Panel
2. From Oceanic Crossroads: Empires, Networks and Histories
Originating from East and Southeast Asia, rice is currently the most cultivated and consumed grain in Asia. Asian culture is said to be revolving around the sacredness of rice (Sharma 2010, 44-47). This sanctimonious relationship between rice and humans irreversibly collapsed during the colonial period when rice was become a cash crop, produced in order to be exported (Carney 2001). In this paper, I am interested in seeing how rice appears in the literature and the cinema of the postcolonial period. I take my examples from twentieth century Bengal which witnessed a devastating famine in 1943, just before India’s independence from colonial rule. I am specifically interested in exploring how writers and filmmakers in postcolonial Bengal, which went through a terrible food crisis, responded to the scarcity of rice at home. I will look at Satyajit Ray’s film, Pather Panchali and the poetry of Birendra Chattopadhyay to argue that rice takes the form of a precious commodity, either extracting an intent gaze of greed and temptation from characters or an uncanny sensation of aromatic nostalgia. I will use Laura Marks’ concept of ‘haptic visuality’ (2020) to explain this ethnic and historical condition of lustfully remembering the pleasures of rice.
Sourit Bhattacharya
University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom