Beyond Domesticity: Translating Cookbooks as State-building in Afghanistan (1890–1920)

This paper examines two Persian-language cookbook translations published by the Afghan state in 1895 and 1919 as tools of statecraft, challenging traditional understandings of “domesticity” in early twentieth-century Afghan history and situating these culinary texts in global culinary history and transregional circuits of knowledge production. The 1895 translation of a British Indian text, Dainty Dishes for Indian Tables, was produced for Amir Abdur Rahman Khan’s court, aligning the Persianate-imperial regime with hybrid British-Indian tastes and colonial circuits of knowledge. Decades later, Mahmoud Sami’s 1919 translation of the Ottoman cookbook Ev Kadını (The Housewife) was commissioned for the Maktab-i Harbiya (Military School), decoupling domestic science from the housewife and repurposing it to train young male bureaucrats and officers. Both translations, produced by and for men, utilized the state printing press to promote transregional blueprints for modernity—Indian and Ottoman, respectively—in the formation of an elite, modern Afghan subject. These translations reveal how modern discourses of domesticity resonated beyond strictly domestic contexts and could be used as instruments for constructing state authority and defining modern Persianate tastes beyond exclusively Eurocentric norms and circuits.