and women workers: Experiences in British India. In H. O’Neill & J. Toye (Eds.), A world without famine? New approaches to aid and development (pp. 128–157). Hampshire: Macmillan. Loveday, A. (1914). The history and economics of Indian famines. London: G. Bell. Mukerjee, R. (1938). Food planning for four hundred millions. London: Macmillan and Co Limited. Mukerjee, R. (1944). A national minimum welfare standard. The Indian Journal of Social Work. Online. https://ijsw.tiss.edu/greenstone/cgi-bin/linux/library.cgi?e=d-01000-00---off-0ijsw--001----0-10-0---0---0direct-10----4-------0-0l--11-en-50---20-about---00-3-1-00-00--4--0--0-0-1110-0utfZz-8-00&cl=CL3.9.1&d=HASH8e136b4e89826c27f2bb57&x=1. Accessed March 20, 2020. Mukherjee, J. (2015). Hungry Bengal. War, famine, riots and the end of empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pandey, R. (2019). Mining and anthropology in Indian industrialism. In M. C. Behera (Ed.), Shifting perspectives in tribal studies. From anthropological approach to interdisciplinarity and consilience (pp. 273–290). Singapore: Springer. Parvardhan, V. S. (1949). Food control in Bombay province 1939–1949. Poona: Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics. Pati, B. (2016). The rhythms of change and devastation: Colonial capitalism and the world of the socially excluded in Orissa. Social Scientist, 44(7/8), 27–51.

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Pattanayak, G. C. (1946). Planned diet for India. Allahabad: Kitabistan. Rabinbach, A. (1998). The end of the Utopias of labor metaphors of the machine in the post-Fordist era. Thesis Eleven, 53(1), 29–44. Report of the Commission of Health Survey and Development (Vol. I, pp. 207–212) (1946). Delhi: Government of India. Report on an enquiry into family budgets of industrial workers in Jamshedpur (1946). Simla: Government of India. Royal Commission on labor in India report (Vol. IV/1–2) (1929). Calcutta: HM Stationary Office. Sanchez, A. (2016). Criminal capital. Violence, corruption and class in industrial India. London: Routledge. Scrinis, G. (2013). Nutritionism. The science and politics of dietary advice. New York: Columbia University Press. Sen, A. (1981). Poverty and famines: An essay on entitlement and deprivation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sen, S. (1999). Women and labor in late Colonial India. The Bengal jute industry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sharma, M. (2012). Indigenous and western medicine in Colonial India. Delhi: Foundation. Siegel, B. R. (2018). Hungry nation. Food, famine, and the making of modern India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sidney, M. (1986). Sweetness and power. The place of sugar in modern history. London: Penguin. Slate, N. (2019). Gandhi’s search for the perfect diet: Eating with the world in mind. Seattle: Washington University Press. Stuart, T. (2006). The bloodless revolution: Radical vegetarians and the discovery of India. London: Harper Collins Publishers Ltd. Tauger, M. B. (2003). Entitlement, shortage and the 1943 Bengal famine. Journal of Peasant Studies, 31(1), 45–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/0306615031000169125 Nomura, C. (2018). The House of Tata Meets the Second Industrial Revolution: An Institutional Analysis of Tata Iron and Steel Co. in Colonial India. Singapore: Springer Nature. Broughton, G.M. (1924). Labour in Indian Industries. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hall-Matthews, D. (2005). Peasants, Famine and the State in Colonial Western India. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan

Chapter 13

Of Khaar, Pithaa and Aitaa’r Posola: Exploring the Folk Aesthetics and the Erotic in Assamese Food Rini Barman and Prerana Choudhury

Abstract This paper will discuss the inextricable bond of food and eros with folk aesthetics of the people of Assam. The oral narrative genres like folk songs, biyanaam (wedding songs), ballads, legends, animal magic tales are replete with associations of food with community being and worship (We would like to focus here on the alkaline dish made out of banana shoots, called khaar, the consumption of which has been relegated later to the popular notion of the assamese community as “khaar-khowa oxomiya” having connotations of lethargy which immediately transfers its signifier to a motif of a culture that’s lagging behind in comparision with the mainland India. It is consumed with Tenga: a sour dish, normally a curry made with various soring agents. Bihu preparation and ingenuity in the kitchen has long been a major part of Assamese culture. The traditional way of serving food is on the floor, where individual pieces of wooden stool, called Piras, are layed on for each person to sit on. In front of this seat is placed a large platter made of bell metal/steel or on a large piece of fresh cut banana leaf. Piraas hold a primary gesture of community respect and belongingness). Associated as they are with colloquial rituals both Vedic and non-Vedic, food is also emblematic of richness in both sacred and secular realms in this part of India’s North-East. Since times immemorial, in ceremonies and festivals, Bihu songs (lyrical songs celebrating the arrival of the mating season—Spring or Bohaag) bring out the artistic aspirations of the local folks and their intimate bonds with elements of food and nature. It is important to locate then, how folklore becomes factlore as its the expression of the desires and dreams of men and women. The approach to food is essentially tactile. What, after all, could be better to pick out treacherous bones of fish like hilsa and kaoi? Apart from this functional aspect, the fingers also provide an awareness of texture which becomes as important as that felt by the tongue. We will focus on the erotic as inter-twined with the elements of Assamese food most prominently in ritual-folk practices and study the forms of community worship. We will also deconstruct here, a body of Assamese folklore constituted by proverbs and idioms which dictate with humour, gender roles R. Barman (B) Assam, India P. Choudhury New Delhi, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Malhotra et al. (eds.), Food Culture Studies in India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5254-0_13

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and behaviour by explicit connotations with food as a lived experience. This will be followed by allusions from women’s poetry of Assam especially Uddipana Goswami, Nitoo Das and Nabina Das and their contemporary take on food, the erotic as situated within this folk context (Pithaa is baked rice-cakes in diverse forms made during Bihu. Aitaa, as mentioned before is Grandmother, in Assamese. Aitaar posola refers here metaphorically, to the nostalgic bond of one’s older generations who transmit stories of food and wonders to their grandchildren.).

lao kha, bengena kha, bosore bosore barhi ja maar’o xoru, baper’ou xoru, toi hobi bor goru’

This lyrical couplet sung on the first day of Bohag or Springtime Bihu of Assam could be said to amply reflect how significant and necessary the ideas of food, growth and nourishment are to life and existence in general, and within the broader realm of that which we call folk aesthetics. Sung while giving cows and buffaloes a wash, farmers and peasants wish for growth and sustenance of their cattle, recite the lines in an incantatory note that heralds the onset the bountiful in nature. Springtime, as is common across all cultures, is a celebration of life, of birth and regeneration. The importance of cattle to agricultural communities need not be mentioned; the gesture of commencing the Assamese new year as well as the festivity of Bohag Bihu by worshipping livestock and wishing for their growth and good life also expresses humility and gratitude to the forces of nature, for a good harvest in the preceding agricultural season, as well as preparing oneself to work in the next cycle with vigour that spring blesses with. The bond between food and eros is inextricable; they are both an assertion of the life instinct. In the wide corpus of rituals, both sacred and secular, Vedic and nonVedic, food forms an essential component be it in the form of feasting by members of the community or as offerings to the dead to satiate and thereby please them. Food becomes not just an indelible aspect of performing these colloquial rituals but also a metaphor of continuity and lineage; it is by commemorating any event with food that members of a community re-establish their links with each other and also re-confirm their presence and belonging to their society. In this manner, food serves as a common thread binding a cultural assimilation of people together. One of the great obstacles to thinking of food as a form of art is that we are accustomed to thinking of food as a assortment of flavours and textures that, although pleasurable, lack meaning. To delve deeper into the relation between food and folk aesthetics, one needs to look at “poetic culinaria” that could express artistic ideas in the same manner that a line of poetry is meant to communicate more than the sum of its words. While on the one hand we can associate food with the erotic in an essentially phenomenological sense, there is also an integral connection between the two “intimately interrelated human pre-occupations of food and sex”. Mark Leichty, in his essay “Carnal Economies: The Commodification of Food and Sex in Kathmandu”, argues that both food and sex are “physical, sensual and symbolic channels through and between which cultural meanings ‘naturally’ flow; both are simultaneously domains of pleasure and of the

