Regulating Sweets in Bengal: Control Orders and Their Afterlife

Introduction

In a televised address to the nation on 24 March 2020, Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi called for a nationwide lockdown for 21 days to curb the spread of Sars-Cov-2. Following the address, the Ministry of Home Affairs (2020), Government of India advised district administrations to arrange for home delivery to encourage social distancing and directed ‘all commercial and private establishments’ to close. ¹ The next day, the world woke up to horrifying images of migrant workers taking to national highways, trying to reach bus stations and railway stations to return home. Amidst this crisis, on the seventh day of the lockdown, the Government of West Bengal announced that sweet shops would remain open, with minimal staff, from 12 noon to 4 pm. Social gatherings were disallowed, and sweet shops were encouraged to sell packed items. News portals and social media debated heatedly whether sweets should be considered an ‘essential’ food item. ²

Chhana’s origin is heavily contested; there are claims and counterclaims of its ritual significance. Though used as a base ingredient to prepare sweets across eastern Indian states such as Odisha and Bihar, chhana is commonly associated with ‘Bengali sweets’, especially sweets produced from the milk base, and these sweets are a ubiquitous item in the Bengali diet. Sandesh, made from the cooked paste of chhana and sweetening agent, was one of the earliest creations from chhana. One of the most well-documented celebrations of sandesh for ritual purposes goes back to the inauguration of Dakshineshwar Kali Temple on 31 May 1855: it is believed that Rani Rashmoni, founder of the temple, ordered 28 maund ³ (364 kg) of sandesh from the legendary sweet shop Bhimchandra Nag of Bowbazar in northern Calcutta (now Kolkata). According to the web portal of K.C. Das Private Limited, when Nobin Chandra Das set up his sweet shop in 1866, most sweets were either sandesh or made from lentils—till he created the spongy rosogolla. ⁴ In other words, by the 19^th century, sandesh and rosogolla had become part of Bengali rituals, including life ceremonies; and three sweets—rosogolla, sandesh and mishti doi—made from milk, primarily cow milk, became integral to the Bengali diet and commercial sweetscape. Despite the penchant for milk-based desserts, India was a milk-deficit country and West Bengal a milk-deficit state till the much-celebrated Operation Flood. ⁵

The cultural obsession with milk-based sweets meant that sweet shops were among the main consumers of milk. In the 1960s, the Government of West Bengal issued two Control Orders to stall the production of sweets in Calcutta and its neighbouring districts and make more milk available to children and women. The first—West Bengal Chhana Sweets Control Order, 1965, passed on 23 August—banned select milk-based sweets (Government of West Bengal 1965a). The second—the West Bengal Milk Products Control Order, 1965, passed on 18 November—banned all kinds (Government of West Bengal 1965b). The bans impacted sweet shops and forced establishments like K.C. Das to sell savouries and explore options outside Calcutta, finally settling in the 1970s for Bangalore (now Bengaluru), owing to the pleasant climate that was conducive for milk-based sweets. ⁶

During my fieldwork in the Hooghly district of West Bengal, the owners of many sweet shops recounted those days and described them as the darkest days, especially for the people connected to the supply chain—the chhana suppliers whose livelihood depended on the daily sales of chhana. In stark contrast, two government notifications of the 2020s allowed sweetshops to remain open to avoid wasting milk. The first order, dated 30 March 2020 allowed the sweetshops to remain open from 12 pm to 4 pm to cater to takeaway orders. This order came at the request of sweetshops who requested the Chief Minister to consider opening of sweet shops to prevent wastage of milk. In a notification issued on 16 April 2020 ‘the order stated that “in continuation of the order dated March 30, it is hereby noted that sweetmeat shops may be open from 8 am to 4pm”’. ⁷

