I am a historian and food studies scholar with a particular focus on community-engaged and food justice research and pedagogies, and empire/post-colonial histories of labour and circulation.
Tea is a plant, comestible, and beverage that appears in multiple, mobile guises across human his... more Tea is a plant, comestible, and beverage that appears in multiple, mobile guises across human history: a medicinal herb, luxury drink, coffeehouse social, parlour ritual, drug food, street brew, supermarket staple, plantation commodity, craft crop, and connoisseur good. This chapter explores tea as a local food that became regionally, globally mobile, and generated a diversity of cultural artefacts as it did so. It considers how the distinct histories of the camellia sinensis and camellia assamica species collided and conjoined when modern Euro-American colonialism carried the tea plant into agro-industrial spaces that accelerated the global consumption of its beverages. However, those same historical processes that enhanced tea's global mobility also restricted the mobility of the working classes engaged in its making. Ironically, famed global teas were largely inaccessible in the local spaces and for the Indigenous peoples who pioneered its use as a food and drink. For centuries, a single plant species, camellia sinensis, dominated plant-human discourses around tea. While there are three major species of camellia tea plant, only sinensis and assamica became widespread. Cultivated in China since the early era of its agrarian history, the culinary, botanical, political, ritual, and cultural enchantments around the camellia sinensis catalysed a steady stream of textual and cultural production. Across the medieval into the early modern eras, its supplies of the beverages circulated across Asia, as the plant's cultivation. By contrast, camellia assamica stayed as a wild plant whose edible parts were foraged, preserved, and consumed by the Indigenous peoples of South east Asia. This was the case until the nineteenth century when it joined sinensis in becoming globally mobile. Over the modern era of colonization and empire, both plant species were transformed into a global commodity. Hundreds of thousands of workers were involved in cultivating, picking, brewing, packing, and marketing their leaves. That
Seeing histories from the margins: an Indigenous labour force on Everest, 1921–53, 2024
The relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled.' 1 This chapter explores ... more The relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled.' 1 This chapter explores 'ways of seeing' Other Everests in the labouring infrastructure of the 1921-53 British Mount Everest expeditions. 2 It juxtaposes expedition photographs of mountaineering labour with first-person published narratives from elite British mountaineers such as Brigadier-General the Honourable Charles Granville Bruce and from Indigenous Sherpa mountaineers such as Ang Tharkay and Tenzing Norgay. 3 General Bruce, the leader of the 1922 and 1924 British Mount Everest expeditions, was deeply convinced of the value of photographs for the mountaineering endeavour: 'Sketches convey very little of the true character of the mountains; this is impossible without the help of photography.' 4 New forms of photographic equipment enabled British mountaineers of the twentieth century to produce impressive photographs that served the crucial purposes of both science and publicity. Photography was a technical and aesthetic device that enabled these mountaineer photographers to claim as truth its knowledge practices, scopic technologies, and forms of representation. 5 Historians of photography consider a photograph as a unique kind of artefact, one that is at the same time a historical document, a site of affective investment, and an aesthetic object. 6 A selection of first-person narratives from imperial and Indigenous mountaineers in dialogue with expedition photographs becomes a way to frame Indigenous histories from the mountain margins of the British Empire, and to see Other Everests.
forests with fields, roads, villages, towns, and cities of a British colony that became Canada in... more forests with fields, roads, villages, towns, and cities of a British colony that became Canada in 1867. Generations of migrants have grown the city since the ninteenth century, and continue to arrive. Our paper takes a longue-durée perspective on Italians, Chinese, Tamil, and Bengali migrant gardeners and ethnocultural plants. Scholars have studied urban gardens as sites of emotional and sensorial experiences, market production and neoliberal values, and resistance to capitalist imperatives. 6 Such gardens do not exist in isolation. The intersectionalities of race, class, age, and gender help constitute them. 7 Our socio-ecological lens considers such gardens as sites of collaboration between human and nonhuman actors. 8 A food studies analysis views them as important components of culinary infrastructure, that is the 'artifacts, institutions, and media that are used to mobilise and organise food or to convey knowledge about food'. 9 These gardens are 'essential' spaces that exist in dialogue with migrant marketplaces, contributing to the city's culinary infrastructure, and to its foodscape.
