Eat, Write, Dramatize: Young Bengal's Gastro Drama

Abstract:This article examines the entanglements of the gustatory and the literary in the first English-language drama written by an Indian, The Persecuted (1831) by Krishnamohan Banerjea. Krishnamohan was among the first generation of Bengali men to receive a formal English language education at the Hindu College. These men fashioned themselves as Young Bengal and beef eating became their most demonstrable form of rebellion against Brahminical Hinduism. The Persecuted, Krishnamohan's only play, dramatizes his real-life excommunication by his family for publicly eating and condoning the consumption of beef. I look at The Persecuted alongside its reception, and other Anglo-Indian writings about Young Bengal's gastronomical rebellion. I use the term "gastro drama" for Young Bengal's gustatory texts to designate a literary genre that dramatizes dramatic, messy, and difficult forms of gustation. I analyze the gustatory, literary, and linguistic traffics in these gastro dramas to argue that the English-educated Bengali imagines a new masculine identity not as a mimic identity but rather as a liminal one between colonial acculturation and resistance. My essay, therefore, pushes back against Young Bengal's popular conception as colonial "mimic men" to instead argue for a more agential form of self-identification and self-representation. By being attentive to gustatory and literary forms, I attempt to imagine a way of analyzing colonial texts that moves beyond extant theoretical frameworks.