How do we understand ‘orders’ as ‘documents’ and how they define ‘sweets’ and ‘sweetness’? Methodologically, orders help us to explore and examine the potentiality of law to make ‘things’ (Murphy 2004) and, in this case, sweets. I take a cue from the existing scholarship on ‘the generative capacity of bureaucratic documents’ (Hull 2012: 259) and their ‘capacity to make things come into being’ (Frohman 2008: 1573). As Hull (2012: 259) writes, this includes ‘entities, for example, disease (Bowker and Star 1999; Mol 2002), place (Feldman 2008; Oppenheim 2008), property (Hetherington 2009), technologies (Latour 1996) and infrastructures (Anand 2011)’. I show how these orders constitute one of the many strands through which juridical technologies (Murphy 2004)—along with the follow-up court rulings, media debates and radio speeches—‘construct’ the meanings of sweets and sweetness. I turn to these documents to understand the significance of how Control Orders created a juridical discourse around the use of milk, chhana and chhana-based sweets as wastage, since milk could be diverted for consumption by children and women. At a different juncture, Control Orders and notifications amidst the lockdown highlighted the relevance of sweetness and the sweet industry. Further, documents do not survive in isolation; these can be read productively against the discourse they produce. In this case, Control Orders banning milk and milk-based sweets generated a debate in newspapers, followed by court rulings that quashed these Control Orders. The state’s miscalculated attempt to garner public support for this move in the form of a radio speech on the All India Radio became the most widely circulated and referenced document in the follow-up court cases.

Control Orders work with lists, among the most classic modes of documentation. Two lists emerge as critical to the discussion in the two Control Orders. The objective of the first—West Bengal Chhana Sweets Control Order, 1965, passed on 23 August—was to maintain the supply and equitable distribution of milk. And ‘chhana’, ‘chhana sweets’ and ‘manufacturing establishments’ are defined in ascending order. ‘Chhana sweets’ are defined as ‘sweets that contain chhana’ but ‘rossogolla, pantua (ladykene) cham-cham, khirmohan and langcha’ ⁸ are exempt from the purview of the definition. Under Clause (3) of the Control Order, Sub-clause 3(1) states ‘No person shall manufacture or sell or cause to be manufactured or sold Chhana sweets’ and Sub-clause 3(2) states ‘No owner, manager or person in charge of having control of any manufacturing or catering establishment shall manufacture, sell, serve or supply or cause to be manufactured, sold or supplied within such establishment Chhana sweets’ (Government of West Bengal 1965a). The order was quashed in the court because a mere ban on select chhana sweets would not lead to an increase in milk supply. The second order—the West Bengal Milk Products Control Order, 1965—was passed on 18 November to extend the ban to all ‘milk products’, implying a ban on chhana and on kheer, another milk base (Government of West Bengal 1965b). Both Control Orders aimed to control the price of milk and divert the supply of milk to government-run milk collection centres. Together, these ended up listing milk as an essential commodity ⁹ compared to sweets made from milk base.

Juridical Technology and Listing

I now discuss how milk is listed as an essential commodity—against the socioeconomic history of milk Control Orders elsewhere in India and the food crisis in West Bengal. Next I discuss how chhana, and by extension sweetness, can be perceived as excess, especially when the legal meaning and life of sweetness is dependent on the reading of milk as an essential commodity. But before we discuss how lists come to define sweetness, especially through a ban on chhana and other milk bases, it is important to understand what I mean by list and listing.

To facilitate the examination and understanding of ‘techniques of control’ I borrow the term ‘juridical technologies’ from Tim Murphy (2004). Murphy suggests that the term ‘technologies’ must consider the limits and possibilities of that machinery in the light of the ‘product’ it makes if it is to be more than a ‘fashionable metaphor’ (ibid.: 120). At an elementary level ‘juridical technologies’ imply ‘the fabrication of appropriate settings in which juridical activities can be conducted’; these technologies—courtrooms, prisons, archives, files and closed-circuit television (CCTV) used in courtroom proceedings—are ‘vehicles through which law becomes visible, even real, in a society’ (ibid.: 121). Murphy’s central question is ‘What constitutes “making” in legal settings?’ (Pottage 2004: 24). The technology of law reflects the larger production processes (mass production). The law is not immune to the trends of society, as Pottage points out. The expanse and breadth of the information economy, and new forms of work, have affected the production of law, and ‘legal applications of technologies emulate or become derivative of other applications: of applications to supermarkets or large financial corporations’ (ibid.: 125).

