Curried Cultures

Although South Asian cookery and gastronomy has transformed contemporary urban foodscape all over the world, social scientists have paid scant attention to this phenomenon. Curried Cultures–a wide-ranging collection of essays–explores the relationship between globalization and South Asia through food, covering the cuisine of the colonial period to the contemporary era, investigating its material and symbolic meanings. Curried Cultures challenges disciplinary boundaries in considering South Asian gastronomy by assuming a proximity to dishes and diets that is often missing when food is a lens to investigate other topics. The book’s established scholarly contributors examine food to comment on a range of cultural activities as they argue that the practice of cooking and eating matter as an important way of knowing the world and acting on it.

Tulasi Srinivas is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies and the Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College and author of Winged Faith: Rethinking Religion and Globalization through the Sathya Sai Movement (Columbia, 2009). Krishnendu Ray is Assistant Professor of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University and author of The Migrant's Table: Meals and Memories in Bengali-American Households (Temple University, 2004).

Part One. Opening the Issues
1. Introduction
Krishnendu Ray and Tulasi Srinivas

2. A Different History of the Present: The Movement of Crops, Cuisines, and Globalization
Akhil Gupta

Part Two. The Princely-Colonial Encounter and the Nationalist Response
3. Cosmopolitan Kitchens: Cooking for Princely Zenanas in Late Colonial India
Angma D. Jhala

4. Nation on a Platter: The Culture and Politics of Food and Cuisine in Colonial Bengal
Jayanta Sengupta

Part Three. Cities, Middle Classes, and Public Cultures of Eating
5. Udupi Hotels: Entrepreneurship, Reform, and Revival
Stig Toft Madsen and Geoffrey Gardella

6. Dum Pukht: A Pseudo-Historical Cuisine
Holly Shaffer

7. “Teaching Modern India How to Eat”: “Authentic” Foodways and Regimes of Exclusion in Affluent Mumbai
Susan Dewey

8. “Going for an Indian”: South Asian Restaurants and the Limits of Multiculturalism in Britain
Elizabeth Buettner

9. Global Flows, Local Bodies: Dreams of Pakistani Grill in Manhattan
Krishnendu Ray

10. From Curry Mahals to Chaat Cafés: Spatialities of the South Asian Culinary Landscape
Arijit Sen

11. Masala Matters: Globalization, Female Food Entrepreneurs, and the Changing Politics of Provisioning
Tulasi Srinivas

Postscript. Globalizing South Asian Food Cultures: Earlier Stops to New Horizons
R. S. Khare

References
Contributors
Index