Week 4 - Clarified Culture

Clarified Commodities: Managing Ghee in Interwar India
Rachel Berger
Technology and Culture, Volume 60, Number 4, October 2019, pp. 1004-1026
(Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2019.0099
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/741381
[ Access provided at 29 Sep 2020 14:13 GMT from University of Toronto Library ]
06_Berger 1004–26.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 11/3/19 2:34 PM Page 1004
SPECIAL ISSUE: NEW HISTORIES OF

TECHNOLOGY IN SOUTH ASIA
Clarified Commodities
Managing Ghee in Interwar India
RACHEL BERGER
ABSTRACT : This article explores genealogies of food, taste, nutrition and

questions of governance through attempts to regulate the production and
sale of vanaspati ghee in interwar India. It explores the “ghee wars” of 1927–
29, when Punjab Province pushed to regulate the production of ghee alter-
natives so as to ensure the quality of the products on offer and regulate the
trade in mass-produced food commodities. The possibility of a regulatory
system brought to the fore a series of questions about the role of the Raj and
the power of provincial legislatures as interwar structures of governance in
India took hold: what was the responsibility of the provincial government to
its citizens? Could taste and desire be gauged in rational terms? Could au-
thenticity and fraudulence be measured? Finally, could food be governed?
This article uses these questions to examine the unusual debates about clar-
ified butter, its forgeries, and the context of interwar citizenship.
In the early 1950s, a sleek ad for vanaspati ghee (clarified vegetable oil) ran
in a variety of popular publications in India.1 In it, a sari-clad mother gazes
lovingly at her young son, cradling him with one arm, while balancing a
platter of food in her other hand. A slogan atop the image reads “Mothers
who care use Dalda,” with a list of four reasons why they might: “made
from the finest vegetable oils, packed in hygienic tamper-proof tins, re-
member DALDA is never sold loose, contains Vitamins for growing chil-
dren.” The product, which is not featured in the ad but is presumably the
substance in which the featured food was cooked, is referred to as Dalda-
brand vanaspati at the bottom of the image, “the pure quality cooking
medium.” Dalda, the name of the company that created the ad and a term
Rachel Berger is associate professor of South Asian history at Concordia University. She
has, in the past, worked on the biopolitics of Ayurveda, and is currently researching the
history of food and nutrition in interwar and early postcolonial India.
©2019 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved.
0040-165X/19/6004-0004/1004–26
1. For a history of Dalda in advertising, see Ambi Parameswaran, Nawabs, Nudes,

Noodles.
1004
BERGERK|KGhee in Interwar India
soon to become a synonym for vegetarian cooking oil, had already had a
go at image-making earlier in the late 1930s, when ads appeared in Hindi-
language vernacular publications. Earlier ads followed the more common
format for advertising goods, cluttered with testimonials attesting in detail
to its uses, and featuring several hand-drawn images of the family mem-
bers who ate it, with slogans attesting to the strength of sons who eat vana-
spati.2 This ad, by contrast, reflected a more modern, streamlined attempt
at advertising this new commodity, which spelled out the benefits of the
product concisely and inaugurated a new way of thinking about the
kitchen in Indian modernity.
The history of food in India has, until recently, been divided rather
evenly into a cultural history of food and its preparations and the history
of its absence, say, in times of famine. Missing from both the history and
historiography is a better sense of the relationship between food produc-
tion and distribution and the greater structures of governance at work,
ranging from histories of food regulation to the pragmatics and politics of
food distribution and the sale of food commodities. While the history of
imperial trade, the connected histories of the Indian Ocean World, the
dynamics of the Bay of Bengal, and more recently, the history of diasporic
foodways have laid the foundation for these sorts of inquiries, the shifting
political terrain of twentieth-century Indian governance proves something
of an impediment to thinking concretely about the history of food regula-
tion in changing times.3
Before independence, the messy politics of interwar India, in which
provinces gained semi-autonomous decision-making capabilities and the
Raj began its political retreat, brought about possibilities for governance
that responded directly to the demands of the market—as well as the law-
makers seeking to regulate the economy to better serve their citizens. At
the core of this history is the unlikely commodity of vanaspati ghee, veg-
etable oil made to resemble clarified butter, which found itself and its vari-
ations at the center of Indian politics for both specious and weighty rea-
sons. This article charts the unlikely trajectory of ghee from a substance
primarily relegated to the realm of the domestic or the spiritual into a com-
modity at the center of politics, hinging broad policy-making upon what
was, until this moment, generally worked out in the bazaar and the home.
It also recovers ghee and its mimetic others from the realm of the cultur-
2. The earlier Dalda ad appeared in Hindi periodicals, including Madhuri, Chand,
and Sudha.
3. A wonderful example of this genre of thinking through diasporic and transna-
tional foodscapes is found in Richard Fung’s film Dal Puri Diaspora, in which he traces
the genealogy of the roti and its journeys around and through imperial/postcolonial
spaces. See Fung, Dal Puri Diaspora. Though not focused on food history, Sunil Am-
rith’s study on Indians who move across the Bay of Bengal to South East Asia and back
has changed the scope of how Indian historians write about migration. See Amrith,
Crossing the Bay of Bengal.
1005
T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E
ally exceptional and interrogates it as a technology undergoing a transi-

tion, situated both in the history of nutrition and in the unfolding of new
economies in interwar India.
Before becoming the subject of peak transnational negotiations for a
variety of governmental and industrial actors, vanaspati had to come into
being as its own entity. Meant to stand in for the more luxe (expensive,
OCTOBER
more work-intensive) ghee made of clarified animal fat (generally cow or
2019 goat butter), vanaspati offered a cheap, easy alternative in a convenient,
VOL. 60 long-store package. This slippage from mimetic copy to marketable prod-
uct involved a passage from substance to commodity, invoking a range of
symbolic, religious, and ultimately, technological changes that ushered in
this modern kitchen staple. The transformation of vanaspati ghee from
substance to commodity tells a story about the way in which the social and
technological life of a new product takes up tropes of earlier substances,
and centers the history of nutrition as a site for thinking through questions
of new technologies in shifting cultural terrains.
From Substance to Technology
Clarified butter, or ghee, is a popular and culturally resonant food

product that serves multiple purposes in South Asian life. Ghee is made by
simmering butter in order to separate the milk solids and fats; frequent
removal of the residue results in a pure golden-colored liquid. The sub-
stance is then strained through a sieve to further dislodge and remove any
impurities. Spices can be added to it during the process, and results vary
depending on the amount of time that the butter spends cooking and the
care with which the residue is removed. Ghee is traditionally stored in
earthenware, airtight containers immediately upon cooling, a process that
has historically required no refrigeration, making the precise and taxing
task of making ghee a thankfully infrequent one. The primary use of ghee
is culinary—it is added to rice, poured atop naan and roti, and dolloped
onto vegetables or meat curries (especially in North Indian cuisine), and it
is a staple of Mughlai cooking. The addition of ghee to a meal symbolizes
wealth, opulence, and care—butter is not a common fat used in the Indian
diet, and until the 1950s, it was not widely available as a food commodity.4
4. The radical transformation of the Indian diet in the 1970s is commonly referred
to as India’s White Revolution (in contradistinction to the global Green Revolution and
its Cold War invocations) or Operation Flood. This was a scheme put together by the
National Dairy Development Board in 1970 aimed to dramatically increase India’s milk
production and distribution by linking producers in rural India with consumers in
major cities. Funded by the EU’s World Food Program and a loan from the World Bank,
the program was hugely successful, transforming India from a milk-deficient nation to
one where the milk available per capita was doubled, and where the dairy industry
became the world’s largest producer. See Martin F. Doornbos et al., Dairy Aid and
Development.
1006
To add ghee to a dish is to elevate it (especially calorically!) and, more sym-

