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Kolkata has had a long and troubled relationship with food and hunger, which has shaped Bengali food-practices in the city. From famine in the 1940’s to food-movement of the 1960’s, as food production dwindled, Kolkata saw a gradual decline of its economic fortune. In the 1970’s and 80’s, it was common to portray Kolkata as a failed postcolonial metropolis filled with starving millions. With this troubled history in the backdrop, this paper focuses on culinary experiences in Kolkata as reflected in Amit Chaudhuri’s novella A Strange and Sublime Address. The novella, in its bid to highlight the trivial and the mundane in Bengali life in Kolkata in the early 1990’s, portrays culinary experiences as epiphanic expressions of an introverted, inner existence. Chaudhuri describes food-practices in an attempt to preserve an esoteric food-system – a system that connects inner life with cooking, serving and eating of food. Bengali food-practices, I argue, appear in this novella as “edible chronotopes” (Krishenblatt-Gimblett) revealing a culture’s fascination with time and food. Through Bengali food practices the novella’s protagonist Sandeep mourns a deep loss he feels about his lack of connection to Kolkata and learns to cultivate a sense of reticence, which allows him to absorb the joy of merging with the life in the city in its banal and quotidian form.  I further connect Chaudhuri’s search for the inner self in culinary practices with his journey to what he terms “bucolic” Kolkata – a journey Ashish Nandy had termed “an ambiguous journey to the city”.

Eating Well in Uncle’s House: Bengali Culinary practices in a bucolic Calcutta/Kolkata in Amit Chaudhuri’s A Strange and Sublime Address