Seasoned Storytelling: The Role of Food in Fiction
Of Grasshopper green chutney and food for plot!
“Once again an abracadabra, an open-sesame: words printed on a chutney-jar…”
By Ashwin Ahmad
Food plays a special role in Indian literature. While western narratives have used food to connote a myriad of emotions such as joy – experienced through Enid Blyton’s wondrous descriptions of a picnic lunch in her Famous Five series; sorrow – as experienced through the lack of food suffered by the children in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, and decadence– as exemplified by the lavish parties in the Great Gatsby, none of them have managed to capture food’s essence in the way our desi scribes have done.
From our ancient epics to modern-day novels, the mention, or the lack of mention, of food can often twist around the entire narrative. The refusal of a young bride to make rotis in her husband’s home; the failure to offer a stranger tea; abruptly getting up from a meal, or simply not eating at all stirs up emotions for an Indian reader that are often too complicated for western cultures to comprehend.
The differences lie in the very different attitudes towards food.
The lack of food for the Victorian writer symbolised how society had failed to care for the vulnerable and underprivileged which were often children. This was the case with Dickens who due to his real-life experience as a child constantly referred to the lack of food provided to the child protagonists. In Oliver Twist the omniscient narrator noted matter-of-factly that “Oliver Twist and his companions suffered the tortures of slow starvation for three months: at last they got so voracious and wild with hunger, that one boy, who was tall for his age…hinted darkly to his companions, that unless he had another basin of gruel per diem, he was afraid he might some night happen to eat the boy who slept next him, who happened to be a weakly youth of tender age.”
Dickens was not alone in this declaration. In Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte wrote of her protagonist’s experiences at her boarding school. “I saw each girl taste her food and try to swallow it; but in most cases the effort was soon relinquished. Breakfast was over, and none had breakfasted. Thanks being returned for what we had not got, and a second hymn chanted, the refectory was evacuated for the schoolroom.”
Such writing while powerful was rooted in the realm of the practical. If poor children were better fed there would no longer be a problem and food – as the powerful symbol for social change in literature – would instead become a comfortable and cliched metaphor for the happy ending.
This proved to be the case and though attitudes about food changed as one transitioned from the Victorian novelists to the gritty realism of the 20th century where American novelists such as Scott Fitzgerald and J.D. Salinger used food to undercut the happy ending; food was no longer the powerful social symbol of before but an allusion that things were going wrong.
Salinger’s allusions about his protagonist Holden Caulfield’s deteriorating mental state in Catcher in the Rye through his “missing of meals” and eating breakfast at “only around noon” is a case in point. The same is true of Fitzgerald. Though the descriptions of the large parties and feasts in The Great Gatsby showcase the social decadence of the time they take second place to the motives and actions of the characters. Nick’s remark on “careless people” like Tom and Daisy who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made,” was the novel’s essence. Food symptomized the decay, but it did not make this larger point here.
West vs the East: Food as sustenance vs performative non-eating
Western literature’s practical emphasis on food could not be further removed from its Indian counterpart. The emphasis on food is not just necessary but natural as it is from food that the story begins and how the narrative is shaped.
But it is not just the depiction of food in Indian literature it is the act of eating or not eating that becomes important. In R.K. Narayan’s novel The Guide (later turned into a film by Dev Anand) a miscommunication between the protagonist Raju and a little boy leads to a belief amongst the villagers of Malgudi that Raju will embark upon an indefinite fast till the drought-stricken village gets rain.
Unlike the Victorian novel where those who do not have food are to be pitied the absence of food makes Raju – a criminal who was sentenced and jailed for forgery – a saint, even if he is an unwilling one. But as he finds out there is little alternative. As he muses on railing against the villagers who have come to regard him as their saviour, he realises that because of their simplicity, “it would not help. They might enjoy it as a joke. He had his back to the wall, there was no further retreat. This realization helped him to get through the trial with a little more resignation on the second day of his penance.”
The story of The Guide underlines India’s complex relationship with food.
While the book satirises his fast, it reveals how Indians see food and the eating of food as a performative art and if the performance is executed well, a larger aim will be fulfilled – even if it is done unwillingly as in Raju’s case.
