Culture Crossing the Ocean: Food and Language in Imraan Coovadia’s The Wedding (2001)

Abstract

For his trader-protagonists’ migration from India to South Africa, Coovadia uses a comic mode to represent the protagonists taking their home-grown linguistic habits across the Indian Ocean, habits which reflect the hierarchical divisions and suspicions of Indian life, and which are perpetuated through the strife in which the marriage of Ismet and Khateja Nassin begins in Durban. This article will trace the ways in which change comes about in the intensely private love story which Coovadia represents as unfolding against the larger history of Indian settlement in colonial Durban at the beginning of the twentieth century, and will show how the devices of comedy are used to resolve culinary and sexual conflict. It will also explore, through Coovadia’s use of a grandson-narrator, how and why the novel’s conclusion is shifted away from romantic comedy to accommodate future generations in the wider story of diasporic life trajectories. In focussing on the ambiguities of settlement and cultural continuity, the discussion will mostly be about language and language use.