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production and reproduction of species; and both are interfaces between the material and the imaginary, the corporeal and the social, and nature and culture” (2005, pp. 4– 5). This holds true from the basic connection between the two in that they both serve as the basic imperatives to survival of the species to the more ulterior commonalities that exist in the structure of “culinary and sexual consumption”, in the context of South Asia specifically. Hence, the extensive network of socio-cultural and religious rituals that institutionalizes and mediates the hunger drives; a taming of the corporeal body to create and maintain the social body (Liechty 2005, pp. 4–5). The culture called “food” of the common folk doesn’t employ only a single sensory modality but fuse all the senses crucial for a mundane day-to-day living. Nabina Das, a contemporary poet from Assam writing in English, touches subtly on the nostalgia that food and memory carries in the prose–poem “Come, Aitaa”, in which the current of socio-political underpinnings cannot be ignored or wished away. The conjoining of the personal and the political, the inert and the violently volatile, all combine to create a dreamscape that is at once beautiful and shocking. “Come Aitaa,” she says… “We want radishes in this year’s garden, green gourds climbing a common fence, sure, you can have some, also coriander to sprinkle on the pitika for a late afternoon meal, bhoot-jolokia that no one will eat, the army fancies it, now we know the newspapers have it all, the tea shops get their fortune told…” (Das 2012). The poet refers to the necessity of having to invent a fairy tale in order to consume food in peace at the backdrop of war and turmoil in the region. This could also be a hint towards a community denial of the horrors that a generation has faced due to the militancy and their only hopes of survival remain stories. The oral written continuum as evident from this instance, then, relates to how food links the bodies to the earth, and to other individuals who share the same meal. It is in this context that the festival of Magh Bihu must find mention. Magh Bihu or Bhogali Bihu marks the occasion of harvesting of crops. At the height of winter season in Assam in mid-January, bonfires, outdoor cooking and community feasts mark the celebration of a surplus crop; food becomes the primary focus of this Bihu which is synonymous with health and prosperity. The logic of commensality that pervades the social-cultural ethos of the country and that also finds feature in several religious and ritual events of Assam surprisingly take a setback in Magh Bihu celebration when everyone from across all social classes come together to eat, drink and make merry together as one. This form of the community’s coming together has been eulogized in many popular Bihu songs as well, a source of pride for the “Assamese identity”. In a society otherwise driven by caste, class and communal rifts, the practice of overcoming these social barriers and engaging in the ritual celebration of feasting together makes “food” a strongest connecting factor which very interestingly subverts the dictates of “purity and pollution” over other normative customs of the community. Folk aesthetics dominate the Bihu celebrations in this part of India’s North-East, in which it is the agricultural calendar and cyclical seasons that determine man’s interaction with nature and the subsequent cultural expressions. Food items like fish, pigeon and duck rule the roost with everyone hurrying to the local bazaars to lay their hands on the best possible bargain. It is customary to prepare traditional ricecakes and sweetmeats out of newly harvested rice flour, jaggery, coconut and sesame

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seeds. Meals on the day of Uruka are laid out on freshly cut banana leaves that as the common saying goes, instils in the food items its own smell and flavour. The eating experience in particular and the festival of feasting in general, then, is an accumulation of the senses and their celebration, where the corporeal, the tactile and the olfactory all assimilate to create in us both memory and identity. It is therefore important that the body be constantly well-fed, since starving would, in effect, efface daily cultural memory. One’s sense of belonging to his/her community is created not by being present in that specific event or get-together only but also by the largely sensory and sensuous experience that is gathered by one’s familiarity to his milieu. In the body is inscribed a memory of time that transcends it. Scholars have asserted how smell and taste are more deeply ingrained in our memory than the visual and aural (Loichot 2004, pp. 92–116). In the body of folklore from Assam, we also get an insight into women talking about their bodily experiences, primarily hunger, through both literal and symbolic means, thereby becoming the agencies of culinary constructions (de-constructions, rather). For example, in one particular song from the vast expanse of Goalporia/Kamatapuri/Koch Rajbanshi lokogeet (folk songs of Goalpara, in Western Assam): Maankacharer sikon sirare bondhu,/Garu baandhaar doi, Bhor pet khaya aaisen kene, Monor kotha koi bondhure, the figure of the beloved is questioning her lover on hedonistically engaging in feasting because she gets no time to talk about her love. Similarly, in a popular Bihu-geet that goes as followsLuit’or bali bogi dhoke dhoki Kacho’i konee pare lekhi Gaat’e jui jole xoriyoh bagore Dhon’ok panighate dekhi. Sage belbela’i kowai kelkelai Kaak pet’or kotha kom Ene money lage tomak oi moina Xorir’ot xumuwa’i thom (Guti 2014)

Sexuality has remained a contested domain as food traditions act as the link of the community to their history, as well as to a historical tradition of resistance. Food expressions go a long way in the representation of a subculture, as Biren Dutta pointed out in his book Folklore and Historiography (Dutta 2002). As we see in the above lyric, the presence of abundant nature imagery including that of a river-turtle laying eggs on the white sand of the shores of the Luit (the river Brahmaputra) enables the invocation of the beloved. Bihu being a seasonal festival that celebrates fertility in the spring paves the subterranean ways of referring to food and romance. Love here is also seen and read as hunger and bodily craving. Fishes occupy the predominant food item in the “edible artscape” Uruka, which are prepared in numerous ways, each variety of fish having its own unique accompaniment of vegetable, souring agents, pot-herbs (xaak) and spices. The cook occupies a special position in any culinary tradition who embodies all aspects of the sensory realm; how can we divorce the tactile experience of cutting a fish and mixing it with

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the right balance of salt and turmeric from within the broader culinary culture of consuming fish? The distinctive smell of each phase of preparing it is overlapped by the gradual and timely transformation of the raw item to the cooked one, realized by a keen assimilation of the senses and their reliance on memory and familiarity. In the poem “How to cut a Fish”, contemporary poet Nitoo Das takes on an authoritative voice that dictates the proper way of cutting a fish, a task familiar to women more than men in the domain of the kitchen (Das 2008). Hence, the emphasis that to cut it, one must sit woman-like, i.e., bent sitting on the floor, ideally. The poem narrates the process in detail, starting from how to hold the fish firmly with the hands by placing a leg on the base of the blade, and moving on to removing its scales briskly and efficiently. It not only relays a vivid picture of the fish being cut for its eventual preparation for consumption, but also heightens the tactile experience of the same. At some level, the poem can be read as making a point of connection between the raw fish at hand, secured by the fisherman (“nature”) whose touch and feel is necessary to wholly appreciate and consume the culinary delicacies that shall prize the dining area (“culture”). Or could it also draw our attention to the “victimhood” of the fish, of the “body” that is to be soon consumed despite the “resistance of the white flesh staring eye”? Because the constitution of the entire fish will have to be dismantled and wrecked, to leave no bones intact so that they “do not disturb afterwards”. The imagery and tonal contours of the voice speaking in the poem ranges from the raw to the violent; yet the violence evoked would be more of the organic sort than alluding to anything destructive. The corporeality of the two bodies—that of the fish being cut and of the one cutting it—becomes juxtaposed. The poem “Matsyagandha” begins with the projection of the self’s body as a site of smells; it is through the sensory element of the smell that the entire verse is carved, chalking out a dichotomy between the untamed body (that smells of fish) and the “civilized” space (characterized by the perfume of jasmines) to which it later comes to belong. Satyavati dwells unfettered at her parental home characterized by an unbound existence, amidst “arrowing, panting fish”—an image suggestive of sexual liberation. For Parashar, she is the coveted “other”, a “body” exoticized by its very freedom, but which will have to be bound within the institution of patriarchy if he is to marry her, ensuring her transition in terms of class, all of it assured through a drastic and claustrophobic transformation of the olfactory field. The “fake skin smell” of aroma dissociates her from her individual identity and memory of natal life, creating a disjunction between her present and former selves and the subsequent emotions of pain and loss in the figure of Satyavati. Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft in his essay “Incensed: Food Smells and Ethnic Tension” talks about how the “history of food has largely been written as the history of taste, at the expense of the other senses”, and the sense of smell—being visceral—is associated with the unfamiliar and the foreign, that which is to be tamed within the site of civilisation. An occasion that celebrates harvest and feasting, with its emphasis on cooking outdoors, shifts the somewhat trapped territory of the cook and the cooked to an open domain where smells of all items mingle and create an ambience of plenitude. Fishes, raw and cooked, pervade the essences of the festival, along with poultry, vegetables, pot-herbs, bamboo shoot, khaar and posola—each having its

