Alimentary Anxieties: Affect in Food and Hunger

Abstract

This chapter explores the relationship between body, food, and nationalist imaginings. In particular, I investigate the question of what kinds of relationships were forged between an emergent nation and the people/bodies who constituted it (adequately fed, clothed, and sheltered) in early twentieth-century India’s anti-colonial nationalist discourses. In other words, was there an analogy or correspondence between the making of the modern nation and making of the modern body, which could be identified with that national space? In what ways did food in particular (and related discourses about hunger, nutrition, diet, and sustenance) supply the ingredients that could offer a material body for the nation and a politico-moral-cultural body for the citizen? I focus on the paradoxes that were germane to the very imagination of the body that was attached to conceptions of the modern Indian nation by the early twentieth century.