Of Edible Grandmothers, Culinary Cosmopolitanisms, and Casteized Domesticities: The Contradictory Ideologies of Shoba Narayan’s Food Memoir Monsoon Diary
2022; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 38; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/08989575.2022.2127285
ISSN2151-7290
Autores Tópico(s)Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy
ResumoAbstractAbstractThis essay analyses Indian-Tamil food memoirist Shoba Narayan’s memoir, Monsoon Diary (2003), arguing that the Indian diasporic feminized food-memoir is a crucial site through which to interrogate the class aspirations of a “new” globalized Indian elite. Narayan’s text was one of the first Indian diasporic food memoirs to be published in the early years of the twenty-first century, and played a decisive role in popularizing the genre of the feminized Indian food memoir. Switching between her life-story and recipes of everyday South Indian home-cooked fare, Narayan established a new hybrid genre within the cultural field of Indian Anglophone life-writing.Keywords: Food memoirdomesticitygenderclasscastecosmopolitanismIndiaSouth Asia AcknowledgmentsI am grateful to my friends and colleagues at Florida International University – Dr. Wanda Raiford, Dr. Heather Blatt, Dr. Martha Schoolman, Dr. Vanessa Sohan – for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this essay. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers, whose insightful comments have made this essay much better. Thanks to Vaidehi, for giving me the permission to quote from her poem so readily, and for showing interest in this work. Last but not the least, the majority of the work for this essay as it appears today, was done as I was recovering from a very, very severe bout of COVID-19. Thanks are due to my friends Dennis, Pramod and Tinku, who had my back at every stage of the recovery process, and my family members – Ma, Baba, Pradip and Mitadi – who made sure that I remember to eat, take medication, and get ample rest.Notes1 Gunew, Feminism and the Politics of Difference, 16.2 Mannur, Culinary Fictions, 148.3 Gardarphe and Xu, “Introduction: Food in Multi-Ethnic Literatures,” 7.4 Accessed on November 24, 2020.5 Roy, Alimentary Tracts, 167.6 Narayan, Monsoon Diary, 142.7 Monsoon Diary, 142.8 Monsoon Diary, 142.9 Monsoon Diary, 144.10 For a more detailed analyses of the politics of the construction of America as a nation of immigrants, seePerry, Leah. The Cultural Politics of U.S. Immigration: Gender, Race and Media. New York: New York University Press, 2016, 1–34.11 Carruth, Global Appetites, 66.12 Chandra, Dislocalism, 174.13 Dislocalism, 176.14 I use the term “globalism” as against such terms as “cosmopolitanism” or “transnationalism,” precisely because Narayan uses this term in her text. While I am aware of the fact that the term, like other similar terms, possesses many different histories and implications, having become a pejorative and negative term in contemporary American political rhetoric, as exemplified in the recent usages by the right-wing politician Steve Bannon, this essay does not provide much space for the discussion of such complex histories of the term. For a quick review of how the term has evolved within American political rhetoric, see Levin, Brian. “Bannon’s Revenge: How Globalism Went from a Mainstream Ideology to Far Right’s Favorite Smear.” NBCNews, April 1, 2018 (https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/bannon-s-revenge-how-globalism-went-mainstream-ideology-far-right-ncna860221).15 Wong, Fifth Chinese Daughter, 64.16 For a more detailed explication of what constitutes “food pornography,” see Chin, Frank. Chickencoop Chinaman and the Year of the Dragon. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981.17 Alimentary Tracts, 173.18 Choudhury, The New India: Citizenship, Subjectivity, and Economic Liberalization, 4.19 For a more detailed analysis of such trends of “reverse” or “return” migrations, see Randolph, Sean. “Reverse Migration Dot Com” (https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/reverse-migration-dot-com/267031); https://www.ilo.org/global/publications/world-of-work-magazine/articles/WCMS_170535/lang–en/index.htm; Chacko, E. From brain drain to brain gain: reverse migration to Bangalore and Hyderabad, India’s globalizing hightech cities. GeoJournal 68 (2007).20 In some ways, a classic example of such a privileged narrative of Indian migration to US, and the ensuing anxieties can be traced back to the works of the Indian American writer Bharati Mukherjee, whose novel Jasmine becomes the ur-text of a female immigrant’s journey through the American social life, in search of the mythic American Dream.21 Mallapragada, Virtual Homelands, 38.22 Rajghatta, The Horse That Flew, 27.23 In his book Postcolonial Insecurities, Sankaran Krishna offers a persuasive definition of the term “postcolonial