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distinct and strong smell that contributes to the formation of identity nuances as much as the specificities of the aural and visual realms. To quote Wurgaft, “The smell of food…reminds us that we have always had only a fantasy of controlling the senses… But smells resurface and remind us not only of our vulnerable natures but also of living culinary traditions, to which we are tied in the body as well as at the table” (Wurgaft 2006, p. 60). In the poem “At age 11”, again by Nitoo Das, the poet narrates the onset of puberty with distaste and revulsion. The rituals surrounding puberty and a woman’s “coming of age” are observed rather strictly during which the menstruating girl is confined in a secluded corner of the house, made to sleep on the ground and keep a fast till the fourth day when she is finally given a ritual bath and then symbolically given in marriage to the banana tree. The banana tree is a symbol of fertility and abundance as it produces too many fruits at the same time. Das pits the implications of this fertility rite that is replete with sexual connotations against the moral and normative dictum of “no sex—no sex—no sex drumbeats” that are imposed upon the woman, and the stark irony of the same. Talking mockingly about her “groom”, the plantain plant to which the girl is ritually married, she says—“We never met after we wedded/or I’d have feasted on all its parts”; the act of eating and sexual consumption becomes synonymous in these lines which provide an outlet for sexual expression that is otherwise contained within a domain of patriarchal rituals. Uddipana Goswami’s subversive verses are also iconoclastic, in inspiration and function. In her poem “Mother Goddess Kamakhya”, the power of images and myths provide a verbal representation of hunger and satiation of the goddess, as understood in the conventional religious sense of the term (the archetypal destructive goddess). She says—“The mother goddess loves blood./She drinks thirstily/Goatblood, pigeon-blood, bull-blood./And once a year, she menstruates./A great event: the only time her devotees/Consider menstrual blood sacred./(You cannot worship a vagina/And expect it will not menstruate”, satirising the political bloodletting of the Assamese culture-scape through the female experience of menstruation, which is often subjected to constraints of controlling hunger and fasting, as has been mentioned already (Goswami 2010). In “Tejimola forever”, the poet makes the conscious stance of taking a gendered stance vis-à-vis the process of translation (2010). Tejimola is crushed to death by the traditional rice-grinder called dheki, by her stepmother, but as fate would have it she would be reborn in several forms thus posing a threat to authority. The dheki here is symbolic of the patriarchal tool for exercising control. She uses her ability to disguise as a transgressive voice and is captured in the lines—“… Now I live and die,/A plant, a creeper,/A vine, a flower. I live and die, Tejimola forever”. Folklore is an echo of the past but at the same time a vigorous voice of the present, so we are looking at the timelessness of such an understanding that is past and trying to relocate it with the changes and continual fragments that have survived the tussles of several class-hunger conflicts and forces of social stratification. Thus, a tale like Tejimola is not a dictated text with “interlinear” translation, but a living oral recitation delivered to a responsive audience for cultural purposes of custom and taboo, release of aggressions through fantasy,

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pedagogical explanations of the natural world and the applications of the pressures of conventional behaviour. The bond between the “word of the mouth” and food is prominent in the Grandma’s folktales by litterateur Lakshminath Bezbarua. In the tale “Owe-Kuwori” [fruit princess], Owe Kuwori is abandoned by her mother, with whom a prince falls in love but cannot marry her in her form. Here comes the character of an old beggar woman who helps him out to get united with his bride by use of a potion, made of simmering fire made of rice-husk and paste of athiya-kol (a heavily seeded variety of banana). It has instances of how “ow” is won by the prince who controls his hunger for the fruit, suggesting an implicit morale: that starvation, or control of temptation can lead to well-being (here, conjugal union). This potion thus becomes a “folk-potion” as has often been stated, which has an ethnopoetic role in the tale. Ethnopoetics studies creative expression of non-Western and marginal cultures through translation, performance and folklore. It offers valuable insights into such folkloristic issues as orality, literacy, translation, cultural change and the relation of language and worldview. While an abundance of harvest calls for celebration with feasts and merry-making, the occasion of Kati Bihu (observed in the month of November) is an austere one, a plea to god to bless us with a good harvest. One worships the sacred Tuloxi plant (sacred basil) that is emblematic of piety and veneration, a ubiquitous presence in every rural household of Assam; and earthen lamps are lit. A mixture of gram, moong, coconut, grated gin and salt, along with banana and other fruits, are first offered to the deity and then eaten after performing simple prayers. It is through the act of eating the Proxaad that one receives the blessings of the lord, and through its consumption, there is hope achieving what is wished for. The idea of receiving fulfilment and blessings through sensory practices like this that requires one to be in contact with the blessed object (or food, in this case) reflects folk and animistic beliefs that, within a paradigm of superiorising the intellect, may be labelled as “naïve sensualism” (Tokarska-Bakir 2000, pp. 69). The phrase “khaar-khua Axomiya”, literally meaning “the khaar-consuming Assamese community” could be symptomatic of such a derogatory attitude that the region faces along with the entire North-East from mainland India. An alkaline mindset alongwith a dose of humid climate are what create the proverbial “land of the laahe-laahe”. What better examples than food items to metaphorically allude to a people’s characteristic features? If khaar constitutes one end of Assamese identity, the other end could be summed up by posola and murighonto; each of the two dishes prepared by remnants left after the primarily eatable is done with and digested. Peculiarity about the Assamese eating scene is the unashamed accumulation of leftovers- vegetable stalks, fish bones, fish heads, meat and chicken bones—all meticulously chewed until not a drop of juice is left in it. This is perhaps also symbolic of the way stories and storytellers of food perpetuate their tales through little residual remnants; picking up on the trails, building up on them through a fall back on tradition and memory, hearkening on the dead-and-gone yet recreating them through the body and being of the storyteller.

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References Das, N. (2008). Boki. Chicago: Virtual Artists Collective. Das, N. (2012). Blue Vessel and other poems. Denmark: Éditions du Zaporogue. Dutta, B. (2002). Affinities between folklore and historiography. Chennai: National Folklore and Support Centre. Goswami, U. (2010). We called the river red: Poetry from a violent homeland. New Delhi: Authors Press. Guti, T. (2014, July). Noi Hukan Balit Boge Nu Dhoke Dhoki. Moran Bihu Song/ Diganta Gohain. YouTube Video, 5, 35. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYdqzdf__Io Liechty, M. (2005). Carnal economies: The commodification of food and sex in Kathmandu. Cultural Anthropology, 20, 1–38. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3651575. Accessed 24 march 2013 Loichot, V. (2004). Edwidge Danticat’s kitchen history. Meridians, 5(1), 92–116. Retrieved December 9, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40338650. Tokarska-Bakir, J. (2000). Naive sensualism, docta ignorantia. Tibetan liberation through the senses. Numen, 47(1), 69–112. https://doi.org/10.1163/156852700511432. Wurgaft, B. A. (2006). Incensed food smells and ethnic tension. Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, 6, 57–60. http://ccdn371.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/wurgaft.pdf.

Chapter 14

Hunger Games: Politics of the Ema Market, the Kitchen and Protest in Manipur Samurailatpam Tarun Sharma and Sumitra Thoidingjam

Abstract This paper looks at the politics of food and abstinence as a mode of resistance in Manipur. Irom Sharmila from Manipur who went on a “fast unto death” from 2000 to 2016 as a protest against the Government of India demanding the repeal of the Arms Forces Special Powers Act 1958 (AFSPA) will be taken up as a case study. The paper will trace the lineage of similar political struggles using similar tropes of abstinence from food/hunger strikes. Another trajectory of the paper will exemplify food as a viewpoint and look at how there has always been a precarious relationship between food and women in Manipur. The widely popular and unique Ema Keithel or Mother’s Market which is run only by women has always been a source of pride for the state, as the “site of resistance” where women rose to rebellion against the British in the two women’s wars. This can be contrasted with the woman within the kitchen in a regular Manipuri household where she is confined to the role of the cook. She has to maintain a safe distance from the male members of the family as food touched/eaten by a woman is called “mangba” or impure (literal translation.)

Food is the most basic form of sustenance for all living beings. In the case of us humans, the mode of eating food has evolved from the primitive mode of hunting and gathering to whole new mode of consumption utilizing various methods of agriculture. In the theorization of Levi Strauss, it is “cooking” of “raw” food that moves man from “nature” to human “culture”. Food has evolved from a mere form of sustenance to a whole new way of integration, in the form of food and culture, traditions, popular culture and even has made foray into consumerism, globalization and business as well. Therefore, food indexes and is rather a meeting point of various theoretical and cultural concerns. However, our intervention into this subject is not only to look at food as symbols of identity, home and heritage but also to problematize S. T. Sharma Centre for Northeast Studies and Policy Research, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India e-mail: [email protected] S. Thoidingjam (B) Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Malhotra et al. (eds.), Food Culture Studies in India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5254-0_14

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it and examine its relationship with women and protest movements in Manipur. The paper shall discuss three different trajectories of food and women. 1. Politics of the Ema Keithel or “Mother’s Market” and the bread-winner of the family 2. Abstinence as a mode of resistance in Manipur taking recourse to Irom Sharmila, who was on a “fast unto death” from 2000 till 2016 as a protest against the Government of India demanding the repeal of the AFSPA. 3. Explore the precarious relationship between food and women in a traditional construct of the kitchen.

Ema Keithel and the Women’s War Ema Keithel, which can be literally translated as Mother’s Market is a traditional market in the heart of Imphal city. The most important aspect of this market is that it is run only by women. Over the years, there are some traders from other parts of India who have shops/stalls around the Ema Keithel, but they would not dare infringe on the main stalls. The market which is over three hundred years old is said to be the largest indigenous women-run market in the world. The market is divided into two sections. One section caters to food—vegetables, fish—which is the staple food of Manipur, fruits, flowers, etc. The other section caters to consumer goods like clothes, trinkets, etc. The various stalls in the market are inherited and are not available easily. Mothers pass it down to married daughters. One would seldom see an unmarried woman attending to the stalls. The widely popular Mother’s Market has become a site of resistance for the Manipuri women. This unique market which can be seen as of Manipur symbol of women’s empowerment in the state. It is here that women of Manipur congregate; it is here that the protests against injustices germinate and take shape. It is an emblem of resistance and protests in Manipur. Most significantly the Ema market is the site of the two women’s war or Nupi Lan where the women of Manipur defeated the mighty British. The first women’s war in 1904 was a revolt against the British administration’s diktat enforcing forced labour on Manipuri men. The second war in 1939 started in the Ema market as a protest against the exportation of rice from Manipur while the people of the state were forced into starvation. The women traders from the Ema market demanded the British political agent, C. Gimson, to ban rice exports from the state. The authorities quite predictably ignored the demand. On 11th December 1939, a group of women went to meet the T. A. Sharpe, the President of the Manipur State Durbar. He assured the women that he would issue a ban the next day. It, however, did not happen. T. A. Sharpe used a convenient excuse that the King’s (who was in Bengal) permission is required to issue such a ban. More than thousand women gathered in the markets the next day—12th December 1939—and intercepted paddy carts on its way to godowns owned by the merchants. Some of women protesting on the street even lay down on the road to block trucks/lorries on the road while some others would pull down bags of rice from the lorries. The women forced Sharpe to send a

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telegram to the Maharaja. The number of protesting women kept increasing, and by evening the number rose to about five thousand. Three women Chaobiton, Ibemhal and Tongou stationed themselves inside the telegraph office, while thousands waited outside, creating a kind of impenetrable human shield around. Sharpe unleashed the 4th Assam Rifles to disperse the women. However, they refused to budge. The women, attacked by the sepoys with guns, bayonets and batons, fought back with whatever they could lay their hands on. Many women sustained injuries and twenty one of them were severely injured. The next day the vendors of Khwairamband bazaar called a strike protesting against the violence. The political agent gave in and announced that he had received a telegram from the Maharaja, imposing immediate ban. It is pertinent to note here that the Meira Paibis1 trace their genesis to the two women’s war and rightly so. The market here functions as a mode of space wherein the women are in control. It provides these women a different role which is not bound by any affiliation to a male-centric or male-oriented organization/system. From its humble beginnings, the market has been a source of pride for women of the state and as a symbol of their empowerment. Countless number of women enjoy the privilege of running their own independent business. The women traders are economically independent, and in most cases the bread-winner of the family whereby, there is a role reversal between men and women in Manipur. This is the primary reason why these women are always at the forefront; condemning and protesting against injustices both historically and in contemporary times.

Hunger Strike to Live Irom Sharmila started her fast to repeal Arms Forces Special Powers Act, 1958 (AFSPA) after the massacre of ten civilians at a bus stop in Malom, Manipur in November 2000. Under the provisions of the Act, a non-commissioned officer can shoot to kill, search, damage property, use force, arrest people on the mere suspicion that someone has committed or was about to commit a cognizable offense. The Act further prohibits and legal proceedings against army personnel without the sanction of the central government. The incident has been called the “Malom Massacre”, and a memorial stands in Malom today as a constant reminder of the atrocity committed by the Indian Army. The victims were waiting for a bus when they were gunned down by the military personnel of the 8th Assam Rifles (AR). The army personnel went on a rampage following a bomb attack by insurgents on an AR convoy at Malom Makha Leikai which killed two army personnel. Irom Sharmila was arrested on charges of attempt to commit suicide under IPC 309 on 6th November 2000. On 21st November 2000, force feeding through a tube attached to her nose was started. As per provisions of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), she was released after every 365 days, produced in 1 The mothers of Manipur are called the “Meira Paibis”, loosely translated into the English language

as the “Torch-Bearers”.

