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Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 7:1 (2018-2019): 19-30  © American Folklore Society 2020 

“Without Sympathy There is No Cookery”: Imperial Knowledge 
and the Creation of “Indian” Cuisine 

SUE SAMUELSON AWARD FOR FOODWAYS SCHOLARSHIP 2019 

By: Julia Fine 

Abstract: By viewing colonial British cookbooks and Indian cookbooks in 
conversation with one another, this essay analyzes the cultural melding and 
appropriation that occurred in foodways during the colonization of the Indian 
subcontinent. It particularly explores how British cookbooks published in India 
at this time attempted to bind Indian cooks within an ahistorical and 
homogenized vision of India. Yet, as demonstrated through a close reading of two 
prominent Bengali cookbooks, South Asian cooks adapted these recipes in order 
to present a vision of nationalism that undercut British superiority and reified 
Indian independence. The dialogue that emerges by exploring contemporaneous 
cookbooks affords a space to view changes to foodways that emerged from the 
colonial encounter as well as their impacts and cultural importance.  

Keywords: India, Great Britain, colonialism, cookbooks, creolization, foodways  

“Perfectly plain cookery is suitable only for England where plain food is of the best; but 
in India, where meat is poverty-stricken and vegetables are tasteless, spices and 
flavoring are a necessity,” opens one 1914 British colonial cookbook, instructing British 
memsahibs on how to run a proper household in colonial India (Shalot 1914: v).1 In the 
wake of the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, new protective borders (both literal and 
metaphorical) emerged around the European community in India. Yet, as the above 
quote evinces, the kitchen remained a site where Indian domestic servants of any gender 
interacted with their British memsahibs. Indeed, as one British Indian cookbook author 
suggested in its title page epigraph, “We may live without friends; we may live without 
books / But civilized man cannot live without cooks” (Newman 1893). Thus, although 
the memsahib instructed the cook as to what dishes to serve, the cook exercised 
significant control over food preparation and presentation. This arms-length 
collaboration created a syncretic cuisine combining British and subcontinental 
influences. The resulting food was, according to food historian Cecilia Leong-Salobir, 
“distinct and different from the food practices of Britain and Asia, but at the same time 
incorporated dietary components of British culinary traditions and embraced 
indigenous ingredients and practices from the colonies”(2011: 69). 

Many scholars have studied the ways in which this cultural mixing functioned within the 
British colonial kitchen. Prominently, Mary Procida has argued that this novel cuisine 
“was intended to demonstrate the colonizers’ mastery and dominance in the private 
arena of the empire as in the public sphere” (2003: 123). In contrast, other scholars, 
including Utsa Ray and Jayanta Sengupta, have focused on the cuisine as it emerged in 
South Asian kitchens outside of and in response to direct colonial control. They argue 
that this cross-cultural melding effectively shaped the colonial middle class in Bengal 
and constituted one means by which they articulated visions of nationhood (Ray 2015; 
Sengupta 2010). While Procida, Ray, and Sengupta put forth important contributions to 



20    Fine, “Without Sympathy,” Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 7:1 (2018-2019) 

 

the field of imperial food studies, by focusing solely on either the colonial British or the 
Indian kitchen, these authors fail to recognize the intrinsically dialectical nature of 
colonialism (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). To understand this cultural dialogue, then, 
we must move beyond dichotomous constructions of the colonial domestic and public 
spheres as well as the British colonial domestic sphere and the Indian domestic sphere. 
By acknowledging these spaces as inherently fluid and permeable we see not only how 
domestic imperial statecraft functioned, but also how it was received and adapted by 
Indian actors. 

