Fourteenth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

Bengal has been the site of multiple famines since the colonial and late into the post-colonial times. While history bears a witness to untold human sufferings- stories of mother’s selling away their children for a morsel of food grains to dead bodies rotting in streets of Calcutta, and the political upheavals where nationalist historians believe that the famine was ‘man-made’ and created by Churchill’s imperialist policies- another natural side-effect of such disaster remains undiscussed. Many Bengali household continue to cherish their grandmother’s recipes of delicious food which had a rather unusual birth. Some of these recipes were created by simple folks to make a hearty yet nutritious meal with cheap and easily available vegetables and grains during times of shortage. However, the last decade saw a sudden rise in capitalisation of Bengali culture with high-end expensive restaurants using such recipes in their menus and bringing back, what they argue, remained lost in the diaries of our grandparents. The simple, poor man’s recipes (much like the rise in ‘poor man’s recipe books’ in America during the Great Depression) are now finding a place in the grandeur of star hotels, in shiny menu cards. This paper chronicles and investigates how the recipe of the poor, for the poor, have now being used as an apparatus of capitalism and the story each ingredient has to offer- from the colonial times to this age of late capitalism enmeshed in nostalgia.