Description
This paper explores how the British Empire’s cultural imagination persists through culinary practices, focusing on the phenomenon of fine-dining Indian restaurants in London such as Gymkhana. Historically, Gymkhana clubs were elite spaces in colonial India, reserved for British officers and administrators, symbolizing racial hierarchy and imperial privilege. Today, their namesake restaurants in London actively reshape colonial identity by selectively curating imperial imagination—foregrounding sanitized aesthetics of colonial food while erasing the violence and exploitation that sustained the British Empire. These restaurants do not merely serve food; they curate an experience that reinscribes imperial imaginaries of the previous colonies through décor, menu design, food, and service rituals.
Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital, fine-dining Indian restaurants emerge as a site where distinction is performed and racial and class boundaries are reinforced. These fine-dining experience, instead of recalling the colonial history, reinforces power hierarchies rooted in colonial relations, translating them into cultural capital for metropolitan elites. This paper thus asks: What can decolonial/postcolonial studies learn from the politics of taste in metropolitan spaces? Situating decolonisation beyond formal independence, this study argues that cultural practices, like fine dining, reveal the unfinished nature of decolonial projects, which are not only in political institutions but in everyday spaces of consumption. The persistence of colonial aesthetics in London’s culinary scene challenges International Relations scholars to rethink its conceptual boundaries and relate everyday practices with the taming and repackaging of imperial desire and imagination of the former colonial states.
