The body and its purity: Dietary politics in colonial Bengal

Abstract

Nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the emergence of a ‘scientific’ project to analyse and reconstitute the dietary practices of colonial Bengal. Since the project was purportedly and confessedly ‘scientific’, it was imperative on it to evolve a general criterion for the evaluation of various foodstuffs. ‘Nutrition’ became that general criterion. A whole range of questions, like for example, what food made the colonial subject virile, what was pure food and what adulterated it, etc., were formulated and investigated under the sign of Nutrition. The deployment of this rhetoric was complicit in the larger project of colonial modernity. In this article, I try to provide a critical reading of the historical evolution of the rhetoric of Nutrition. I will pursue two aspects of the history. First, I will document the discourse of Nutrition that moved on the original ‘scientific’ tangent—how people were increasingly partaking of the pleasures of colonial capitalism and how nutrition was becoming an issue in events like eating ‘adulterated’ food in the new restaurants. Second, I will engage with a cultural aspect of the history. The cultural aspect is about the middle-class imagination of the pre-colonial as a period of abundance in relation to the colonial era as the period of scarcity and rampant adulteration of foodstuff. Comparing these two aspects, I will argue that this double play on the rhetoric of Nutrition was possible because the ‘scientific’ definition of Nutrition itself was always left partial and relative in the project of colonial modernity.