Colonization And Colonization In Bangladesh

“Bhojonbilashi” (roughly translated as gourmand) is a popularly used expression coined to delineate the people of Bangladesh to illustrate their love of indulging themselves in eating and consumption. In Bangladesh, it is run-of-the-mill to have four meals on a daily basis starting with a homemade breakfast, a heavy lunch followed by evening snacks at 7 pm, usually from the outside street vendors, and ending the day with an extravagant dinner which includes rice, lentils, meat (or fish) and vegetables. Everyday food preparation is a grand affair in the household with at least 2 to 3 accompaniments with rice.

The sixty-four districts of the country boast about its individual unique culinary delicacies that represents their identity. Food is a predominant part of the culture where the type of

Over time, different rulers from different regions shaped the culinary construct of Bengal, even before the colonisation (which shaped the modern culinary fusions of the Bangladesh). The Bengal region was one of the first states of Hindustan (India) to be colonised by the British who ruled India for over 200 years. The impact of colonization on consumption has been explored in the context of Western cultures in numerous discourses by theorists such as Werner Sombart (1928 cited in Sassatelli, 2007) and Arjun Appadurai (1988 cited in Sassatelli, 2007), however, looking at the other side of the coin, very little has been explored on the culinary colonization in South Asia especially Bangladesh. The Bengal region has been the melting pot of culinary colonization with influences that can be traced back to as old as the thirteenth century from the various trade links of the Turkish rule to the Mughals, to the French, Portuguese and finally to the British which created the modern culinary construct of Bengal (West Bengal Dept. of Tourism,