On Food and Commensality
As part of the India Today/Copenhagen Tomorrow programme, and to celebrate the new study programme on Modern India and South Asian Studies - ADI and ToRS invite you to a series of late afternoon double-lectures this autumn. Tea will be served.
The third and final double lecture is by Assistant Professor Manpreet K. Janeja and NIAS Associate Stig Toft Madsen and will touch upon Food and Commensality.
What’s in a Meal? - Everyday Cooking and Eating in Bengali Middle-Class Households in India(Calcutta) and Bangladesh (Dhaka)
Manpreet Kaur Janeja, Assistant Professor
Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen
This lecture focuses on how and why food is critical to social relations and forms of identity that emerge as normal and not-normal. It does so by describing the practices of everyday cooking and eating ‘normal Bengali meals’ in middle-class households in contemporary Calcutta (India) and Dhaka (Bangladesh) that employ cooks from poor classes. It examines the constant and tense negotiations that feed into definitions of normality vis-à-vis not-normality, the middle-classes vis-à-vis the poor, and identities, through networks of human and non-human interactions – persons, places, and things. It thus invites the audience to approach the form that a meal acquires as a window on the flux of everyday life.
The Udupi way of eating out
Stig Toft Madsen, Senior Fellow, NIAS, University of Copenhagen
A modern restaurant represents a total refutation of the entire orthodox culinary and jati commensal rules that the tradition inculcates at the level of the domestic hearth", wrote RS Khare in 1976. Nevertheless, over the last one hundred years, Udupi restaurateurs have taught South Indians to eat old and new types of food in commercial, yet culturally acceptable, settings. Reform of the social and religious matrix of Hindu civilization has proven integrally tied to Brahmin-driven changes in public dietary practices.
India Today/Copenhagen Tomorrow
India Today/Copenhagen Tomorrow is a Danish/Indian project initiated by the Danish Holck-Larsen Foundation. The foundation was established by Henning Holck-Larsen, co-founder of the Indian company Larsen & Toubro in India.
The purpose of the project is to link the people of India and Denmark by promoting the exchange of culture, science and trade between the two countries. India Today/Copenhagen Tomorrow includes contemporary art exhibitions, film festivals, music, dance and literature events, as well as conferences and academic lectures.
Under the umbrella of
