Culinary Nostalgia: Authenticity, Nationalism, and Diaspora

Abstract

Culinary practices situate themselves at most rudimentary level, at most necessary and most unrespected level. Luce Giard, Nourishing Arts, (156) 'The diaspora women who thought Culture meant being able to create a perfect mango chutney in New Jersey were scorned by visiting scholar from Bombay--who was also a woman but unmarried and so different. --Sujata Bhatt, Chutney (29) Behind assiduous documentation and defense of authentic lies an unarticulated anxiety of losing subject. Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity (10) In Food and Belonging: At 'Home' in 'Alien-Kitchens,' Indian American cultural critic Ketu Katrak suggests that culinary narratives, suffused with nostalgia, often manage immigrant memories and imagined returns to homeland. Narrativizing her own migratory journey from Bombay to United States, she remarks, own memorybanks about food overflowed only after I left India to come to United States as a graduate student. The disinterest in food that I had felt during my childhood years was transformed into a new kind of need for that food as an essential connection with home. I longed for my native food as I dealt with my dislocation from throbbing Bombay metropolis (270). As an immigrant subject distanced geographically and temporally from her childhood home in Bombay, food becomes both intellectual and emotional anchor. Psychically food transports Katrak to her childhood home, giving her a sense of rootedness when she immigrates to United States. And yet, she also acknowledges how experience of dislocation, modulated by a nostalgic longing for familiar, is also deeply rooted in creation of imaginary fictions which distort lived realities of her prior life. She notes: food was not pleasurable to me as a child. Thinking about this now as an adult, I can say that food was an overdetermined category for me in my childhood years; it tasted of heady tropical environment, it delineated who was in and out of favor with my father. I tasted anxiety in onions fried a bit too brown and tension in too many dark burned spots on roasted papad. One never knew what would be considered faulty at a particular meal, and uncertainty overwhelmed any pleasure in what was eaten. (266-67) Katrak's honesty registers affective value of food and smells, in process reflecting nostalgia structuring memories of home for immigrant subject. Recalling Salman Rushdie's take on nostalgia and historical memory in his now classic essay, Imaginary Homelands, she cautions against a tendency to transform nostalgia for ineffable into an idealization of past. In Imaginary Homelands, Rushdie sets in motion a complex investigation into condition of diasporic exilic writer. As he so eloquently puts it, It may be that when Indian writer who writes from outside India tries to reflect world, he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost (9). Seeing past through shards of a mirror inevitably distorts idealized memory one has of a homeland: owing to exigencies of displacement and dislocation certain memories are remembered, while others, literally, are re-membered. As Rushdie moves us through problem of memory and mimetic fidelity, he tells a story about returning to India after an absence of many years. He draws an analogy between an old black-and-white photograph of his childhood home taken prior to his birth and his perceptions of his childhood. With passage of time and movement to different spaces, the colours of history had seeped out of my mind's eye (9): nostalgia intervenes to colorize, or, in this case, decolorize past, reducing it to a pale imitation of what it might have been in mind's eye. I begin with this brief but necessary trail through these two essays to highlight how nostalgia is always already predetermined indeed over determined--in scripting immigrant attachment to past. …