Bengali Mughlai Platter on the Table: Muslim and Indo-Persian Food Culture in Bengal

Abstract

ABSTRACT Shorn of a strong aristocratic lineage tracing its roots to the Turko-Persian world, Bengal’s Muslim population was created by a wide-ranging conversion of poor peasants. Indo-Persianate cuisine was thus slow to spread here, patronized by the eighteenth-century Nawabi court in Murshidabad, fitfully adopted by Bengal’s predominantly Hindu landed aristocracy in the mid-nineteenth, and spreading among the non-elite only after the move to Calcutta of the deposed Nawab Wajid Ali Shah of Awadh. The Partition created two slightly different culinary traditions on either side of the international border, in Kolkata and Dhaka. How does one then approach the question of “heritage food” among the Muslims today in a state – and in a city like Kolkata – that combines such divergent historical trajectories? The paper will offer some tentative answers by examining both the materiality of food consumption, and the discursive processes that crafted an imagined heritage of Indo-Persian food culture in Bengal.