Food as a symbol and site of Cultural Memory in the fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Food is something more than mere sustenance in life as well as in literature. Food is a socially and culturally loaded term that holds a central part in our cultural imagination. For South Asians, food regularly plays a role in how issues of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and national identity are imagined as well as how notions of belonging are affirmed or resisted. Food in literature thus becomes a material substance as well as symbolic entity. In the Literature of the Diaspora especially, food becomes a way of creating and consolidating cultural identity. This paper represents how the diasporic writers like Jhumpa Lahari and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni have chosen food as a powerful multivalent symbol in communicating the psychological and cultural meanings in connection to postcolonial identity. The immigrants at different part of the world form their own ethnic groups in their new land and they nominate food symbols for nostalgic enactments of culture and identity, there by seeking the ethnic identity. Those food symbols are represented in the selected novels in the form of food performances, resistance, sensory factors and food memories expressed by the immigrant characters in the host land to have a communal bonding and preserving their native culture. The writers have made their characters nostalgic in their attempt in using food symbols as a representation of their identity.