Indian Cuisine in Western Dish: Negotiations and Assertions in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's Arranged Marriage

Abstract

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, a prominent South-Asian writer, has won several prizes for the short stories collection entitled Arranged Marriage , published in 1995, wherein she has sinuously added the food recipes, culinary ingredients and the beautifully stacked kitchen in the narrative pattern of the stories to convey those contests that characterize the lives of the Indian immigrants who attempts to imagine the promising worlds beyond the familial and cultural antagonisms. In these stories the food can also be seen functioning as an index of changing social and cultural status of the characters in their journey from India to America and mediating the experience of displacement and encoding the accounts of cultural exchange, accommodation, estranging relationships, resistance and illusory existences in contexts marked by racialism, violence, expulsions and inequality. The uniqueness of the present study lies in engraving the element of the represented Indian cuisine which proves to be the only source of happiness, comfort and security for these characters living in an alien world i.e. America, and they also appears to be cherishing their ethnicity by retreating to their native cuisine.