Covert communications: Food in transition in Ritesh Batra’s the Lunchbox

ABSTRACT

Ritesh Batra’s 2013 film The Lunchbox explores issues of belonging, tradition and progress in contemporary India. By evoking, reworking and subsequently redeploying the traditional diasporic symbol which is Indian cuisine, The Lunchbox self-reflexively addresses and tests the boundaries of diasporic narratives and explores issues around globalization and transnationality. The film ultimately remains ambivalent about late modernity’s progressive project in India, instead advocating creative and adaptive solutions in response to the alienation and loss of home experienced by characters in the film.

KEYWORDS:

• Food
• India
• cuisine
• diaspora
• postcolonial
• Batra
• The Lunchbox

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I use the term “South Asian” to designate diasporic cinema emerging from and/or depicting the subcontinent and am aware that “Indian cuisine” is not representative of the culinary diversity of this area. However, Indian cuisine is often deployed by popular diasporic narratives as a shorthand metonymic representation of the entire region.

2. Although Indian characters speaking to each other in English in South Asian diasporic film is not unusual, it is overwhelmingly affluent Indians of a particular class who are granted the privilege of speaking English.

3. I deploy this term with an awareness of its double connotation: as the root sense of the term as those who were “born to the land”, and in the pejorative sense commonly utilized in colonial, neocolonial and orientalist discourses.

4. As Ila is a married woman, a friendship between the two characters would be unusual given their sociocultural context, and seen as improper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Muzna Rahman

Muzna Rahman has recently joined Manchester Metropolitan University as a lecturer. Her research focuses on food, the body and contemporary literature and film. She has previously taught at the University of Lincoln, and the University of Manchester.