Performance aside, food in Indian literature often depicts deeper undertones about the characters and the plotline. In Tagore’s novel Chokher Bali, which revolves around the affair between a young widow Binodini with a married man Mahendra, food is both the subtext and the hinge around which the plot revolves.
Mahendra is in love with his wife Asha till the couple decide to cook for themselves at which point the plot shifts. Binodini comes to their home and her mastery over domestic duties and food places her above Asha in status. The affair between her and Mahendra is first prompted through the sharing of paan at which point the narrative again undergoes a shift. These narrative shifts in Chokher Bali are interspersed with constant references to food by the characters which leads them to reflect upon new and raw realisations. Such a relationship allows food to enjoy an intimacy in the Indian novel that one cannot find in the Western counterpart.
It is a character, an all-seeing narrator, a device to further the plot, cultural shorthand and much more. The flexible role that it performs ensures the reader can understand the dynamics within an Indian home, village, or area in a single sentence.
But food’s literary power goes much beyond just that. The “grasshopper green chutney” tasted by Saleem Sinai, the story’s protagonist and narrator in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, prompts him to recall his past thereby creating the story. As Rushdie writes in the garb of Saleem, “the taste of the chutney was more than just an echo of that long-ago taste – it was the old taste itself, the very same, with the power of bringing back the past as if it had never been away…Once again an abracadabra, an open-sesame: words printed on a chutney-jar, opening the last door of my life.”
Paradise pickles and magic realism
Therefore, as Rushdie suggests, it isn’t literature that has created food it is food that has created literature. Food isn’t part of the narrative it is the narrative here.
This realisation that the reader is left with after reading Midnight’s Children shows that one now cannot think about an Indian or Indian-origin novel without looking at how food shapes and defines the plot.
Realising this Indian writers have often used food as devices to push back against social customs. In The God of Small Things Arundhati Roy titles her first chapter “Paradise Pickles and Preserves” which in a Rushdian touch of magic realism is not just the name of the pickle factory next to the Ipe House around which the novel revolves but is also an ironic reference on preserving caste, sexual and social norms.
Writing about the factory she states. “They used to make pickles, squashes, jams, curry powders and canned pineapples. And banana jam (illegally) after the FPO (Food Products Organization) banned it because according to their specifications it was neither jam nor jelly. Too thin for jelly and too thick for jam. An ambiguous, unclassifiable consistency, they said… Looking back now, to Rahel it seemed as though this difficulty that their family had with classification ran much deeper than the jam-jelly question… They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much.”
The God of Small Things is a wonderful example of how food can be used effectively to comment upon almost every aspect on Indian society whether it be sexuality, gender relations, caste and religious issues, or the attitudes of society in general.
As a result, food immediately is the goto motif for Indian or Indian-origin writers to further the plot, build connections, and explain complicated emotions. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine the story revolves around a Muslim botany professor Mr Pirzada from East Pakistan who comes daily to dine with a Hindu Indian family living in suburban Boston in 1971. Told from the point of view of the Hindu’s family’s daughter Lilia, a first-generation American, the story shows how food not just helps bridge divides between religions but also serves as a larger commentary on larger events. As Lalia goes trick-or-treating with her American friend Doria, a carved Halloween jack-o-lantern serves as a special motif. As Mr Pirzada helps Lilia carve the pumpkin news comes in that India may soon go to war with Pakistan. The knife slips from Mr Pirzada’s hand leaving the jack-o-lantern’s mouth frozen in astonishment. This simple motif sums up the deep understanding of the personal anguish of a man who “religiously sets his watch to Dhaka time every day.”
Lahiri and the ability of many Indian and Indian-origin authors to use food to prompt, further and make a larger point is something that remains unique to Indian literature. So while the Indian reader will admire Western novelists and even titter at the witticisms of Oscar Wilde – who stated in A Woman of No Importance that “after a good dinner one can forgive anybody even one’s own relations” – he will most probably feel that literature is best understood and experienced through “grasshopper green chutney.”
