Acknoledgments  

Introduction  

1. Disgust: Food, Filth, and Anglo-Indian Flesh in 1857  

2. Abstinence: Manifestos on Meat and Masculinity  

3. Dearth: Figures of Famine  

Appetite: Spices Redux  

Remains: A Coda  

Notes  

Selected Bibliography  

Index  

“I
f ever a work took seriously Jacques Derrida’s insistence that we must understand eating as an act through which we both consume and are consumed, it is Parama Roy’s remarkable new book, Alimentary Tracts.”—Julietta Singh, Reviews in Cultural Theory

“[A]n unusual but much-needed approach to such extraordinary phenomena as the “greased cartridges” (i.e., ones lubricated with beef and pork fat)
and legendary “migratory chapati[s]” that figure largely in histories
of the Sepoy Rebellion (1857) (p. 31). This finely written book draws our attention to other food-related episodes in the history of Indian nationalist resistance, such as Mahatma Gandhi’s discovery of a vegetarian restaurant in London.”—Joseph Bristow, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900

“Roy’s beautifully produced book looks at writing since the mid-nineteenth century to argue that food, its production, consumption and rejection, are key to an understanding, and rethinking, of wider processes of colonization, decolonization and globalization…. [Her] account is commendable for the extent to which it manages to combine theoretical sophistication with precise historical detail…. It is Roy’s incisive precision, and her embodied understanding of eating that ultimately ensures the broader abstractions of her thesis are by turns convincing and compelling.”—James Procter and Stephen Morton, Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

“The book that results…is a historically dense, fluidly metacritical, lucidly theorized and exquisitely written meditation on eating as a poetic and political practice in South Asia and its diaspora from the mid-1800s to the present – one that would be of equal interest to postcolonial and literary scholars, as well as to interlocutors of the emerging areas of critical animal studies, posthumanities and food studies.” —Pooja Rangan, Parallax

“I
f ever a work took seriously Jacques Derrida’s insistence that we must understand eating as an act through which we both consume and are consumed, it is Parama Roy’s remarkable new book, Alimentary Tracts.”—Julietta Singh, Reviews in Cultural Theory

“[A]n unusual but much-needed approach to such extraordinary phenomena as the “greased cartridges” (i.e., ones lubricated with beef and pork fat)
and legendary “migratory chapati[s]” that figure largely in histories
of the Sepoy Rebellion (1857) (p. 31). This finely written book draws our attention to other food-related episodes in the history of Indian nationalist resistance, such as Mahatma Gandhi’s discovery of a vegetarian restaurant in London.”—Joseph Bristow, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900

“Roy’s beautifully produced book looks at writing since the mid-nineteenth century to argue that food, its production, consumption and rejection, are key to an understanding, and rethinking, of wider processes of colonization, decolonization and globalization…. [Her] account is commendable for the extent to which it manages to combine theoretical sophistication with precise historical detail…. It is Roy’s incisive precision, and her embodied understanding of eating that ultimately ensures the broader abstractions of her thesis are by turns convincing and compelling.”—James Procter and Stephen Morton, Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

“The book that results…is a historically dense, fluidly metacritical, lucidly theorized and exquisitely written meditation on eating as a poetic and political practice in South Asia and its diaspora from the mid-1800s to the present – one that would be of equal interest to postcolonial and literary scholars, as well as to interlocutors of the emerging areas of critical animal studies, posthumanities and food studies.” —Pooja Rangan, Parallax

“While Swami Vivekananda suggested that Indians needed ‘beef, biceps, and Bhagvadgita’ to overthrow the British, Mahatma Gandhi demonstrated that vegetarianism, abstinence, and nonviolent protest were the more appropriate practices for a spiritualized Indian national movement. By revealing the agency of gastropoetics and gastropolitics throughout modern South Asian history, Parama Roy brilliantly interrogates disgust, abstinence, dearth, and appetite as ‘biomoral’ categories that transformed traditional vectors of cultural analysis and social action. Roy’s book is, unsurprisingly, great food for thought. It yields exquisite morsels alongside an intellectual savoring of all those gastronomic staples that resonate throughout history and literature. Did chapatis leaven the Mutiny? How did salt marinate the satyagraha? And why does the diaspora crave chutney and spices?”—Srinivas Aravamudan, author of Guru English: South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language

“This splendid book uses ideas about food, fasting, and famine to explore the Indian colonial sensorium in a truly original manner. It should be of great interest to historians of colonialism, of cuisine, and of the affective practices through which the colony—and the postcolony—produce their effects. It is beautifully and forcefully written, thus itself a sensory bonus for the reader.”—Arjun Appadurai, New York University

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