Neo-Colonial Food 'Raj' & Politics of the Kitchen

There are a few things in India that are at once as intimate and as public as food. Yet food has never been only about nutrition or hygiene. It occupies a world somewhere between the sacred and the ordinary, the mythic and the material, where eating can be an act of devotion, hospitality, hierarchy, pleasure and memory. For many of us, food carries something of the wonder of childhood—in Ganesha’s irresistible craving for laddoos, Krishna’s playful stealing of milk and butter, or Draupadi’s Akshaya Patra—the vessel of inexhaustible abundance and the duty to feed others. If prasada in the Gaudiya Vaishnavism devotional movement makes food an offering and an act of grace, then the food in a temple, the langar, food distributed after a church service, iftar during Eid, the feast at a village mela, or food eaten after a bath in the river are not marginal embellishments to Indian life.

In other words, food has a ritually and morally ambivalent place in Indian life. Feasting, sharing, and feeding others can signify abundance and devotion, while fasting, vrat, abstinence, and ahimsa can signify discipline, purification, penance and ethical restraint. Jains take ahimsa to its most rigorous dietary expression, making vegetarianism an act of moral absolutism. Yet the absence of food can be equally consequential. Hunger and food shortages have repeatedly marked Indian history with suffering, nowhere more tragically than in colonial India, most notoriously in the Bengal Famine of 1943, when millions died amid a devastating crisis of food access and availability. Therefore, food is not merely the joys of sharing or consumption; it can also become a site of resistance. Bhima, the great warrior, famed for his legendary appetite and culinary skills, becomes a cook during the Pandavas’ exile and kills Kichaka, the army commander of King Virata, for his lecherous behaviour. No wonder The Assassination of Kichak, Krushnaji Prabhakar Khadilkar’s famous 1907 Marathi play, used this mythological episode as an allegory for resistance to British colonial rule. The kitchen, in other words, has never been entirely innocent of power or protest.

State’s Entry Into The Kitchen

Seen in this light, the post-colonial Indian state’s entry into the kitchen appears strangely familiar, yet unsettling. The recent inspections and raids in Maharashtra on restaurants and hotels evoke not merely the familiar spectre of a Kafkaesque state, but the transformation of the old colonial Raj into a neo-colonial Food Inspector Raj, with its own totalising vision of bureaucratic surveillance and discipline. What was once an apparatus of colonial surveillance now returns in the language of hygiene and public health. One might even say—borrowing from French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari—that we are witnessing a reterritorialisation of the pleasures of the palate. The kitchen, once an intimate and socially embedded space, becomes a site of bureaucratic discipline and order.

At the level of simple hygiene or public health, these official raids are difficult to fault. The expensive restaurants, fashionable cafés and even five-star hotels are not magically purified by polished interiors, imported crockery, or high prices. Behind the dazzling dining room or café, food may be badly stored, ingredients contaminated, or kitchens left stinking and unhygienic. Government canteens, hospital kitchens, railway food and corporate cafeterias are equally notorious for failing elementary standards of hygiene. Yet the unsettling experience begins with the Janus-faced character of contemporary food capitalism. In order to secure moral consent for its vision of social order, it unleashes a world of abundance, novelty, choice and pleasure, only to turn its bureaucratic apparatus against the very desires it has helped to set loose. A legitimate concern for public health thus acquires a dreaded Hobbesian dimension through an ever-expanding vocabulary of inspection, licensing, certification, compliance and standardisation. The kitchen therefore ceases to be merely a place where food is prepared. It becomes an administrative object, governed by an authorised idea of hygiene and public health. The furore over the ban on the sale of loose ghee and oil by small shops and vendors in Mumbai captures precisely this unease.

This produces a strange paradox. The ascetic state encounters the hedonistic citizen. Having presided over a consumer society organised around abundance, novelty, choice and pleasure, the state increasingly finds itself compelled to discipline the desires that such a society produces. The neo-colonial Food Inspector Raj, in this sense, is not simply a story of regulation. It is the post-colonial Indian state’s attempt to discipline an utterly narcissistic culture of consumption through an increasingly draconian apparatus of administrative control. The kitchen of the hotel and the food of the street make this contradiction particularly visible. At one end lies the world of hotels, restaurants and clubs, the elitist pleasures of modern capitalism rendered seductive by celebrity chefs, spectacular interiors, curated menus and a dazzling vocabulary of culinary indulgence. Here, pleasure is commodified, elevated, aestheticized, and sold as a post-anthropocentric experience.

Street Food

At the other end lies street food, perhaps one of the greatest expressions of palate democracy in India. Bada pav, samosa, pav bhaji, chole bhature, momo, chow mein, dosa, kebab, and chai are not merely cheap substitutes for restaurant food. They constitute the everyday infrastructure of urban pleasure and survival. They are eaten between in trains, after college, during office breaks, after a shift at work, on a date, or at midnight. They belong to no single class. The student, taxi driver, clerk, migrant worker and executive may all find themselves standing at the same stall, sharing the same counter, eating the same food. The equality is temporary and imperfect, but real enough to momentarily suspend the segregated geography of the city.

There is a strange irony here. The neo-middle class can obsess over detox, pesticides, gluten, organic apple, preservatives, cholesterol, fasting apps, weight-loss regimes while remaining fascinated by the samosa, momo or chaat outside the office. Modernity has not abolished anxiety about food. It has multiplied it. The result is a peculiar new biopolitics of eating. If classic capitalism flourished on delayed gratification, modern food capitalism survives on compulsive enjoyment, producing a perverse psychological and political deadlock. Not surprisingly, the modern state speaks instead in the language of contamination, nutrition, hygiene and bodily risk. Meanwhile, the masses continue to eat street food, whether safe or unsafe, often outside the regimes of both state regulation and middle-class self-discipline. These worlds now coexist. Food becomes at once a religious object, a social marker, a commodity, a public-health problem and a project of self-fashioning for the post-colonial state.

The Deeper Paradox

Here lies the peculiar weakness of the bureaucratic food regime. The state is powerful where food has already been formalised, yet strangely powerless where food remains embedded in the anarchic, democratic life of the street. It is precisely here that the post-colonial Indian state confronts what Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek calls fetishistic disavowal. The modern bureaucratic food regime hides the horrors of industrial food practices, yet maintains the fiction that danger can be located, contained and corrected through visible acts of inspection and enforcement. Street food, in contrast, becomes the fetish object through which a much larger anxiety about food, contamination, modernity and disorder is displaced. This is the deeper paradox at the heart of the contemporary bureaucratic food regime in India.

The old colonial Raj sought to make Indian society legible through surveys, classifications, licences, censuses, police records and administrative categories. The neo-colonial Food Raj extends that impulse into the kitchen. Hygiene, safety, certification and compliance become the new vocabulary of domination, surveillance and control. Yet the so-called unhygienic street food continues to mimic, evade and defy this order, remaining a quotidian space of dissent and defiance. In short, raids on restaurants reflect the increasing banality of modernity and the intrusion of the violent modern state into the most intimate spaces of everyday life. Perhaps this is why the vegetarian–non-vegetarian divide has become one of the defining obsessions of Indian modernity. No wonder the vegetarian ideal can be weaponised to generate clinical disgust against the hedonistic others and erode the syncretic civilisational ethos in which diverse food practices have long coexisted in India.

(The author is a poet, political scientist and presently a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi)

(Views expressed are personal)