Changing Winters: Labour, Taste, and Memory around Nolen Gur in West Bengal

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines the production, consumption, and sensory life of Nolen Gur (date palm jaggery) in West Bengal, India, through an ethnographic exploration of seasonality, labour, memory, and nostalgia, keeping climate change as a backdrop. It unfolds first on the labour of date palm tapping and jaggery production, showing how the work demands repetitive rhythms shaped by the biological cycles of the trees, the coldness of winter mornings, and the temporality of sap collection and boiling. Through these practices, winter becomes lived through bodily exhaustion, sensory experience, and economic necessity. The thesis further examines how this seasonal labour sustains what I understood as “three-month economy”, where income earned during winter supports households throughout the year. Most importantly, the thesis has tried to see how climate change is perceived in this temporal economy, and how people adjust to live with it, sustaining both the consumption and production of nolen gur. The consumption pattern of nolen gur has shown how the jaggery acts as a sensory and affective substance within Bengali households. Consumers frequently describe contemporary gur “not like before”, revealing how nostalgia emerges through perceived changes in taste, climate, and production. The thesis argues that memory and nostalgia are not abstract emotions but embodied experiences enacted through food, sensory practice, and seasonal repetition. The key contribution being the difference between memory and nostalgia, which argues how memory acts as an embedded action and nostalgia creates a present in relation to the sensory experiences of the past and an expected future. This shows that nostalgia is dependent on memory when a gap between the two persists that cannot be enacted seamlessly.