Calcutta Town Hall or Covent Garden? Colonial horticultural knowledge, mimicry, and its discontents
Section snippets
The exhibitions as a project of anglicization
The main reason why the AHSI started the yearly vegetable exhibitions was to begin the anglicization of vegetable production in India. Due to its location, the officers focused first on Calcutta. There were two interrelated reasons for this project of anglicization: first, they proclaimed the Bengali vegetable diet to be nutritionally deficient; second, they wanted to replicate a familiar diet for themselves. As early as 1796, William Carey complained in a letter to England that, despite its
Malis
The malis are a Sudra caste, the lowest of the four varna in the Hindu caste system. However, their status and occupations tend to vary quite widely in different locations. Malis generally work as gardeners, flower sellers and makers of garlands for decorating idols. In Rangpur, W.W. Hunter lists them as being a pure Sudra caste; however, in 24 Parganas (which included Calcutta) they were a high Sudra caste originating from a Kshatriya father and a Brahman mother.54
Malis at the AHSI exhibitions
Malis were not just passive recipients of the AHSI anglicization project. They also shaped the content and structure of the exhibitions by bringing fruits and vegetables that were not from the seed distributed by the AHSI. These unsolicited contributions resulted in several changes to the exhibitions over time as the AHSI officers tried to decide how to treat them. Initially, the AHSI organized the exhibitions specifically to promote new European vegetables and had some difficulty in getting
Conclusion
Both the ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ exhibitions remained popular into the 1840s.87 As such, the work of the AHSI remained an ongoing process of ‘improvement’ which could never be finished. Through the exhibitions, the European members of the AHSI imagined that they could transform local markets and gardens, improving Bengali diets by making them more European. Yet, the primary project of anglicization was constantly challenged by the ‘native’ produce
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the US Department of Education’s Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Award (Project number: P022A150020) and the Bilinski Foundation Dissertation Research and Writing Fellowship. I would also like to thank the dedication of archivists and librarians at the Agri-horticultural Society of India library, the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, the Center for Studies in Social Sciences (Calcutta) library, the National Library in Kolkata, and the Angus Library in Oxford. In