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court and re-arrested. She was not allowed any visitors and permission to meet her needs special sanctions from the government and approval from DG prisons. She also had to routinely appear in court every 14 days after which she was remanded to custody. The cycle went on. She faced various charges and trials, one of them were in the Patiala House court in Delhi where she was charged under IPC 309 (attempt to commit suicide) for fasting at Jantar Mantar in 2006. It is ironic that the Government of India (GOI) chose to persecute her when the Supreme court had already declared that, “…hunger strike is a form of protest which has been accepted, both historically and legally in our constitutional jurisprudence” during the Ram Lila Maidan corruption protest. The pertinent question that one cannot help but raise here is why did the GOI insist on trying Sharmila? How does one reconcile this Janus faced reality in the land of Mahatma Gandhi and non-violence? In her trail at the Patiala House, Sharmila said I know you can kill me for you, the Indian State, have superstitiously claimed the right to take life in the form of a violent politics that masquerades itself as a ‘law’; but you have an obligation and duty to protect and preserve life as per your own admission, constitutionally or otherwise. Therefore, my humble submission is as simple as this: I know you can kill me but can you save my life? And I wonder whether you are suffering from a schizoid paranoia and thereby feel so insecure that you have lost the power to perform your responsibility and duty to protect and preserve (Right to) life; and that you can therefore only claim the right to kill and engage in rape and murder under a ‘legal fiction’ to counter your sense of impotency as a fragile national self that wears a garb of modern democracy? However, I must admit that unlike you, I, as an individual citizen, have both the power to take my life as well as to live insofar as the decisions shall be mine; so, do deal with me and in the process see what you’ve got or what you are and what you want to be?2

Irom Sharmila eloquently refuted the crime of attempt to commit suicide she was charged with and pointed out the absurdity of the charge against her. During her interviews, she talked about her favourite Manipuri dish “chagem pomba” and sweets, which strikes home the fact that she wanted to live and let live. But she had to fast to secure the life that the people desire. Sharman Apt Russell in her book Hunger, warns that a hunger strike needs the oxygen of a publicity but interest will wane if the cause at stake does not withstand public scrutiny (2005). But Irom Shamila has broken all stereotypes. Her protest went unnoticed and unheard of for years. It is true grit that kept her going and not publicity. She received some publicity when she landed in Delhi on 3rd October 2006 and protested at Jantar Mantar. But she was promptly arrested and “deported” to Manipur, back to solitary confinement. And then, she was forgotten for years. Her struggle challenges the boundaries of hunger strike as a mode of political protest in the twentieth century. There has been many hunger strikers. Father of our nation Mahatma Gandhi, Anna Hazare, Thomas Ashe, Tianenmen students, actress Mia Farrow, the Irish hunger strikers to name some famous people. However, Irom Sharmila’s struggle will remain unparalleled, “We need a movement which has a more collective ethos to persuade the government. Our democratic leaders should see that what they have decided to do is wrong. Army should be controlled by the 2 Irom

Shamila, Patiala House trail, 4th March 2013.

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government.” (“Nothing will change my stand against AFSPA: Irom Sharmila” 2013, para 6). Irom Sharmila finally ended her fast on 9th August 2016. She on her own tasted a finger dipped in honey. After her decision to end the fast, she decided to enter politics which was met with wide criticism across the state. She made the decision based on the notion of switching her methods of the aim to remove AFSPA. She, however, received a mere 90 votes from the Khangabok constituency where she went up against the then Chief Minister Okram Ibobi. After the elections, Irom Sharmila Chanu married her British partner Desmond Anthony Bellarnine Coutinho in Kodaikanal on Thursday, 17th August 2017. She gave birth to two twin daughters in Karnataka in Bengaluru, named Nix Shakhi and Autumn Tara on Sunday, 12th May 2019. Since then, we have not heard much about Sharmila and the kind of life she must be living, having spent a major chunk of it in the public eye. It is safe to say that a person of her stature has earned a much quieter and simpler life. But what does a “simpler and quieter” life mean exactly? Is it devoid of the politics of food and hunger? These are questions that we will be looking into in the next section.

Women’s Role in the Kitchen Politics In stark contrast to the empowered women in the public space, we come to the role that they play in the traditional construct of the kitchen. Most Manipuri households even today follow a very traditional mode of maintaining the kitchen on the lines of Hindu brahmanical structures. The kitchen is considered to be a holy place, and it is not an open space. It becomes a “prison cell” for the woman of the family where every action is dictated by an illogical notion of the “scared” and the “profane”. The same kitchen might have new and modern technological appliances but that hardly changes the dynamic of the oppression. A woman can only enter the kitchen after they “purify” themselves, i.e., they have bathed and wore clean clothes. Until a few decades ago, women were only allowed to wear a set of muga or rough silk garments—a sarong and a scarf—that was kept in the kitchen. They were not allowed to wear slippers or warm clothing even in freezing winter. Once the cooking in done and the garments changed, the woman revert back to being “impure”. The role of most women in this construct of the traditional form of kitchen has further rules that they have to adhere to. It is then of no surprise that the women are without question expected to cook all the meals for the family. Once in the space of the kitchen, they maintain a stiff distance from the male members of the family. After having cooked the meal and served the family, the dining space also remains separate. There is no exact allotted space for dining; however, the distance between the women remain at a stiff distance. And while in the process of dining, again the distance between the women and other members is maintained. Here, it is interesting to note that a male member while in the process of eating can be served food by the women (if she is still in her cook mode and kitchen garments). The men can pass food to women taking utmost care to avoid any physical contact. But interestingly,

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any item/content of food from the women’s plate cannot be transferred to the male’s plate. This imaginary boundary remains even to this day and women still follow and adhere these different rules. Another important aspect to the politics of the kitchen and women also focuses on the monthly cycle and how it is perceived. The women for this short period of time are considered “impure” and cannot enter the space of the kitchen nor do they cook for six days. Women have to undergo two process of purifying “baths” on the 3rd and the 6th day. The woman becomes an untouchable. They are forbidden from touching closets where clean clothes are kept or a man’s bed. However, they are able to “help” in the preparation of the meal. This precarious role of women in the kitchen politics remain the same in all the classes and sections of society who follow the Vaishnavite tradition of Hinduism, mainly followed by the Meiteis. Hired help or hired cooks for the elite classes mostly tend to be women and are not excluded in playing the same role as the women of the same family or as with any women.

Conclusion The earlier two relationship of women and food remain in a position which is in binary opposition to the role that they play in the kitchen. With the Ema market, the women are free of any subversions and restrictions. They enjoy the freedom, independence and empowerment which can be found in the space of the market. The rich history of the market and the various women in the market remain as a source of pride for the people of Manipur. It stands as a testimony to the status of women in Manipur. Similarly with Irom Sharmila, her stance and resolve to fight against the draconian law AFSPA has catapulted her into the spotlight of the nation. She is also hailed as the Iron Lady of Manipur. She has succeeded in erasing any doubts of the how powerful one lone woman’s voice can become. She exemplifies the qualities any Manipuri woman would strive to imbibe and to follow. Even though these women have their own different avenues where they are empowered, at the end of the day they still have to go back home and play the submissive role and fall into the misogynistic and insensitive system of kitchen politics in their own homes. With the two earlier understanding of women and food, the role of women and their image remains a source of inspiration and pride for many. They are projected as brave and empowered and with a higher status in society from their counterparts in the country; however, one conveniently fails to see and to simply talk about the submissive role that they still have to adhere to irrespective of class and position in society.