Kalimpong as a Transcultural Missionary Contact Zone
Transcultural Encounters in the Himalayan Borderlands Kalimpong as a “Contact Zone” Heidelberg Studies on Transculturality, 2017
This article explores Kalimpong as a transformative mountain space for mixed-race children, a loc... more This article explores Kalimpong as a transformative mountain space for mixed-race children, a locality closely associated with a range of imperial missionary activity, notably through the personality and career of its famous adoptive citizen, the Rev. John Anderson Graham, the founder of the St Andrew’s Colonial Homes, now known as Graham’s Homes. From the 1870s, the Foreign Mission of the Church of Scotland undertook an array of activities directed at the diverse populations of the hill-station towns of Kalimpong and Darjeeling on the mountainous edges of British India and the regions of Bhutan, Nepal, Sikkim, and Tibet. The chapter examines how Scottish Presbyterian associational networks around print, religion, education, social reform, and self-help enterprises helped develop Kalimpong’s role as a transcultural and transnational hub that functioned as a key contact zone in the Eastern Himalayan region.
Darjeeling and Kalimpong, British imperial towns in the eastern Himalayan borderlands at the junc... more Darjeeling and Kalimpong, British imperial towns in the eastern Himalayan borderlands at the juncture of Bhutan, China, India, Nepal, Sikkim, and Tibet, played a vital yet under-studied role as transcultural hubs of a hybrid modernity. This themed section explores “connected histories,” paying particular attention to these Himalayan towns as a modern crossroads for empires, ethnicities, religions, and cultural and economic mobilities. It offers alternative approaches that connect and intersect the history of local places and spaces with broader narratives of global history. Contributors draw upon a range of perspectives to frame their historical explorations of Darjeeling, Kalimpong, and the eastern Himalayas in terms of local, regional, and global circulation, transnational connections, and transcultural encounters.
British science, Chinese skill and Assam tea / 429 British science, Chinese skill and Assam tea: Making empire’s garden
This article traces the workings of science, ideology and economy which integrated Assam into imp... more This article traces the workings of science, ideology and economy which integrated Assam into imperial and global commodity networks as a tea ‘garden’. It discusses how imperial botanists and their colonial subordinates conceived of botanic gardens as a conduit for transplanting plants such as tea into British-ruled territories. While this clearly served British economic interests, they stressed its vital scientific and strategic implications. The East India Company was willing to finance the Indian tea enterprise when its profitable China monopoly ended. Although the tea plant was found growing wild in Assam, importing Chinese plants and skilled growers was a priority. Nineteenth-century ideas about race science had an important impact, denigrating Assam’s plants and people as wild and uncultured, as compared to the civilised lineage of the Chinese. However, as the British acquired greater knowledge about tea cultivation, planters began to prefer bringing cheap, unskilled labourers...
Food cries, historical city sounds, and the twentieth century silencing of street vendors
Food, Culture & Society, 2021
This article explores historical street cries, the sounds, calls, and music of peddlers, hawkers,... more This article explores historical street cries, the sounds, calls, and music of peddlers, hawkers, and vendors who sold food, provisions and services, and their changes within global soundscapes and urban communities. It considers food cries as an acoustic, socio-economic, and cultural phenomenon associated for centuries with street selling as a key constituent of culinary provisioning and subaltern livelihoods. It examines how and why from the mid-nineteenth century, such cries were perceived negatively by many urban residents and how the sounds of selling food that were historically integral to culinary provisioning systems were portrayed as an undesirable and backward aspect of urban life and virtually relegated to the realm of nostalgia.
The East India Company and the Natural World, Vinita Damodaran, Anna Winterbottom, Alan Lester (Eds.). Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke (2015), xix + 297 pages, £68 hardcover
This article explores the social production of Darjeeling through the social and cultural encount... more This article explores the social production of Darjeeling through the social and cultural encounters that helped transform a mountain health resort for colonial functionaries into a vibrant Himalayan hub for vernacular modernity and local cosmopolitanism. While Darjeeling's high-altitude setting inextricably linked it to the intense exploitation of subaltern bodies, it evolved as a dynamic urban locality that offered mobile individuals and groups the opportunity to seek out new livelihoods and realize modernistic aspirations in a transcultural setting.