I explore lists as one of the many documents of ‘juridical technology’ that employ the technique of a ‘circulating reference’ to explicate the social and political dynamics of milk Control Orders and their ‘sweet’ effects. Latour (1999) introduces the concept of ‘circulating reference’ in his case study of soil collection in the Amazon Basin. Pottage (2004: 6) develops the notion as a ‘kind of “in-between” action which produces legal form, and especially persons and things’ ¹⁰ : the ‘process of collection and analysis of soil samples describes a process of displacement, in which each successive inscription becomes a referent for the next signifying inscription’ (18–19). The notion of ‘transportation’ here is neither immobile nor replaceable; instead, it is constituted by a ‘continuous transportation process of reference’ through a chain of inscriptions. The chain of inscriptions and the ‘facts’ become important analytic tools for this continuous transportation process.

To understand how Control Orders work, I use the notion of the ‘circulating reference’ as one of the techniques that informs the ‘juridical technologies’ of ‘listing’, which has become part of ordinary communication about heritage and culture. Murphy (2004) cites the example of ‘listed buildings’ in the heritage discourse of the UK to illustrate how the terminology of ‘listing’ has been appropriated in the contexts of emergent cultural property. A heterogeneity of practices goes into making such heritage ‘lists’; yet, ‘the elusiveness of cultural property is managed by producing and publishing “lists”’ (ibid.: 139). Drawing from Goody (1977), Murphy reiterates that ‘lists have an added attraction: unless closed, new items can be added’ (2004: 139). Practices of ‘listing’ help to understand the creation of classificatory systems. ‘Forms of classification’ are integral to bureaucracies because these bring conformity to an ‘unruly world’ through a ‘prefabricated system of categories’ that can be fitted into forms via ‘tables and charts’. A gap lies between a document and its referents in postcolonial societies of the Global South (Gupta 2013); the gap is crucial, and unique to postcolonial societies, especially in the life of food commodities such as sweets that are viewed as non-essential to human life. An ethnographic reading of Control Orders shows how the technique of listing creates a classificatory system of essential commodities—some to be banned and others to be exempted.

‘Listing’ Milk as an ‘Essential Commodity’

The practice of ‘listing’ commodities as essential is integral to the state’s measures of control over production and pricing. The practice forms an integral part of the Control Orders issued under the Essential Commodities Act, 1955 (Government of India 1955), and other legislation (Defence of India Rules 1962) that allow the central and state governments to issue Control Orders. ¹¹ The essential commodities listed in the Act are constantly under review. The techniques of listing are appropriated in defining an essential commodity. The Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 2006, defines ‘essential commodity’ as ‘a commodity specified in the schedule’ but the schedule identifies commodities as essential; it does not describe the characteristics of an essential commodity. Thus, the idea of a list lets the state designate any commodity as essential.

Before Operation Flood, India depended on donated milk powder for its milk requirement, and states such as Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Delhi would use temporary Control Orders to ensure that the supply of milk was adequate, especially during the crisis that would recur in the summer months. ¹² To discourage the export of milk ‘within an eight-kilometre belt of Uttar Pradesh’, the Uttar Pradesh Milk and Milk Products (Export) Control Order, 1976, prohibited the export of liquid milk to the union territory of Delhi. The order specified the amount of milk and milk products that a single traveller would be allowed to carry—not exceeding 10 kg for milk or 5 kg for ghee. The listing limited the prasad or blessed food items made from milk that could be carried and embargoed the export of desiccated milk or khoa. ¹³ A similar Control Order—the Delhi, Meerut and Bulandshahar Milk Products (Control) Order, 1973, passed under the Essential Commodities Act, 1955—restricted the consumption of milk products in Delhi, Meerut and Bulandshahar.