Here, I focus on British cookbooks written in Indian languages aimed specifically at 
both the memsahib and Indian cook in the British colonial household. I analyze them in 
conversation with Indian-authored cookbooks written in South Asian languages for 
Indian housewives rather than memsahibs, which were beginning to be published in 
certain regions of India during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I 
explore the different forms of cultural mixing that emerge in these colonial cookbooks. 
As Robert Baron and Ana C. Cara write in their discussion of “creolization” as a lens for 
cultural analysis, “when cultures come into contact, expressive forms and performances 
emerge from their encounter, embodying the sources that shape them yet constituting 
new and different entities” (Baron and Cara 2011: 3). Many have discussed this cultural 
mixing in terms of Homi Bhabha’s concept of hybridity, which he presented in his work 
The Location of Culture (1994).2 However, here, I elucidate these emergent cultural 
forms using Baron and Cara’s understanding of creolization. I use this not to describe 
the Indian subcontinent, as creolization is a historically specific phenomenon as well as 
a “powerful marker of identity in Latin America, the Caribbean, Southern Louisiana, 
Cape Verde, and the islands of the southwest Indian Ocean.” Rather, I use this as a lens 
to analyze Indian cultural forms to “liberate us conceptually from a nation of fixed or 
‘finish’ products in culture, whether purportedly ‘hybrid’ or whole” (Baron and Cara 
2011: 4).  

Following Baron and Cara’s recognition of the in-process and dialogic nature of 
creolization, I bring together contemporaneous British and Indian cookbooks. While the 
colonizers’ cookbooks attempted to bind Indian cooks within a homogeneous, 
ahistorical vision of India and Indian food, South Asian cooks adapted this cuisine to 
produce their own melded culinary forms which expressed an understanding of India as 
separate from and superior to Britain. This emergent Indian cuisine not only undercut 
the totalized colonial vision of “native food,” but also opened up space for new 
imaginations of a decolonized India. 
 
Inside the Colonial Kitchen:  
Inscribing India within British Imperial Knowledge 
Cookbooks written by British authors in dual-language South Asian languages and 
English reveal significant aspects of imperial ideals and aspirations. These books came 
into vogue in the late nineteenth century (Leong-Salobir 2015: 140–141). Although their 
authors acknowledged that many cookbooks for the British colonial kitchen already 
existed in English, they felt the need to publish recipes in South Asian languages as well 
because, as one cookbook author put it, “not one Englishwoman in a hundred can, even 
in her own tongue, give an intelligible explanation of a receipt, much less in a language 
that Nabi Bukhsh3 could understand. The results are sometimes appalling” (Shalot 1914: 



Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 7:1 (2018-2019): 21

iv). Similarly, an 1881 cookbook written in both English and Urdu justified its 
publication by a need for standardization and control: 

The principal stumbling block in the way of teachers has hitherto been the 
impossibility of relying on the memory of their cooks to retain the 
numerous ingredients and often complicated processes of a variety of 
dishes of which they have no record. It seemed to us that this obstacle 
would be removed by the possession of a Cookery Book which our cooks 
could read, in which they could find a simple clear account of the dishes 
they have to make, instead of being as heretofore dependent on a garbled, 
inaccurate, vague viva voce translation (Newman 1893: iii).  

Thus, in order for the memsahibs to instruct their cooks more accurately and quickly, 
these dual-language cookbooks began to proliferate. 

From the above quotes, we can glean the intended audience of the dual-language works: 
the English woman or memsahib, as well as “Nabi Bukhsh,” a stereotypical moniker for 
an Indian cook. Within the British imperial domestic sphere in India, cooking in the 
colonial home was not necessarily seen as a woman’s task. Rather, as Mary Procida has 
demonstrated, “neither the physical space of the kitchen nor the knowledge and skills 
required of the good imperial homemaker were narrowly gendered as feminine” (2002: 
132). Indeed, men authored many of the works that the British imperial cookbooks were 
based on. In the preface to the 1879 work Dainty Dishes for Indian Tables, a cookbook 
in English and Urdu, the author writes, “Where Francatelli, Soyer, Miss Acton, and a 
host of others have spoken in vain, what hope is there for a new teacher, unless he be the 
pioneer of a new path up the hill of difficulty?” (Newman 1893: iii).  Both Charles 
Francatelli and Alexis Soyer are men, and while use of the word “he” might signal any 
gender, it suggests the unnamed author could be as well. Procida notes as well that 
“ordinary Anglo-Indians found nothing unseemly or unmasculine in men’s involvement 
in domestic and culinary affairs” (2002: 132). This subgenre of cookbooks thus 
destabilizes contemporary expectations about how men and women were to interact in 
both the domestic sphere as well as the larger biopolitical project of empire.4  

