Tasting
Home: Culinary Memory and Diasporic Identity in The
Mistress of Spices and Midnight’s
Children
Dr. S. Mahalakshmi,
Assistant
Professor,
Department
of English,
Chikkaiah
Govt. Arts and Science College,
Erode,
Tamil Nadu, India.
Abstract:
Food in Indian English fiction is
not ornament but ontology: a medium through which memory, identity, and power
are made sensible and narratable. This article places culinary symbolism at the
center of a comparative reading of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices (1997) and
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
(1981). In Divakaruni, spices are endowed with sentience and curative force,
sustaining Diasporic identity, especially women’s, within unfamiliar
geographies. In Rushdie, chutneys and pickles serve as an archive of the
nation, preserving history while foregrounding its instability. Drawing on
Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire,
Arjun Appadurai’s “gastro-politics,” Homi Bhabha’s hybridity, and Carole
Counihan’s feminist food studies, the article argues that both novels deploy
food as a narrative language of remembrance and resistance. Divakaruni’s
diasporic kitchen functions as a portable mnemonic and therapeutic site;
Rushdie’s pantry of pickles operates as a satirical, self-aware historiography.
Read together, these texts reimagine how taste encodes belonging and
contestation in postcolonial modernity.
Keywords: Food, Diaspora, Memory, Identity, Indian
Literature
Introduction
Food is among the most intimate
carriers of cultural memory. Smell, taste, and texture often summon the past
more forcefully than words or images. As Pierre Nora observes, memory “attaches
itself to sites, to gestures, to images, and to objects” (Nora 12). In migrant
worlds, cuisine becomes one of the most resilient of such lieux de mémoire:
a portable, reproducible site that bears the weight of home across borders and
generations. The diasporic kitchen, with its jars, rituals, substitutions, and
compromises, is not merely a domestic space; it is a laboratory of identity
where continuities are maintained and differences negotiated.
Indian English fiction, long
preoccupied with colonial aftermaths, migrations, and uneven modernities, brims
with culinary images that are anything but incidental. Arjun Appadurai’s notion
of “gastro-politics” reminds us that food is a “highly condensed social fact,”
a field where hierarchy, intimacy, and identity are staged and contested (How
to Make a National Cuisine 5). In literary narratives, recipes and meals
become scripts of power; eating and cooking mark the boundaries of caste,
gender, class, and nation; spices and condiments crystallise memory while
opening it to reinvention.
This article centers on food as a
critical vocabulary in two landmark novels, Divakaruni’s The Mistress of
Spices and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. It proposes that
Divakaruni dramatises the diasporic kitchen as a curative, memory-bearing zone,
especially for women navigating racism, precarity, and patriarchy. Rushdie, by
contrast, makes of the pantry a historiographic theatre in which chutneys and pickles
parody, preserve, and re-flavour the national past. If Divakaruni’s spices heal
and anchor, Rushdie’s pickles preserve and destabilise. Both, however,
translate taste into a language that can articulate the contradictions of
belonging and the politics of remembering.
Food and Cultural Memory in Chitra Banerjee
Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices
Divakaruni’s novel is explicit about
the agency of food. Tilo announces at the outset, “I am Mistress of Spices. I
can work with the others too… But the spices are my love” (Mistress 3).
The declaration moves spices beyond ingredient or décor and recognises them as
interlocutors. The later assertion, “Each spice has its own voice, its own
magic, its own purpose” (12), personifies the pantry, transforming it into a
chorus. This anthropomorphism is not whimsy; it recasts the kitchen as a site
where matter speaks back, where diasporic subjects can listen to a homeland
encoded not as monument but as aroma, flavour, and ritual.
As lieux de mémoire, spices
collapse distances. A pinch of turmeric recalls domestic rituals of protection;
asafoetida hing evokes everyday remedies and vegetarian kitchens;
mustard seed crackles with the memory of Bengali tempering; chilli, in Tilo’s
hands, becomes a conduit for anger transfigured into courage. The immigrant’s
culinary practice thus becomes mnemonic: recipes are not merely instructions
but maps of return, a way to reproduce at least one dimension of “home” in
exile. This is why substitutions (spinach for methi, jalapeño for green chilli)
feel both practical and poignant; they enact hybridity while registering loss.
