Between Elite Hysteria and Subaltern Carnivalesque: the Politics of Street-Food in the City of Calcutta

Abstract

Deriving from the recent discussions on paideia (spiritual exercise), which links knowledge with mores and manners, this article argues that the expurgation of certain extreme tastes from the genteel Bengali palate, in the course of ‘nationalist’ reform in the 19th century, demonstrates the operation of a certain ‘civilizing process’ coterminous with the wider process of westernization. Positing a homology between this and the suppression of the carnivalesque in Europe, it further shows that through the well-known process of the ‘return of the repressed’, the marginalized elements are reconfigured in a new category of anti-food – street-food – consumed by marginal sections of the population. In sum, the historic process of disavowal of the extreme tastes leads to the formation of a new symbolic economy.