English Language & Literature

Of Edible Grandmothers, Culinary Cosmopolitanisms, and Casteized Domesticities: The Contradictory Ideologies of Shoba Narayan’s Food Memoir ‘Monsoon Diary’

Of Edible Grandmothers, Culinary Cosmopolitanisms, and Casteized Domesticities: The Contradictory Ideologies of Shoba Narayan’s Food Memoir Monsoon Diary

Switching between her life-story and recipes of everyday South Indian home-cooked fare, Narayan established a new hybrid genre within the cultural field of Indian Anglophone life-writing.

Author

Nandini Dhar, Associate Professor, Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana, India.

Summary

This essay analyses Indian-Tamil food memoirist Shoba Narayan’s memoir, Monsoon Diary (2003), arguing that the Indian diasporic feminized food-memoir is a crucial site through which to interrogate the class aspirations of a “new” globalized Indian elite. Narayan’s text was one of the first Indian diasporic food memoirs to be published in the early years of the twenty-first century, and played a decisive role in popularizing the genre of the feminized Indian food memoir. Switching between her life-story and recipes of everyday South Indian home-cooked fare, Narayan established a new hybrid genre within the cultural field of Indian Anglophone life-writing.

Published in: a/b: Auto/Biography Studies

To read the full article, please click here.