West Bengal had been struggling with food shortages and rising food prices since the famine in 1943. Till about the mid-1960s, the state survived on the PL 480 programme; ration supplies were disrupted constantly. Chief Minister Prafulla Chandra Sen proposed a compulsory levy on food grains, along with cordoning, rationing and procurement of food grains. But this extreme step made him unpopular among the Mahishya, Sadgope and Kurmi—lower castes that played an important role in the rice-producing districts—and led his party (the Indian National Congress) to lose the West Bengal Legislative Assembly elections of 1967 (Bandyopadhyay 2003: 879). The state felt the shortage of liquid milk, too, and Sen banned chhana-based sweets (Lahiri 2023). ¹⁴

An Extraordinary Issue of The Calcutta Gazette published the West Bengal Chhana Sweets Control Order, 1965, on 23 August. ¹⁵ The Order was to come into effect on 24 August 1965 and apply to Calcutta, Chandernagore and 33 other municipal areas in West Bengal. ¹⁶ The opening lines read:

No. 7040. Milk 23rd August 1965. Whereas the Governor is of Opinion that it is necessary to do so for the manufacture of the supplies and the equitable distribution in West Bengal of milk.

The order foregrounded the definitions of items. Chhana is the signature milk intermediate base of commercial sweet production along with thickened milk (kheer), desiccated milk (khoa) and milk cream (sar). Chhana is also cooked with sugar into different consistencies, which yield sandesh, a classification of sweets used for pak or cooked chhana items. First, chhana was defined as ‘the product obtained through coagulation of milk by draining off the whey’. ‘Chhana sweets’ were categorised as ‘sweets of any kind containing chhana as one of the key ingredients but did not include the variety of sweets commonly known as rosogolla, pantua (lady-kene), chamcham, khirmohan and langcha’. The third item pertinent to our discussion is the definition of milk: ‘the lacteal secretion of bovine species including buffaloes and goats, and includes milk reconstituted from milk powder’ (Government of West Bengal 1965a: 2788).

Chhana-based sweets boiled in sugar syrup were exempt from this order. The print media rechristened the first Control Order the Sandesh Regulation. Sweet shops in the listed areas were dependent on milk suppliers for milk and chhana, the intermediate cottage cheese base.

Confectioner Nani Gopal Paul petitioned the Calcutta High Court challenging the West Bengal Chhana Sweets Control Order, 1965. ¹⁷ R.C. Deb, the advocate representing the petitioners, pointed out that Part V of the Rules did define an essential commodity: according to Rule 35(3) of Part V, an ‘essential commodity’ meant ‘food, water, fuel, light, power or any other thing essential for the existence of the community which is notified on this behalf of the Government’. This definition also indicated the scope for ‘listing’ as an implicit technique to understand an ‘essential commodity’. It was pointed out that this definition could be applicable to Part V of the Rules and not to Part XII. Since ‘essential commodity’ was not defined in Part XII, to which Rule 125 was applicable, this definition could not be appropriated for the listing of milk as an essential commodity.

In his ruling Justice Banerjee observed that since the power to control and regulate extended to ‘all articles and things’ in addition to essential commodities, the state was justified in framing the Control Order under this Rule. The court order took into cognisance that the Control Order was made under the Defence of India Rules, 1962 (under Sub-rules (2) and (3) of Rule 125) and reviewed the Rules to understand the meaning of an ‘essential commodity’ in general and milk in particular. Section 3(1) of the Act allowed the central government to make rules ‘for securing the defence of India and civil defence, the public safety…or for maintaining supplies and services essential to the life of the community’ through a notification in the Gazette. The court order elaborated that Rule 125(2) allowed the central or state government to regulate or prohibit ‘the production, manufacture, supply and distribution, use and consumption’ of ‘supplies and services essential to the life of the community’. The process of listing considered these rules and allowed the state government to regulate any ‘essential commodity’. ¹⁸

Justice Banerjee said ‘…milk is an article essential to the life of the community. If a state government seeks to make supply and distribution of milk at fair price easier by promulgating a Control Order, such as will effect the desired result, a Court of Law has no power to interfere’. Immediately steering the discussion to the importance of milk in the life of newborn infants and pointing out the nutritional qualities of milk in the diet across age groups, Justice Banerjee emphasised that ‘milk’ ‘may be justly treated as a commodity essential to the life of the human community’. ¹⁹ The court order reinstated the state’s right to regulate and, thence, its listing of milk as an essential commodity.

