Culinary Nostalgia: Authenticity, Nationalism, and Diaspora

Author(s): Anita Mannur

Source: MELUS , Winter, 2007, Vol. 32, No. 4, Food in Multi-Ethnic Literatures (Winter,
2007), pp. 11-31
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Society for the Study of the Multi-
Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS)

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Culinary Nostalgia: Authenticity,
Nationalism, and Diaspora
Anita Mannur
Denison University

Culinary practices situate themselves at the most rudimentary level, at the

most necessary and the most unrespected level.

-Luce Giard, "The Nourishing Arts" (156)

The diaspora women who thought Culture

meant being able to create
a perfect mango chutney in New Jersey
were scorned by the visiting scholar
from Bombay-who was also a woman
but unmarried and so different.

-Sujata Bhatt, "Chutney" (29)

Behind the assiduous documentation and defense of the authentic lies an

unarticulated anxiety of losing the subject.

-Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity (10)

In "Food and Belonging: At 'Home' in 'Alien-Kitchens,"' Indian

American cultural critic Ketu Katrak suggests that culinary narra-
tives, suffused with nostalgia, often manage immigrant memories and
imagined returns to the "homeland." Narrativizing her own migratory
journey from Bombay to the United States, she remarks, "my own
memorybanks about food overflowed only after I left India to come
to the United States as a graduate student. The disinterest in food that
I had felt during my childhood years was transformed into a new kind
of need for that food as an essential connection with home. I longed
for my native food as I dealt with my dislocation from the throbbing
Bombay metropolis" (270). As an immigrant subject distanced geo-
graphically and temporally from her childhood home in Bombay, food
becomes both intellectual and emotional anchor. Psychically food
transports Katrak to her childhood home, giving her a sense of root-
edness when she immigrates to the United States.
And yet, she also acknowledges how the experience of dislocation,
modulated by a nostalgic longing for the familiar, is also deeply rooted
in the creation of imaginary fictions which distort the lived realities of

MELUS, Volume 32, Number 4 (Winter 2007)

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12 MANNUR

her prior life. She notes:

food was not pleasurable to me as a child. Thinking about this now

adult, I can say that food was an overdetermined category for me
childhood years; it tasted of the heady tropical environment, it del
who was in and out of favor with my father. I tasted anxiety in th
fried a bit too brown and tension in the too many dark burned sp
the roasted papad. One never knew what would be considered faulty at
a particular meal, and the uncertainty overwhelmed any pleasure in what
was eaten. (266-67)

Katrak's honesty registers the affective value of food and smells, in the
process reflecting the nostalgia structuring memories of home for the
immigrant subject. Recalling Salman Rushdie's take on nostalgia and
historical memory in his now classic essay, "Imaginary Homelands,"
she cautions against a tendency to transform nostalgia for the inef-
fable into an idealization of the past. In "Imaginary Homelands,"
Rushdie sets in motion a complex investigation into the condition of
the diasporic exilic writer. As he so eloquently puts it, "It may be that
when the Indian writer who writes from outside India tries to reflect
the world, he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose
fragments have been irretrievably lost" (9). Seeing the past through the
shards of a mirror inevitably distorts the idealized memory one has
of a "homeland": owing to the exigencies of displacement and dis-
location certain memories are remembered, while others, literally, are
re-membered. As Rushdie moves us through the problem of memory
and mimetic fidelity, he tells a story about returning to India after an
absence of many years. He draws an analogy between an old black-
and-white photograph of his childhood home taken prior to his birth
and his perceptions of his childhood. With the passage of time and
movement to different spaces, "the colours of history had seeped out
of my mind's eye" (9): nostalgia intervenes to colorize, or, in this case,
decolorize the past, reducing it to a pale imitation of what it might
have been in the mind's eye.
I begin with this brief but necessary trail through these two essays to
highlight how nostalgia is always already predetermined-indeed over
determined-in scripting immigrant attachment to the past. Further,
both essays highlight some fundamental "truths" about the immigrant
condition-the desire to simultaneously embrace what is left of a past
from which one is spatially and temporally displaced, and the recogni-
tion that nostalgia can overwhelm memories of the past, allowing the
colors of history to seep out of the mind's eye. Katrak's essay
attention to the imprecise rendering of personal memory by using a
culinary idiom to reflect familial tensions. She shows how food takes
on a nostalgic significance only upon migrating to the United States.
Such distortions of actual memories underscore how the immigrant's
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CULINARY NOSTALGIA 13

memories of the past are always reflected in and refracted through

shards of a mirror which nostalgically restructures how memories
seen.

