Cultural Politics of Food A Study of Selected Indian Writings

Abstract

The present study falls under the purview of Cultural studies and aims to illuminate how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power and hegemony in society, keeping food at the center of the analysis. In seeking to understand how meaning is generated, disseminated and contested within particular social formations, the study engages with food as a mean mode and marker of these discursive terrains. It aims to interrogate certain selected food narratives through focus on food and its significance in the lives of dalit, women and diasporic communities. newlineCommunities and individuals are shaped by the foods they select, the ways they prepare and share them. The earliest human settlements were determined by this very basic need for food. As societies settled they created symbolic significations of acculturation and food acquired deeper meanings beyond being a body fuel. In such capacities, food gets related to cultural identity, continuity, validation and is a powerful tool of social control. The interplay of food practices with identity and subject formation, permits a fuller understanding of our place in the complex spaces we inhabit. newlineThe key research question posited by the study is, how food becomes literary ethos and how this ethos helps define the interventionist nature of food? Approached through the lens of food, literary texts tend to unravel significant cultural, ideological and creative insights as to their constitutive politics. This methodology also helps analyze how food coheres, defines and defies existing power praxis. The study involves analyses of select fictional narratives, with regard to dalit, gender and diaspora, as case studies and proposes to explore food as a discursive, narrative, cultural, ideological and representational trope. The writers whose works have been discussed in detail are, Ambai, Bama, Anjali Purohit, Sharan Kumar Limbale, Omprakash Valmiki, Premchand, Anita Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. The works have been analyzed only through the lens of food...