bolically, to render it opulent.
The secondary use of ghee is as a component of Hindu religious ritual.
Ghee as an offering to murtis (effigies of gods) is a sound historic practice
with roots in the Yajurveda (1000 BCE).5 It is included prominently in fire
ceremonies, from a formal havan (fire ceremony) to the daily arathi (even-
ing fire prayer) to keep the fire burning and signify the sacrifice of a costly
item, similar to leaving a coin or jewel for the god in question. This offering
up, or prasada, entails a material offering, which is made in return for the
darshan, or blessing, that the god imbues upon the beholder.6 The material
offerings, or naivedya, are meant to invoke a feeling of bhoga, or enjoyment,
in the god-figure. In all cases, the onus is on the beneficiary of the blessings
of the God to ensure that the prasada offered is pure and prepared to the best
of one’s abilities; the laboring over ghee ensures the element of sacrifice as a
part of the ritual of receiving the blessing.
Finally, ghee has a strong presence in Ayurvedic medicine, firstly for its
rich dietary contribution, and also as a purifying substance appropriate for
the non-digestive parts of the body.7 Ayurvedic recipes call for the addition
of the live yogurt cultures cultivated in traditional dahi (yogurt) that bol-
ster the health benefits of the substance. The fourth-century Susruta Sam-
hita, the earliest text in the Ayurvedic tradition, identifies a ghee/honey
mixture as a salve for injury and a method of packing a surgical incision or
large wound. Another common practice for diseases of the eye, for exam-
ple, is the application of warm ghee directly onto the eyeball.8
Taken together, ghee is a valuable food commodity whose richness
comes not only from the value of its base component, but equally from the
care taken to ensure its proper preparation. While it is used throughout the
subcontinent and across religious and ethnic divides, the frequency of its
use is class-based, given the expense of attaining proper butter, especially
before the 1950s. Even in religious ceremonies, it can be substituted by
cheaper, more readily available commodities, such as honey, coconut, or
pressed oil. Cooking too can do without ghee, making it a desired, if non-
essential component of the South Asian kitchen. Moreover, ghee is tradi-
5. The Yajurveda is the third text of the Vedas, the ancient literature of the first
epoch of Hindu civilization in the Indian subcontinent. Ghee is mentioned as an offer-
ing during rituals of devotion.
6. For a thoughtful overview of the practice and meaning of prasada, see Andrea
Marion Pinkney, “Prasada, the Gracious Gift.”
7. Ayurveda is the oldest cogent medical tradition that is still practice in the sub-
continent. The oldest extant texts date to the forth century CE, but the practice of the
tradition dates back to at least the time of the Vedas (1500 BC) and is likely built on
already-extant practices in the region.
8. Scientific reproduction of Ancient Indian knowledge systems of the body is de
rigeur in India today. One study that argues for ghee to promote eye health is Shilpa
Rahul Rewale, “Critical Review on Anatomy of Eye.”
1007
tionally associated strongly with home, for the care in its preparation is
such a major part of its value. Scholars of Hinduism go as far as to suggest
that to prepare it for puja (worship) is itself a devotional act.
An inquiry into the meaning of ghee offers up a fascinating paradox to
its framing: despite the focus on its slow and careful production, there is a
wide berth for inclusion around its materiality. The broader category of
OCTOBER
ghee, which relies on the particularities of authenticity and purity that we
2019 can track for other biomoral substances, isn’t held to the standard of purity
VOL. 60 or the specificity of instruction.9 This is in keeping with a certain flexibil-
ity identified in historical and anthropological writings about the embodi-
ment substances. Launched as a catchall that accommodates the relation-
ship between embodiment and morality, the biomoral is used as a term to
refer to ways in which medical and physical or indeed physiological sub-
stances or states of being are inflected with a moral component.10 The
metaphysics of humoral balance, environmental context, and chemical in-
teraction are always already more important than the specifics of ingredi-
ents, which are integral but for which scientific thinkers allow for substitu-
tion and replacement. For instance, the antibacterial bark called neem,
used for millennia to brush one’s teeth in the subcontinent, can be easily
replaced with cloves, or launga, if neem is unavailable, or by the antiseptic
haldi (turmeric), which also works against inflammation. There is no one
path to health—or to god, as we see with ghee. For the truth about the dis-
course on the purity of ghee is the widespread use of its other—the use of
a wide variety of oils, prepared in myriad ways, to achieve the same clear
substance that bears the import of imbued values of an elevated, worthy
substance. While this is true for cooking, it appears that it is equally true
for religious worship and even for Ayurvedic modes of healing. Rather
than adhering to purity, ghee is inherently a mixed substance, defined as
much by its simulacrum as it is by a labored-over pot of clear butter.11
While there is no obvious restriction around the use or imbibing of
9. An example of the purity of water, for instance, connects the length of time spent
striking the vessel in order to warm up and conduct energy in its brass. Instructions
around ghee are much less precise, placing an importance on the absence of blemishes
but without specificity around instruction. See Dagmar Wujastyk, Well-Mannered Med-
icine. Also see Lakshmi-Chandra Mishra, Betsy B. Singh, and Simon Dagenais, “Health-
care and Disease Management in Ayurveda.”
10. The term “biomoral” originates in the Indian context with work done on caste
and the free flow of substance, focusing on the complexity of the narrative contamina-
tion given the inevitability of contact between human beings. I have written on the term
extensively in Berger, Ayurveda Made Modern, chap. 1.
11. The idea of the simulacrum is Baudrillard’s, meant to render into a position of
meaning something where the point of origin has been lost or abandoned. While vanas-
pati exists very much in the world of bona fide ghee, the complexity around the rela-
tionship of its point of derivation and its ultimate circulation as its own entity invokes
the modes of relationality that Baudrillard discusses. See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra
and Simulation.
1008
ghee along caste lines, there is an inherent barrier at work given its dual
nature as a luxe and also religiously resonant substance. There are power-
ful tropes at work around food that work to create conditions of exclusion
in South Asia, and ghee is inherently subject to these.12 The economic
motive for exclusion is a dominant one at play: ghee, along with curd and
other products made of milk fats, are expensive and have not been histor-
ically plentiful, and are thus thought to be out of reach by the vast major-
ity of poor and working people. The historic economic marginalization of
Dalits is articulated in part as an issue of food scarcity, as well as a barrier
of access to more expensive, nutrient-rich foods. This is borne out as both
lived reality and cultural trope in the literature on Dalit food traditions.
For instance Joothan, Omprakash Valmiki’s lauded memoir of growing up
Dalit in postcolonial India, literally takes its name from the notion of the
leftover, discarded piece of flesh passed on from casted to uncasted com-
munity.13 More recently in 2016, Shahu Patole, a member of the Mangs
community of Marathwada, launched a cookbook called Anna He Apoor-
nabrahma (The incomplete Supreme Being [Brahma]) written in Mar-
athi.14 In it, recipes that rely on seemingly unconventional logics of cook-
ing are celebrated, and tell their own story of an Indian food culture that
doesn’t rely on conventional practices—in short, they are recipes con-
ceived in poverty, which privilege the use of spices and steaming, and
specifically notes the popularity of ghee. The recipes reveal an alternative
food culture, likely more familiar to the masses than the dominant dis-
course of savarna cooking, where beef, rats, buffalo, and other commonly
used but discursively excluded foodstuff are literally the center of the meal.
Patole’s work disrupts on many levels, both in its introduction of new
12. The noted anthropologist R. S. Khare was a key figure in determining the every-
day meaning of food in organizing daily life in India. Khare’s larger contribution was in
contrasting work he did on Brahmins and on Dalits, where the worked-out worldview
of the former, described in some of his texts, stands in stark contrast to the ways in
which he centered the latter by revealing a Dalit political ideology and a self-fashioned
Dalit subject consciously at odds and in opposition to the seemingly intractable domi-
nance of savarna morality. See for instance Khare, “Food as Nutrition and Culture”;
Khare, Food, Society, and Culture; Khare, The Eternal Food.
13. See Omprakash Valmiki, Joothan.
14. Shahu Patole wrote evocatively about his motivation on the blog Foodie Express,
a popular Indian social media site for food writers. See Patole, “Why I Wrote a Book on
Dalit Food.” In 2009, a class of students at Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule Women’s Studies
Centre in Pune University undertook a study of Dalit food history entitled, “Isn’t This
Plate Indian? Dalit Histories and Memories of Food,” which led to the creation of a book
based upon their findings. The editorial team was led in part by the late Indian sociolo-
gist Sharmila Rege, whose thought has been so crucial to parsing the relationship be-
tween caste and gender. The project sought to recover the cultures of eating and of food
preparation that defined Dalit foodscapes in the region—a revelation that substantially
challenged and widened the scope of what has been until now considered Marathi cook-
ing. The findings are collected in Rege, Isn’t This Plate Indian? For coverage of the class,
see Divya Trivedi, “A Matter of Tastes.”
1009
foods and techniques of preparation, and also in its assertion of a food cul-
ture from below as a vital and legitimate part of the national cuisine.
The association of ghee with Hindu culture, and the symbolic and lon-
gitudinal importance of cow-worship to the preservation of a distinct iter-
ation of Hindu nationalism, has also rendered ghee a substance rife with
political tension, as articulated once more as an exclusionary mechanism.
OCTOBER
B. R. Ambedkar, the founder of Dalit politics in modernity, references ghee
2019 in his foundational text The Annihilation of Caste:
VOL. 60 A most recent event is reported from the village of Chakwara in Jai-
pur State. It seems from the reports that have appeared in the news-
papers that an untouchable of Chakwara who had returned from a
pilgrimage had arranged to give a dinner to his fellow untouchables
of the village, as an act of religious piety. The host desired to treat
the guests to a sumptuous meal, and the items served included ghee
(butter) also. But while the assembly of untouchables was engaged
in partaking of the food, the Hindus in their hundreds, armed with
lathis, rushed to the scene, despoiled the food, and belaboured the
untouchables—who left the food they had been served with and ran
away for their lives. And why was this murderous assault committed
on defenceless untouchables? The reason given is that the untouch-
able host was impudent enough to serve ghee, and his untouchable
guests were foolish enough to taste it. . . . This means that an un-
touchable must not use ghee, even if he can afford to buy it, since it
is an act of arrogance towards the Hindus.15
The contemporary iteration of gau-mata (literally cow-mother) worship
bears out stories of similar bans, sometimes outright and sometimes more
obliquely, that work to limit Dalit consumption of the substance, therein
reifying it as the arena of savarna (casted) folk and an exception when im-
bibed by those outside of caste.
The dividing line in a consideration of ghee and its role in South Asian
culture concerns the ways in which it was brought into modernity. Until
the twentieth century, ghee remained well outside the purview of the state
or any form of governance. Rooted squarely in the more peripheral spheres
of cooking and religious practice, ghee’s only notoriety was as a potential
vehicle for some other event—namely, the use of food as poison. Before
ghee took the stage in 1927, it was mentioned in reports of the Chemical
Examiner’s Office, an institution founded in 1849 after a series of deaths
involving poisoning were brought before the British courts in Madras.16
The Chemical Examiner’s Laboratory was a forensics lab set up for testing
substances suspected to have been altered to cause harm. The first was set
15. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste.
16. For a preliminary history of the Chemical Examiner’s Laboratory, see David
Arnold, Toxic Histories, 111–13.
1010
up in Madras Presidency, and others followed in Calcutta, Agra, and Bom-

