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Crisis, Identity, and Social Distinction: Cultural Politics of Food, Taste, and Consumption in Late Colonial Bengal
Author(s) -
PRASAD SRIRUPA
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
journal of historical sociology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.186
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1467-6443
pISSN - 0952-1909
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-6443.2006.00281.x
Subject(s) - bengali , taste , middle class , politics , colonialism , modernity , gender studies , nationalism , hinduism , sociology , cultural identity , bengal , identity formation , identity (music) , consumption (sociology) , aesthetics , social science , history , political science , art , religious studies , psychology , law , philosophy , archaeology , linguistics , bay , negotiation , neuroscience
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.