But his ruling showed that a ban on chhana sweets as listed in the order might not lead to increasing the supply of milk that was sought as essential. Justice Banerjee referred to the claims made in the affidavit-in-opposition in citing four reasons for the shortage of raw milk: (1) restriction on the ‘import of skimmed milk powder’; (2) ‘non-replenishment of stock of cattle by the licensees in milk colonies’; (3) ‘departure of licensees from the colonies in the expectation of higher profits elsewhere’; and (4) the ‘procurement of milk by sweetmeat traders, chhana dealers and condensed milk manufacturers from city khatals (cowsheds) and rural areas at exorbitant prices’. ²⁰

Sweetmeat traders or sweet shop owners were not the only persons who bought milk at high prices; so did chhana dealers and condensed milk manufacturers. The state government furnished details regarding the status of milk supply, hinting at a requirement of 750,000 litres daily of liquid milk in and around Calcutta. In addition, the status of the milk supplies from three primary sources was also submitted. Around 92,500 litres of milk supply came from city-based cowsheds. Domestic cowsheds supplied 37,000 litres of milk and Greater Milk Supply Scheme of the Government provided 83,000 litres of milk. This amounted to 212,500 litres of milk as opposed to 750,000 litres of the daily requirement.

Justice Banerjee drew attention to another set of figures furnished by the state government in relation to the milk consumed by sweetmeat traders: sweetshops utilised 92,500 litres of milk from city khatals and 148,000 litres of milk from rural areas. These figures, based on a ‘recent survey’, suggested that control over the sweet trade could reduce their daily consumption of milk (24,000 litres) and lead to the availability of milk at ‘a fair price’. Banning chhana sweets would lead to an increase of at least 9,000 litres of the supply of liquid milk, but Justice Banerjee pointed out that the actual deficit was 630,000 litres and that even after the ban there would still be a deficit of 621,000 litres of milk.

Considering the importance given to the ‘survey’ in the framing of the Control Order, the court decided to probe it. It was brought to the court’s attention that S.C. Roy, Adviser to the Government of West Bengal on Dairy Development and Animal Husbandry, had conducted the survey and could explain its technical details to the court. Roy was brought in as a witness. The lawyer representing the petitioners refused to question him as ‘he neither produced nor proved the records of the survey’ but Justice Banerjee tried to understand the nature of the survey. Based on his interactions, Justice Banerjee concluded that the figures were not based on any survey but ‘were speculative, some assumptive, some processed figures and others worked out figures of doubtful technicality’. ²¹ Severely critical of the way in which the government had used speculative figures from a supposed ‘survey’ and of the state’s failure in controlling the production of chhana, Justice Banerjee said that a mere ban on chhana products such as sandesh would not meet the deficit in milk supply, and the Calcutta High Court quashed the first Control Order on 16 November 1965.

As a result, daily milk collection fell by 1,423 litres, Minister of Animal Husbandry Fajlur Rahman said in his address to the Vidhan Sabha, according to a newspaper report. Rahman explained that the ban needed to be extended to milk products to increase the supply of liquid milk. By January, he added, the Government was expecting to collect 100,000 litre of milk and the Calcutta High Court order had pushed this target down to 40,000 litres. ²² Justice Banerjee’s ruling suggested that the court would not interfere if the state government came up with regulatory measures that would ensure the supply of milk. Taking a cue, the Government of West Bengal passed the West Bengal Milk Products Control Order, 1965, on 18 November. In this second Control Order, ‘milk products’ implied chhana, kheer and sweets prepared from chhana, kheer or a combination of both, redefining the nature of Bengali sweets by creating a new category, ‘milk products’, or sweets made of chhana and kheer, two milk bases critical to commercial sweet production. By separating milk products and listing two milk derivatives under control, the second Control Order was successful in controlling the production of milk derivatives as well as sweets produced from these derivatives. It exempted the following products from the purview of the ban, however: curd, ghee, butter, paneer (cottage cheese), ice-cream, chocolate, baby food, milk powder, drinks produced from milk and sweets produced from flour, semolina, gram flour, pulses, etc. ²³

This second Control Order, passed also to augment the supply of milk, coincided with one of the peak business periods of sweet shops—the Hindu wedding season, when special variety of sweets called ‘tatwa sweets’ are exchanged as gift items. Most of these varieties of sweets are made from three milk bases—chhana, ksheer (thickened milk) and khoa (desiccated milk). Specially designed sweets—shaped like a bride and groom, fish and butterfly—are made available at a higher price. The demand for liquid milk and chhana increases for small and large shops during this season.