bay in the 1850s and ’60s, creating a field of medical jurisprudence tied to
the encroaching categorization and implementation of criminal law in the
subcontinent. Eventually, there was a laboratory responsible for each
province of British India, tied to a series of acts established to discipline the
medical establishment in the 1910s. However, legal scholars have stressed
the ties between the Chemical Examiner’s Office and the legal system,
arguing that its purpose was to serve the legal apparatuses—and not act in
any way as a general regulatory body.
The absence of a conversation about ghee made the onset of a ghee-
related subject of governance all the more striking when it emerged in the
1920s. Ghee was one of the first untraded food commodities to cause any
concern for the Raj. While medical historians have rightly claimed that the
biopolitical reach of the colonial state stretched as far as the daily routines
of Indian subjects, the specifics of food commodities had been largely left
out of the conversation, even when dealing with the particularities of diet in
everyday life.17 Broader conceptions of spice, food combination, healing
properties, and dietary restrictions all came to construct the Orientalist
framework of the Indian moral and physical constitution. At the same time,
while the imperial state was invested in food commodities fit for export, like
sugar or tea, colonial histories of famine emphasize the Raj’s lack of concern
with the daily eating habits of the Indian people, making commodities fit
for consumption within India a non-priority for the imperial state.
The first inkling of change in the broad discussion of food came in the
early twentieth century when scientists interested in the then-burgeoning
new field of nutrition linked into the broader claims made about certain
foodstuffs by the Chemical Examiner’s Office. A 1919 article in the Ana-
lyst, a journal of chemical innovation, attempted to taxonomize the various
products from which ghee originated (cow, buffalo, goat) and to decipher
the precise instructions for its preparation, delineating the fat percentages
of the proteins in question and speculating about the success rate of differ-
ent cooking times.18 The authors proposed the article as a response to the
newly-released Bombay Adulteration of Ghee Act of 1910, the first of its
kind to attempt the protection of ghee—and also the last to frame ghee as
a product reasonably devoid of adulteration.
The Analyst article marks a shift from the way in which ghee had been
historically considered. Once firmly entrenched within the private spheres
of religion and domesticity, this concern with its properties and the
17. The biopolitical stretch of the state was first outlined by D. Arnold, Colonizing
the Body, where the everyday practices of discipline, surveillance, and control employed
by the Raj were read onto the embodiment reality of living as a colonized subject. Other
authors have taken up this approach from different perspectives, ranging from the his-
tory of population control to the division of space. Please see especially S. E. Hodges,
Contraception, Colonialism and Commerce; Stephen Legg, Spaces of Colonialism.
18. E. Richards Bolton and Cecil Revis, “Further Analyses of Ghee.”
1011
specifics of its preparation began a process of scientifying ghee, rendering

it subject to the components and rule for its substantive existence, rather
than the symbolism and meaning of its various states of being. In a follow-
up article in 1911, the authors reported the sampling of several varieties of
ghee, arguing that buffalo milk ghee seemed richest in nutrition.19 In this
article, they stressed the importance of the Reichert-Meissl table as a deter-
OCTOBER
mining agent of the purity of ghee, determined by the amount of fatty acid
2019 in a substance that can be removed via saponification (the separation of
VOL. 60 fats into triglycerides and their transformation into soap). They also advo-
cated following the values of chemical makeup introduced by the German
chemist Eberhardt Ave-Lallmane to determine the structure of the sub-
stance in question. In subsequent articles following up on ghee adulter-
ation, the Reichert-Meissl and the Ave-Lallmane values remained the gold
standard for testing and evaluating ghee of all sorts.
The real significance of the attempt at a scientific breakdown is the
identification of the sophistication and seeming uniformity of the adulter-
ating factors. Richards Bolton and Cecil Revis identified a common seed,
the bassia buryracea plant, at work as a common adulterant in oil passed
off as ghee, and draw this conclusion about the market in India:
The nomenclature of this subject, as stated above, has been confused
on account of the application of the term ghee butter” to the veg-
etable fat obtained from the seeds of the Bassia butyracea. This fat,
while not at all unlike ghee in appearance, yields entirely different
analytical figures, as will be seen below. We consider that such a
use of the name “ghee” is erroneous and should be avoided. As far
as we can ascertain the following native names are used to describe
the Enssia butyracea: Phulwara, chara, chima, cheuli, chiin, and yel;
while the fat or butter from the seed is properly known as chiura-
ke-piwa, phalel, or phulwa.20
In so doing, the authors preempted a conversation that would set the
stage for the politics of food regulation in the twentieth century. The early
twentieth century saw a momentous rise in the ways in which diets,
through the study of food as nutritive substance, were reconceptualized,
most notably in Europe and the United States, but with far-reaching out-
comes for Empire. The question of nutrition bifurcated into one that strad-
dled science and industry—the nutritious nature of food substances was
courted by the question of its governance in the form of concerns about
food regulation and the safety of the consumer. The American historian
Helen Veit conceptualizes this as the creation of rules for eating, routed
around an economic, scientific, and cultural rationalization of what food
did in the body and in the social and economic worlds around it.21 The
19. Ibid.
20. Bolton and Revis, “Some Analyses of Ghee,” 343.
21. Helen Zoe Veit, Modern Food, Moral Food, 4.
1012
1910s also saw the revamp of scientific thinking around the content of
food, most notably after the 1912 discovery of the vitamin (a word com-
pounded around the measurement of the vital amines at work in a given
substance), which revolutionized the nineteenth-century discussions of the
chemistry of food by providing a more specific mode for measuring the
nutrients within based on an analysis of the constitutive proteins and
amino acids.22 The precision evidenced in the identification and manipu-
lation of folic acid, phosphorous, Ribloflavin, and Vitamin D in this period
stand out as equally major accomplishments, all of which greatly informed
the tactics employed to determine the nutritional value of food.23 These
discussions had deep imperial roots, taken up as they were with the “new”
diseases being encountered in the imperial world, where illness was inher-
ently connected to the profit margin involved in trading operations. Beri-
beri, though imminently earlier in its presentation to the medical world,
became a riveting issue for American Empire in the Philippines facing the
devastation of the disease in moments of crisis.24 The bridge between
global food contexts and the growing precision of the science of nutrition
collided in a series of questions like those posed of ghee concerning nutri-
tional content, and ultimately, the question of politics and regulation ap-
peared as specters in the background.
Beyond the scientific innovations of the 1910s and 1920s, the ongoing
processes of urbanization, connected with a shift to the industrialization of
agriculture and the introduction of new food commodities, was made pos-
sible by a rise in the use of new food preservatives. Trans fats, the first man-
made fat product, were innovated and perfected in the 1890s, thus creating
a mechanism necessary for the preservation of naturally occurring veg-
etable and animal fats that vastly increased their shelf life. Margarine, the
most notable substance produced via this method and using this technol-
ogy, has the distinction of being the first product to raise questions of reg-
ulation pertaining to processed goods, and was the first product regulated
by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.25 The challenge in the early
twentieth century was to help the law and the economy catch up to the sci-
entific innovation that enabled the longer life of new food products.
This is a crucial part of the story of ghee, as it is rendered a more inter-
esting and complicated substance when it reaches another stage of develop-
ment—namely, the innovation of its mimetic other. Vanaspati ghee—which
looks similar to butter ghee—is made out of vegetable and legume oils and
processed to approximate the look and feel (and taste) of traditional ghee.
“Vanaspati” is an ancient term, referring in original Ayurvedic texts to trees
that bear fruit, thus defining this as ghee that comes from vegetation rather
than cows. Vanaspati as a concept played heavily on the fear of adulteration
22. Kenneth J. Carpenter, “A Short History of Nutritional Science.”
23. Ibid.
24. Theresa Ventura, “Medicalizing Gutom.”
25. See Ruth Dupré, “‘If It’s Yellow, It Must Be Butter.’”
1013
that permeated the cultural terrain in this period, especially with regard to
ghee. Where the clarity of the color and the pleasing nature of the smell
determined “purity” in the face of the possibility of ghee’s adulteration,
vanaspati was, from its introduction to the market, an explicit imitation.
This intervention, reified by the subsequent rise of the category of
vanaspati as the catch-all framework for the evaluation of ghee, trans-
OCTOBER
formed ghee from a substance to a technology, rendering it measurable, its
2019 components isolatable, the product capable of re-creation and perfection.
VOL. 60 Ghee had, of course, always been available for this kind of examination: its
composition and preparation were the subject of much—not little—atten-
tion. It had never, however, been subject to scientific scrutiny. The inter-
vention of the chemical examiner and the subsequent framing of ghee in
terms reliant on its chemical makeup ensured the emergence of vanaspati
as a modern technology subject to the rules of science, law, and economy.
Governing Ghee: Legislative Contexts in a Time of Change
While the specter of food adulteration engaged a preemptive concern

