Edition of 6 + 2AP

Jeet Chowdhury’s photographic and film works explore the significance of meat in India’s cultural history. The film work references texts through Indian history that have talked about meat-eating; from the Rig Veda on what meats can and cannot be eaten to recipes attesting to the influence of Islamic culture through to diagrams of British meat cuts which were introduced to India during the Raj. His photographs are set in the New Market in Kolkata which was for a time named the Sir Stuart Hogg Market in honour of the Calcutta Corporation’s chairman. The market was founded to allow the city’s growing English population to shop by themselves, away from the city’s native residents. After the British left it became known as a place where one could purchase almost anything but now it is a symbol of decaying grandeur. Traditions remain – particularly in the meat section of the market where the workers continue to kill and cut meat in the tradition of British butchery that is the legacy of Empire. Chowdhury’s works meditate on the ways in the which the past filters into and informs the present in the most unexpected, everyday ways, and also how something as seemingly neutral as what we eat is filled with cultural history and significance.