Beer, banquets and a Patiala Peg: food and drink on tour

Abstract

This article critiques photographs and material culture pertaining to the consumption of food and alcohol during the first Australian cricket tour of India in 1935/36. The artefacts—menus, seating plans and food advertisements—enable the present-day researcher to interpret the rapidly transforming political, cultural and sporting landscape as well as the internal dynamics of the tour. The archival objects function as links to the cricketers and are pivotal in interpreting the 1935/36 tour in light of the absence of living participants. Food and beverages represent a significant ethnographic difference and the cricketers’ response to the customs of culinary consumption in late-colonial India exposes broader societal sentiments and reflects imperial politicking. The Australian cricketers encountered bicultural culinary influences comprising the vestiges of British hegemony in combination with a new nationalistic indigenous influence.

Notes

1. For example, Ranji’s non-payment for rental of, and damages to, Shillinglee Park; a country property owned by Lord Winterton (Wilde 1990, 211–213).

2. Hobbs was knighted in 1953 and named as one of the five greatest cricketers of the twentieth century by Wisden in 2000.

3. In addition to the six Australian colonies, Alfred also visited the Cape of Good Hope, New Zealand and India.

4. Poona inn was only one of the many residences used by Lord Harris, the Governor of Bombay from 1890 to 1995, and these figures do not reveal the total consumption of his many households.

5. The same could apply to Frank Tarrant.