about vegetable oils, the first substantial mention of ghee in any of its forms
was in 1927 in the state of Punjab, where a debate was held in the legisla-
tive council about the counterfeiting and false sale of a product called
“vanaspati ghee.”26 Scholars trace the term to 1926, the year when vanas-
pati was first coined and marketed, and then later reified as a commodity
by the questions raised for debate at the next meeting of the Legislative As-
sembly.27 The complaint raised in the Punjab legislature addressed the
absence of a standard method for identifying the contents of the vanaspati
ghee, meaning that the product varied widely from container to container,
making it impossible to guarantee that its contents were safe. Moreover,
the producers and distributors of the substance seemed little phased by a
provisional Food Adulteration Act that had been introduced in Punjab in
1919, and which legislators struggled to apply and implement across the
province. Members of the legislature felt that the punishment meted out by
the Act, which amounted only to a small fine, was merely a preventative
measure, but that the sale of vanaspati was so lucrative that distributors
would not be deterred by it. Vanaspati ghee varied widely in form—at
times it was mixed with pure ghee to bring down the price, sometimes it
contained no dairy at all, and in its most base form, paraffin was added to
oil in order to bulk up the can and drive the price down further.
At this juncture, the claim that drove efforts to limit the industry was
26. Health no. 272-275B, 1929, in NAI EHL.
27. The authors, who consulted the worlds of agricultural development, advertising,
and government records, place “vanaspati” in a 1926 a point of origin, while noting the
usage of several other terms (phel, poli, etc.) for similar products. See Health no. 272-
275B, 1929, in NAI EHL.
1014
framed around the idea of safety. The vanaspati was argued to be “deficient
in vitamins which are essential for the proper growth of young children
and nourishment of nursing-mothers,” assigning to the legislature a re-
sponsibility for the daily health of citizens of the state that was unprece-
dented only ten years earlier.28 Where the initial concern of the chemical
examiner, and indeed the adulteration acts, had addressed the potential for
causing acute ill health (through poisoning due to food spoilage), an argu-
ment founded on the science of nutrition—in this case the content of vita-
mins and other nutrients—was a departure.
Later iterations of the debate revealed more details and more attempts
to circumvent the problem, with members of the legislature approaching
different kinds of potential allies. The most interesting of these attempted
alliances was with a coterie of Pandits, who the members felt might protest
vanaspati ghee on the grounds of its impurities. The Pandits collectively
defied the legislature, arguing that vanaspati ghee was a fine substitute for
pure butter and would help the lower classes to properly complete various
forms of worship that had been off limits due to the cost of pure ghee.29
The members of the Punjab Legislature opted to take the argument to
the next level, which, in this case, they decided was the Indian Chamber of
Commerce in Calcutta, in essence framing this question as one of consumer
protection, and calling upon a body they felt might feel for their plight.
Their argument was that the “white oil” (vanaspati did not carry the yellow
cast of pure ghee) was being imported illegally from Germany and England
and should be stopped. The Chamber’s hands were tied, as the import of
“white oil” was not recorded separately from other imports, and fell under
the provisions for the application and exemptions of tariffs therein. The
Chamber simply had no framework for banning a product that didn’t vio-
late a treaty for reasons of taxation, and with no verifiable risk associated
with the product. Moreover, the imported vanaspati varied so widely that it
could not be conclusively deemed dangerous enough to investigate.30
The Chamber referred the province back to the Imperial Department
of Education, Health, and Lands to see if the agricultural or health appara-
tuses of the Central Government had anything conclusive to say about the
product. Rather conversely, a report issued by the director general of the
Chamber of Industry investigating the matter found that some of the sub-
stances identified as harmful, including liquid paraffin, were used broadly
in medical care and were often more expensive than the cost of the pure
ghee itself, making it unlikely that they were being used incorrectly in
harmful quantities.
Ultimately, the outcome of these early conversations about vanaspati
28. Health no. 272-275B, 1929, 2, in NAI EHL.

29. This surprising turn of events is reported in a letter to the Punjab Legislature
found in Health no. 304-307B, 1929, 5, in NAI EHL.
30. Health no. 304-307B, 1929, 7, in NAI EHL.
1015
ghee, in which the substance was established as a commodity, was a critique

