Crisis, Identity, and Social Distinction: Cultural Politics of Food, Taste, and Consumption in Late Colonial Bengal

Abstract  This paper explores the culture of taste in the production of an urban, Hindu, Bengali middle class in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Bengal/India. It analyzes how the Bengali middle class, the bhadralok , attempted to construct a "doxa" of gastronomy in order to subsume a dominant position for itself and to classify hierarchically other classes and social groups. The aspirations of this class as the future guardians of an incipient nation were in reality a politics of self-identity, which was based on ideas of a cultural exclusivity. This politics of self-identity for the Bengali middle class were inextricably inter-woven with issues of modernity, nationalism, and colonialism. Through my analysis, I stress the importance of the "historical" or the "collective", particularly in the context of formation of the bhadralok , as a dominant class.