Ishita Banerjee-Dube

Caste, race and difference: The limits of knowledge and resistance:

This article reconsiders the past and the present of Dalit and lower-caste struggle in India, including recent efforts to link caste and race in order to make a common platform against discrimination at international fora. It explores the burden of colonial concepts and statist imaginaries in the shaping of objectified identities by Dalits, especially as they seize upon and crucially rework such categories. Critically engaging with the notion of coloniality, ‘the other side of modernity’, the article reveals the limits of categorical perspectives and intellectual theory in the articulation of social worlds. Instead, it points towards a global sociology that acknowledges and affirms ambivalence and contradiction as crucial attributes of thinking, writing and practice.

Reading Time: Texts and Pasts in Colonial Eastern India

The opening couplet of Bhima Bhoi Malika ba Padmakalpa, an early twentiethcentury Oriya text published as late as 1971, authoritatively asserts the lingering presence of the idea of kaliyuga, the era of evil. In the classical conception of time in Hinduism, kaliyuga constitutes the last of the four progressively deteriorating epochs that complete the time cycle before a return to the pristine satyal kreta age. Kaliyuga has enjoyed great prominence in Brahmanical literature since the time of the early Puranas. General disorder characterizes Kali: the different castes do not perform their assigned functions, rituals are disregarded, heretical

Cooking Cultures: Convergent Histories of Food and Feeling

This volume offers a study of food, cooking and cuisine in different societies and cultures over different periods of time. It highlights the intimate connections of food, identity, gender, power, personhood and national culture, and also the intricate combination of ingredients, ideas, ideologies and imagination that go into the representation of food and cuisine. Tracking such blends in different societies and continents developed from trans-cultural flows of goods and peoples, colonial encounters, adventure and adaptation, and change in attitude and taste, Cooking Cultures makes a novel argument about convergent histories of the globe brought about by food and cooking.

Modern Mixes: The Hybrid and the Authentic in Indian Cuisine

This essay introduces food and cooking as elements significant to the understanding of historical processes and concept categories such as the ‘modern’. It draws upon crisscrossing tales of cooking and cuisine from Bengal and other parts of India and Britain between the late nineteenth and twenty first centuries to underscore hybridization and innovation as constant, enduring, and intrinsic components not just of food and cooking but also of human lives and encounters in general. This allows it to raise questions about the novelty and rupture on which the ‘modern’ is supposed to be based. Exploring the centrality of food, cooking, and taste in the shaping of personhood, identity and belonging, status and class, and examining how the claims of novelty and distinction often besets the modern with anxieties and desire, this chapter calls for a reconsideration of concept-categories and a scrutiny of the ‘authentic’ and ‘pure’ to make a case for identities poised on the indeterminate and impure.

Book Review: Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal

PARNA SENGUPTA, Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011, pp. 211.