of the lack of infrastructure for accommodating the growing body of prod-
ucts like this that were new, mass-produced, lacked oversight, and were
beyond the purview of any one committee. While food acts of various sorts
pushed for regulation, the apparatuses of regulation had yet to be deter-
mined. The failure of the apparatuses of the state to address the issue of food
OCTOBER
regulation raises questions about the broader changes in government at
2019 work during this time. Each letter received or crafted by the Imperial Health
VOL. 60 Department was written in response to concerns about consumer protec-
tion, and raised the question of delegation. The first conversation—before
the speculation about adulteration, quality, marketing, or branding—was
occupied with a single question: whose decision is this to make?
The answer would be influenced by the reorganization of governance
that came about after the imperial losses of the First World War. The cost
of dominance in colonial India took its toll after the economic devastations
of WWI for the British Empire, and the articulation of Indian political
nationalism became more formalized and organized. Empire, as the British
had known it in India, was no longer economically or politically sustain-
able, especially given that some of the loftier goals of the late nineteenth
century—including banning traditional midwifery or instituting English
primary education—were no longer economically feasible. Despite agita-
tions for home rule and Gandhian swaraj (liberal self-governance)
throughout the war, which Indians had demanded in return for their loy-
alty and active, voluntary participation in the war effort, only weak meas-
ures of semi-autonomous rule were handed down in 1919.31 These took the
form of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms. Based on the principal of dy-
archic, devolved governance, several portfolios that had been controlled by
the Central Government were transferred to the provincial governments,
including responsibility for education, health, lands, municipal concerns,
roads, local policing, and a range of other issues that structured the daily
life of Indian subjects, who now held their regional governments account-
able to their demands as citizens of their province. The portfolios not
transferred included foreign affairs, economics, and the military, for
instance, which came as a huge disappointment for Indian nationalists for
whom self-rule over the entire subcontinent remained elusive.
What dyarchy managed to accomplish was the forging of a new rela-
tionship between local governments and their citizens. The creation of re-
gional portfolios that took into account the daily affairs of citizens—where
a school should be built, when a hospital should open, which villages a
road should cover—ushered in a new era of governance in which proactive
planning for daily life was a central component of rule. While the actual
31. This period has been revived very recently as an area of interest. See in particu-
lar Stephen Legg, “Dyarchy Democracy, Autocracy”; Prashant Kidambi, “Nationalism
and the City”; Rachel Berger, Ayurveda Made Modern, 4.
1016
success of this newfound reciprocity between government and citizen was

abstract at best, it created the conditions to stage conversations about the
role of governance in regulating the parameters of everyday life. The flavor
of this arrangement—especially its newness—is felt powerfully in the first
conversations about ghee. Whose job was it to govern ghee? The rerouting
of files to the central imperial docket were themselves an anomaly: they
were incorrectly directed to the Home Department, which had ceased to
exist after the devolution of power, and spent some time bouncing between
the departments of education, health, lands, agriculture, and business be-
fore the final decision was taken to deploy the question to the provinces
directly involved.
This confusion in governance reveals the scalar politics at work during
the interwar period.32 The original imperial model of a tough center met-
ing out decisions to provincial officials appointed and elected to imple-
ment them was transformed in the early 1920s. Issuing a request to a seem-
ingly “National” body was a useless endeavor—both the economic space of
the nation and the symbolic importance of nationalism failed to address
the pragmatics of regulation, despite the urgency of the matter at hand.33
The Legislators of Punjab writing to the Chamber of Commerce started the
conversation, but focused on process rather than fulfilling a demand.
Ultimately, the answer passed down from the imperial center was sim-
ple: this concern about food regulation, ranging from the details of its im-
port from foreign shores to ways to determine its safety, was the jurisdic-
tion of the provinces, a decision which elevated the importance of these
makeshift legislative bodies quickly arranged after 1919. To quote an impe-
rial commissioner in Delhi charged with handling the matter: “Prima facie,
it seems to me to be absurd that the government of India should be asked
to undertake drastic legislation of the nature suggested by the GOP because
the local government are unable or unwilling to enforce the existing law or
try other expedients.”34
From the Local to the Global: Ghee and the International

Marketplace
This verdict passed down hastily from Delhi became significant given
the scale of politics following the more complex question of import/export
32. This term is Stephen Legg’s, and it is wonderfully evocative of the layers of pol-
itics that stretched from the city to the province to the nation to the Empire in this
period of radical upheaval. See Legg, “Of Scales, Networks and Assemblages”; Legg,
“Transnationalism”; Legg, “Dyarchy Democracy, Autocracy.”
33. Manu Goswami distinguishes between the economic space of the nation and the
affective potentialities of nationalism as embodied in the popular feeling of Indian her-
itage and history. See Goswami, “From Swadeshi to Swaraj.”
34. G. S. Bajpai to E. A. R. Eustace, 17-1-28, Health no. 175-177, 1930, in NAI EHL.
1017
activity. Members of the legislature were correct in identifying the interna-

tional market as a threat to the local economy and legal practices of Punjab.
The concerns about the potential additives in foreign vanaspati and the de-
mand that it be colored, like margarine, to change its appearance sparked
the interest of exporters around the world with a finger in the ghee game.
Adding depth to the dynamics of provincial versus central regulation
OCTOBER
was the structure of the market in vanaspati itself. A chunk of the market
2019 in vanaspati ghee distributed in the subcontinent was actually produced at
VOL. 60 a factory in the Netherlands owned by the Van den Bergh family, the own-
ers of a Dutch conglomerate with ties to South Africa and the British East
African colony more generally.35 Dutch agricultural products were pro-
cessed and packaged in machines built with raw materials from the British
Empire in East Africa, which secured Van den Bergh’s a sweet promise to
be major importers of faux-dairy to the Indian colony (and other out-
posts).36 Among the first to respond to the question of adulteration
brought up at the Health Council was S. M. Liddell, a London bureaucrat
writing on behalf of the Van den Bergh Ltd., who offered to send a repre-
sentative to India during the hot season (the letter was penned in February,
making an early summer arrival inevitable) rather than wait for the annual
fall visit that year. The company was concerned that calling the product
“vanaspati” and insisting it be dyed like margarine would ensure that
Indian consumers who could not afford to buy pure butter would feel
“lesser-than,” and would view the vanaspati ghee as an inferior product.
Moreover, they echoed the concern of the legislature (as well as the Central
Government) that banning one variety of processed food would do little to
deter the adulteration of pure ghee with other foodstuff or products.37
Liddell and his firm in London went so far as to prepare a serious report
on the subject of food reform and margarine use in India, detailing the his-
tory of margarine in the subcontinent and the nutritional contribution
made by European goods in the Indian marketplace.38
Also of interest is the speed at which industry, through the representa-
tive of a private investing firm based in London, came to the call of the
Indian citizen-subject, privileging the reading of the masses as consumers
first, rather than colonized subjects of Empire. The language of the docu-
ments found in the records of the health department—for this issue was
cast by Punjab as a case of fraudulence with maximum impact upon one’s
health, and only secondarily upon the wallet—stands out from others by its
consideration of the subjective experiences of the individual as embodied
35. The informal structure of the vast majority of the market in India makes it im-
possible to determine the extent of foreign trade, making this attempt at dominance
using official recourse to trade an even more significant endeavor.
36. Health no. 175-177, 1930, 5–6, in NAI EHL.
37. Health no. 175-177, 1930, 6, in NAI EHL.
1018
subject and as subjective consumer. A consumer’s health, pride, rational

