“Me in Place, and the Place in Me”

Abstract

In this memoir, the central of role of food in the life of migrants is recalled in the story of an Indian family's journey to Britain in the 1950s, a time when very few South Asian restaurants or shops had been established. The memoir seeks to redress the imbalance in much writing on food and migration, where food is the primary focus, and migrants and their journeys tend to form a rather ghostly backdrop to the culinary action. The family's quest for the “food of home” highlights the centrality of culinary practices in their lives, and the relationship between food and ideas of home and belonging. It provides an alternative window into an intimate world of food and migration, offering insights into both the inner space of the migrant psyche, and outer, mobile, food geographies and social histories. Food practices are explored as a grammar for a politics of the migrant self.

Keywords:

• migration histories
• food practices
• home
• belonging
• affective association
• migrant selfhood

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Parvathi Raman

Parvathi Raman is a senior lecturer in social anthropology and chair of the SOAS Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies. She studies the politics of belonging in migrant communities in historical and contemporary contexts and the transnational socialist imaginary. She is currently working on a project examining ideas of national loyalty and affiliation among South Asians in Britain through the prism of cricket. Department of Anthropology, SOAS, Thornhaugh Street, London WC1 0XG, UK ([email protected]).