Adopting and implementing Strategic Asset Management (SAM) is a prerequisite to improving day-tod... more Adopting and implementing Strategic Asset Management (SAM) is a prerequisite to improving day-today management and long-term utility planning. Field-level employees play a key role in implementation of a SAM program and have to make often burdensome adjustments to their work processes to comply with newly instituted systems. They are not always consulted in planning and technology adoption. They frequently do not receive feedback or recognition for their contribution. Based on a water utility survey, the authors provide insights and recommendations on how to increase field staff commitment to SAM. They will utilize their results to conduct further research directly with field staff on their perceived role and what can be done to improve their adoption of SAM processes.
Darjeeling and Kalimpong, British imperial towns in the eastern Himalayan borderlands at the junc... more Darjeeling and Kalimpong, British imperial towns in the eastern Himalayan borderlands at the juncture of Bhutan, China, India, Nepal, Sikkim, and Tibet, played a vital yet under-studied role as transcultural hubs of a hybrid modernity. This themed section explores “connected histories,” paying particular attention to these Himalayan towns as a modern crossroads for empires, ethnicities, religions, and cultural and economic mobilities. It offers alternative approaches that connect and intersect the history of local places and spaces with broader narratives of global history. Contributors draw upon a range of perspectives to frame their historical explorations of Darjeeling, Kalimpong, and the eastern Himalayas in terms of local, regional, and global circulation, transnational connections, and transcultural encounters.
The Himalayas had long been a dynamic, yet geographically remote and ecologically challenging spa... more The Himalayas had long been a dynamic, yet geographically remote and ecologically challenging space of spiritual significance and cultural flux for Asian borderland peoples and mountain cultures. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, imperial policies, colonial explorations, labouring migrations, plantation capital, commodity trades, and a unique pattern of urban morphology transformed the Eastern Himalayas into a more accessible space that became a transcultural contact zone for circulation, contact, and mobility. At the Darjeeling hill station of British India, the high altitudes and temperate climes promised to alleviate bodily ills and nurture modernity through the plantation, missionary, military, and mountaineering enterprises that had taken root. Given the diversity of indigenous, migrant, and colonial subjects who inhabited this space, asymmetrical and unequal experiences based on class, race, and gender difference became intrinsic to this promise. This article examines D...
Himalayan Darjeeling and Mountain Histories of Labour and Mobility
Darjeeling Reconsidered, 2018
This chapter interrogates the historical trajectories of the Himalayan subjects named as Lepchas,... more This chapter interrogates the historical trajectories of the Himalayan subjects named as Lepchas, Bhutias, Gurkhas, and Sherpas, who played a crucial role in producing Darjeeling as a vibrant mountain space for circulation, enterprise, and culture. The establishment of an imperial hill station resort led to numerous and novel—often unanticipated—labouring and service openings that the indigenous peoples of the Eastern Himalayan borderlands parleyed into new possibilities for livelihood and mobility, albeit with varying degrees of success. The chapter examines how the complicated negotiations of indigenous groups with the racially determined practices of tea plantations, botanical and mountaineering expeditions, mission stations, and military recruitment shaped new modernistic identities and were constitutive of Darjeeling as a trans-Himalayan space defined by mobile lives and cross-cultural encounters which in turn it helped constitute.
In this article, we ask what makes photographs different from other kinds of historical source ma... more In this article, we ask what makes photographs different from other kinds of historical source material. What can photographic images do that other documents cannot? And what traps lie in wait for the historian using the visual record? Our more fundamental concern, however, is with the capacity of photography to capture labor and capital. Photographs are of the concrete and specific; but capital abstracts, rendering equivalent that which was once concrete. Can photographs help us to see how capitalism works? Here we consider the ways that photography has been central to both the expropriation and exploitation of labor and to the artistic critique of these practices. We argue that photography documents and artistically refigures the various things—nature, work, and caring communities—that capitalism needs to continue generating surpluses in a finite world.