Divakaruni links this memory work to
care. Tilo does not simply sell spices; she prescribes them, acting as healer,
counsellor, and cultural mediator. For a man humiliated at work, she blends
chilli and coriander to kindle self-respect. For a woman facing domestic
violence, she offers cinnamon for courage and saffron for strength. The point
is not pharmacological accuracy but symbolic restoration: the remedy reconnects
the client to a repertoire of meanings and practices that predate displacement.
In Ketu Katrak’s words, Divakaruni “reconfigures the immigrant kitchen into a
site of survival, where food becomes a metaphor for resilience” (78). In other
words, culinary practice is not a nostalgic retreat but tactical endurance.
The kitchen’s political charge
intensifies around gender. In many narratives, kitchens signify confinement; in
The Mistress of Spices, they also stage agency. Tilo wields knowledge,
ritual, and spice to protect and enable others; yet she is also constrained by
the Mistress’s order, bound by rules that prohibit personal attachment. Her
love for Raven, a Native American man, tests this order. Choosing love does not
negate her vocation; it reveals the friction between communal care and
self-realisation. Carole Counihan’s argument that cooking can be “a means of
expressing identity and exerting power” (Anthropology of Food 34) is
literalised here: a woman’s mastery of recipes doubles as mastery of self and
circumstance, even as it risks censure from patriarchal and mystical
authorities alike.
Divakaruni is clear-eyed about the
ambivalences of culinary memory. The same spice that sustains connection can
sharpen the ache of distance. “In America, the spices lose some of their power…
they remember India too much” (Mistress 102). This line captures the
paradox of Diaspora: fidelity to flavour may intensify longing. The mnemonic
device becomes an affective boomerang, returning not only comfort but also the
sting of absence. At the same time, the pantry adapts. Supermarket shelves,
health-code regulations, and non-Indian customers fold into Tilo’s practice,
yielding a hybrid culinary economy that is neither pure replication nor simple
assimilation.
Divakaruni’s most vivid emblem of
spices-as-agency is the “chilli scene,” where Tilo advises an abused woman:
“Eat the chilli, feel it burn through you, let it fill you with its fire”
(151). The directive reframes pain as fuel. The body that suffers becomes the site
of ignition; taste, often coded as domestic pleasure, becomes a vector of
politicised courage. The Mistress’s prescriptions function as Appadurai’s
“gastro-politics” in action: control and interpretation of food practices help
restore voice and dignity (Appadurai, National Cuisine 8). The result is
a kitchen that both remembers and remakes, one that treats recipes as
techniques for surviving racism, economic vulnerability, and gendered harm.
Finally, Divakaruni’s poetics of
spice is dialogic rather than static. Tilo listens—to cumin, to customers, to
her own divided loyalties. The shop mediates among immigrant generations (the
homesick student smelling cardamom “that brought back evenings in his mother’s
kitchen,” Mistress 67), among cultural codes (vegetarian taboos,
festival foods), and among bodily needs (healing, desire, sustenance). Spices
are not props; they are protagonists in a narrative where memory and care are
inseparable.
Food, Nationhood, and Hybrid Identity in Salman
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
If Divakaruni’s pantry is a clinic
of memory, Rushdie’s is an archive and a stage. Saleem Sinai’s assertion, “To
pickle is to give immortality” (Midnight’s Children 529), announces a
culinary historiography: the nation bottled, brined, and spiced. The famous
chutney chapters catalogue memories as flavours: mango as childhood summers,
lime as the bitter taste of Partition, and chilli as the riot and rage.
However, the promise of immortality is immediately undercut by the epistemology
of the palate: “Memory’s truth… selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates”
(211). Preservation, in Rushdie, always arrives with distortion; the jar is a
safeguard and a funhouse mirror. Rushdie thus literalises Nora’s insight that lieux
de mémoire arise when “real environments of memory” fade (Nora 12).
