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a peer-reviewed quarterly journal on literature
E-ISSN 2457-0265
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Erothanatos
Scholarly Article
Namrata Chowdhury
The Culinary Sub-Text in Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘When Mr. Pirzada Comes to Dine’ in Interpreter of Maladies
Volume
5
Issue
1
Pages:
40-51
Keywords:
diaspora, discourse, homeland, South Asia.
doi:
Abstract
When it comes to South Asian diaspora, families, communities and relations within the private space of the family is often pitted against the unfamiliar if not hostile territory of the public space. It is also a common understanding that while the process of assimilation works within spaces, the kitchen and the food prepared at home is the sacrosanct core that speaks of home and smells of home. This paper attempts to walk into one such home that might be given a label of a South Asian diasporic home with Jhumpa Lahiri's story 'When Mr. Pirzada Comes to Dine' from the collection Interpreter of Maladies to question the role that certain specific social spaces play in the event that a war plays out within the four walls of this home and the effect that the culinary nostalgia has on the traumatic suffering of the war. This paper would also like to contest the engendering of stereotypical roles in the interface between food, families and identities.
About the Author
Namrata Chowdhury has completed her Master degree from the Department of English, Presidency University, Kolkata in 2013. She qualified the UGC-NET (National Eligibility Test) in the year 2013. She has held Guest Faculty positions with Ramakrishna Sarada Mission Vivekananda Vidyabhavan, Seth Anandram Jaipuria College (Morning), and at Naba Ballygunge Mahavidyalaya. She went on to join Pakuahat Degree College, Malda, West Bengal as an Assistant Professor of the Department of English in the year 2017 and shifted to St. Xavier's College (Autonomous), Kolkata in 2019, where she holds the position of an Assistant Professor till date. She has presented papers in national and international seminars and conferences and published in academic journals. She is also a doctoral scholar at the Department of English, West Bengal State University, carrying out her research under the supervision of Dr. Chandrava Chakrabarty, who is currently the Head of the Department of English, West Bengal State University. The subject of her doctoral research is the mapping of the city, Calcutta through a decoding of the culinary registers in select non-fiction works by the migrant and immigrant authors. Her research interests also include the city and the space, postcolonial literature, Indian English Literature, popular culture, cultural studies.
