Performance of Gender in Bengali Culinary Culture and the emergence of a new nation as a 'Thirdspace'

The paper seeks to trace the progress of food cultures in Bengal and the emergence of a culinary
Thirdspace with respect to gender and nation formation. Food in middle – class Bengali homes has always
been a gendered concept. Edward Soja while propounding the theory of the Thirdspace says that it is a
space that is born out of the friction of binaries and grows to offer resistance to the Centre. He cites bell
hooks’ argument about how the margin can be seen as a space of radical openness. Although Soja being
an urban geographer limits the concept to architectural spaces, this paper seeks to explore the idea of
Thirdspace with regards to the middle-class Bengali kitchen and the gendering of food that has resulted in
the development of a culinary Thirdspace. Food mainly divided into masculine and feminine where the
best piece of fish is reserved for the man can further be divided into food for the unmarried, the married
and the widowed woman. In such a space however, the Indian man’s food was being called ‘effeminate’
by the British Raj. Hence a change of diet was being recommended for the building of the Indian youth.
The paper seeks to trace the friction between these factions and how the Indian man became ‘effeminate’
while the woman whose diet was thoroughly neglected took upon herself the job of real nation building.