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References Bhonsle, A. (2016). Mother, where’s my country?: Looking for light in the darkness of Manipur. New Delhi: Speaking Tiger Books. Chaki-Sircar, M. (1984). Feminism in a traditional society: Women of the Manipur Valley. New Delhi: Shakti Books. Choudhury, S. (2016). Women and conflict in India. New Delhi: Routledge India. Ghosh, G. K., & Ghosh, S. (1997). Women of Manipur. New Delhi: APH Publishing Corporation. Henthoiba, L. (2015). Revisiting the Kuki Rebellion and Nupi Lan. In A. Noni & K. Sanatomba (Eds.), Colonialism and resistance: Society and state in Manipur (pp. 42–55). New Delhi: Routledge India. Kipgen, T. G. (2010). Women’s role in the 20th century Manipur: A historical study. New Delhi: Kalpaz Publications. Kshetri, R. (2006). The emergence of Meetei nationalism: A study of two movements among the Meeteis. New Delhi: Mittal Publications. Loitongbam, B., & Anurag, P. (2016). Interplay between Individual and Shared Identities of Women Entrepreneurs in Manipur. In P. Kumar (Ed.), Indian women as entrepreneurs: An exploration of self-identity (pp. 3–20). New Delhi: Palgrave Macmillan. Mehrotra, D. P. (2009). Burning bright: Irom Sharmila and the struggle for peace in Manipur. New Delhi: Penguin Books. PTI. (2013). Nothing will change my stand against AFSPA: Irom Sharmila. The Indian Express Archive. https://archive.indianexpress.com/news/nothing-will-change-my-stand-against-afspairom-sharmila/1085885/. Accessed 10 March 2020. Russell, S. A. (2005). Hunger: An unnatural history. New York: Basic Books. Singh, N. J. (1992). Social movements in Manipur, 1917–1951. New Delhi: Mittal Publications. Thokchom, B. D. (2011). Women’s movement in Manipur. New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company.

Chapter 15

Food for Soul, “Soul” for Food: The Tale of Blacks Told Through Soul Food Ved Prakash

Abstract The paper will look at the politics around soul food and African American identity while drawing cultural references from India. Food is not just about subsistence but it is as much about culture, tradition and community. While delving into the domain of food, the paper will discuss the space of the kitchen and the politics attached to it. How the kitchen is not just a domestic space but also a political space. The issues of caste, purity and pollution are pertinent to the kitchen. Moreover, the paper will deal with the idea of the body in relation to soul food. How both soul food and African Americans were looked down upon by the so-called privileged white masters. Today, when the narratives of hate and discrimination have become a part of every day, the politics around soul food and the black body becomes even more crucial.

Introduction Food has always been a significant entity concerning both culture and society. One cannot imagine a social framework outside the rubric of food. It will not be preposterous to propose that food defines individuals, communities and occasions. While a lot is thought about what to eat and what not to eat, it is also true that food could not escape from the politics of segregation. As per its location and reception in terms of the position of the subject who consumes/eats, food becomes both profane and pure. There are communities which do not eat certain kind of food as it is not considered to be a part of their diet chart as well as culture and tradition. Many in India From ‘Black Power Movement’, ‘Black History Month’ to ‘Black Lives Matter’, the term ‘Black’ has been a signifier of resistance against white supremacy. This paper uses ‘Black’ to depict the racial identity of African Americans and ‘African American’ to represent the overarching identity which is a culmination of art, culture, literature, music, food etc. Moreover, the word ‘Black’ has been included to bring an element of universalism while addressing people who share their roots with the African past as well as those who do not. V. Prakash (B) Department of English, Central University of Rajasthan, Ajmer, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Malhotra et al. (eds.), Food Culture Studies in India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5254-0_15

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do not eat beef; on the other hand, many Muslims refrain from eating pork. Food and its consumption can be read from the point of religion too. For instance, many Buddhists consider beef to be a matter of taboo. It is entirely understandable when people get to decide for themselves about what to have in their meals and what to avoid but then what becomes rather very pertinent and discussion-worthy is when people don’t have a choice to decide what to consume. What do we do when people don’t have the capital and freedom to access food? In such a scenario, one can’t help but bring in the power play that exists in society. The subordinates rely on the dominant groups for food and their survival because they cannot demand and decide what they should be eating. The origin of soul food lies in this very hierarchy of power and its dissemination. How the slaves, who were forced to work for long hours on cotton plantations by the white masters, didn’t have avenues to procure things they wanted to have. Most of the African Americans, who were forced to work as slaves, rarely got wages which further intensified the hardships which they had to face on a dayto-day basis. At times, wages were paid in the form of food but the ration extended towards slaves was nothing elaborate. Many a time, it was the leftover which was consumed by the slaves. The present paper aims to look at the space of the kitchen and how it oscillates between profane and pure when it comes to its accessibility by the so-called vulnerable others while drawing references from the Indian and African American cultural contexts. The paper will also examine the origin of soul food. How soul food proves to be an extension of African American identity? Moreover, the paper will address the issue of “soul” concerning food. It is interesting to notice that once soul food was considered to be a delicacy of the poor African Americans but now the scenario has changed. People of diverse ethnicities are consuming soul food and this could primarily be because of globalization and late capitalism. Despite this, soul food and its legacy is under a threat. The paper will also attempt to trace the status of soul food.

Food and Kitchen The kitchen as a space in the Indian context comes with several rules and regulations having a close association with culture and tradition. Moreover, the way houses are designed, often there is a clear distinction between the kitchen and the washroom as the kitchen is considered to be a sacred space that allows and forbids a number of recipes and food. In many non-vegetarian kitchens, anything beyond chicken, mutton and fish is unimaginable while vegetarian kitchen spaces consider meat to be abhorrent. Meat and its consumption in vegetarian households may invite a serious crisis and question the vegetarian legacy of one’s past. Therefore, it becomes rather very important to be attentive about what one consumes within the boundary of a home. At present, the rise of vegetarian food culture in India is not only confined to those who are conscious of their carbon footprints but it has as much to do with the

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dominant political ideology that valorizes the ones who abstain from eating meat. Moreover, the issue of caste could never leave the Indian kitchen space. Shivam Vij in his article “Between the Bathroom and Kitchen, there is Caste” mentions that there is a clear policy of segregation in India. Brahmins are very particular about their kitchen space. A person from the lower caste is not invited inside the kitchen. Moreover, many households do not encourage domestic help, who cleans the house and the washroom, to also work as a cook. There is a hierarchy on several levels. First, a person who is from the lower caste shall not be appointed as a cook. Second, the job profile of cleaning and moping can hurt the status of one’s caste even if one features higher in the caste chart. Ambedkar in Annihilation of Caste mentions that caste is not just about the division of labour but it is also about the division of labourers (2014, p. 233). Vij as part of a project interacted with some members of the Valmiki community in Delhi. Many claimed that they do not reveal their caste to get jobs as domestic workers. Many families are not comfortable with hiring people from the Valmiki community let alone keeping them as cooks (2014). There is a conspicuous politics of division not only within the dominion of food, but also body, vis-a-vis caste. Thereby, the policy of social segregation in the name of purity as well as pollution is exercised. Varsha Torgalkar in “Caste and the Kitchen: Domestic Workers in Pune Allege Systemic Discrimination” talks about the case of Medha Khole, who had filed an FIR against her cook for hiding her caste (2017). While in India, caste still plays a crucial role about who all can access the kitchen and who cannot, concerning African Americans it was the issue of surveillance which the slaves could not evade in case they were working in the kitchen because of its proximity to the house of the master. Moreover, they had to use the kitchen located outside the periphery of the house to cook their food, which also involved smoking (smoke cooking) the food so that it could be preserved for long. Peter Crimmins in his article “Understanding a Slave’s Essential Role in the Colonial Kitchen” talks about the space of the kitchen being the centre of the house because it often led to social and cultural exchange between the slave and the master. Moreover, slaves as cooks had a huge responsibility on their shoulders, as, the status of a house had also to do with the kind of food that is served to guests (2015). It is an irony that slaves, who were present in the kitchen, remained absent and invisible from historical records. It is also a shocking reality that irrespective of how accomplished, a slave, as a cook, could be s/he was still subjected to racism and discrimination on the basis of colour. While America has not been able to resolve the issue of racism and colour prejudice, in India, the struggle is more or less same. Today when humanity is facing a serious crisis because of COVID, there have been several cases in India that highlight the quandary of people, refusing to eat food cooked by Dalits in quarantine centres. In Uttar Pradesh’s Kushinagar, a person in quarantine refused to eat food cooked by Lilawati Devi, who is a Dalit (Chattopadhyay 2020). Another incident came in Nainital’s Bhumka Village, wherein a twenty-three years old man named Dinesh Chandra Milkani refused to eat food prepared by Bhawani Devi, who hails from a Dalit community. Milkani was serving the quarantine period in a government school (Jha 2020). These incidents indicate

