Sweet Excess - Crafting Mishti in Bengal

This book encapsulates the socio-cultural meanings of sweets - ritual, pride of craftsmanship, heritage and cultural identity. It also shows how sweets continue to be a part of 'Bengali' diet with a past of acute hunger, starvation, food movements and social welfare programmes for food security.

List of contents

1. Sweetness as Excess 2. Following Sweetness 3. Mapping Sweetness 4. Making Sweets 5. Navigating work 6. Regulating Sweets 7. Authorship 8. Value and Excess

About the author

Ishita Dey is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, South Asian University, Delhi. Her research interests are food, labour, and senses. She has co-anchored an art research project on Smells of the city with a focus on Delhi supported by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi and collaborated on an art installation Dawakhana as part of Seema Kohli's solo show Khula Aasman.
She is an editorial board member of the journal Society and Culture in South Asia (Sage), Gastronomica (University of California Press) and has published her work on food in edited volumes, Oxford Compendium to Sugar and Sweets and journals such as Contributions to Indian Sociology, South Atlantic Quarterly, The Sense and Society, Gastronomica. She has coedited a book Sustainability of Rights After Globalisation (Sage, 2011) and co-authored a book Beyond Kolkata : The Dystopia of Urban Imagination (Routledge, 2013).

Product details

• Authors: Ishita Dey
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 08.09.2025
• EAN: 9781032291864
• ISBN: 978-1-0-3229186-4
• No. of pages: 210
• Series: Ethnographic Innovations, South Asian Perspectives
• Subjects: Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Geosciences > Geography; Social sciences, law, business > Social sciences (general); History, Sociology, SOCIAL SCIENCE / General, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / General, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Regional Studies, Anthropology, HISTORY / Social History, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social, Food & society, Regional Studies, Social and cultural history, Social and cultural anthropology, Regional / International studies, Medical Sociology, Indian sub-continent, Cultural studies: food and society, West Bengal