Listing became an effective means for the state and the judiciary to regulate, prohibit and exempt the production and distribution of food items. Central to these listing practices are perceptions of food commodities as ‘essential’ or ‘luxury’. The court order repeatedly mentioned the nutritional value of milk and considered milk-based sweets a luxury because these are prepared from a milk derivative that entails wastage of milk. By considering the production of sweets ‘non-essential’ and the consumption of liquid milk ‘essential’ for the physiological needs of the body, the Control Orders established milk as an essential commodity and sweets and milk derivatives as excess, especially in times of crisis.

Chhana as Excess

The West Bengal Chhana Sweets Control Order, 1965, passed on 23 August, defined chhana as ‘a product obtained through acid coagulation of milk followed by draining off whey’ (Government of West Bengal 1965a). The West Bengal Milk Products Control Order, 1965, passed on 18 November, defined chhana as ‘a product obtained from acid coagulation of milk’ and kheer and khoa-kheer as ‘product obtained from evaporation of milk’ (Government of West Bengal 1965b: 4640). Both chhana and kheer are milk derivatives, therefore; yet, the court order that quashed the ban on chhana viewed chhana as wastage.

The affidavit-in-opposition stated that 6 kg of milk is needed to make 1 kg of chhana and, so, milk is wasted. Justice Banerjee agreed with the affidavit-in-opposition that the process resulted in the wastage of ‘one-third of the valuable constituents of milk’. The sweets exempted from the ban are made by boiling the chhana mix in sugar syrup, which meant those need much less chhana than the banned sandesh, as I indicated in the previous section. Banning ‘chhana sweets’ exclusively might fuel an increase in the demand for other commercially available chhana sweets exempted from the ban and so the milk supply would not be augmented, the court order stated, and criticised the state government for not controlling ‘chhana production’ and condensed milk, ‘two trades’ that ‘were allegedly responsible for the rising price of milk purchase’.

On 16 November, 85 days after the state government passed the first Control Order, the Calcutta High Court repealed it. On 17 November 1965, the newspapers celebrated repealing the order on the newspaper’s front page. The article ‘Repeal of regulation of Sandesh’ carried a detailed discussion of court proceedings that led to the order’s repeal. ²⁴ The euphoria continued in the subsequent articles celebrating the arrival of sandesh in sweetshops. On 18 November 1965, the Anandabazaar Patrika published reports about sweetshops selling sandesh, customers queuing up in search of sandesh and one relating to supply of milk titled ‘Milk supply has increased by threefold’. ²⁵ Without naming Nakur (a sweetshop that only sold sandesh), the article mentioned that the shop had been closed since the Control Order came into effect on 24 August. Another well-known sweetshop K.C. Das decided to open its production unit in Bangalore. Kamal Chowdhury, the President of West Bengal Sweet Traders Association, said they were relieved and hopeful that the Government of West Bengal would accept the High Court Order:

We don’t want to disrupt the milk supplies of the Government. Milk is scarce. However, if we receive permission to prepare sandesh we won’t spend much milk. We will see to it that the price of milk and chhana does not increase. ²⁶

Before the ban, sweet shops in Kolkata sold chhana sandesh at ₹16 per kg. After the ban was lifted, shops sold sandesh at ₹10–12 per kg, reported newspapers, and that the shops in Calcutta and Howrah could not meet this demand, and the price of jal-chhana and jnak chhana ²⁷ fell considerably.

