BAVARCHI, KHANSAMAN, KHIDMATGAR: NATIVE SERVANTS IN THE KITCHEN AND DINING-ROOM OF COLONIAL BUNGALOW IN THE 19<sup>TH</sup> CENTURY INDIA
The paper aims to examine one category of the domestic servants in the nineteenth century India, who were responsible for preparation and organization of everyday meal and formal dinner parties in the English colonial bungalows. The wide range of colonial narratives - memoirs, travelogues, housekeeping handbooks and manuals - provides factual information for analysis of the contentious character of the relations between white masters and native servants. The conflict that has a spatial dimension is displayed in two symbolically opposable premises - kitchen and dining-room. Till the middle of the nineteenth century the Indian servants not only enjoyed full rights in the bungalow kitchens but created noticeable oriental atmosphere in the dining-rooms through introduction of specific tastes, smells and visual objects. The English home in India intended to be a territory of tranquility, conservatism, constancy and to reproduce the left motherland had been involuntarily captured by the “others” that is the servants who run the masters’ households in accordance with their native habitual practices. During the following period the colonial bungalow has been Europeanized to a certain extent by means of pushing out the servants into utility rooms and incursion of the white memsahibs into these premises. This microhistory case shows the mechanism of encounter with alien world on the local level of private home. The article covers the issues of Anglo-Indian gustatory habits, adopted table etiquette, menu, methods of cooking, kitchen utensils, that taken together allows to restore the routine of everyday colonial life.