Negotiations of Taste, Memory and Heritage: Colonial Foodscapes and Beyond

The thriving foodscapes around eateries are integral to the diverse urban ethos of places like Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Karachi or Lahore —the erstwhile colonial cities—negotiating their identities between the remnants of colonial modernity and more recent waves of globalization. The exposure of the cities to variegated cultural influences engendered a progressive, tolerant, and experimental outlook which extended to their eating habits, from the growing fascination for tea drinking to setting up of tea rooms and cafes in different places to the coming up of clubs and coffee houses in the colonial period with their distinctive dishes. 

With the changing tastes of the eating populace and the globalization of the food culture, many of the eateries and the associative cultural practices embedded in community life are now either at risk of extinction or have transformed substantially to expand and embrace the changes as a way of responding to the exigencies of the time. This panel is particularly interested in exploring how food cultures travelled from Europe to the subcontinent and vice versa in the colonial and postcolonial times creating synergies between cultures and cities with a colonial history, imbricated in a network of reciprocal, albeit unequal, relationships. To do so the panellists may look into a wide range of foodscapes, material spaces, commensality and food practices, ranging from, but not limited to the eateries in urban centres of colonial India and the establishment of Irani-cafe style food chains in the UK, to the evolution of tea consumption in India and Britain with the newly emerging chai parlours, or the opening of Toddy (a local liquor in South India) Shops in England tapping the cultural nostalgia for the homeland. This panel as a whole, thus, seeks to understand how foodscapes and foodways could not only reimagine heritage and local narratives of the neighbourhoods around the “gastronomic modernity” of the colonial cities, but rewrite the spatial histories of colonialism as a whole by delving into the memories of affective exchange, solidarities, convergences, and equally of friction and exploitation through food and their diverse modes of consumption.

The thriving foodscapes around eateries are integral to the diverse urban ethos of places like Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Karachi or Lahore —the erstwhile colonial cities—negotiating their identities between the remnants of colonial modernity and more recent waves of globalization. The exposure of the cities to variegated cultural influences engendered a progressive, tolerant, and experimental outlook which extended to their eating habits, from the growing fascination for tea drinking to setting up of tea rooms and cafes in different places to the coming up of clubs and coffee houses in the colonial period with their distinctive dishes. 

With the changing tastes of the eating populace and the globalization of the food culture, many of the eateries and the associative cultural practices embedded in community life are now either at risk of extinction or have transformed substantially to expand and embrace the changes as a way of responding to the exigencies of the time. This panel is particularly interested in exploring how food cultures travelled from Europe to the subcontinent and vice versa in the colonial and postcolonial times creating synergies between cultures and cities with a colonial history, imbricated in a network of reciprocal, albeit unequal, relationships. To do so the panellists may look into a wide range of foodscapes, material spaces, commensality and food practices, ranging from, but not limited to the eateries in urban centres of colonial India and the establishment of Irani-cafe style food chains in the UK, to the evolution of tea consumption in India and Britain with the newly emerging chai parlours, or the opening of Toddy (a local liquor in South India) Shops in England tapping the cultural nostalgia for the homeland. This panel as a whole, thus, seeks to understand how foodscapes and foodways could not only reimagine heritage and local narratives of the neighbourhoods around the “gastronomic modernity” of the colonial cities, but rewrite the spatial histories of colonialism as a whole by delving into the memories of affective exchange, solidarities, convergences, and equally of friction and exploitation through food and their diverse modes of consumption.

Keywords: foodways, foodscapes, colonial history, city, memories, heritage

About BASAS: https://www.basas.org.uk/news-events/basas-conference-2024/

Interested applicants, please send an abstract of 100 words and provide up to five keywords that capture the main themes of your paper. by 12th April 2024

Contact email: srijita20@iiserb.ac.in