The culinary metaphor extends to
hybridity. Pickling is a technology of mixture and transformation: ingredients
mingle, ferment, and become more than themselves. Homi Bhabha’s “third space,”
where cultural negotiation unsettles fixed binaries (Location of Culture
37), is here a literal brine. Saleem, born at the stroke of Independence,
embodies this hybrid process in his body and narrative: Anglo-Indian lineages, Muslim
and Hindu rituals, colonial schooling, subcontinental sensibilities. The
chutneys’ layered, unstable flavours map onto identities that are layered and
unstable by design. In Rushdie, the nation’s plurality is neither a defect nor
a problem to be solved; it is the condition of taste.
Abundance is integral to this
vision. Saleem’s early family meals read like carnivals of plenitude: “Dishes
that filled every inch of the table… curries, dals, breads, chutneys, halwas,
puddings” (83). The exuberance is aesthetic and political. Mikhail Bakhtin’s
carnivalesque, its laughter, excess, and inversion, pervades the dining table,
temporarily suspending hierarchies and celebrating plurality. The feast mocks
purity politics, whether colonial or nationalist, by staging simultaneity:
sweet alongside sour, heat alongside cool, vegetarian alongside non-vegetarian,
Persianate alongside subcontinental. Food, here, makes a difference edible. But
Rushdie also attaches ethical weight to cooking. Mary Pereira’s compulsive culinary
labour, “curry after curry, pickle after pickle”, performs guilt, penance, and
the fantasy of absolution (131). The kitchen becomes a confessional where the
sin of baby-switching is stirred, salted, and bottled, never fully redeemed. If
Divakaruni’s chilli fires courage, Rushdie’s pickles hold remorse in
suspension, preventing oblivion without curing it. Preservation is survival,
not salvation.
Rushdie’s pantry is unapologetically
political. It satirises official histories by parodying their archives: where
the state hoards documents, Saleem hoards condiments; where textbook history
claims neutrality, the chutney chapters flaunt subjectivity. Critics have noted
this tactic. James Harrison argues that the chutneys “parody the historian’s
archive, replacing the official record with a culinary one” (214). Ketu Katrak
reads them as registering “the hybridity of India’s cultural past while
resisting closure” (82). Through Appadurai’s lens, the stakes are clear: “To
control food is to control identity” (National Cuisine 8). Saleem’s
pickling is a bid for narrative control over both self and nation, even as the
narrative confesses its spices.
Midnight’s Children
transforms the pantry into a historiographic laboratory. The chutney jar,
opaque, sticky, aromatic, renders history tangible and contestable. Taste
becomes a method: not a betrayal of objectivity but an acknowledgement that all
archives are flavoured by selection and desire.
Comparative Analysis: Food as Memory, Identity, and
Resistance
Juxtaposing
Divakaruni and Rushdie clarifies not only shared premises but also divergent
emphases in how culinary symbolism works across diaspora and nation.
Divakaruni’s stage is intimate: the neighbourhood shop, the kitchen counter,
the private conversation over a spice packet. Her stakes are immediate,
healing, safety, dignity, especially for women and precarious immigrants.
Rushdie’s theatre is capacious: the chutney factory and the national saga. His
stakes are archival and satirical, concerned with who writes the nation and
with what preservatives. Both, however, insist that food mediates belonging;
the scale shifts, but the function rhymes.
In
The Mistress of Spices, memory is therapeutic and connective. Spices
retrieve the past to stabilise the present; recipes become techniques for
inhabiting new worlds without surrendering old ones. In Midnight’s Children,
memory is preservative and corrosive at once. Pickling rescues episodes from
oblivion but alters their flavour; each jar admits its own bias. Both novels agree
that remembrance is a material practice, performed by bodies and kitchens, not
merely mental recall.
Divakaruni
reclaims the feminised domain of cooking as authority: Tilo’s expertise confers
social power, and the kitchen becomes a site of counter-patriarchal action.