The desire to remember home by fondly recreating cul

ories cannot be understood merely as reflectively nostalgic gestures;
rather such nostalgically-framed narratives must also be read as meta-
critiques of what it means to route memory and nostalgic longing for a
homeland through one's relationship to seemingly intractable culinary
practices which yoke national identity with culinary taste and practices.
Discursive and affective aspects of food are valued over their symbolic
or semiotic meaning in nostalgic narratives that negotiate the param-
eters of "culinary citizenship," a form of affective citizenship which
grants subjects the ability to claim and inhabit certain subject positions
via their relationship to food. Within such narratives official and tra-
ditional models of national definition become reinterpreted so as to
hint towards the multiplicity of definitional possibilities. Divergent but
related models of "culinary citizenship" cast food into a complex web
of affiliations mediated by class and sexuality.
Food therefore becomes a potent symbol for signifying the eth-
nic integrity of Asian Americans, serving both as a placeholder for
marking cultural distinctiveness and as a palliative for dislocation. Yet
literary studies has maintained a deep seated suspicion of considering
the place of the culinary.1 Furthermore, Asian American and Asian
diaspora literary studies, somewhat counterintuitively, currently offer
few paradigms to navigate the relevance of food in Asian American
and Asian migrant psychic and material lives, despite the fact that food
often functions as a multivalent symbol within Asian American litera-
ture.2

To work through these gaps in Asian American literary studies,

must bring to the table narratives which mine the potential of estab
ing food as an idiom for expressing nostalgic desire, such as the sh
stories by Indo-Trinidadian Canadian author Shani Mootoo, "Out on
Main Street" and "Sushila's Bhakti," An Invitation to Indian Cooking by
Madhur Jaffrey, the prolific author of numerous cookbooks, and Sara
Suleri's memoir, Meatless Days. All three texts use culinary discourse
to critique nostalgic longings for home and negotiate the pangs of
migratory displacement. These texts entangle the language of food,
nostalgia, and desire; in doing so they foreground how memory is dis-
torted and recreated in the diasporic imaginary of subjects who are
multiply located and ambivalent about their own tenuous connections
with a "home" contiguous with the geographic parameters of South
Asia.3 The texts by Jaffrey and Mootoo have rarely entered into Asian
American literary criticism. Meatless Days, a favorite text in postcolonial
and diaspora studies, has enjoyed greater visibility, but critics rarely
engage with the culinary dimensions of the work.4 While foodways are
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14 MANNUR

not the only narratival axes in Jaffrey's, Suleri's, and Mootoo's wo

they undeniably intervene into debates about displacement and plu
subjectivities rendered legible when food is placed at the center of
critical analysis.

As hinted by the lines from Sujata Bhatt's "Ch

epigraph above, diasporic women-diasporic married women-are
often wedded to the belief that the faithful reproduction of "Culture"
inheres in accurately replicating, for instance, the perfect mango chut-
ney. The domestic arena, so frequently associated with femininity, also
becomes a space to reproduce culture and national identity. As Katrak's
essay illustrates, immigrants often invent an image of the homeland as
an unchanging and enduring cultural essence and are often singular

about the ontological coherency of their national cuisines, despite the

fact that memories are fragmentary, partial, and "irretrievably lost" (9).
Anthropologist Kathleen Stewart unravels the bases of these distor-
tions, which lead individuals unconsciously to nostalgize fragmentary
knowledge of the past. Stewart defines nostalgia as, "a cultural prac-
tice, not a given context; its forms, meanings, and effects shift with
the context-it depends on where the speaker stands in the landscape
of the present" (252). For upper-class Indian immigrants located in
the United States, such as cookbook author and culinary aficionado
Madhur Jaffrey, cooking is one such cultural practice resignified, re-
interpreted, and even distorted within the diasporic imaginary. In her
autobiographically organized cookbook, An Invitation to Indian Cooking,
cooking "Indian" food stands in as a potent signifier of a connection
with a place "back there." Concurrently, the desire for Indian food is
mediated by a form of nostalgia that can only exist once she has left
the physical borders of India. The conditions of becoming diasporic,
or living diasporically, produce a fundamental and affective longing for
Indian-coded comestibles. In words reminiscent of Katrak's, Jaffrey
candidly observes, "It was when I was twenty and went to England as a
student that I started to learn how to cook. I was extremely homesick,
and this homesickness took the form of a longing for Indian food"
(4). If India is reified as that mythic space back "there," the originary
point from which the Indian immigrant to the United States emerges,
it is because recipes contained in cookbooks such as Invitation strategi-
cally mobilize nostalgic memories of the past to enhance the value of
the recipe for a readership hungry to consume "authentic" d
For example, in a recipe for baingan-ka-bartha, a smoked eggp
typically found on menus of Indian restaurants in the United States,
Jaffrey introduces the recipe with the following narrative:

Until the advent of gas, most cooking in India was done on wood or coal,
and one of the waste products of wood and coal, is, of course, ash. Not
wishing to waste even a waste product, we geared our cuisine so that while
some foods were cooking on top of the flame, others were being r
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CULINARY NOSTALGIA 15

in the ashes. (Later, the ash was used like Comet to scour the pots a
pans.) As a child, I remember begging the cook to put some onion
the ashes, just for me. He would pick out a tiny onion from the vegetab
basket and bury it deep in the ashes with his iron tongs. Then, about
hour later, he would whisper to me that it was ready. I would pick off t
burned outside, scorching my hands as I did so and gobble up the su
culent inside. (162)

A flavor of authenticity is added to Jaffrey's recipe for baingan-ka-b

because it is routed through a tale of childhood nostalgia for aut
tically "Indian" dishes, steeped in tradition and prepared with l
Stewart argues that nostalgia rises to importance as a cultural pract
and is structured more as "feelings": "the search for a past and a pl
leads them to reconstitute their lives in narrative form, a story desi
to reassemble a broken history into a new whole" (261). The story e
casing the baingan-ka-bartha recipe is one such reassembled story.
For voluntary exiles and immigrants such as Jaffrey, culinary cu
is associated with "feelings" which take on monolithic and mytholo
cal proportions. The actual, rather than affective, place of baingan-
bartha in Jaffrey's life may be of secondary importance. She tells
about producing an authentic version of Indian cooking seductively
framed with a pre-modern tale of a simpler time, when baingan-ka-
bartha was prepared over ashes, but she is also cognizant of the nos-
talgia for the past driving her to seek creative strategies to fabricate
authenticity:

Over the years, I discovered that the electric blender

what the grinding stone did, and much faster; that i
eggplants in hot ashes as my mother recommended, I co
over a gas burner; that American meats just couldn't
way because they contained too much water and that it w
cook with canned tomatoes than fresh ones because th
and color. Slowly I began changing the recipes to sui
managed to arrive at the genuine taste of traditional dis
to take quite a circuitous and unorthodox route to get there. (5)

Jaffrey's conscious attempts to fabricate authenticity are modulated by

the anxiety to reproduce authenticity while trying to create a sense of
home and belonging in adopted homes and kitchens. This desire
at home can elicit nostalgia for things that never were; it can eli
example, a nostalgia for a past that is blind in some ways to structural
inequities and forms of difference. Jaffrey's strategies to fabricate au-
thenticity are tempered by a logic which seeks to fix her own past in a
particular moment free of care and worry, while simultaneously cater-
ing to a readership in search of the ever elusive authentic Indian food.
"Authentic" dishes exist in Jaffrey's repertoire and by emphasizing cre-
ativity and innovation in the kitchen, she can recreate the conditions of
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16 MANNUR