anxiety.” According to Krishna, “postcolonial anxiety” refers to the “social constructions of past, present and future for state elites and educated middle classes in the third world are mimetic constructions of what has supposedly already happened elsewhere: namely, Europe or the west” (xix). Furthermore, Krishna terms such anxieties as efforts to “replicate” historical modes of existences that are “ersatz to begin with” (xix).24 The term “alimentary domesticity” is borrowed from a review essay by literary scholar Martha Schoolman. For more details, see https://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue92/schoolman.htm. Accessed on March 29, 2020.25 Mannur, Culinary Fictions, 30.26 For a more detailed analysis of caste and class and nation-formation in India, see Omvedt, Gail. Understanding Caste. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2011; Rao, Anupama.The Caste Questions: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010; Bayly, Susan. The New Cambridge History of India: Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.27 For a more detailed analysis of the politics of smell, see Holwitt, Pablo. “Strange Foods, Strange Smells: Vegetarianism and Sensorial Citizenships in Mumbai’s Redeveloped Enclaves.” Contemporary South Asia 25 (4), 2017: 333–46; Lowe, Kelvin E.Y. “Ruminations on Smell as a Socio-Cultural Phenomenon.” Current Sociology 53 (3), 2005: 397–417; Manalansan, Martin F. “Immigrant Lives and the Politics of Olfaction in the Global City.” The Smell Culture Reader. Edited by J. Drobnick. Oxford, New York: Berg, 2006; Drobnick, Jim. The Smell Culture Reader. Oxford, New York: Berg, 2006; Classen, Constance. Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures. London: Routledge, 1993; Corbin, Alain. The Foul and the Fragrant: Odour and the Social Imagination. London: Papermac, 199628 The word “TamBram” is often used colloquially in India to refer to refer to Tamil Brahmins.29 Narayan, Monsoon Diary, 51.30 For a more persuasive reading of “curry” as an imperial metaphor, see Zlotnick, Susan. “Domesticating Imperialism: Curry and Cookbooks in Victorian England.” In The Recipe Reader: Narratives, Contexts, Traditions, edited by Janet Floyd and Laurel Foster. Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 2003; Narayan, Uma. “Eating Cultures: Incorporation, Identity, and Indian Food.” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture. Volume 1, 1995: Issue 1; Roy, Prama. Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions and the Postcolonial. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.31 Levine, Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn, 1.32 While an exhaustive list of such memoirs is beyond the scope of this essay, examples of such memoirs would include the classic Kitchen Confidential (2000) by Anthony Bourdain, Michael W. Twitty’s The Cooking Gene (2017), Bill Buford’s Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany (2006), Simon Majumdar’s Eat My Globe: One Year to Go Everywhere and Eat Everything (2009), and Kalyan Karmakar’s The Travelling Belly: Eating Through India’s By-Lanes (2016).33 While examples of such cookbooks are too many to list here, recent examples of such cookbooks from the Indian mainland and diaspora would include The Bengali Five Spice Chronicles: Exploring the Cuisine of Eastern India (2012) by Rinku Bhattacharya, Aarti Party: An American Kitchen with an Indian Soul (2014) by Aarti Sequiera, The Kerala Kitchen: Recipes and Recollections from the Syrian Christians of South India (2015) by Lathika George, Five Morsels of Love (2018) by Archna Pidathala, and Indian-ish: Recipes and Antics from a Modern American Family (2019) by Priya Krishna. While I do not claim that this is an exhaustive list, or representative of the field of family-inflected cookbooks, these texts, published recently, provide the readers with important sampling of the ways in which domestic foodways constitute an important trope in contemporary women-authored cookbooks, thus directing us towards yet another aspect of the feminized gastro-sphere, a fuller analysis of which is beyond the scope of this essay. Also, to be noted is the fact, I have excluded here any reference to the cookbooks of the same genre from outside of India, or Indian diaspora, precisely because, that would demand a different kind of bibliographic attention which is not the purpose of this essay.34 Anne E. Goldman uses the term “culinary autobiography Rosalia Baena uses the term “gastro-graphy.” Scholars of autobiography, Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith, alternate between the terms “food memoir” and “gastro-graphy.”35 Mannur, 30–35, 195–96; Roy, 154–190.36 Avakian, “Cooking Up Lives: Feminist Food Memoirs,” 279.37 Halloran, The Immigrant Kitchen, 5.38 For more detailed analyses of the cultural work that recipes do, see Phillips, Delores B. “Recipes for Reading Recipes? Culinary Writing and the Stakes of Multiethnic Pseudonarrative.” Narrative Culture, 7 (1), 2020; Leonardi, Susan J. “Recipes for Reading: Summer Pasta, Lobster a la Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie.” PMLA, Volume 104, Number 3, May 1989; Bower, A. L. “Cooking Up Stories: Narrative Elements in Community Cookbooks,” Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories. Ed. A. L. Bower. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1997; Kelly, T. M. “‘If I Were a Voodoo Priestess’: Women’s Culinary Autobiographies.” Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender, and Race, ed. S. A. Inness. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.39 Observations and arguments about the ethnographic voice in the cookbooks and food memoirs have been made by other theorists. For more details, see Appadurai, Arjun. “How to Make a National Cuisine Cookbooks in Contemporary India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History Vol. 30, No. 1 (Jan., 1988); Kelly, T. M. “‘If I Were a Voodoo Priestess’: Women’s Culinary Autobiographies.” Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender, and Race, ed. S. A. Inness. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001; Bardenstein, Carol. “Transmissions Interrupted: Reconfiguring Food, Memory, and Gender in the Cookbook-Memoirs of Middle Eastern Exiles,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2002, vol. 28, no. 1; Roy, Parama. Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions and the Postcolonial. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.40 Avakian, “Cooking Up Lives: Feminist Food Memoirs,” 280.41 Phillips, “Quieting Noisy Bellies: Moving, Eating, and Being in the Vietnamese Diaspora,” 51.42 Mannur, “Culinary Fictions,” 8–10.43 Roy, Alimentary Tracts, 168.44 Ong, “On the Edge of the Empires: Flexible Citizenship among Chinese in Diaspora,” 746.45 Mannur, Culinary Fictions, 33.46 Gopinath, “Who’s Your Daddy? Queer Diasporic Framings of the Region,” 277.47 Mallapragada, Virtual Homelands, 27.48 For a more detailed discussion of the problematics of the word “curry,” see Narayan, Uma. “Eating Cultures: Incorporation, Identity, and Indian Food.” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture. Volume 1, 1995: Issue 1; Collingham, Lizzie. Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.49 Considerable work has been done in India/South Asian studies on the relationship between caste and vegetarianism. For more recent scholarship on the relationship between caste and vegetarianism in contemporary history, see Gorringe, Hugo and Karthikeyan, D. “The Hidden Politics of Vegetarianism: Caste and “The Hindu” Canteen.” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 49, No. 20 (May 17, 2014); Arunima, G. “Being Vegetarian, the Hindu Way.” Economic and Political Weekly, April 18, 2014; Avenshi Center for Women’s Studies (2012 Avenshi Center for Women’s Studies. “Editorial: What’s the Menu? Food Politics and Hegemony.” Broadsheet on Contemporary Politics 1, no. 4 (2012). Accessed November 5, 2020. https://www.anveshi.org.in/editorial-whats-the-menu-food-politics-and-hegemony/ [Google Scholar]). Editorial: What’s the menu? Food Politics and Hegemony. Broadsheet on Contemporary Politics 1 (4). For a more detailed analysis of how this relationship existed within the casteized historical past, see Achaya, K.T. Indian Food: A Historical Companion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994; Appadurai, A., “Gastro-Politics in Hindu South Asia.” American Ethnologist, 8 (3), 1981; Caplan, Patricia. “Crossing the Veg/Non-Veg Divide: Commensality and Sociality Among the Middle Classes in Madras/Chennai.” South Asia: Journal in South Asian Studies, 31 (1), 2008.50 Gopinath, Unruly Visions, 5.51 Narayan, Monsoon Diary, 8.52 “Lecture: In Inauguration of the Chair of Literary Semiology,” 8.53 Chakravorty, In Stereotype, 5.54 I use the term “feudal modernity” to suggest a specifically sub-continental social, political and cultural formation where feudal social and cultural norms often survive and intersect with political, social and economic norms of capitalist modernity, often giving birth to complicated, contradictory and non-uniform socio-cultural developments. While the core of such a notion has been developed out of the Chinese Marxist thought, following Mao Zedong’s coinage of many of the Asian economies, including China, as “semi-feudal,” theorizations of the feudal modernity in India can be found in theorists such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ranajit Guha and other South Asian subaltern and Marxist scholars and thinkers, without necessarily using the term. For more details, see Zedong, Mao. On New Democracy. Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1940; Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000; Guha, Ranajit (Ed). A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986-95. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000.55 Narayan, Monsoon Diary, 11.56 See Chatterjee, Partha. “Whose Imagined Community?” In Mapping the Nation. Edited by Gopal Balakrishnan. London: Verso Books, 2012. For a scholarly account of such material ways in which women in nineteenth century Bengal grappled with new notions of home and domesticity, see Walsh, Judith. Domesticity in Colonial India: What Women Learned When Men Gave Them Advice. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004.57 Chatterjee, “Whose Imagined Community?,” 177.58 Narayan, Monsoon Diary, 15.59 Monsoon Diary, 15.60 Caplan, “Crossing the Veg/ Non-Veg Divide: Commensality and Sociality Among the Middle Classes in Madras/Chennai,” 131.61 Caplan, 131.62 For a more persuasive analysis of the intersections between caste and gender, see Rao, Anupama Edited. Gender and Caste. London: New York, 2005; Patil, Smita M. “Revitalising Dalit Feminism: Towards Reflexive, Anti-Caste Agency of Mang and Mahar Women in Maharashtra.” Economic and Political Weekly, September 2019; Chakravarty, Uma. Gendering Caste: Through a Feminist Lens. Calcutta: Stree, 2003.63 https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html.64 Tanumihardja, The Asian Grandmothers’ Cookbook: Home Cooking from Asian American Kitchens, ix.65 Tanumihardja, ix.66 Jaffrey, An Invitation to Indian Cooking, 3–5.67 Lopez, “Asian American Food Blogging as Racial Branding,” 153–54.68 Lopez, 153–54.69 Tanumihardja, The Asian Grandmothers’ Cookbook, ix.70 Chakravorty, In Stereotype, 10.71 In Stereotype, 10.72 In Stereotype, 9.73 Nguyen, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America, 9.74 Chandra, Dislocalism, 171.75 Vaidehi, “Girl in the Kitchen,” 220.76 Vaidehi, 220.77 Vaidehi, 220.78 Narayan, Monsoon Diary, 15.79 Ibid.80 Bardenstein, “Transmissions Interrupted,” 365.81 While chronic famine conditions form the consistent subject of much of the literatures in South Asian languages, some of the most canonical texts of famine literature from the sub-continent would include the Bengali play Nabanna (1944) written by the progressive-Marxist scholar Bijon Bhattacharya and the novel So Many Hungers! (1947) by Bhabani Bhattacharya, both set in the context of the Bengal Famine of 1943. Depictions of chronic conditions of famine can be found most notably in the short fiction of Urdu writers Premchand, Krishan Chander, Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi, and a whole host of other, too numerous to list in a single footnote. For critical scholarship on famine conditions in the literatures of the subcontinent, read Kelleher, Margaret. The Feminization of Famine: Expressions of the Inexpressible. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997; Roy, Parama. “Women, Hunger and Famine: Bengal, 1350/1943” in Roy, Bharati ed. Women of India: Colonial and Post-colonial Periods. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005; Bhattacharya, Sourit. Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel: On Catastrophic Realism. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.82 For a more detailed discussion on caste, politics and food in Indian contemporary public culture, see https://www.thequint.com/news/india/caste-on-your-plate-a-tale-of-food-snobbery-in-india#read-more; https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/how-caste-influences-food-big-fat-baos-instagram-series-revelation-150774; https://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/food-wine/caste-on-your-plate-where-is-the-dalit-food-5154007/; https://www.differenttruths.com/advocacy/gender/marginalised-bengali-widows-created-a-rich-repertoire-of-veg-dishes/.83 Leonardi, “Recipes for Reading: Summer Pasta, Lobster a la Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie,” 169.84 Sceats, Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction, 10.85 Leonardi, 10.86 Collingham, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, 120.87 For a brief public cultural discussion on rasam, caste and Brahmanical hegemony in South India, see https://www.thenewleam.com/2018/05/food-politics-bowl-rasam-vulgar-hegemony-caste-hierarchy/.88 Narayan, Monsoon Diary, 19.89 Salvio, “Dishing it Out,” 36.90 hooks, “Eating the Other,” 14.91 hooks, 14.92 hooks, 14.93 Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography: Interpreting Life Narratives, 149.94 Smith and Watson, 149.95 Smith and Watson, 150.96 Narayan, Monsoon Diary, 23.97 For an exposition of the housework debate as it has existed in much of Marxist-Feminism, read Oakley, Ann. The Sociology of Housework. London: Martin Robertson, 1974; Weeks, Kathi. The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011; Federici, Silvia. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. New York: PM Press, 2012.
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