While it is impossible to quantify the readership of these works, something of their 
popularity in British India can be inferred from the many editions issued. For example, 
at least seven editions of What to Tell the Cook, or, The Native Cook’s Assistant: Being 
a Choice Collection of Receipts for Indian Cookery, Pastry, &c., &c.: in English and 
Tamil were released between 1875 and 1910. The book proved so successful throughout 
British India that a Sinhala adaptation of the book was published for British colonists 
living in Ceylon in 1895, which was then reissued at least once in 1901. Similarly, Dainty 
Dishes for Indian Tables was first published in 1879 and then reissued six times 
between then and 1908. These new issues included a Persian edition in 1895, 
demonstrating the work’s sustained appeal to a wide audience. The introduction to the 
fifth edition notes that “the cordial reception with which ‘Dainty Dishes’ has been 
received may be taken as proof that such a work was needed by English Residents in 
India” (Newman 1893: v). Their popularity makes these works potent historical sources 
for understanding the construction of colonial cuisines.  



22    Fine, “Without Sympathy,” Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 7:1 (2018-2019)

I argue that these cookbooks present the British as benevolent, validating the right of 
Britons to consume what they understood as “native food” and the notion that mutual 
understanding undergirded the colonization of India. For instance, Ceylon Cookery, Or, 
The Native Cook’s Assistant (1901: vii) opens by noting its creation at the request of a 
Sinhalese cook: 

Many years ago, an intelligent Sinhalese cook came to us with a ponderous 
English Cookery Book saying: — “Master make one Sinhalese book like 
this, plenty good for Cokies”! In an office where a newspaper is 
manufactured daily, our cook evidently thought it would be a small matter 
turning out a Sinhalese edition of Mrs. Beeton’s well-known work. 

The nature of the text presents colonialism as a benevolent (albeit patronizing) 
exchange of British and Indian cultural ideals, one that answers to the requests of 
Indian servants. This effect is even ingrained in the format of these books, which 
typically present English and South Asian translations on facing pages. The bilingual 
diptych, combined with the English production of these vernacular cookbooks, implies 
mutual construction and exchange of British and Indian cultural ideals.   

The recipes and meal plans featured in these books also further this vision of benevolent 
exchange, as they attempt to consolidate “Indian” food traditions that were 
comprehensible to and consumable by the British colonizers. In What to Tell the Cook, 
for example, one sample meal menu consists of “Mulligatawny, Beefsteak Pie, Cutlets à 
la Soubise, Kabob Curry, Pancakes.” Other menus offer “Clear Soup, Roast Leg Mutton, 
Harico, Chicken Curry, Bread and Butter Pudding,” or “Vegetable Soup, Boiled Fowls 
and Tongue, Mutton and Cucumber Stew, Dry Curry, Custard Pudding” (1875: 86). 
Although mulligatawny and curry were essentially foods created by British colonizers—
based on the  presumed Indian originals—the texts implicitly mark them as “Indian” 
foods by writing that these are foods “every native” makes and eats (cf. What to Tell the 
Cook 1875: 34; see also Narayan 1995; Roy 2010; Ruthnum 2017).5 The inclusion of 
such allegedly “native” recipes alongside European dishes without distinction suggests a 
form of cultural mixing through which British imperialists can absorb Indian culture.  