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that discrimination happens not only in the name of caste, race, colour, but also hygiene. It is assumed that people from the lower caste are not clean, what they cook is not worthy of consumption, just like African Americans were looked down upon for consuming soul food. Another reason of this marginalization may have to do with the way food was cooked by Dalits and African Americans. The nature of cooking was simple as money to procure ingredients was always a challenge. Hira Bansode, a Marathi Dalit poet in her poem “Bosom Friend” talks about the lack of ingredients in her kitchen when it comes to food. The poem is about an upper-caste friend who has come over for food but upon realizing that no buttermilk is being served, the friend starts to pass comments about the eating habit of the ones who can’t afford dairy products. Bansode writes; You know, in my childhood, we didn’t even have milk for tea much less yoghurt or buttermilk My mother cooked on sawdust she brought from the lumberyard, wiping away the smoke from her eyes. Every once in a while we might get garlic chutney on coarse bread Otherwise, we just ate bread crumbled in water. (2006, p. 50)

Concerning the food culture, there has always been an attempt to incarcerate certain communities and what they consume. Incarceration also depends upon how a particular food is prepared as mentioned already. Boiled food, smoked food, food with no abundance in terms of ingredients is overlooked by many. In northeast India, duck legs, ant eggs, pig entrails, fish insides, silkworm, pigeons, doh khleh (pork salad with pig’s brain), snail stew, etc. are part of the diet. However, outside the northeast region, one can hardly find any mention of these on the menu. Moreover, frog legs are common in Sikkim and parts of Goa. In parts of Chhattisgarh, red ant chutney known as chaprah is a delicacy. Jumma that is cooked with sheep blood can be found in parts of Himachal Pradesh. The Musahar, one of the most marginalized communities of India, eats rats as a part of their diet as well as survival. It is imperative to mention that food culture is not only about what one likes to eat but it is also about what one has to eat for continued existence. For many marginalized communities, the option to choose one’s food is not an option. Similarly, the origin of soul food has more to do with the survival of African Americans. Recipes, no matter, how profane they might be termed by the privileged sections, had to be created because surrendering to hunger was not an alternative. Moreover, the invisibility of recipes belonging to the marginal sections has to do with the politics of documenting privileged food or food consumed by the privileged class. The tools of documentation lay with the ones with power; therefore, the hegemony is exercised by them in cooking, talking, writing and publishing what was cooked in their kitchen.

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Soul Food Linda Civitello in her book Cuisine and Culture: A History of Food and People writes, food and how it is prepared often oscillates amidst layers of meaning. There are rituals about how a certain food is prepared and often recipes are passed on to generations after generations through various means. This act of passing on the recipe is not so much about retaining a particular taste but it is about locating the historicity of certain food preparations. Civitello writes that the meaning of food lies in various acts such as what utensils are used to cook, the timing of eating food, the sitting arrangement while eating, the order in which the food is served, how it is served, and who gets to serve, etc. (2008, p. xiv). At present, when the national and cultural boundaries are widening, food is playing an important role in bringing people and cultures together. However, when we talk about the dominion of soul food then more than erasing the line of differentiation, it came into existence because of the rampant policy of segregation. When we talk about hierarchy, then one also needs to understand “thrown away” or “leftover” is often considered to be waste, something which should be consumed by people who do not feature on top in terms of the hierarchical graph. The reason why soul food becomes an important point of discussion is that it represents black identity. It addresses the idea of the black body and how African Americans managed to survive defying all modules of oppression. Doris Witt in Black Hunger: Soul Food and America (1999) talks about the phenomenon of soul food regarding the black body. Witt talks about how there was a sense of apprehension about accepting soul food through the 1960s and 1970s in America and this hesitation was prevalent not only among the whites but many African Americans too. For example, Amiri Baraka valorized soul food as an expression of black pride and survival against hate; on the other hand, Dick Gregory talks about how the slave diet was termed as unclean and probably one of the ways to ensure racial genocide (qtd. in Witt 1999, p. 80). Before one delves into the domain of black body and soul food, it is important to locate the origin of soul food. And how is it different than southern food? Some believe soul food to be the subset of southern cooking, while some are of the opinion that the term “soul food” was invented by the northerners as more of a marketing tool. Northerners didn’t have much knowledge about southern cooking; therefore, anything southern would be referred as soul food. Julia Moskin in “Is It Southern Food or Soul Food?” talks to Todd Richards and Virginia Willis, authors of several cookbooks on the cuisine of the American South, about the distinction between black food and white food and how do we understand soul food. The dominant narrative about the origin of soul food is that when slaves were brought to America from parts of Africa, many of them brought home recipes along. Soul food is also known as comfort food including fried chicken, pork, okra, collard green, cornbread, yam, etc. The slaves carried both recipes and some of their crops to imagine a sense of home in America. Todd Richards says soul food is not about black v/s white but it is more about class. He opines that people get caught up with the colour of one’s skin but it is all about wealth. Poor people can’t afford fresh meat; therefore, they

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are compelled to eat chitlins and neck bones (Moskin 2018). Moreover, it is also about the place as people who lived in the South ate the same food more or less. But what needs to be kept in mind is also the fact that during the period of slavery, many African Americans occupied the space of the kitchen to feed the white master. Therefore, the whites were eating the food which was cooked by the slaves. Towards the end of the article, Richards says soul food can be seen as a black art form and this art has evolved in all these years but what he forgets to mention is that apart from the class issue, there has been a history of bias and prejudice against the African Americans. From the fifteenth to nineteenth century, many Africans were brought to America without a sense of consent as a part of the slave trade. Many died on the way and the ones who survived were exposed to hostile living conditions. There was a rampant prejudice against the black body. It was seen as animalistic and exotic by the whites. Even though the black body was used for the means of production and economy, it remained indistinguishable in the public discourse for a long time. African Americans didn’t have any rights to address the kind of violence they had to face. Dickson D. Bruce in his essay “Politics and Political Philosophy in the Slave Narratives” writes about how slaves continued to struggle for their existence. The resistance among the slaves against injustice became more firm after the rise of the abolitionist movement in the 1830s (2007, p. 28). A lot changed with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Act of 1965 but the black body was still viewed with an apprehensive gaze and above all, the food upon which the black body had survived all these years was also considered to be ominous by many. Soul food has always been associated with the black body. As far as the origin of soul food is concerned, it cannot be traced as easily because its roots go back to West Africa and the oral mode of exchanging recipes. Therefore, it may be a bit challenging to trace the epistemology of the texts that were passed on to generations orally. Adrian Miller in Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time writes about how there has been a negative image of soul food in pubic. Many see it to be unhealthy and there are numbers of stereotypes about how it is mostly fried with hot sauce (2013, p. 2). At this point, it is also important to mention that spices in food have to do with the hot climate the slaves were brought from. Moreover, spices in food activate the receptors of the skin that respond to heat. Miller writes, “Except for an overt connection to slavery, all of soul food’s dominant themes are: the centrality of pork, the low social status of blacks, racial stigma, resourcefulness, ingenuity, and communal spirit”. (ibid, p. 10). The low social status of African Americans vis-à-vis soul food may have to do with the southerners going for parts of a hog which were cheaper such as, chitterlings, pig’s feet, hog jowl (cheeks of pork), things which the white people ignored. African Americans created something delicious out of things which were considered to be unclean. One could argue that the meaning of the term soul food shall not be restricted to food alone which nourishes the “soul” but the whole process of cleaning and cooking is significant too. At this point, one could ask where the soul of soul food lies. Can one find it in the food or is it more about the process and the act of preparing soul food. Also if the southerners ate soul food, then how is it different from southern cuisine? Can one draw a line of distinction? The most prominent point which could

