In Grhini Kartavya Shastra, Arogyashastra Arthat Pakshastra (The Duty of a Housewife, Health or Cooking Science), published in 1913, the writer Yashoda Devi weaves recipes together with descriptions of an “ideal” kitchen routine. Aimed at women from middle-class backgrounds, living in Hindu joint families, the cookbook instructs them to get busy with grinding spices, chopping vegetables, and prepping meals to be served through the day from the early hours of the morning. In Ras Vanjyan Prakash (Essence of Culinary Delights), published in 1902, the writer Bhakt Bhagwandas explains the logic behind gendered, “women-only,” domestic rituals centred around meal preparation. “Cooking food is a woman’s religious duty,” he writes. “The responsibility of cooking should lie with women because they are the ones who remain at home.” The book’s illustrations reinforce his message, showing women cooking and serving food while the men sit and eat.
At first glance, these two cookbooks can appear to be simple compilations of regional recipes, along with dietary instructions and guidelines on how to run a kitchen, for literate women. But a closer examination reveals their conservative bent towards orthodox Hindu beliefs, fuelled by one, clear objective: moulding educated, newly-wed, middle-class Indian women to manage and run “ideal” domestic kitchens in dominant caste homes. Both publications were among the many vernacular cookbooks published in India between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. This was after the British introduced the printing press in the subcontinent, making mass production and distribution of printed books, newspapers, periodicals, and pamphlets a reality.
Just like the printing press, the British introduced other modern technologies and systems that led to widespread social and cultural churning in India. Traditional banking, administration, trading, and law were significantly altered, leading to the emergence of new, often specialised, occupations. New administrative positions were created to manage the colonial government and its expanded bureaucracy. Not surprisingly, it was mostly Hindu men from dominant caste backgrounds — who had the means to study and clear the qualifying exams — who joined these new professions. But, gaining economic stability came with a price. The turn of the clock hands began regulating their lives outside the home, as they watched new hierarchies take shape in these work spaces — ones that privileged race, in addition to educational qualifications and merit, over caste credentials. Indian men, especially those employed as clerks or other such positions in the lower rungs of the British colonial bureaucracy, felt increasingly marginalised in the public sphere. Anxieties surfaced in dominant caste households around maintaining ritual purity while pursuing economic goals in these new workplaces that demanded a quiet acquiescence to colonial modernity and the rejection of “backward” Indian culture.
At the same time, the anticolonial struggle was also gaining momentum. As scholar Utsa Ray explains, these twin developments prompted nationalist discourse to glorify the domestic and private sphere, reconfiguring it into an autonomous space insulated from the “corrupting” influence of colonial modernity. It is of little to no surprise, then, that the earliest vernacular cookbooks reasserted Hindu ideologies around the ideal family structure, gender roles, and “purity” codes that held women responsible for guarding the home from dubious outside influences. Several cookbooks refer to married women as “grihlaxmis” (goddesses of the hearth and home), glorifying their role as domestic caregivers. Cooking skills were seen as central to the identity of these domestic “goddesses,” to ensure the health and prolonged life of family members.
The rise of women’s education during this period heightened anxieties around domestic labour. In her book, Domesticity in Colonial India (2004), Judith Walsh quotes one panic-stricken male author of a household manual, who asked: “Will the woman who has obtained the BA degree, cook or scour plates?” Similarly, other cookbooks consistently doubled down on the messaging around the Indian woman’s “rightful place” in the kitchen and the domestic sphere. Educated young women faced the most scrutiny with apprehension around how modern education made them eager to escape domestic drudgery — an ominous precedent indeed for “stable” Hindu households running on female labour.
The cover of one of the earliest confectionary cookbooks in Hindi, Pakprakash Aur Mithai (Knowledge of Cuisine and Sweets) written by Mataprasad Gupt and first published in 1929, captured this tension perfectly. It showed one woman rolling dough and frying puris while another reclined on a diwan, reading a book. It is not hard to guess which of the two, according to the book, embodied the qualities of an “ideal housewife.” Later editions of Pakprakash reinforced this idealised domesticity with images of women working collectively in the kitchen, surrounded by overflowing plates of food.
While Pakprakash conveyed this ideal visually to its audience, Maniram Sharma’s Pak Chandrika (1926), one of the most popular cookbooks of its time, hammered it home with words. “Just like feeding breast milk to children is women’s prime duty, it is their main duty to prepare food and feed their family,” averred Sharma. To bolster their case about a woman’s place being in the kitchen, these cookbooks invoked nostalgia for a mythic Hindu culinary past, when women took care of their families by feeding them nutritious, healthy, and delicious meals. Any perceived deviation from this ideal, especially among young housewives, was condemned as laziness or a sign of moral decline. Sharma, for instance, blamed young women who did not know — or were unwilling to learn — how to cook, for weakening the foundations of the Hindu family unit, linking it to the nation’s decline. He criticised young men’s growing attraction to street food as a sign of this decline, warning of the unsanitary and immoral implications of “outside” food.
Though the earliest wave of vernacular cookbooks were written primarily by men, by the early twentieth century, women were taking on the role of culinary educators too. Their tone was less strident than male authors like Sharma, but no less authoritarian when it came to a woman’s domestic duties. Yashoda Devi’s Grhini Kartavya Shastra, for instance, upheld a rigid gendered division of labour, while placing the responsibility for both the family’s health, and the nation’s well-being, squarely on women’s shoulders.
Most female cookbook writers supported women’s education but insisted it must not interfere with their duties in the kitchen. For Devi, education for women was most valuable when directed toward learning the art and science of cooking. Vrindeshwari Devi, in Saras Bhojan Kaise Banayen, (How to Cook Tasty Food), published in the mid-twentieth century, warned young women against letting their education interfere with household responsibilities. “Women cannot rely on bookish knowledge alone. Our primary responsibility is to run our households, and at the heart of that is cooking. If a hungry and thirsty guest is met with a reading from a book instead of a meal, he will curse rather than praise the educated girl,” she wrote.
These cookbooks not only enforced gender roles around domestic labour but also helped shape a “national cuisine” rooted in dominant-caste Hindu preferences. Vrindeshwari Devi’s recipes promoted “sattvik” (pure, balanced, good) cooking, best suited for householders. These vegetarian dietary norms, by eliminating ingredients like meat, eggs, onion, and garlic were said to reduce “rajasic” (aggressive, passionate) or “tamasic” (inert, lazy, negative) tendencies, as per Ayurvedic texts. Bhagwandas’ Ras Vyanjan Prakash made its Brahminical underpinnings clear both in its vegetarian recipes and in its illustrations of Brahmin men, sporting a single tuft of hair on the back of their heads, being served food by women.
Most vernacular cookbooks of this era leaned towards vegetarian recipes, reflecting the caste identity of their authors as well as their intended audience. Sharma justified Pak Chandrika’s rejection of meat-based recipes as a response to India’s hot climate. Yashoda Devi drew on Ayurvedic principles to assert that a nation’s food ought to embody its character and temperament. Shailkumari Chaturvedi’s Pak Shastra dismissed non-vegetarian dishes as irrelevant to “common people.” Hanumanprasad Sharma’s Aahaar Vigyan went further, invoking Western science to argue that human teeth were never meant for meat consumption.
But as scholar Dr Charu Gupta notes, the promotion of vegetarianism also served political ends. These culinary ideologies unfolded against the backdrop of growing debates around vegetarianism and the consumption of meat during the nationalist movement. In response to colonial stereotypes of Indian men as weak and effeminate, some nationalists, like Swami Vivekananda, advocated meat-eating to build a healthy citizenry. But others, particularly leaders from dominant Hindu castes, like Mahatma Gandhi, doubled down on vegetarianism as a marker of moral superiority and purity — notions that were rooted in caste norms. This ideological turn aligned with the broader project of asserting Hindu identity as synonymous with the imagined Indian nation.
Vernacular cookbooks participated in this nationalist project through their implicit assumption of vegetarianism as the default. In the process, they not only upheld caste hierarchies but also advanced the idea that only dominant-caste Hindus were the true custodians of India. Food practices of dominant Hindu castes were elevated as the nation’s own, while Muslim, Dalit, Anglo-Indian and other non-Hindu food practices were regarded as impure, backward, or “un-Indian.”
Overall, these cookbooks fed into a larger cultural project of constructing a discourse around national cuisine that was synonymous with dominant Hindu caste ideology. Central to this project, as we have seen, were women who were tasked with maintaining caste-based, ritual rules inside the home, especially with regards to food purity. The grihlaxmi was seen as a vital pillar propping up the Hindu household — the one who not only protected the health of family members but also kept them away from “unclean,” outside food. Romanticised as a female labour of love, home cooking was seen as central not only to the household’s existence but also to the project of nation building.
Seen in this way, early vernacular cookbooks did more than prescribe recipes. They produced a regressive and gendered vision of the ideal (Hindu) household, legitimised caste-based norms around food, and laid the groundwork for exclusionary ideas of national belonging that Indians continue to grapple with.
Sohel Sarkar is a Bangalore-based independent journalist and editor. She explores the intersections of food, environment, gender, and culture through her work, which has appeared in Himal Southasian, Whetstone Magazine, Mongabay, Goya, Locavore, and Feminist Food Journal, among others.