While this mixing of cultural influences here does not represent true creolization in the 
terms of Baron and Cara due to the fact that rather than “embody[ing] resistance to 
domination and asymmetrical power relations,” it works to uphold them even as it 
claims benevolence, it suggests the way cultural forms were changed in a dialogic 
process among both colonizers and colonized. As the 1902 cookbook Things for the 
Cook (In English and Hindustani) begins, “Without sympathy there can be no cookery” 
(Shalot 1914: iv). The book makes clear that sympathy here is demonstrated through 
appropriating “Indian” cooking styles, writing that “Perfectly plain cookery is suitable 
only for England where plain food is of the best; but in India, where meat is poverty-
stricken and vegetables are tasteless, spices and flavoring are a necessity” (Shalot 1914: 
iv). By framing this mixed style in terms of “sympathy,” the British writer suggests both 
the ability of Britain to understand Indian cuisine on a visceral level, as well as the 
larger idea of consent and benevolence underlying imperialism. Yet this sympathy is 
predicated on the superiority of British vegetables and meat over Indian ones, and thus 
recapitulates British supremacy even within the claim of benevolence. This notion of 



Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 7:1 (2018-2019): 23 

 

unequal cultural mixing is furthered by the very inclusion of Indian languages alongside 
English. What to Tell the Cook; or The Native Cook’s Assistant, which in its first 
iteration was written only in Tamil, begins by noting that in the second edition, the 
“Publishers have availed themselves of the suggestion proffered by several of their 
constituents, with a view to make it more valuable to House-keepers to print the English 
Text on the opposite page of the Tamil.”(1875: Preface). In other words, the inclusion of 
the English was meant to allow the memsahibs to check up on domestic servants and 
correct their cooking. In this sense, while the first edition allowed Indian cooks to use 
the book on their own terms, this edition attempted to control Indian knowledge 
through the inclusion of English.  
 
Moreover, the addition of Indian dishes (or rather, what the British thought were Indian 
dishes) in English meal plans also served to reify colonial ideals about what is Indian. In 
British India, “cultural forms in society newly classified as ‘traditional’ were 
reconstructed and transformed by and through [imperial knowledge] which created new 
categories and oppositions between colonizer and colonized” (Dirks 1996: ix; see also 
Mantena 2018: 89-118).6 In the case of these colonial cookbooks, the promotion of 
mutual understanding in fact worked to articulate and actualize British control over an 
idea of India and Indian cuisine. Consider the description of curries given in What to 
Tell the Cook: “Curries. Every native  knows how to make these: chicken and prawn are, 
perhaps, the favourite ones” (1875: 34). By claiming it as the single dish that South 
Asians intrinsically know how to make, the cookbook marks curry as a unified symbol of 
Indianness. But the book then goes on to provide over fifteen recipes for variations on 
curry. By informing cooks how to prepare a dish “every native knows how to make,” the 
cookbook essentially instructs the Indian cooks how to prepare properly what they 
supposedly already know, repackaging and presenting “Indian food” to domestic 
servants in a form chiefly understood and comestible by British colonialists.  
 
A similar process occurs in many other colonial cookbooks. Things for the Cook, for 
example, offers a recipe for “Shami Kabab,” which is subtitled “a Native receipt” (Shalot 
1914: 31). The subtitle suggests that the recipe came from the cook, one of the few 
“natives” with whom the memsahib would have interacted. Yet by including the recipe 
in Things for the Cook, the memsahib essentially re-instructs the cook on what she 
understands to be his own cuisine to conform to British interpretations. Moreover, this 
British construction of curry and kebabs, as scholars such as Uma Narayan (1995: 63) 
and E.M. Collingham (2006: 115-120) have demonstrated, wholly elides the regional 
and cultural specificities of India. This melded cuisine thus recapitulates and reinscribes 
a British vision of a homogeneous, knowable, and controllable India.  
 