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probably sum up the divide between soul food and southern cuisine is that soul food was seen as home food, comfort food, easy food or negro food while southern cuisine was more vegetables, beans, and fish-based and was much more elaborate in terms of cooking and spices. In this case, one could propose that soul food is basically a food of survival; moreover, it was a food of poor southerners who could not afford to buy the expensive pieces of meat. Massimo Montanari in Food is Culture opines that food is not culture rather it becomes culture when it is cooked. Food becomes a part of a culture in the act of eating. People from different locations and cultures consume all kinds of diverse food. Moreover, food becomes one of the most important markers of human identity (2006, pp. xi–xii). Similarly, soul food has become a significant symbol of black persistence. During the 1960s, a whole movement had started in America against all kinds of oppressive forces. One movement which grew out of the Civil Rights Movement was the Black Power Movement. This movement began to ensure African American representation across spectrums. The movement began in the mid-1960s and went on till 1985. This was the time when many African Americans realized that if they had to write their history, then they would have to own bookstores and printing press. The movement was influenced by Pan-Africanism and one writer who had played a major role during this movement was Marcus Garvey. It was Garvey who had introduced the narrative that if African Americans had to survive, then they would have to come together and fight collectively. Peniel E. Joseph in his article “The Black Power Movement: A State of the Field” writes that the modern expression of Black Power has to do with the freedom uprising and 1920s New Negro extremism. This also led to the idea of reimagining citizenship, democracy and civil rights (2009, p. 752). It is important to point out that during the 1960s, the word “soul” was associated with black culture and Black Power Movement and, thus, the name soul food was derived. One may also propose that the word soul comes from soul music, a popular genre that emerged in America in the 1950s and the 1960s amidst the African Americans. Soul music was primarily a genre which brought Jazz, Rhythm and Blues, and Gospel Music together. Soul music had the call and response pattern and this was to encourage a dialogue between the artist and the audience. What connects soul food with soul music is the idea of healing and nurturing something which Sethe does to Beloved in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. In the novel, food helps the slaves in constructing a sense of community to deal with the horrors of the past. Paul D, who cannot sit at one place for long because of all the pain he had to endure, sings even in suffering; Little rice, little bean, No meat in between. Hard work ain’t easy, Dry bread ain’t greasy. (1987, p. 48).

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Conclusion At present, soul food has become one of the ways to peep into the African American Past. The journey of soul food has come a long way as now there are restaurants that serve soul food in America. One such is Sylvia’s which was founded in 1962 in Harlem by Sylvia Woods. In America, Sylvia is also known as the queen of soul food. One the one hand, it is praiseworthy that there are food joints that are serving soul food in parts of America, keeping the culture of African American cuisine alive, but what is concerning is that soul food, which was once the common man’s food, has become rather exotic at present. However, soul food restaurants are still suffering because of the popular mindset that soul food is primarily for African Americans. Nevertheless, despite all obstacles, soul food has survived. Frederick Douglass Opie in his book Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America writes that soul represents rural folk culture and soul has to do with black spirituality and knowledge. Opie addresses soul to be the intellectual property of African Americans (2008, p. xi). With the Republican Party in power at present, the divide between the white supremacists and African Americans has become even more apparent which has further affected the intellectual as well as the cultural property of African Americans. This has impacted the discussions around the status of soul food too. It is nothing astonishing that Donald Trump has made prejudiced proclamations concerning the African American community on several occasions. Recently, Trump gave a statement about the Baltimore District stating “it is a disgusting, rat and rodent-infested mess where no human being would want to live” (Levin 2019, para 1). According to many, the remark was made keeping the African American community in mind, which qualifies as blatant racism. From the time of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, America has come a long way; however, it is also a fact that American society has not been able to find an effective method to deal with the colour/race divide which exists even now. From the time of public lynching to senseless killings of African Americans by the state machinery, the dream to live in an egalitarian social framework remains a dream. It is indeed a fact that food can be a way to erase lines of differences but what happens when food itself becomes a site of conflict or when it is made to be a site of disputation. How one can think of eradicating bias when food too just like the body is classified in between blasphemous and clean. It is a fact that both food and body go through a constant change all the time. It is the politics and policy of power and control which terms certain bodies and food as valid and acceptable while others as problematic. When one talks about the (black) body and its movement in America, then one must be aware of the fact that the mobility of a body is never free or one could state that within the hierarchical social structure, there is a further hierarchy in terms of the scanning of the body. Some bodies/food is scanned more than the others. African American food is seen as a site of risk that may disrupt the harmonious clean social framework. It must go through multiple checkpoints on multiple occasions. It must welcome the institution of scrutiny with all humility and self-effacement.

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To conclude, one could say that soul food is not to seen as the food which was consumed by powerless vulnerable African Americans but rather it needs to be seen as food by the ones who not only suffered but also resisted to reclaim their present as well as past. Moreover, the word “soul” has spiritual connotations for African Americans and soul food is nothing less spiritual when it comes to feeding the body as well as soul.

References Ambedkar, B. R. (2014). Annihilation of Caste. UK: Verso Pulication. Bansode, H. (2006). Bosom friend. In The individual and society: Essays, stories and poems (pp. 48– 51). Department of English, University of Delhi: Pearson. Bruce, D. D., Jr. (2007). Politics and political philosophy in the slave narrative. In A. Fisch (Ed.), The African American slave narrative (pp. 28–43). New York: Cambridge University Press. Chattopadhyay, A. (2020). Uttar Pradesh: Man booked for refusing to eat food cooked by Dalit at Quarantine Centre in Kushinagar. The Logical Indian. https://thelogicalindian.com/news/updalit-quarantine-refused-food-village-head-20594. Accessed on May 22, 2020. Civitello, L. (2008). Cuisine and culture: A history of food and people. New Jersey: Wiley. Crimmins, P. (2015). Understanding a slave’s essential role in the Colonial Kitchen WHYY PBS. https://whyy.org/articles/understanding-a-slaves-essential-role-in-the-colonial-kit chen/. Accessed on May 24, 2020. Jha, P. (2020). Quarantined Youth, 23, refuses to eat food cooked by Dalit woman in Nainital, booked. The Times of India. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/dehradun/quarantinedyouth-23-refuses-to-eat-food-cooked-by-dalit-woman-in-nainital-booked/articleshow/758346 36.cms. Accessed on May 22, 2020. Joseph, P. E. (2009). The black power movement: A state of the field. The Journal of American History, 96(3), 751–776. Levin, B. (2019). Trump: Actually, African Americans love that I said they’re “living in hell”. Vanity Fair Hive. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/07/donald-trump-african-americansbaltimore. Accessed on 20 May, 2020. Miller, A. (2013). Soul food: The surprising story of an American cuisine, one plate at a time. USA: The University of North Carolina Press. Montanari, M. (2006). Food is culture. USA: Columbia University Press. Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. London: Vintage Books. Moskin, J. (2018). Is it southern food, or soul food? The New York Times. https://www.nytimes. com/2018/08/07/dining/is-it-southern-food-or-soul-food.html. Accessed on 15 Feb, 2020. Opie, F. D. (2008). Hog and hominy: Soul food from Africa to America. New York: Columbia University Press. Torgalkar, V. (2017). Caste and the kitchen: Domestic workers in Pune Allege systemic discrimination the wire. https://thewire.in/caste/pune-domestic-workers-caste-discrimination. Accessed on May 21, 2020. Witt, D. (1999). Black hunger: Soul food and America. USA: Oxford University Press. Vij, S. (2014). Between the Bathroom and the Kitchen, there is Caste Scroll. https://scroll.in/article/ 692513/between-the-bathroom-and-the-kitchen-there-is-caste. Accessed on May 20, 2020.