‘Eating Offal’: Caste and Famine Food in Indian Literatures

Abstract

Famines have long resulted in new kinds of food introduced to the diet. In Ireland during the Great Famine, stinging nettle, wild mustard, watercress, and pine bark bread were regularly eaten (Poirtier, 1995). In Rajasthan, a similar type bread, sangri, made from the bark of khejra tree became popular (Bhandari 1974). In Bengal, where famines have frequently occurred in the British colonial period, previously non-food items were recognised as food such as kochu, lau-er khosha, yam, or cassava. These food items carried strong undercurrents of class, caste, religion, and gender (see Kikon 2020). For instance, Gangacharan master in Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s 1943 Bengal famine-based novel, Ashani Sanket (1954) cannot eat wild yam because it is beneath his caste-based honour and purity. When millions were subjected to deprivation and hunger in the streets of Calcutta for the famine, they were forced to eat ‘filthy food’ such as fyan (steamed rice water), rotten veggies in the dump yard, or entrails (‘offal’) of animals, as journalist Kali Charan Ghosh’s and literary writer Ela Sen’s work have shown. While some of these items became part of the heritage of famine food in Bengal, some could not because of their caste- and religion-based connotations. In this paper, I will look at Sen’s and Bandyopadhyay’s work to understand under what pressure caste and eating boundaries are collapsed for new food, and in what way the hierarchy of heritage food takes place