Alimentary Tracts

In Alimentary Tracts Parama Roy argues that who eats and with whom, who starves, and what is rejected as food are questions fundamental to empire, decolonization, and globalization. In crucial ways, she suggests, colonialism reconfigured the sensorium of colonizer and colonized, generating novel experiences of desire, taste, and appetite as well as new technologies of the embodied self. For colonizers, Indian nationalists, diasporic persons, and others in the colonial and postcolonial world orders, the alimentary tract functioned as an important corporeal, psychoaffective, and ethicopolitical contact zone, in which questions of identification, desire, difference, and responsibility were staged.Interpreting texts that have addressed cooking, dining, taste, hungers, excesses, and aversions in South Asia and its diaspora since the mid-nineteenth century, Roy relates historical events and literary figures to tropes of disgust, abstention, dearth, and appetite. She analyzes the fears of pollution and deprivation conveyed in British accounts of the so-called Mutiny of 1857, complicates understandings of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s vegetarianism, examines the “famine fictions” of the novelist-actor Mahasweta Devi, and reflects on the diasporic cookbooks and screen performances of Madhur Jaffrey. This account of richly visceral global modernity furnishes readers with a new idiom for understanding historical action and cultural transformation.

“This splendid book uses ideas about food, fasting, and famine to explore the Indian colonial sensorium in a truly original manner. It should be of great interest to historians of colonialism, of cuisine, and of the affective practices through which the colony—and the postcolony—produce their effects. It is beautifully and forcefully written, thus itself a sensory bonus for the reader.”—Arjun Appadurai, New York University, “While Swami Vivekananda suggested that Indians needed ‘beef, biceps, and Bhagvadgita’ to overthrow the British, Mahatma Gandhi demonstrated that vegetarianism, abstinence, and nonviolent protest were the more appropriate practices for a spiritualized Indian national movement. By revealing the agency of gastropoetics and gastropolitics throughout modern South Asian history, Parama Roy brilliantly interrogates disgust, abstinence, dearth, and appetite as ‘biomoral’ categories that transformed traditional vectors of cultural analysis and social action. Roy’s book is, unsurprisingly, great food for thought. It yields exquisite morsels alongside an intellectual savoring of all those gastronomic staples that resonate throughout history and literature. Did chapatis leaven the Mutiny? How did salt marinate the satyagraha? And why does the diaspora crave chutney and spices?”—Srinivas Aravamudan, author of Guru English: South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language, “[A]n unusual but much-needed approach to such extraordinary phenomena as the 'greased cartridges' (i.e., ones lubricated with beef and pork fat) and legendary 'migratory chapati[s]' that figure largely in histories of the Sepoy Rebellion (1857) (p. 31). This finely written book draws our attention to other food-related episodes in the history of Indian nationalist resistance, such as Mahatma Gandhi’s discovery of a vegetarian restaurant in London.”, “If ever a work took seriously Jacques Derrida’s insistence that we must understand eating as an act through which we both consume and are consumed, it is Parama Roy’s remarkable new book, Alimentary Tracts.”, “Roy’s beautifully produced book looks at writing since the mid-nineteenth century to argue that food, its production, consumption and rejection, are key to an understanding, and rethinking, of wider processes of colonization, decolonization and globalization…. [Her] account is commendable for the extent to which it manages to combine theoretical sophistication with precise historical detail…. It is Roy’s incisive precision, and her embodied understanding of eating that ultimately ensures the broader abstractions of her thesis are by turns convincing and compelling.”

Parama Roy is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India and an editor of States of Trauma: Gender and Violence in South Asia.