Rushdie also centers women’s labour through characters like Mary Pereira, but
the emphasis falls on moral burden and historical entanglement rather than
empowerment. Read through Carole Counihan’s framework, Divakaruni illustrates
how culinary skill can articulate female agency, while Rushdie shows how the
same space can sediment guilt and reproduce unequal obligations. Together, they
disclose the kitchen’s ambivalence as both a resource and a risk.
Both
texts also dramatise Homi Bhabha’s hybridity through taste. Divakaruni’s
substitutions - jalapeño for green chilli, supermarket turmeric for freshly
ground haldi - materialise diaspora’s negotiation between availability and
authenticity. Rushdie’s brines enact a mixture as a method; the “third space”
is saline and spiced. In each case, flavour refuses purity, countering nativist
yearnings for unseasoned origins and homogenising projects of assimilation
alike. Arjun Appadurai’s dictum that food condenses social fact illuminates
both plots. Tilo’s prescriptions are micro-political: they restore agency to
the humiliated worker, courage to the abused wife, dignity to the homesick
student. Saleem’s pickling is macro-political: it contests state historiography
and repoliticizes remembrance. Control over food practices becomes control over
the meaning of selfhood in Divakaruni, of nationhood in Rushdie.
The
effects of taste differ as well. Divakaruni’s palette runs through comfort,
courage, and care; the heat of chilli becomes ethical fuel. Rushdie’s runs
through exuberance and remorse; carnival and confession cohabit the pantry.
Both treat taste as an affective technology, capable of igniting action or
sustaining reflection. Neither novel entertains purity myths. Divakaruni shows
that authenticity, pursued too rigidly, can paradoxically intensify alienation:
spices that “remember India too much” (Mistress 102) wound as they
soothe. Rushdie ridicules purity by revelling in excess and bricolage; the
national palate is cacophonous by design. The lesson is shared: home is not
recovered by freezing recipes; it is made again by cooking across difference.
Finally,
the ethics of preservation diverge sharply. In Divakaruni, preservation is
care: a spice mix tailored to a life. In Rushdie, preservation is critique: a
jar that admits its distortions. Both guard against erasure, yet they warn
against stasis. The best spice mix is freshened; the best pickle ferments.
Memory, likewise, must be tended, not embalmed. Taken together, the novels
propose a culinary hermeneutic for postcolonial and diasporic literature: to
read flavours is to read power. Kitchens and pantries emerge as archives and
clinics, schools and sanctuaries, confessionals and parliaments. Taste, in both
senses, gustatory and aesthetic, becomes the medium through which identity is
negotiated and history re-told.
Conclusion
Divakaruni and Rushdie transform the
ordinary work of cooking into a theory of belonging. In The Mistress of
Spices, the diasporic kitchen serves as a workshop of resilience, where
spices remember, heal, and empower, especially women navigating the double bind
of racialised precarity and patriarchal constraint. In Midnight’s Children,
the pantry is an ironic archive in which chutneys preserve the nation even as
they confess their flavouring, exposing history’s dependence on selection and
spice.
Both writers draw strength from
Nora’s insight that memory adheres to objects and practices; both activate
Appadurai’s sense that food is a condensed social fact; both stage Bhabha’s hybridity
as technique and ethos; both register, with Counihan, the gendered labour that
makes memory edible. Yet they diverge productively. Divakaruni’s emphasis falls
on care, cure, and continuity in migrant life; Rushdie’s on satire, abundance,
and the ethics of narration in a plural nation. Between them, food emerges as
not only a metaphor but a method: a way to restore voice, contest officialism,
and rehearse plural futures.
To taste in these novels is to learn
how communities endure and how histories are told. The pantry becomes a
syllabus; the recipe, a politics; the meal, a memory that feeds tomorrow. In
refusing purity and embracing mixture, in dignifying labour and exposing
archives, Divakaruni and Rushdie show that home is not a fixed address but a
practice, prepared daily, shared generously, and seasoned to resist erasure.
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