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Abstract
This article looks at three post-Independence Indian short stories to do with masculine guilt about eating. Looking to alleviate the boredom of their clerical existence, the male protagonists in this fiction seek refuge in a fantasy of consumption focused on foods such as milk, ‘chicken fry’ and sweets. Right when their desires look to be met, however, a clamour of alternative claims on the food compels them to forego fulfilment. What does this narrative pattern say about the postcolonial experience of modernity for lower-middle-class men? Does the inability to consume signify their inability to be subjects in their own right? Or can we see the stories as offering an alternative model of agency located in self-denial? This article examines the complex relationship between masculinity, modernity and consumption to argue for the significance of a provincial masculinity as a subaltern position.
Notes
1. Parker, “You Are What You Eat,” 349.
2. Chatterjee, “Talking about Our Modernity,” 281.
3. Mishra, “Defining the Self,” 120.
4. Uberoi, Freedom and Destiny, 33.
5. Mitra, “A Drop of Milk,” 276.
6. Srivastava, Passionate Modernity, 99.
7. Ibid., 101.
8. Acharya, “Order Cancel,”183.
9. Conlon, “Dining Out in Bombay.”
10. Names of motorcycle models.
11. De Haan, “Calcutta's Labour Migrants,” 201.
12. Mitra, “Sweetmeat,” 267.
13. Srivastava, Passionate Modernity, 148.
14. Ibid., 200.
15. Ibid., 140.
16. Ibid., 155.
17. Sarkar, Writing Social History, 307.
18. Ibid., 289.
19. Chatterjee, “Talking about Our Modernity,” 265–6.
20. Ibid., 267.
21. Ibid., 268.
22. Ibid., 280–1.
23. Mukherjee, Twice Born Fiction, 96.
24. Roy, Alimentary Tracts, 84.
25. Ibid., 80–1.
26. Ibid., 99.
27. Gandhi, Autobiography, 199.
28. Ibid., 231.
29. Ibid., 232.
30. Roy, Alimentary Tracts, 106.
31. Gandhi, Autobiography, 231.
32. Roy, Alimentary Tracts, 107.
33. Ibid., 109, 114.
34. Ibid., 77.
35. Gilligan, In a Different Voice.
36. Spivak quoted in Chattopadhyay, “Art of Auto-Mobility,” 113.
37. See Sarkar, Writing Social History, 83.
38. Lazarus, “Introducing Postcolonial Studies,” 9–10.
39. Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory, 108.
40. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 158
41. Sarkar, Writing Social History, 206.
42. Gandhi, Autobiography, 67.
43. Marglin, The Dismal Science, 69–70
44. Uberoi, Freedom and Destiny, 151.
45. Gandhi, Autobiography, 231.
46. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 67.