Reading communities and culinary communities: The gastropoetics of the South Asian Diaspora

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Volumn 10, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 471-502

  Roy, Parama ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33751048888     PISSN: 10679847     EISSN: 15278271     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10679847-10-2-471     Document Type: Article

References (70)

1. Definitive statements about origins and beginnings operate, as we shall see from the reading of Suleri and Jaffrey that follows, under the sign of errancy, deferral, ironic indirection, and metaphoric substitution. Seeking a suitable temporal beginning to her genealogical tale, Suleri renders the movement of time into a geography of the body: "Tillat was not around to hear me sigh and wonder where I should possibly begin. The breast would be too flagrant and would make me too tongue-tied, so I decided instead to approach the kapura in a mildly devious way" (Meatless Days [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989], 24). It is not entirely inapposite, I trust, to frame an essay on these figures (and figures of speech) with a reading of such allegorical substitutions before proceeding to the declarative statement of a thesis.
2. Arjun Appadurai, "How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India," Comparative Studies in Society and History 30, no. 1 (January 1988): 11.
3. Suleri, Meatless Days, 22.
4. Inderpal Grewal describes the rnetaphorizability of food and body in the novel in the following terms: "Pregnancy, eating, motherhood, and injury ... become metaphors for the elasticity of the boundaries of this subject made up of unstable parts. The prevalence of the metaphor of food all through the narrative emphasizes the notion of incorporation and multiplicity, rather than a complete whole" ("Autobiographic Subjects and Diasporic Locations: Meatless Days and Borderlands," in Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, ed. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994], 241).
5. Madhur Jaffrey, An Invitation to Indian Cooking (New York: Knopf, 1973; rpt., New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 6.
6. Madhur Jaffrey, Quick and Easy Indian Cooking (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996), 134.
7. She has produced for the Tilda food products company a number of pickles and cook-in sauces.
8. Shrabani Basu, Curry in the Crown: The Story of Britain's Favourite Dish (New Delhi: HarperCollins Publishers India, 1999), xvi. Basu provides a detailed account of "currymania" in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s.
9. (Appropriately, the favorite "curry dish" of most Britons is chicken tikka masala, a dish created in London by Bangladeshi restaurateurs in response to local demand for a sauce to accompany the tikkas.) The magnum opus of Isabella Beeton, Jaffrey's nineteenth-century predecessor, is The Book of Household Management (London: S. O. Beeton, 1861). It is of some interest to note that Jaffrey's likeness now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London.
10. Appadurai, "How to Make a National Cuisine," 5;
11. R. S. Khare, Culture and Reality: Essays on the Hindu System of Managing Foods (Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1976);
12. Khare, The Hindu Hearth and Home (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1976).
13. In a similar vein see Roland Barthes on French food advertising: "[It] assigns to food a function that is, in some sense, commemorative: food permits a person (and I am here speaking of French themes) to partake each day of the national past. In this case, the historical quality is obviously linked to food techniques (preparation and cooking).... They are, we are told, the repository of a whole experience, of the accumulated wisdom of our ancestors.... it is fair to say that through his food the Frenchman experiences a certain national continuity. By way of a thousand detours, food permits him to insert himself daily into his own past and to believe in a certain culinary 'being' of France" ("Towards a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption," Annales: Economies, Societes, Civilisations, no. 5 [September-October 1961], 977-986; rpt. in Carolyn Coumhan and Penny Van Esterik, eds., Food and Culture: A Reader [New York: Routledge, 1977], 24).
14. Susan J. Leonardi, "Recipes for Reading: Summer Pastas, Lobster a la Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie," PMLA 104, no. 3 (summer 1989): 340.
15. The informality of the earlier editions of Joy is underscored in the title: The Joy of Cooking: A Compilation of Reliable Recipes, with an Occasional Culinary Chat (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943).
16. Jacques Derrida, "The Law of Genre," trans. Avital Ronell, Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (autumn 1980): 55-81.
17. Sudha Koul, Curries without Worries (New York: Warner Books, 1983);
18. Julie Sahni, Classic Indian Cooking (New York: William Morrow, 1980).
19. Jaffrey, Invitation to Indian Cooking, 16.
20. Chitrita Banerji, Life and Food in Bengal (London: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991; rpt. New Delhi: Rupa, 1993);
21. Jennifer Brennan, Curries and Bugles: A Memoir and Cookbook of the British Raj (London: Viking, 1990).
22. Jacket blurb for Brennan, Curries and Bugles.
23. For Rushdie's analysis of Raj nostalgia, see "Outside the Whale," in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991 (New York: Penguin, 1992), 87-101.
24. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 145.
25. Also see Dernda, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978): "One cannot determine the center and exhaust totalization because the sign which replaces the center, which supplements it, taking the center's place in its absence - this sign is added, occurs as a surplus, as a supplement. The movement of signification adds something, which results in the fact that there is always more, but this addition is a floating one because it comes to perform a vicarious function, to supplement a lack on the part of the signified" (289). I am greatly indebted to Jeff Tobin's reading of supplementarity in "Supplementing French Sauces: Masculinity, Deconstruction, and Nouvelle Cuisine" (unpublished manuscript).
26. Jaffrey is not necessarily unique in her production of the cookbook as national allegory. Rombauer's Joy of Cooking has functioned as an American institution, a resource consulted over several generations on the basics for its ease of use and its compilation of time-honored and quintessentially American recipes. (The fact that it was chosen by the New York Public Library in 1995 as one of the 150 most consequential books of the century is evidence enough of its talismanic status.) In Britain Beeton's Book of Household Management has served a similar function (though it is not as much in current use as Joy is), dedicated as it is to "plain English" food (complete with a preference for overdone vegetables) and a careful sequestration of deleterious French influences. On the content and impact of Beeton's work see Elizabeth David, "Isabella Beeton and Her Book," Wine and Food, 1961, 3-8;
27. and Graham Nown, Mrs. Beeton: 150 Years of Cookery and Household Management (London: Ward Lock, 1986). (The national imaginary features more overtly in Jaffrey than in Rombauer or Beeton, an inescapable corollary of the diasporic production of her work.)
28. Anne McClintock, "Family Feuds: Gender, Nation, and the Family," Feminist Review 44 (summer 1993): 61-80.
29. Madhur Jaffrey, Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cookery (Woodbury, N.Y.: Barron's, 1983), 8.
30. Note Chitra Divakaruni's The Mistress of Spices (New York: Doubleday, 1997) and films such as Mira Nair's Mississippi Masala (1991) and Srinivas Krishna's Masala (1992).
31. Madhur Jaffrey, Madhur Jaffrey's Cookbook: Easy East/West Menus for Family and Friends (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 225, 255.
32. Jean-Francois Revel, Culture and Cuisine: A Journey through the History of Food, trans. Helen R. Lane (New York: Doubleday, 1982, 1984).
33. Madhur Jaffrey, A Taste of India (London: Pavilion Books, 1985), 12-13.
34. See Frank F. Gonlon, "Dining Out in Bombay," in Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, ed. Carol A. Rreckenridge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 90-127, for an account of the development of public dmmg in Bombay over the course of the century.
35. Luce Giard describes her stake in the study of everyday cooking practices in terms that are analogous, if more romantic: "A will to learn to consider the fleeting and unpretentious ways of operating that are often the only place of inventiveness available to the subject: they represent precarious inventions without anything to consolidate them, without a language to articulate them, without the acknowledgment to raise them up; they are bricolages subject to the weight of economic constraints, inscribed in the network of concrete determinations" ("Doing-Cooking," in The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 2
36. Living and Cooking, by Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol, trans. Timothy J. Tomasik [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998], 155-156).
37. Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present, 2d ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 271.
38. Jaffrey, Taste of India, 107-108.
39. For a related discussion of food processing that distances the viewer from the recipe, though in a distinctly different class context, see Roland Barthes on "ornamental cookery": "This ornamental cookery is indeed supported by wholly mythical economics.... It is, in the fullest meaning of the word, a cuisine of advertisement, totally magical, especially when one remembers that this magazine is widely read in small-income groups. The latter, in fact, explains the former: it is because Elle is addressed to a genuinely working-class public that it is very careful not to take for granted that cooking must be economical" (Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers [New York: Hill and Wang, 1972], 79).
40. Stephen Mennell's criticism of Barthes's errors about the empirical details of the food publications he compares does not invalidate the latter's larger point about the irreducibility of many forms of gastronomic writing to serviceability alone; see Mennell, All Manners of Food, 250-255.
41. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 217-251.
42. A. L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India, 3d rev. ed. (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1967).
43. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 77-78.
44. See also Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), 111-125
45. and Jameson, "Nostalgia for the Present," in Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991).
46. Renato Rosaldo, "Imperialist Nostalgia," Representations 26 (spring 1989): 107-122.
47. Verne A. Dusenbery, "A Sikh Diaspora? Contested Identities and Constructed Realities," in Nation and Migration: The Politics of Space in the South Asian Diaspora, ed. Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 33-34.
48. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991).
49. On the often awkward fit between "space" and "culture" see Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, "Beyond 'Culture': Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference," Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1 (February 1992): 6-23;
50. rpt. in Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 33-51.
51. Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Umpire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
52. See Barbara Ramusack, "The Indian Princes As Fantasy: Palace Hotels, Palace Museums, and Palace on Wheels," in Rreckenridge, Consuming Modernity, 66-89.
53. See Arjun Appadurai's "Gastro-pohtics in Hindu South Asia," American Ethnologist 8, no. 3 (August 1981): 494-511, for a splendid account of how food can serve as the medium or the message of conflict in South Indian Brahmin households.
54. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1985): "[Increased English consumption of sugar) represent[s] an extension of empire outward, but on the other [hand], [it] mark[s] an absorption, a kind of swallowing up, of sugar consumption as a national habit. Like tea, sugar came to define English 'character'" (39).
55. Also see Charlotte Sussman, "Women and the Politics of Sugar, 1792," Representations 48 (fall 1994): 48-69.
56. Piya Chatterjee, A Time for Tea: Women, Labor, and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 21.
57. Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace describes how tea, sugar, and china (all ingredients of a genteel tea-drinking ritual) came to signify, in eighteenth-century Britain, gendered allure and gendered degeneracy; see Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
58. The scene seeks to hyperbolize and to repudiate Manjula's solicitations; Lizzie's contact with Manjula is far more phobically charged than are her encounters with Sanju. The almost delirious character of such a repudiation makes it possible to suggest that while the scene unquestionably harks back to the prototypical colonial scene of romance between the Eastern man and the Western (white) woman, it also supplements it in ways that are worthy of note. The visual and performative conjuration of the zenana within the tea-drinking frame is evocative of another and more perverse libidinal possibility, in which a depraved Eastern patriarch is present and yet bracketed. The scene cannot but recall the Orientalist fantasies of lesbian eroticism that are inescapably associated with the sexual politics of the harem, especially since so many of the film's scenes of (incipient or actual) commensality between two actors are rendered in an explicitly erotic register. Recall the pan-eating when Lizzie and Sanju first meet, Sanju's and Manjula's coupling and quarreling over delayed meals and shared delicacies, and the erotic tensions of eating on the road. (The feast in the maharaja's palace early in the film is obviously exempt from this logic.) In the sexually and racially anxious economy of the film, the fascination and terror of such interminglings is the more potent for being articulated through modes of indirection. It should be noted that the modern term lesbian can only feature here under erasure, as one that must be invoked but that is not quite commensurable with the erotic experience imagined and reported in a range of Orientalist writing from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Diana Fuss reminds us to be vigilant about how linguistic categories can and do function as categories of analysis: "Can one generalize from the particular forms sexuality takes under Western capitalism to sexuality as such?" (Identification Papers [New York: Routledge, 1996], 150.)
59. Analogously, Michel Foucault has drawn attention to the nineteenth-century invention of (male) homosexuality and heterosexuality; see The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (1978; rpt., New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1990).
60. For an elaboration of the associative continuum between the harem and lesbian eroticism, see the following texts (written from widely discrepant perspectives): Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986);
61. Felicity Nussbaurn, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995);
62. Gayatri Gopinath, "Theorizing Transnational Sexualities: Nostalgia, Desire, Diaspora," positions 5 (winter 1998): 467-489;
63. and Richard Burton, "Terminal Essay," in The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (London: Kama-shastra Society, 1885), 10: 152-219.
64. Rosie Thomas, "Melodrama and the Negotiation of Morality in Mainstream Hindi Film," in Breckenridge, Consuming Modernity, 162.
65. Also see the following: Rosie Thomas, "Indian Cinema: Pleasures and Popularity," Screen, May-August 1985, 116-131;
66. Ravi Vasudevan, "The Melodramatic Mode and the Commercial Indian Cinema,"Screen, summer 1989, 29-50;
67. and Erik Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
68. Jaffrey, Quick and Easy Indian Cooking, 134.
69. It should be noted that the bottled products assert, even more strenuously than is the wont for such products, their claim to ethnic and culinary legitimacy. Thus the description of the chutneys reads as follows: "Tilda's Mango Chutneys have a taste and texture unlike any you can buy outside India, because we use only the finest Indian chutney mangoes" (www.tilda.com/products/index/shtml).
70. Basu, Curry in the Crown, 121. Basu attributes the use of this sauce to the unfamiliarity of the mostly Bangladeshi owners of Indian restaurants in Britain with the northern Indian dishes they were forced to serve.