an anterior original essence. Yet, Jaffrey's ambivalence about affi

a unified culinary national essence, one which faithfully reproduces an
authentic Indianness, emerges in the autobiographical preface to her
cookbook. She is reluctant to classify the varied cuisines of India un-
der the homogenizing label "Indian," yet at other times the cookbook
replicates the very logic of hegemonic Indianness she seeks to com-
plicate. Jaffrey is cognizant of the problems of purporting to cover all
of Indian cuisine within the pages of one cookbook. She reminds her
readers, "if you are looking for an encyclopedic tome encompassing
all Indian food, you won't find it here," explaining that her book offers
readers "the chance to understand and cook the food of one specific
area-the region in and around Delhi, including the adjacent sections
of Uttar Pradesh" (13).
Jaffrey, to be sure, takes care to remind her readers of the fine dis-
tinctions between the eating preferences of Indians: "Indians can be
divided into the rice-eaters and wheat-eaters. While most of South
India and Bengal are considered rice-eating areas, Delhi, Punjab, Uttar
Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh are generally considered to be the wheat-
eating areas" (180). But in order to weave a coherent and compelling
narrative, Jaffrey frequently alludes to what "we Indians" eat, evoking
a secularist definition of national unity. Indianness, paradoxically, be-
comes defined broadly with attention to regional differences, but also
is reinscribed as the hegemony of North Indian cuisine; the cookbook
effectively conflates the regional with the national.5
In its yearning to nostalgically remember the simplicity of childhood
and life back in the "homeland" while simultaneously being cognizant
of the impossibility of this endeavor, Jaffrey's autobiographical mus-
ings and anecdotal stories bear traces of the classic immigrant story.
Her reluctance to reify a monolithically defined Indian national iden-
tity is but one manifestation of having one's identity "minoritized."
Cultural critic R. Radhakrishnan's useful imperative reminds us:

[W]e must keep in mind that in the United States the renaming of ethnic
identity in national terms produces a preposterous effect. Take the case of
the Indian immigrant. Her naturalization into American citizenship mi-
noritizes her identity. She is now reborn as an ethnic minority American
citizen. Is this empowerment or marginalization? This new American citi-
zen must think of herself as an ethnic self that defers to her nationalized
American status. The culturally and politically hegemonic Indian identity
is now a mere qualifier: "ethnic." (205)

Like the hypothetical Indian immigrant who figures in Radhakrishnan's

formulations, Jaffrey's adopted persona grapples with the minoritized
status of Indian cuisine. She does not deny India's culinary diversity,
but she does reject the idea that Indian cuisine is only an "ethnic" cui-
sine. Indian cuisine is strategically reified to insist on its integrity as a

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CULINARY NOSTALGIA 17

"whole" and national entity.

In her text, the avowedly impossible task of the Indian in the
United States is to make "Americans" aware of the cultural and culi-
nary diversity and unity of India. Although her book is directed at an
audience of "Americans" (presumably white), it is also directed in part
towards Indian readers. This is most apparent in the introduction to
the volume, where she explains that "there is no place in New York, or
anywhere in America where top-quality Indian food can be found-
except of course, in private Indian homes." Out of "guilt and patriotic
responsibility," Jaffrey decides she has to "let Americans know what
authentic Indian food was like" (4). Placing patriotism squarely in the
middle of her agenda, Jaffrey's words are also directed to an audience
of responsible and "patriotic" Indians in the United States who care
enough about their nation's culinary image to portray an "authentic"
version of Indianness in the space of their homes and who will, then,
presumably turn to Jaffrey for guidance.
Jaffrey's message may also be directed towards Indian women, in
particular. Women are frequently (but problematically) associated with
positions within the domestic cultural economy, and charged with
maintaining the edifice of home life. As Partha Chatterjee has argued:

[I]n the entire phase of the nationalist struggle, the crucial need was to
protect, preserve and strengthen the inner core of the national culture.
Its spiritual essence ... the home was the principal site for expressing the
spiritual quality of the national culture, and women must take the main
responsibility of protecting and nurturing this quality. No matter what
the changes in the external condition of life for women, they must not
lose their essentially spiritual (i.e. feminine) virtues; they must not in other
words, become essentiall westernized. (239)

The home site becomes a space in which to produce a version of

Indianness. As Bhatt's poem reminds us, nationalist discourse fre-
quently casts the woman as broker of cultural traditions. Diasporas
produce their own version of this gendered logic by repeatedly insist-
ing that the task of the female Indian immigrant subject in diaspora,
or in this case, in the cookbook, is to be vigilant about the faithful
reproduction of Indianness.
While popular discourse insists on the clear recognizability of cu-
linary "Indianness," cuisines are rarely structured by such uncompli-
cated and benign symmetries between food and nation.6 Even while it
is the implicit task of the Indian immigrant female subject to repro-
duce culinary Indianness with the help of cookbooks such as Jaffrey's
Invitation, the historical circulation of commodities and spices between
colonized spaces has undermined the definition of an Indian cuisine.7
As historian Sucheta Mazumdar's careful reading of national origins
within the context of the international trade in food and commodities
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18 MANNUR

