Food, identity and difference in travel writing from Muslim South Asia

Migration History Seminar Series

This event is co-hosted by the Global Diversities and Inequalities Research Centre

‘Human or not, everyone has their own habits and tastes’: Food, Identity and Difference in Travel Writing from Muslim South Asia

Migration is one of the great facts of human society. Its contribution to the making of the modern world cannot be overstated. While historical writing in settler societies such as the USA and Canada has emerged over a long time period, European nations with rich migration histories, such as the UK, France and Germany, have more latterly recognized the centrality of population movements. There is great scholarly interest in the field and that will grow now as legacies of imperialism become much more directly entangled with the lives of immigrants in the countries they have settled.

‘Human or not, everyone has their own habits and tastes’: Food, Identity and Difference in Travel Writing from Muslim South Asia

That India was experiencing a rise in vigilante-style violence linked to the emotive issues of cow slaughter and meat consumption came to widespread public attention in 2015. A wave of ‘beef lynchings’ drew attention to the spread of a ‘food fascism’ directed at Muslims and Dalits. What one ate – beef or not – was being constructed as a fundamental marker of difference between religious communities, and caste groups too. In the communal discourse, the protagonists were undifferentiated and immutable: Hindus and Muslims have always been divided, and perhaps inevitably in conflict, because one worships the cow, while the other eats it.

As a challenge to this politicized narrative, my paper will explore how food has been employed as a marker of identity and difference among South Asian Muslims in the modern period. To access more quotidian experience, the main sources are travel narratives, many of which were written by women being that they were more occupied with the preparation and serving of food. What these writings reveal is the ways in which food was used at different historical moments and locations to differentiate, not just between Hindus and Muslims, but also between colonizer and colonized, men and women, old nobilities, a new middle class, and ‘the poor’, and Muslims of different regions and locales.

As one woman from Delhi indicated during a debate over ghee aboard a pilgrim ship to Jeddah in the early 1920s: ‘Human or not, everyone has their own habits and tastes. In other words, food may be a universal human experience, but it is also a means of differentiating self and others that is contingent on history.

Speakers:

Siobhan Lambert-Hurley

Chair:

Professor Don MacRaild

The Global Diversities and Inequalities Research Centre is a home for an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary scholarship that explores migration, diasporas, nations, regions, and localities through the lenses of diversity and inequality.

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Photo credit: Andrew Neel

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