Rethinking Street Foods: Street Food Hospitality in Contemporary Calcutta

TY - CHAP

T1 - Rethinking Street Foods

T2 - Street Food Hospitality in Contemporary Calcutta

AU - Janeja, Manpreet Kaur

PY - 2016/8/12

Y1 - 2016/8/12

N2 - Calcutta, dating back more than 300 years when three settlements were combined by Job Charnock of the British East India Company, was the capital of India under British colonial rule until 1912. After the partition of India in 1947, Calcutta remained in the Indian Union as the capital of West Bengal - the western part of the divided region of Bengal - while Dhaka became the capital of East Bengal which joined Pakistan as its eastern wing but later gained independence to become the present-day nation-state of Bangladesh. These various political divisions generated large numbers of displaced people across borders, with Calcutta being at the crossroads of constant flows of migrants into and out of the city. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the decline of Calcutta’s jute mills and engineering industries led to the unemployment of thousands of workers, and further reinforced the city’s transformation into a ‘peripheral city’ when compared to the vibrant energies that animated it especially in the early nineteenth century. Many unemployed workers and migrants turned to street vending and hawking to earn a livelihood. However, with economic liberalization reforms set into motion by the Union government in the mid-1990s focusing on urban centres and urban renewal initiatives, the then long-standing Left Front government in power in the state of West Bengal aspired to reshape Calcutta as a ‘world-class’ city, a paradigm which excluded street vendors and hawkers. It consisted of constructing satellite townships, special economic zones and ‘beautification’ drives over the years to ‘re-order’ the city, e.g. Operation Sunshine in 1996 to ‘cleanse’ the streets of vendors ‘responsible’ for the dirty and disordered city.3 Periodic cleansing drives and changing forms of regulations to manage the ‘hawker problem’ have continued over the years, e.g. a recent state government (now headed by the All India Trinamool Congress Coalition) order banning street vendors from heating and cooking food on pavements levied in December 2013.4 The variegated genealogy of Calcutta’s street foods and Bengali food relationships has to be described in the nexus of such flows, circulations, movements and stoppages.

AB - Calcutta, dating back more than 300 years when three settlements were combined by Job Charnock of the British East India Company, was the capital of India under British colonial rule until 1912. After the partition of India in 1947, Calcutta remained in the Indian Union as the capital of West Bengal - the western part of the divided region of Bengal - while Dhaka became the capital of East Bengal which joined Pakistan as its eastern wing but later gained independence to become the present-day nation-state of Bangladesh. These various political divisions generated large numbers of displaced people across borders, with Calcutta being at the crossroads of constant flows of migrants into and out of the city. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the decline of Calcutta’s jute mills and engineering industries led to the unemployment of thousands of workers, and further reinforced the city’s transformation into a ‘peripheral city’ when compared to the vibrant energies that animated it especially in the early nineteenth century. Many unemployed workers and migrants turned to street vending and hawking to earn a livelihood. However, with economic liberalization reforms set into motion by the Union government in the mid-1990s focusing on urban centres and urban renewal initiatives, the then long-standing Left Front government in power in the state of West Bengal aspired to reshape Calcutta as a ‘world-class’ city, a paradigm which excluded street vendors and hawkers. It consisted of constructing satellite townships, special economic zones and ‘beautification’ drives over the years to ‘re-order’ the city, e.g. Operation Sunshine in 1996 to ‘cleanse’ the streets of vendors ‘responsible’ for the dirty and disordered city.3 Periodic cleansing drives and changing forms of regulations to manage the ‘hawker problem’ have continued over the years, e.g. a recent state government (now headed by the All India Trinamool Congress Coalition) order banning street vendors from heating and cooking food on pavements levied in December 2013.4 The variegated genealogy of Calcutta’s street foods and Bengali food relationships has to be described in the nexus of such flows, circulations, movements and stoppages.

UR - https://books.google.dk/books?id=2F7UDAAAQBAJ&pg=PT7&lpg=PT7&dq=Rethinking+Street+Foods:+Street+Food+Hospitality+in+Contemporary+Calcutta&source=bl&ots=Wu3O9TtAqJ&sig=81EAgqFVPNy4SS1hnkms-HdnbHU&hl=da&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwigqKeB5pHSAhWGFCwKHbI7CrgQ6AEIKjAE#v=onepage&q=Rethinking%20Street%20Foods%3A%20Street%20Food%20Hospitality%20in%20Contemporary%20Calcutta&f=false

M3 - Book chapter

SN - 978-1-4094-5042-9

SP - 186

EP - 207

BT - Food Hawkers

A2 - Calaresu, M

A2 - Van den Heuvel, D

PB - Ashgate

CY - Farnham

ER -