Freedom and Beef Steaks: Colonial Calcutta Culture

Nineteenth century in Calcutta was emblematic of several personal acts of defiance lived out in the daily lives of a legion of ordinary men and women who sought to be true to the spirit of the age. Freedom and Beef Steaks explores path breaking debates to do with the literary, with identity, and with cultural authenticity in nineteenth-century Bengal. The themes in this book arising from the creative and critical work in that period.
There are seven essays collected in this book. They cover a range of issues that have been little look at so far but crucial to our understanding of the making of modern Indian culture in a particular location, these are issues that uncover the complexity of the postcolonial field and further extend its scope.
A poem written in 1831 by an English poet in India, Henry Meredith Parker (1796-1868), about the educated youth of Calcutta, is used to frame the debates for and against meat-eating in the continuing context of Indian nationalism as it developed across a century.
A closer look at the political poetry written by a radical iconoclast such as Henry Derozio, reveals the communal stereotyping of the Muslim as Other, representations that were very much in keeping with British historiographical orthodoxies of the time.
The author deals with the early history of the mixed-race community in India, the Anglo-Indians, by scrutinising early letters written to the Calcutta Journal in 1819 about the community s thoughts on naming and defining itself.
From problems of modernist readings of Milton, and Bengal s greatest nineteenth-century poet, Madhusudan Datta, to an investigation into how the teleological time of history is configured in individual works by three poets (Derozio, Ishwar Gupta and Antony Firingi) in unsettling and contradictory ways, the chapters in this book open up a new way of looking at a cultural history.
In an important chapter on certain subalternist historians (mis)readings of Tagore, the author investigates the place of the relation of history and literature in history-writing today.
The volume also explores the changing modes of everyday cultural experience in the colonial city, in the shifting representations of the drawing room in the culture of upper- and middle-class Bengal.
This is a valuable book for students and scholars of literature, cultural studies and colonial studies.