The Culinary and the Colonial in G.F. Atkinson's Curry and Rice

Abstract

Abstract:This article examines the culinary conceit in George Francklin Atkinson's illustrated book Curry and Rice. Published immediately following the Indian Revolt of 1857, Curry and Rice is remarkable for its complete silence on this major anticolonial challenge to British rule in India. I examine the role that food plays in creating, maintaining, and ultimately imploding this suggestive silence. While previous scholarship on this book has read its culinary discourse as complicit in its narrative amnesia about the Revolt, I argue that food speaks the agency that it is supposed to silence. In the colonial setting, the culinary cannot be read apart from the corporeal: food always figures bodies that prepare, present, and eat it. Thus, whereas Atkinson uses an extended food conceit to discursively overwrite rebel agency in this post-1857 satire, I show through a careful reading of such culinary discourse how food subverts and usurps narrative containment and narratorial intention by signifying anticolonial menace, Indian agency, and narrative slippages.