Aestheticizing labour: An affective discourse of cooking in colonial Bengal

Abstract

This article examines how a gendered discourse of taste was formulated in colonial Bengal by the Bengali Hindu middle classes, which in its turn facilitated the self-fashioning of Bengali bhadralok. This discourse of taste was articulated specifically through the culture of food. The middle-class Bengali Hindus constituted a new rhetoric of cuisine that enabled them to distance themselves from their 'others', especially the lower classes. Often this distancing was done through aestheticizing women's cooking that assimilated gender with class. Undoubtedly, women were the signpost of 'tradition' in the middle-class discourse. However, the same discourse also assigned them the responsibility for producing a 'modern' Bengali cuisine. © 2010 Taylor & Francis.