The journey of food from ‘When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine’ to ‘Mrs. Sen's’ in Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies

Abstract

As a chronicler of cultural interface, in Jhumpa Lahiri's debut collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, food paradoxically establishes intertextuality, humanity, otherness, negotiation as well as respect, albeit in different contexts. This article tries to highlight how the highly acclaimed writer constantly underscores the politics of Bengali diaspora identity in her stories through multiple nuances of the food metaphor, highlighting the specificity of Bengali cuisine and eating etiquettes, by creating a subtle dialogue between the second and the sixth story of the collection. It intends to explore how the journey of the food metaphor from ‘When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine’ to ‘Mrs. Sen's’ works in a typical pattern of the deconstruction of hegemonic discourses, in the critique of the plight of Bengali diaspora women, in the reinterpretation of difference and, thereby, in the development of their Bengali immigrant identity.

Keywords:

• Jhumpa Lahiri
• Bengali cuisine
• food studies
• short-story cycle
• diasporic identity

Notes on contributor

Dr Paromita Deb obtained her BA (Hons), MA and PhD degrees in English literature from the University of Calcutta, India. Her doctoral thesis was on body studies in early modern Europe. She served as a guest lecturer in Gauhati University, India. She did her postdoctoral research in contemporary Indian diasporic literature in the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, India. Currently she is guest lecturer of English Department, Hijli College, Kharagpur in India. She has published papers on Shakespeare, Tagore, body studies, early modern literature, gender studies, South Asian Diaspora and Partition literature.

Notes

1. Bess (2004) highlights that all the nine stories in Interpreter of Maladies share the same theme of alienation and loss. She points out that the individual quest of the first couple, Shoba and Shukumar, in the initial story, ‘A Temporary Matter’, is balanced by the mature understanding of the narrator and his wife Mala, in the last story, ‘The Third and Final Continent’. While agreeing with Bess's central point, this article argues that, in the context of balancing the use of food metaphors, the other characters and their experiences – Lilia's and Eliot's in the second and the sixth stories of the collection, for instance, are also poised on different levels.

2. Fishman (1973, 153) explains his point further as: ‘the essence of nationality is its spirit, its individuality, its soul. This soul is not only reflected and protected by the mother tongue, but, in a sense, the mother tongue is itself an aspect of the soul made manifest’.

3. While proposing a ‘Gastronomic Theory of Literature’, Kessler (2005, 151) suggests that food scenes in literary works often ‘stimulate the reader's appetite for the larger meal ahead’.

4. Githire (2010, 870), in her study of food-nation dis/connection in Andrea Levy's works, argues that the latter ‘challenges the image of England as a gastronomic enclave, a pocket of stasis oblivious to outside influence’.