Multiple Spaces of Cooking

Abstract

A recent surge of interest in South Asian culture has met with a wealth of outstanding novels by Indian, Pakistani, and Sri Lankan authors. These writers have contributed a fine balance between historical and modern settings, divergent religions, geographical diverse settings, and a wide range of literary techniques which has earned them worldwide acclaim. Artefacts such as food, clothing, music, art, or literature pertain to culture. Thus, food occupies an important place in the delineation of culture and is used abundantly in South Asian literature. Recent interest in food studies has opened doors to examine how the use of food imagery and metaphor represents complex ideas and deeper meaning in literature. Literary food studies analyses food symbolism to reflect on cultural identity. The domestic arena associated with femininity also becomes a space to reproduce cultural and national identity. Studying ordinary moments in everyday life can yield insights into the culture of the past and present. Women writers have used food and eating to symbolize cultural issues of acceptance, resistance, and preservation of culture, as well as symbols of memory, emotions, narrative history, relationships, power, and consumption.Food is a crucial indicator of individual and social identities. In the context of the diaspora, it is more than an indicator of one's nostalgia and search for rootedness. This paper seeks to explore whether food can be used as a tool of recognition-personal and national.The texts to be taken up for the present study are Esther David’s The Book of Rachel and Kamila Shamsie’s Salt and Saffron. in which recipes are interwoven into the texts as part of the narrative process.