suggests, "Indian" is not a clearly demarcated category within the

of food commodities. The argument that a particular dish is "Indian"
because it combines "Indian" staples such as chili peppers, tomatoes,
or cashews does not (and perhaps cannot) adequately take into account
that "Indian" foods might come from somewhere else. Yet branding
as an idiosyncratic conceit this desire to view certain foodways as "es-
sentially" Indian fails to grapple with the deep nostalgic investment in
considering certain types of food to be authentically, and autochtho-
nously, "Indian." Jaffrey's cookbook might, at least in part, be linked
to the symbolic regional or national sentimental significance attached
to particular dishes. For the diasporic immigrant subject such as the
Indian women in Bhatt's poem, mango chutney does not bear any in-
dependent intrinsic value as comestible; its value inheres in its symbolic
connection to an articulation of national identity. In a vastly different
context, that of the culinary preferences of Punjabis in contemporary
India, as well as in diaspora, consumption of overtly ethnically coded
food may well be about matters other than eating and palatal pleasure.
As Mazumdar puts it, "eating makkai ki roti (corn flat breads) with
sarson ka sag (mustard greens) in the spring is more of a symbolic state-
ment of Punjabi regional identity today that nostalgically celebrates the
rural roots of its sons of the soil rather than an accurate reflection of
the levels of maize consumption in Punjabi history" (72).
Eating dishes such as makkai ki roti to affirm a Punjabi identity
strongly resonates at a symbolic level, but as Pakistani American liter-
ary critic and author Sara Suleri point outs, for reasons which exceed
mere symbolism immigrants remain deeply invested in the ontological
coherency of their culinary memories. Indeed, it is this nostalgia that
drives immigrants, as Suleri puts it, to become "adamant, entirely pas-
sionate about such matters as the eating habits of the motherland"
(22). Meatless Days provides snapshot glimpses into the life of Suleri
as she comes of age, both literally and intellectually, in postcolonial
Pakistan. Food and culinarity are important thematic threads through-
out the text, but it is particularly in the second chapter, titled "Meatless
Days," that Suleri provides the most substantial "food for thought."
This chapter follows the oft-discussed first chapter, "Excellent Things
in Women," which ends with the (in)famous claim, "there are no wom-
en in the third world" (20), a phrase that has been debated at length
within postcolonial, Asian American, and feminist literary studies. The
second chapter is an extended meditation on culinary memories from
Suleri's pre-emigration childhood, which informs her experiences as
an adult in Connecticut and New York. It also draws attention to the
mechanisms by which diasporic subjects grapple with the desire to fix
memories and nostalgize the past. Culinarity emerges as an important
counter discourse which destabilizes the mechanisms by which gen-
dered national subjectivity is granted visibility and legitimacy in post-
colonial spaces. At the same time, underlying class tensions complicate
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CULINARY NOSTALGIA 19

the potentially subversive aspects of the text. In the larger convers

tion from which this reflection is drawn, Suleri and friends debate
meaning of kapura. In the chapter named "Meatless Days," Suleri te
a series of culinary tales in which she is confounded repeatedly by
way food is never quite what it seems to be. Narrating a tale about
she comes to equate sweetbreads with kapura, she marks her horror
at receiving an "unequivocal response: kapura, as naked meat, equals
a testicle." She recreates the scene of a conversation amid the "taut
companionship of Pakistanis in New York," when kapura becomes the
topic of discussion:

"But," and here I rummaged for the sweet realm of nomenclature,

"couldn't kapura on a lazy occasion, also accommodate something like
sweetbreads, which is just a nice way of saying that pancreas is not a pleas-
ant word to eat?" No one, however, was interested in this finesse.
"Balls, darling, balls," someone drawled, and I knew I had to let go of
the subject. (22)

