Domesticating Disgust: Food, Labor, and Disgust in Colonial India

This essay demonstrates the centrality of disgust to nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian culture and identity by examining a range of cultural materials, from Anglo-Indian travelogues and cookbooks to household guides and fiction. It shows how disgust shaped the creation of appropriate Anglo-Indian tastes in ways that asserted racial and civilizational supremacy. In imagining their homes as the domain of racial purity as well as the microcosmic representation of empire, Anglo-Indians sought to paradoxically eliminate disgust by depending on its very source—Indian servants. Given the alimentary embeddedness of disgust, this contradiction was particularly pronounced in thinking about culinary regimes and labor. Disgust in domestic cultures of British India, I argue, served three purposes: it identified its object, prescribed its own exclusion, and constituted Anglo-Indian subjecthood. It thus created a fiction of civilizational coherence and stability. Drawing on studies of disgust, nineteenth-century food cultures, and histories of imperial domesticity, this article shows how an affective history of the domestic culinary cultures of British India can yield stark understandings of its racialized material, labor, and gender ideologies.