This article examines the role of late twentieth-century transnational migrants to Canada in tran... more This article examines the role of late twentieth-century transnational migrants to Canada in transforming Scarborough into a culinary hub with global and Asian resonances-a place where dense affective, sensory, social, cultural, and economic networks of foodways overlap and combine to create place-specific diasporic sensescapes. The primary research questions are: How does such an Asian culinary hub emerge and function in the transnational and diasporic setting of a contemporary global city and how do citizens' negotiations of its mobile foodways constitute the hub, and act as its archive? To locate answers for these questions, the authors engaged with long-term collaborative research among academics, students, and community stakeholders connected to the Culinaria Research Centre of the University of Toronto. Somewhere in time Scarborough became what it is today, a city with huge apartment buildings, rambling subdivisions, indoor shopping malls, a multicultural society full of lots of new and interesting tastes and smells and sounds. (Scarborough Public Library 1997, 14) In this article, we analyze the ethnoburb of Scarborough, through its longue durée historical evolution, from an indigenous gathering-place, to a nineteenth-century colonial agro-township, into a Toronto suburb famed for its vibrant Asian foodways. We examine the role of late twentieth-century transnational migrants from Asia in making Scarborough into such a culinary hub-a place where dense affective, sensory, social, cultural, and economic networks of foodways overlap and combine to create place-specific diasporic sensescapes. Our primary research questions are: How does such an Asian culinary hub emerge and function in the transnational and diasporic settings of a global city? How do citizens' negotiations of its mobile foodways constitute the hub, and act as its archive? To locate answers, we engage in collaborative research that involves academics, students, and community stakeholders connected to the Culinaria Research Centre of the University of Toronto, a center committed to exploring Scarborough foodscapes. Our work develops a two-pronged research methodology that builds upon contributions of the historical craft to recent theoretical innovations in food studies. First, this research
antebellum plantation society in a “golden haze,” was the importance of abolition for the creatio... more antebellum plantation society in a “golden haze,” was the importance of abolition for the creation of Lowcountry cuisine. Although shrimp, oysters, and shad are now local icons, Northern fishing fleets dominated even inland Carolina waters before the Civil War because most planters refused to allow their slaves the liberty of a fishing boat. Seafood only became widely available in Charleston markets through the efforts of Charles C. Leslie, a free black pilot and ex-Confederate gun-runner, who organized former slaves into a well-regulated fishing fleet. Shields has achieved a genuine methodological breakthrough for sensory histories by shifting the focus from cookbook recipes to agricultural manuals as archives of terroir and taste. He also provides a valuable reminder of the historical nature of cuisines, and the importance of creativity to ensure that “traditions bring the strongest elements of a community’s tastes and practices into the future” (251). Nevertheless, this otherwise admirable account of the communal sharing of taste betrays at times a peculiar sectionalism, even as commodity markets were being nationalized through the exchange of asparagus, melons, and strawberries from Lowcountry truck farms for dairy products and grocery staples from New York City. Despite New Yorkers’ access to Southern bounty, Shields maintains that they were enthralled by “a law of mass markets” and failed to appreciate new watermelon varieties such as the “superlative sugary Bradford, Ravenscroft, Odell’s, Pomaria, and Souter melons” (204). He thereby rhetorically enhances Lowcountry connoisseurship through contrast with the supposedly tasteless Yankee. But perhaps many Northeastern consumers simply lacked such an intense sweet tooth for fruit; sugary apple varieties like the Honeycrisp and Gala remain, to this day, less popular in the region than the tart McIntosh and Empire. In any event, Shields has made important strides in advancing the historiography of regional cuisine and communal taste beyond the realm of anecdote and stereotype. Like Berry’s plea for more reflective eating, this book challenges us with a manifesto for engaged scholarship in what has become an age of fast food history. The steady stream of volumes on virtually every conceivable food that are now being produced by academics hungry for publications and presses lusting after profits may prove as unsatisfying as a diet of fast food meals. Rather than grinding out books to a McDonaldized template, Shields plowed methodically through overlooked archives and discussed his findings with local farmers, shrimpers, grocers, and cooks for more than a decade before releasing the manuscript. The results were worth the effort. Southern Provisions is an intellectually and spiritually nourishing work of community-engaged scholarship that should inspire all food historians, in the words of a well-known Southern chef, to “kick it up a notch.”
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Papers by Jayeeta Sharma