Start Date
27-5-2026 10:00 AM
End Date
27-5-2026 10:15 AM
Description
This paper examines how public food and drink spaces in early twentieth-century Malabar functioned as critical infrastructures of everyday subsistence as well as sociability. It argues that toddy shops, beyond sites of intoxication, might have provided low-cost nutrition, informal credit, and cross-caste interaction for segments of the labouring poor. Colonial excise policies and temperance movements progressively narrowed these spaces, contributing to the rise of tea shops aligned with reformist ideals of respectable public consumption. While tea shops fostered political discussion and vernacular modernity, they could have been less reliable as nutritional buffers, especially during the food crises of the 1940s. The paper shows how this moral and spatial reordering reshaped access to food. It concludes showing how post- independence development debates revisited older subsistence logics–particularly the triad of tapioca, fish, and toddy–highlighting the persistence of material constraints beneath shifting public norms.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Included in
Toddy, Tea, and Tapioca: Food, Famine, and the Moral Reordering of Public Space in Malabar (Kerala), 1900- 1965
This paper examines how public food and drink spaces in early twentieth-century Malabar functioned as critical infrastructures of everyday subsistence as well as sociability. It argues that toddy shops, beyond sites of intoxication, might have provided low-cost nutrition, informal credit, and cross-caste interaction for segments of the labouring poor. Colonial excise policies and temperance movements progressively narrowed these spaces, contributing to the rise of tea shops aligned with reformist ideals of respectable public consumption. While tea shops fostered political discussion and vernacular modernity, they could have been less reliable as nutritional buffers, especially during the food crises of the 1940s. The paper shows how this moral and spatial reordering reshaped access to food. It concludes showing how post- independence development debates revisited older subsistence logics–particularly the triad of tapioca, fish, and toddy–highlighting the persistence of material constraints beneath shifting public norms.