The Transformation of Indian Foodways: A Case Study in Bengali Cuisine 
The Indian colonial kitchen can be seen as one site of creolization, offering a “critical 
way of conceptualizing the emergence of cultural phenomena borne out of the necessity 
to negotiate cultural differences and to resist dominance by asserting a new local voice” 
(Baron and Cara: 3-4). These Indian colonial kitchens represented sites of creolization, 
where “subaltern cultural communities resisted the imposition of mechanistic, 
systematizing, standardizing norms from official, politically dominant cultures” (Ibid: 
6). Utsa Ray has shown (2015) that colonial British cookbooks represented one way that 
British cuisine was transmitted to Indian people and appropriated into different 



24    Fine, “Without Sympathy,” Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 7:1 (2018-2019) 

 

regional cuisines, thus contributing to the production of cultural mixing within Indian 
foodways. Of course, I do not mean to suggest that this was the only way such mixing 
occurred; rather, this solely represents one fruitful way of knowing what parts of Anglo-
Indian culture were actively and explicitly transmitted to Indian peoples. In order to 
trace this exchange of culinary ideas and the effects of this exchange on Indian foodways 
more completely, here I draw on the work of Utsa Ray and compare recipes provided in 
British colonial cookbooks written in Indian languages to those appearing in cookbooks 
written by South Asians for use in the Indian domestic sphere. These comparisons help 
illustrate how cooks might have taken and transformed the knowledge disseminated in 
texts such as What to Tell the Cook and Things for the Cook, to varying effects. This 
process reveals one change to Indian foodways catalyzed by the colonial encounter, and 
significantly, the emergence of an Indian cuisine self-consciously symbolizing Indian 
independence from the British. 
 
Most scholars focus on the development of cookbook culture in South Asia only in the 
postcolonial era. Arjun Appadurai (1988), for example, has focused on the spread of 
cookbooks in postcolonial India during the 1950s, and similarly, Rachel Berger confirms 
that the Indian cookbook was a “largely twentieth-century commodity” (2013: 1628). 
Yet South Asian cookbooks published in the nineteenth century can already be seen as 
active participants in a dialogue—or even a debate—with British cookbooks about the 
colonial kitchen. While caste restrictions as well as oral traditions would likely have 
limited the popularity of these works, such cookbooks were published in several regions 
of the country during the late Victorian period in multiple languages: પાક શા%& [Pak 

Shastra: Cookery], a late nineteenth-century Gujarati cookbook; पाक र%नाकर [Pak 
Ratnakar: The Gems of Cooking], a late nineteenth-century Hindi cookbook published 
in Delhi; and many Bengali cookbooks, two of which will be the focus of the remainder 
of this essay. This smattering of examples begins to demonstrate the variety of food 
cultures across South Asia as well as the publication of cookbooks taking place across 
the different regions in relation to their cultural and linguistic differences.  
 
In the remainder of this essay, I turn to how these culinary cultural dynamics played out 
specifically in the region of Bengal. Because Bengal was the center of colonial 
administration until 1911, uniquely creolized British/Indian cuisines emerged in the 
kitchens of the growing Bengali middle class. Bengal was also an important site for the 
development of different strands of Indian nationalist thought, where, as Jayanta 
Sengupta and Rachel Berger demonstrate, cooking and eating became important arenas 
for  the expression of nationalistic expression (Sengupta 2010: 97; Berger 2013: 1622–
1643). Cookbooks, especially popular among the developing Bengali middle class, were 
central to the very construction of that Bengali middle class itself, as Ray has 
demonstrated (2015: 3-8). However, this is not to suggest that Bengal is representative 
of all of colonial India. In focusing on Bengal, my aim is not to extrapolate a general 
claim about the transformation of Indian foodways across different regions and 
cultures. Rather, through close-reading the works of two popular authors at the time 
period— Pragyasundari Devi and Bipradas Mukhopadhyay—I demonstrate one way the 
colonial encounter changed the sorts of foods that South Asian cookbooks prescribed, 
and the specific ways in which these changes were presented by writers in Bengal. By 
focusing on the works of two popular authors, I do not mean to suggest that they 
represent the only visions of Indian nationalism promulgated at this time in Bengal. 



Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 7:1 (2018-2019): 25 

 

Rather, they represent a specific vision of Indian nationalism closely tied to their own 
subject-position as middle-class Hindus. Yet at the same time, these represent, as Ray 
has shown, significant contributions to Bengali literature as the “most popular” recipe 
books at the time, constituting “classic examples of the changing diet of Bengalis” (2015: 
63-64). 
 
These cookbooks exemplify what Ray calls “hierarchical cosmopolitanism,” which 
attempted to “cosmopolitanize the domestic” while maintaining a regional flavor (2015: 
13), as can be seen by comparing two recipes for plum pudding. A typical British 
cookbook from this time period might simply list ingredients in a recipe for plum 
pudding as: “One lb. raisins, 1 lb. flour, ¾ lb. suet, 2 tablespoonfuls of treacle, 1 pint 
milk. Ginger may be added, but no eggs. It cannot be boiled too much” (Poynter 1904: 
8). By contrast, Pragyasundari Devi presents a recipe from the early 1900s in a 
paragraph of full sentences outlining steps and details for making the dish (1995: 118; as 
translated in Ray 2015: 70-72):7  
 

The bread needs to be made into crumbs by rubbing them between both palms. 
Lard needs to be finely chopped and mixed with finely chopped candied peel. 
Then slivered nuts, currants, raisins, lard, and candied peel are to be mixed with 
the bread crumbs. Add sugar. Mix three eggs. This mixture is then spooned onto 
a flesh towel. Ghee is to be added. Then this towel is tied together and dropped 
into a vessel of boiling water. This mixture will be steamed. 
 

Here, we see how the British recipe for a dish given in “What” and “How” has been 
transformed into one acceptable to Bengali Hindus by the substitution of lard or pork fat 
for beef suet, a foodstuff against Hindu law. In Devi’s other recipes, she further 
transformed British dishes by adding ingredients not widely used in Europe. For 
example, British colonial cookbooks tended to make a custard sauce sweet: “Flavour 
with vanilla essence, or almond if preferred, add the well-beaten yolks of 5 eggs, and a 
little salt, with a tablespoon of cold milk, and stir over the fire till thick; whisk to a froth” 
(A Lady Resident 1865: 65; cf. the presentation in Ray 2015: 70). By contrast, Devi 
(1995: 118), translated in Ray (2015: 70-72), made the sauce she called “custard” a 
sweet-sour savory:   
 

Slice the onions into four, stem them and mince them. Pour ghee into the 
saucepan. Put in onions and whole spices of cinnamon and cardamom. After 
stirring for a while add some milk. Add celery and salt. After it comes to a boil 
add some flour mixed with water. When the mixture thickens add vinegar.  
 

The addition of ghee, which had Hindu ritual uses, suggests that Devi deliberately 
transformed this dish into a melded British/South Asian one (Ray 2012: 706–707). The 
use of cardamom corroborates this conclusion. While heavily used in Bengali cooking at 
the time, it was still rarely found in British home cooking then. This vision of 
cosmopolitanism makes foreign food acceptable to Bengali tastes while demonstrating 
Bengali modernity and cultural know-how in engaging with worldly foods. Devi’s recipes 
defiantly reject the center-periphery model of power that typically makes 
cosmopolitanism the preserve of the imperial country, thus undercutting British 
perceptions of Bengali cooking.  



26    Fine, “Without Sympathy,” Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 7:1 (2018-2019) 

 

 
In other Bengali works, authors are explicit about the fact that they are mixing their 
cuisine. For instance, in Cookery, Mukhopadhyay identifies English chops as an 
“authentic recipe,” but then writes (1887: 358-359): 
  

Readers can clearly understand that the way this English chop has been prepared 
seems rather bland despite the fact that this is a much-esteemed delicacy for the 
English. To make it more palatable to food lovers across the world we suggest a 
few tweaks in the recipe.8  
 

Mukhopadhyay then elaborates a similar recipe with the addition of ghee and ginger 
juice, a popular seasoning in Bengal. Thus he self-consciously shows that he has 
constructed a creolized dish that is more acceptable to the Bengali palate, thereby 
bringing the European into the realm of the Bengali. Conversely, by noting that the 
Bengali additions to the dish would make it more “palatable to food lovers across the 
world,” the Bengali palate displaces European taste as the default. 
 