decision-making abilities, affective relationship to the market, recognition
of the product and brand, and decisions about his family’s needs were all
exceptionally well-articulated by Van den Bergh Ltd. in ways that even the
most tender-hearted Indian Medical Services official might never have
considered, including in treatises pertaining to midwifery or smallpox vac-
cination. Industry, of course, had its bottom-line to consider, and India
proved a large and growing market for manufactured goods.
Van den Bergh Ltd. also implied that the state, in its liberal idiom, was
expected to step in and mediate that relationship between the right of the
citizen as consumer and the responsibilities of its office to the colonized
subjects to ensure good, nutritious food products. The “state” in this in-
stance remained the Raj, but the government of India had abdicated re-
sponsibility for these matters to the provinces. Ultimately, it was to the
provinces—first Punjab, then the United Provinces, and finally the North
West Frontier Province—to which Liddell and his associates traveled on
their journey to India in 1929.39
In an ironic turn, the Raj came begging once the Van den Berghs made
their visit. The direct contact between representatives of the Punjab Legis-
lature and the Van den Bergh’s firm, called Dada, strengthened ties be-
tween the two entities, worked to improve the passage of goods from the
Netherlands to Punjab, and finally, resolved the question of food-coloring,
thus ensuring a modicum of safety for Indian consumers.40 In fact, the
conversations progressed so smoothly that two other possibilities arose
from them: a) the replication of this particular trade agreement with other
provinces and b) the acquisition of some of the resources used by the Dada
firm from Punjab itself, in order to cut down on the resources purchased
in East Africa. It was this latter part that raised a red flag for the imperial
government—while the province of Punjab could act autonomously of
Empire to secure a trade agreement of this nature, the same was not true
for East Africa, where a more hegemonic and severe colonial presence still
retained control over agreements of this nature. It was an embarrassment
for the imperial government, and the peons sent from Delhi to Chandigarh
were literally forced to beg legislators there to back out of the deal in order
to preserve the economic balance of the Empire. The legislators in Punjab,
in a very satisfying statement, did not heed the concerns of the Raj.
One of the arguments lobbed about in the vanaspati debates in the
Punjab legislature was the suggestion that a campaign force the Raj to con-
trol ghee by making the case that the spread of this allegedly contaminated
vanaspati ghee beyond the borders of Punjab could result in a public health
problem on a larger scale. In their eyes, this was an issue of national con-
cern for the citizens of India. Under whose jurisdiction, however, did
1019
potential harm to citizens fall? Dyarchy had relegated concern for the lon-
gitudinal problems of private citizens to the provincial systems of gover-
nance. However, the affective work of Indian nationalism, not to mention
the fast spread of industry in this period, demanded a broader audience,
and a national response. The problem for Punjab was that the mechanisms
didn’t exist to negotiate cross-provincially. Although provinces had a de-
OCTOBER
gree of autonomy from the center, they couldn’t barter with each—deci-
2019 sions had to move through the Central Government in Delhi. Ultimately,
VOL. 60 after the Dada agreement had been forged, another plan took its place that
addressed the rigidity of the provincial line as an unshakeable boundary.
Legislators in Punjab reversed the proposal they had initial posed as a
problem: with the question of due diligence sorted out by the Dada firm,
the Punjab government now wondered if, instead of stopping the spread of
Dada’s vanaspati into the neighboring provinces, why not try selling it?
Why not act as the intermediary between Dada and the United Provinces
of Agra and Awadh on the other side of the border?
What the ghee debates bring to light are the experimental capacities for
governance that see Punjab Province acting as an international trade entity
to which the Raj had to kowtow, as an arbiter of the completely uncharted
waters of grand-scale intra-provincial trade, and also as a stand-alone
political entity, empowered to regulate the goods and services offered to its
citizens. Here the province, rather than the Central Government of India,
was in the position to profit, with economic urgency shaping the much
slower legal apparatuses that were adapting to regulate the market.
Buttressing the transformation of the political mechanisms through
which to enact change was the challenge of presenting the product as a de-
sired commodity. Dalda vanaspati, which found its strong base in late
1920s Punjab, became the dominant mass-producer of ghee in modern
South Asia and its diaspora—in an extraordinary turn, a 1934 issue of the
Analyst actually discusses Dalda vanaspati as a new product introduced to
Trinidad and Tobago, where Pulli ghee had dominated.41 The Dalda com-
pany helped to incorporate the Hindustan Vanaspati Manufacturing Com-
pany in 1931 in order to have a foothold in India to explore the possibili-
ties of producing ghee there. In 1932, four Dutch companies (including the
Van den Berghs’ Dalda firm) merged with the British firm owned by the
Lever brothers to form Unilever, the world’s first conglomerate and the
largest producer of margarine and soap products globally. In India, the
Levers insisted that the name reflect the partnership—and hence, the
Dalda company was born.
The challenge for Dalda was to raise the stakes and convince more and
more of the Indian public to buy the product. This is the most resonant
and familiar part of the story of vanaspati—for this was the biggest chal-
41. Please see Das Ram Dhingra, “The Component Fatty Acids”; Anon., “Trinidad
and Tobago.”
1020
lenge, and the one won most successfully. The history of advertising in
India is strongly linked to the further solidification of class identity among
the Indian bourgeoisie in the interwar period, along with the evolution of
branding and the introduction of brand names, ready-made goods devel-
oped, in part, to serve them.42 The struggle to market ready-made goods,
to both serve the perceived “needs” of the population and to stimulate the
steady growth of consumption, was in essence a struggle to overcome the
lure of the easily accessible and affordable presence of the bazaar, where
fresh goods could be obtained.
While the lure of luxurious or limited goods could adopt an effect of
the unattainable—for instance, a printed sari, a pair of new shoes, or a col-
lection of holiday cards—products that aimed to replace goods easily con-
jured or created by bazaar purchases remained a harder sell. The introduc-
tion, branding, and marketing of prepared food products that already
circulated widely in unbranded forms posed a particularly vexing problem
to advertisers, as consumers had to be taught to purchase ready-made
goods (curry pastes, tea bags, and packaged spice mixes) that they were
used to preparing for themselves. Food needed to be marketed in such a
way as to convince the consumer to negotiate his or her relationship to its
preparation.
The Dalda company’s advertisement for canned vanaspati ghee men-
tioned earlier in the article provides an interesting example of the broader
genre. The advertisement features pictures of fresh fruit and vegetables laid
out on a very basic-looking thali, a traditional Indian plate. Somewhat
obfuscated by the image of fresh produce is a cookbook, which bears the
name of the company and features a tin of the ghee; a tiny image of a
woman, her arms spread over the large corner of the book, strives to open
its pages. Atop this image is a slogan in large, bold print, reading: “It will
build strength.” Also featured across the text of the advertisement is a
woman in a sari, to signify the mother figure, looking down at a group of
boys running towards her; placed across from her is a man, legs spread,
hands firmly on hips, and chin facing upwards. Clearly, he is meant to be
the father and the instigator of the family’s shift in consumption. Lower
down the page, the toothy grin of a boy is featured, with a cartoon bubble
in which he informs the reader that: “Father says that this will invigorate
me.”43 The slogan of the company, found at the bottom of the advertise-
ment next to the company’s name, reads, “For invigoration.”
42. The history of advertising in India is not well charted, but has been approached
by historians and anthropologists alike. William Mazarella’s study on advertising trends
in post-liberalization India remains the dominant study, and privileges the rise of the
middle class and its tenuous ties to the global and the local in the late twentieth century.
See Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke. A recent collection addressing specific moments in the
history of advertising is D. Haynes et al., Towards a History of Consumption.
43. Nearly eighty years later, one of the slogans often used is “husband’s choice.”
1021
Dalda continued to innovate in the field of advertising, as evidenced by

