G.F. Kellner and the making of an imperial state apparatus in the Indian railways

This paper attempts to chalk an account of the rise and decline of G.F. Kellner & Co., a hospitality and merchandizing firm affiliated to the Indian railways, to primarily demonstrate how its culinary provisioning contingently took on the role of an imperial state apparatus. Drawing on archival sources, the paper argues that Kellner’s created imperial mobile spacetimes to reinforce colonial hierarchies of taste, authenticity, provenance, civility, hygiene, and segregation. The firm’s gastronomic spectacle and its mythologization by imperial raconteurs naturalized Eurocentric values while obscuring the violence and exclusions behind railway expansions in nineteenth-century India. Kellner’s post-1947 erasure from collective memory, linkable to broader processes of postcolonial nationalisms and archival instability, stems from the firm’s almost absolute reliance on colonial monopolies and hierarchical networks in its heyday. Kellner’s is both the story of a forgotten retail brand and an example an ideological apparatus of Empire.