In addition to regionalizing these foreign dishes, the Bengali cookbooks—as 
demonstrated in Mukhopadhyay’s introduction to Cookery—attempted to construct a 
distinctly national cuisine in which the foreign and regional are brought into the fold of 
a developing Indian cuisine. Besides the “English Chop” recipe, Cookery expressly 
draws on global ingredients and recipes, including recipes for “German Stew,” “French 
Mutton Cutlet,” “Irish Stew,” and “English Meat Roast” (9-10). While the integration of 
Western European food specialties demonstrates the cosmopolitan palate of the Bengali 
middle class, as Ray has argued (2014: 63-64), in Cookery Mukhopadhyay subsumes 
these foods into the realm of Indian cuisine. “India has an unparalleled wealth of 
chewable, suckable, lickable, drinkable food. The science of consuming food that was 
beneficial for health was also devised in this country,” he writes in the introduction (9-
11), advocating that the consumption of all healthy food stems from a supposed Indian 
ideal. 
 
This country to which Mukhopadhyay refers is also understood to be made up of the 
different regions and religions within the subcontinent. At the beginning of one edition, 
he writes that he has taken “recipes from across India like the laddus from Patna, gujiya 
from Allahabad, kachori from Kasi, pera from Mathura, dalmut from Agra, nakuldana 
from Delhi, mohanpapri from Lucknow, mohanbhog from Lahore and Ambala, papad 
from Hapar, kulcha from Kashmir” (11). By listing places throughout the Indian 
subcontinent, Mukhopadhyay suggests that it is the regional which constitutes the 
national cuisine. Thus he subverts the British vision of a pan-Indian curry by forming a 
vision of Indianness predicated on the regional. Furthermore, he encompasses multiple 
religions within this understanding of India, writing that his work is aimed at “the 
Hindu and the non-Hindus, as well as the Shakta and the Vaishnavs” (Ibid). By listing 
these different religions, he suggests that Indian cuisine is made up of the foods of “all 
creeds of people,” rather than being a single, homogenous entity. By extension, then, he 
promulgates a vision of a decolonial nation that is ambitious and somewhat utopian.  

 
In opposition to British attempts to codify “Indianness” within a framework of British 
knowledge, the indigenizing of the foreign may have even functioned as a way to uphold 



Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 7:1 (2018-2019): 27 

 

Indian cultural superiority over the British. Mukhopadhyay offers many recipes for 
“curry”in his discussion of curry in Cookery.9 Lizzie Collingham argues that curry in 
British India was “not just a term that the British used to describe an unfamiliar set” of 
South Asian dishes, but a “dish in its own right, created for the British in India” (2006: 
118). In Cookery, however, Mukhopadhyay offers a different explanation that displaces 
the ownership of curry from the British living in India, while still noting its essential 
melded form. Acknowledging many different recipes for the dish, including “Sour 
Curry,” “Fennel Seed Curry,” “Papaya Curry,” “Fish Curry,” and “Arum Curry with 
Potatoes,” he explains their origins in Europeans learning “to cook ‘curry’ from the Jews 
and the Jews learnt it from the Muslims” (Mukhopadhyay 1928: 272; trans. Ray 2015: 
67). Unlike cookbooks such as What to Tell the Cook which claim that curry is a recipe 
“every Native knows,” Mukhopadhyay attempts to historicize the dish as a mix across 
European cuisine, Jewish cuisine, Muslim cuisine, and now—based on Mukhopadhyay’s 
own subject-position—Hindu cuisine. Here, then, Mukhopadhyay takes the imperial 
knowledge given in cookbooks like What to Tell the Cook and reinvents curry to be an 
essentially mixed dish from its beginnings, while still claiming its origins as non-
occidental. Mukhopadhyay thereby removes ownership from the Europeans while 
subverting ideas about what “every Native knows,” undermining British understandings 
of Indian culture.  
 
