Cultivating taste: Narratives of biscuits in colonial western India

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the ways in which biscuits were imagined, described, and projected in western India by different groups of the elite during the colonial period, and how the taste for biscuits began to be cultivated among them. As Lizzie Collingham (2021) shows, the ‘biscuit-eating culture’ became firmly established in India during the colonial and postcolonial periods. While previous studies on this subject have mainly focused on sources from eastern and northern India, this paper examines materials from western India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Specifically, it explores how the taste for biscuits began to develop among the elite in the urban space of the Bombay presidency/province.

      Drawing upon advertisements in periodicals and memories of biscuits included in the writings of intellectuals from this region, the paper seeks to demonstrate the manner in which the taste for this ‘new’ food was cultivated through various strategies employed by manufacturers, as well as through a wide range of social and political changes that influenced ideas of food among the urban elite.