The Maternal Presence in Diasporic Women's Lives in the Works of Amulya Malladi and Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni: A Focus on Gender, Identity, and Place

Migrant Women and Cooking in Fiction

Culinary and other “domestic” arts in fiction in general and in South Asian diasporic fiction in particular have sparked the interest of many scholars working on the relationship between domestic items and the migrant figure, especially the woman migrant. Annette Svenson points out that “besides representing the source or target cultures, food, or rather what Tamara S. Wagner refers to as “food fiction” is also used to illustrate multiculturalism” (Svenson, 2010, p. 78). Food practices found in works of fiction by migrant writers, according to Svenson, manifest gender related power hierarchies. It is also a way through which migrant characters express nostalgia for the home culture” (Svenson, 2010, p. 78). This becomes a doubly significant factor when one considers the role of the woman as the maker and provider of food and other domestic comforts, paving the way for migrant citizens to indulge in nostalgia for home, thus reinforcing once more the connection between women, food/domestic items and nostalgia for the home left behind.

Therefore, I suggest that it is valid to envisage culinary fictions as challenging the familiar and domestic paradigm(s) about women and domesticity. On one hand they can be said to invest familiar (and often devalued) domestic chores with power and agency. On the other, they compel us to view the familiar women figures associated with traditional domesticity (such as mothers and grandmothers) in a new and empowering light for women.