Conclusion  
 
Through these Bengali cookbooks by Devi and Mukhopadhyay, we see how creolization 
within the region served to undercut the vision of Indianness promoted by the British in 
their cookbooks. As the Bengali cookbooks show, the emerging middle-class kitchen was 
a space where colonial (mis)understandings of a homogeneous and consenting India 
could be rewritten and transformed by both men and women Indian cooks. In the terms 
offered by de Certeau, colonized Indians were able to “continually turn to their own ends 
forces alien to them” through the conscious creation of and discourse surrounding 
creolization (1988: xix). The appropriation of British-introduced recipes and foodstuffs 
represented an “everyday form of resistance” through which Indians could assert their 
own understanding of India and its relationship to the world.10 

 
References Cited
 
 Cookbooks 
A Lady Resident. 1865. The Englishwoman in India: Containing Information for the 
Use of Ladies Proceeding to, or Residing in, The East Indies, or the Subjects of Their 
Outfit, Furniture, Housekeeping, The Rearing of Children, Duties and Wages of 
Servants,Management of the Stables, And Arrangements for Travelling. To which are 
added Receipts for Indian Cookery. 2nd ed. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 
 
[No author]. 1901. Ceylon Cookery; or, the Native Cook’s Assistant. A Collection of 
Receipts for Ceylon Cookery with Useful Household Hints: In English and Sinhalese. 
4th ed. Colombo: A.M. & J. Ferguson. 
 
Devi, Pragyasundari. 1995. Amisha o niramisha ahara. Calcutta: Ananda Publishers. 
 



28    Fine, “Without Sympathy,” Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 7:1 (2018-2019) 

 

Mathur, Chaube Dattram Ji. 1869. Pak Ratnakar [The Gems of Cooking]. Delhi: Matbae 
Hindu Press. 
 
Mukhopadhyay, Bipradas. 1886. Pak Pranali Vol. 2 [Cookery]. Calcutta: Dr. R.J. 
Chakraborty’s Dispensary at Great Edin Press. 
 
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Notes 

1 The word “memsahib” typically refers to a respectful term employed by non-Europeans 
to address a white married woman living in India during the colonial period. For more 
information, see Procida (2002, 2014 reprint edition). 

2 Scholars that have used hybridity to analyze British-Indian foodways include Mary 
Procida (2003), Utsa Ray (2015), and Jayanta Sengupta (2010). 

3 Nabi Bukhsh seems to be a stereotypical name for Indian servants and employees used 
by British writers. Rudyard Kipling used a similar name (1888: i). 

4 Here, I draw on Foucault’s definition of biopolitics as set forth in his posthumously 
published 1978-1979 lecture series (Foucault 2008). 

5 For the British fabrication of curry and mulligatawny, see: Collingham (115-120); Roy; 
Narayan (63); and Ruthnum. 

6 Mantena’s work discusses the importance of codification in imperial statecraft. 

7 Volume 1 of Devi’s Amisha o Niramisha Ahara was published around 1900, the second 
volume followed shortly, and the third was published in 1907. The 1995 work is a reissue 
of the volumes. For more, see Ray (2015: 63). 

8 I am grateful to Amrita Mukherjee for translating this passage. All translations from 
the Bengali cookbooks used here are courtesy of Amrita Mukherjee, unless noted 
otherwise. 

9 The term “curry” most likely originally came from a Tamil word. For more, see 
Collingham (115). 

10 I am indebted to James Scott for the phrase “everyday form of resistance” (1987: xviii-
xxii).	