the sleek, modern, minimalistic ad with which this article began. In 1937,
Dalda hired Harvey Duncan of the Lintas Ad agency (the in-house agency
of the Lever firm and later of Unilever) to create a campaign for the prod-
uct that ended up radically changing the culture of advertising. Beyond ads
in magazines, Duncan developed stalls set up to sample Dalda and distrib-
OCTOBER
uted detailed leaflets with information about how to use it and recipes to
2019 try. But the biggest innovation was a filmed advertisement that was shown
VOL. 60 before talkies in Bombay. This film was actually the second such advertise-
ment to target the Indian market—the first was an ad for a GM Chevrolet
Tourer introduced in 1931. Duncan’s minions would drive the van around
rural areas to appeal to people in small towns and larger villages, making
Dalda a product that was relevant beyond the middle class. The film was
projected onto a specially-crafted van that was built round to reflect the
shape of the can of Dalda vanaspati.44
The plan worked. Dalda remained unchallenged through the 1980s as
the dominant manufacturer and seller of vanaspati ghee. The liberalization
of the Indian economy in the 1990s saw the entry of new food products and
technologies, as well as a shift towards using straightforward pressed plant
oil—including canola, for instance—that grew in popularity in this time of
change. However, beyond the success of the company (which expanded in
time to cover a wider range of food commodities), Dalda’s success was
marked by its complete appropriation of the product, which was now
transformed from a useful commodity to an essential part of the modern
Indian kitchen. With this turn towards the mass marketing of the product,
vanaspati lost the flexibility of the biomoral symbolism allotted to it by the
Pandits of yore and became, quite simply, cooking oil, with vanaspati most
commonly known as “Dalda.”45
Conclusion
This early commercial history of ghee poses a good entry point to

thinking about the evolution of state politics and the beginning of state
involvement in alimentary affairs precisely because it made demands on
44. The dearth of scholarly writing or archival material on advertising in India is
particularly felt in this moment, where Wikipedia pages, coverage in business newspa-
pers, and general websites produced by the company have to stand in for sources that
are more authoritative. As such, this insight into Dalda’s advertising past, which fits so
nicely with the scholarly narratives of consumption in this period, is from an article in
a popular business publication. See Susan Pinto, “40 Years Ago.”
45. In essence, “Dalda” became code for vanaspati, something I’m reminded of
every time I discuss this project with South Asians, who generally have not heard of
vanaspati but are familiar with the substance when I call it “Dalda” instead. Madhuri
Sharma makes this point about other commodities as well, including a soap called Sun-
light and Colgate as a synonym for toothpaste. See Sharma, “Creating a Consumer,” 227.
1022
the government that it was not quite set up to handle. It raised a series of
questions that struck to the heart of the problems of interwar governance:
what was the responsibility of the government pertaining to the private
lives of the citizen, especially regarding their embodiment? Was it possible
for provincial governments to even attempt to account for—much less reg-
ulate—the vast expanse of food production? How could taste and desire be
gauged in rational terms, and how could authenticity and fraudulence be
measured? What measures of surveillance and discipline could be effec-
tively applied? Both industry experts and state officials were essentially
asking the state to operationalize a regulatory system for food items that
the state had yet to create. And yet industry continued undeterred, and
vanaspati ghee, tea bags, powdered milk, and other controversial food
commodities flourished in this era and became the backbone of the Indian
food economy.
In light of the vacuums of power left by this experiment in governance,
matched with the tenacity and organization of a rapidly expanding market-
place, the regulative and legislative process adapted to consumer demand at
precisely the moment where the economic and legal balances of empire
were shifting dramatically. Situated as it was within the tumultuous politics
of the interwar Indian context, this latter move reveals the ways in which
the travails of the economy were responsible for ostensibly shaping the
law.46 It also reveals the extent to which the framing of a cultural product as
a scientific technology helped to normalize a process of regulating food,
invoking a mode of scientific inquiry that had not previously been central-
ized within experiments of governance. The transition from ghee to vanas-
pati to Dalda outlines the transformation of a biomoral substance to a com-
modity, and also harkens its entrances into modernity by virtue of the
political and economic work that it inspired and by which it was bound.
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Clarified Commodities: Managing Ghee in Interwar India

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

SPECIAL ISSUE: NEW HISTORIES OF

ABSTRACT : This article explores genealogies of food, taste, nutrition and

1. For a history of Dalda in advertising, see Ambi Parameswaran, Nawabs, Nudes,

BERGERK|KGhee in Interwar India

ally exceptional and interrogates it as a technology undergoing a transi-

From Substance to Technology

Clarified butter, or ghee, is a popular and culturally resonant food

BERGERK|KGhee in Interwar India

To add ghee to a dish is to elevate it (especially calorically!) and, more sym-

BERGERK|KGhee in Interwar India

BERGERK|KGhee in Interwar India

up in Madras Presidency, and others followed in Calcutta, Agra, and Bom-

specifics of its preparation began a process of scientifying ghee, rendering

BERGERK|KGhee in Interwar India

Governing Ghee: Legislative Contexts in a Time of Change

While the specter of food adulteration engaged a preemptive concern

BERGERK|KGhee in Interwar India

28. Health no. 272-275B, 1929, 2, in NAI EHL.

ghee, in which the substance was established as a commodity, was a critique

BERGERK|KGhee in Interwar India

success of this newfound reciprocity between government and citizen was

From the Local to the Global: Ghee and the International

activity. Members of the legislature were correct in identifying the interna-

BERGERK|KGhee in Interwar India

subject and as subjective consumer. A consumer’s health, pride, rational

BERGERK|KGhee in Interwar India

Dalda continued to innovate in the field of advertising, as evidenced by

This early commercial history of ghee poses a good entry point to

BERGERK|KGhee in Interwar India

BERGERK|KGhee in Interwar India

Methodology.” Information (International Social Science Council) 19,

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