To understand the cultural politics of chhana one must recognise the caste-class-gender dimension of the chhana supplier. I conducted long-term fieldwork and unstructured interviews with sweetshop owners across West Bengal. Most took pride in the long-term association they had with the ‘Ghosh-es’, a classificatory term used for chhana and milk suppliers. ‘Ghosh’ is a surname used by people across caste groups, including Kayasthas (Dey 2022), and to classify men of the Goala Samaj or the milkmen caste. Along with ‘Mayara/Modak’, Ghosh is listed among the Other Backward Classes (OBC) of West Bengal. ²⁸

When I conducted my fieldwork, the cowsheds or khatals had been removed from the city’s vicinity due to various environmental restrictions. Many a time while returning from fieldwork by a local train from Chandernagore, I would board the same train as a chhana vendor of a local sweetshop. Requesting anonymity, the vendor said to me that he had been supplying chhana to one of the sweetshops in Beliaghata, Kolkata. In his words, he was a ‘daily passenger’ (a term of reference for travellers who travel daily to their place of work) on a chhana local, a colloquial reference to a train full of chhana vendors. He remarked that many chhana vendors supply to Kolkata and surrounding areas and travel in local trains in a ‘vendor compartment’ designated to carry freight.

Chhana suppliers rely mostly on local cow milk. They coagulate the milk and wrap the chhana in a cotton cloth. They put stacks of such cloth-wrapped chhana in two wicker baskets. The chhana vendors carry the wicker baskets on their shoulders, balancing a wooden frame as they make their way through the bustling railway stations of Howrah and Sealdah to board buses to reach their destination. The smell and stain of whey water on the station signals the arrival of chhana vendors. Some chhana vendors have fixed arrangements with shops who purchase their produce. Some end up selling at Notun Bazaar in Kolkata, a wholesale market dedicated to chhana and khoa. The price of chhana varies by season. This extremely unorganised market of exchange is based on informal ties of trust, kith and kin networks and intergenerational trust. In 2010, most sweet shop owners—barring a few sweet shops with their own dairy farms or links with dairy farms—relied on the informal networks of chhana suppliers popularly referred to as Ghoshes. The scenario would not have been vastly different in 1965; therefore, when the second Control Order was introduced there was a hue and cry that it would lead to the loss of livelihoods. There were intensive debates in the Vidhan Sabha where concerns were raised repeatedly about the livelihoods connected to sweet production, which included the livelihoods of artisans at the workshops and also unorganised milk and chhana suppliers.

Robi Ghosh, one of my interlocutors who continues to trade in milk cream (sar) in Krishnanagar, reminded me that not every chhana supplier owns cows:

Look at me. Can you spot one cow in my house? No. I go to nearby villages to source milk, your sister (implying his wife, Baby Ghosh) boils the milk and then prepares milk cream. We (implying sar suppliers and chhana suppliers) are dependent on people from other samaj ²⁹ who own cows.

Most chhana suppliers reported that they did not own cows; they depended on milk sourced from others, which impacted the quality. They worked, earned and cleared their dues daily. A milk supplier who owned two cows and supplied milk to sweet shops in Krishnanagar told me that he reserved the best milk for the shop where I was doing field work because they could pay him a better price. Despite owning two cows he could not depend on only one buyer because the cost of cattle feed was exorbitant and most cows were mixed-breed and, therefore, prone to illness. ‘In this line, you need fresh quality milk. If my cow falls ill, how will she give milk?’ This informal chhana supply arrangement gives us a glimpse into how a section of rural peasantry depended on sweet shops for their livelihoods.

The second Control Order, passed on 18 November 1965, enforced a ban on the production and sale of chhana in areas under the first Control Order. ³⁰ Soon after, on 26 November, The Statesman reported that since 19 November, no chhana was spotted on the Martin Railway, ³¹ or on the Eastern Railway from the 24 Parganas or Nadia district, but since the ban was not in force in areas along the South Eastern Railway (Bankura, Midnapore) ³² their chhana traffic had not changed. The rural areas of the Howrah and Hooghly districts would supply 75 maund (1,000 kg) of chhana on average per day before the ban and about 400–500 baskets (5,000 kg) would reach Howrah Station on the Eastern Railway from connecting districts such as Howrah, Burdwan and Hooghly.

Since milk-based sweets could not be sold, 8,000 shops in Calcutta and 4,000 in its neighbouring areas would be affected. These shops employed more than 50,000 workers; estimating four family members per worker, the Control Order was expected to affect 200,000 people. ³³ Therefore, the chhana suppliers from rural areas, who sold their produce mostly to individual customers, were concerned about their livelihood. As shops closed, the quantity of milk collected rose sharply to 73,603 litres, as opposed to the decline in milk collection after the first Control Order was quashed, published The Statesman on 21 November 1965, and that some shops had asked their employees to return home since 70,000 workers would be out of work because of the ban. ³⁴

On 23 November Mrs. Kusum Kumari Ghosh and Others filed an application at the Calcutta High Court requesting that the second Control Order, too, be quashed. Justice B.N. Banerjee ‘issued a rule on the state of West Bengal to show cause why West Bengal Milk Products Control Order, 1965 should not be declared null and void. The rule was returnable on November 26’. ³⁵ In defence of the second Control Order, Chief Minister P.C. Sen broadcast a speech in Bengali from the Calcutta station of All India Radio on 25 November. Excerpts were published in Amritbazaar Patrika and The Statesman. Sen did not see any reason for the retrenchment of 39,000 workers employed in about 8,000 shops. The new Control Order ought not to affect the livelihood of the workers across sweetshops as ‘the shops also sold salted edibles and dahi as well as sweets which did not require chhana’. ³⁶ Sen announced that arrangements were being made so that shops could procure larger quantities of sugar. If the milk supply increased steadily, the government proposed to open 1,000 milk depots; retrenched workers could find alternative employment there. Sen suggested that chhana producers and intermediaries should sell their milk to the chilling stations. ³⁷ Clearly trying to build public opinion in favour of the second Control Order, Sen pointed out that milk consumption per capita was lower in West Bengal than in other states. This point was made also by Minister of Animal Husbandry Fazlur Rahman during a debate in the Vidhan Sabha when he said that the main purpose of the second Control Order was to make milk available to children, mothers, elderly and sick people. ³⁸ The vernacular and English press reported the discussion on 20 November 1965.

Conclusion

The above discussion on chhana as ‘waste’ is embedded in a larger politics of social welfare. The politics of chhana and its benchmarking is evident in the social welfare schemes around food scarcity—food rations, Mid-Day Meals and Food for Work programmes in India. Pushing this discourse to what is maximallly desirable is off-limits as ‘excess’ is associated with overconsumption. History is central to understanding how cultural economies of excess are lived, embodied and renewed. In defending the Control Orders the state said repeatedly that a ban on milk products would not lead to loss of Bengali culture.

Interestingly, in his discussion on the reproduction of labour, Marx (1887 [1972]) factors in the idea of excess. Marx concludes that beer is a ‘necessary want’ for the English working class just as wine is for the French (Marx 1887 [1972]: 171 in Rubin 1975: 164). Commenting on Marx’s notion of the reproduction of labour, Rubin (1975) argues that Marx made room for cultural registers in his categorisation of necessary wants (163–64).

I do not want to conflate the idea of ‘necessary wants’ with that of necessity. But it does seem as though excess and its meaning-making capacity finds legitimacy through the cultural register and denial in the language of essential commodities. For Marx, beer and wine were necessary wants as seen from the angle of the country’s cultural register. In Bengal the cultural legitimacy of chhana-based sweets was apparent, while the state posited chhana as leading to milk scarcity.

Control Orders that regulate the production of sweets show how the sociocultural meanings of milk reverberate through official documents. In these documents milk is a constant circulating reference. Its reading shows how the life of sweetness is coterminous with the shifting statist readings of ‘essential’ commodities. It is through the lists of Control Orders that sweets and sweetness acquire a new meaning, a meaning under the purview of the state. Food commodities, and the lists of regulatory practices are concerned with a welfare state’s notion of ensuring equitable distribution of food and freedom from malnutrition and poverty, that come to shape the idea of ‘essential commodity’.

Even people associated with the sweets industry understood that milk should be equitably distributed because of its nutritional value. On the other hand, the state government faced the dual responsibility of ensuring food security, by increasing the milk supply, and ensuring the security of the informal livelihoods associated with the milk and chhana industry.

The cultural role of sweets in Bengali life is ubiquitous. In seeking to control cultural registers by assessing the viability of the modes of sweet preparation, and by bringing in notions of sweetness as excess in times of scarcity, official documents and orders reshaped the meanings and relevance of sweets.