Suleri wishes to think of kapura in more finessed and palatable terms

but even as she has to "let go" of the subject, it continues to haunt her.
Her desperate need for kapura to be a "pleasant word to eat" is also
a symptom of Suleri's desire to attach a primacy to her own (perhaps
willful) distorted modes of naming foods.
While Suleri's attempts to be coy are undercut by an unequivocal
affirmation that kapura are indeed male genitalia, she digests this rev-
elation with uncertainty, observing, "I was shocked. It was my mother,
after all, who had told me that sweetbreads are sweetbreads, and if she
were wrong on that score, then how many other simple equations had I
now to doubt?" (23). Suleri's desire to know exactly what kapura is can
be read as a symptom of her own location among a US-based com-
munity of Pakistani expatriates. Nostalgically she yearns for things to
remain as she remembers them, but she must confront cultural purists
who refuse to accommodate alternative namings and culinary logics.
Later, she points out how in her childhood in Pakistan, "Our days
and our newspapers were equally full of disquieting tales about adul-
terated foods and the preternaturally keen eye that the nation keeps on
such promiscuous blendings" (29). She continues, "I can understand
it, the fear that food will not stay discrete but will instead defy our cat-
egories of expectation in what can only be described as a manner of
extreme belligerence. I like order to a plate, and know the great sense
of failure that attends a moment when what is potato to the fork is tur-
nip to the mouth. It's hard, when such things happen" (29). Yet at the
same time that she fears transmogrifications of potato into turnip, she
also recognizes that food does not remain within neat borders. Even
her so-called "meatless days" are anything but "meatless." They are
marked instead by the wealthier families' conspicuous consumption of
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20 MANNUR

meat. As Suleri puts it, those "who could afford to buy meat, afte
were those who could afford refrigeration" (31). Commenting on the
so-called meatless days-periods when meat would not be sold in local
markets Suleri writes:

the only thing the government accomplished was to make some people's
Mondays very busy indeed. The Begums had to remember to give
cooks thrice as much money; the butchers had to produce thrice as
meat; the cooks had to buy enough flesh and fowl and other sundry
gans to keep an averagely carnivorous household eating for three
days . .. And so, instead of creating an atmosphere of abstention in the
city, the institution of meatless days rapidly came to signify the imperative
behind the acquisition of all things fleshly. We thought about beef, which
is called "big meat," and we thought about mutton, "little meat," and
then we collectively thought about chicken, the most coveted of them
all. (31-32)

Her numerous tales of culinary transmogrification-hard-boiled eggs

breaking out of their shells to form "gills and frills" (36), kapura that
might be sweetbreads, testicles, or pancreas, potatoes that feel like tur-
nips, meatless days during which the nation's elite voraciously consume
meat-are more than mere nostalgic reversions to the past; these cu-
linary transmogrifications are conscious attempts to repud
narratives proclaiming an authentic Pakistani subject. Suleri also ar-
ticulates her own uneasiness about presenting a complete and seam-
less narrative about her childhood memories of culinarity. She admits,
"perhaps I should have been able to bring those bits together, but such
a narrative was not available to me, not after what I knew of storytell-
ing" (37). She writes:

my sisters and I would place ourselves in time by remembering and nam-

ing cooks. . . . There is something nourishing about the memory of all
those shadow dynasties: we do not have to subsist only on the litany that
begins, 'After General Ayub came General Yahya; after the Bhutto years
came General Zulu Haq," but can also add; "Qayuum begat Shorty and
his wife; and they begat the Punjabi poet only called Khansama; he begat
Ramzan and Karam Dad the bearer; Ramzan begat Tassi-Passi, and he
begat Allah Ditta, meanest of them all." (34)

Underlying the humor of using Biblical language to describe the line

of cooks that passed through the Suleri household is an attempt to
replace the national(ist) hegemonic narrative with a consciously femi-
nist script. Suleri's own tenuous connection with the past refuses to be
circumscribed by a patriarchal nationalist logic; rather, she strategically
remembers and commemorates the past on her own terms, rendering
the official face of Pakistan tangential to her own personal history
that includes the domestic workers and cooks, or khansamas (Muslim
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CULINARY NOSTALGIA 21

cooks) in her household.

At the same time that Suleri's alternatively rendered history
hegemonic narratives of official historical doctrine, it is blind
incommensurability of her class position and those of the very
she claims are written out of the patriarchal national narrative. S
Dayal notes that, "the problematic sign of class is raised only to be
whisked away from under our noses by sleight of hand" (255). Suleri
imagines herself linked to the cooks who labor in the household. But
with the exception of Qayuum, the cook who works in the Suleri
household for a number of years, in this chapter the voices of the
cooks do not emerge. The cooks serve, instead, as her personal yard-
stick, enabling Suleri to bask nostalgically in the memory of what the
meatless days meant for her during her privileged time within the safe
space of the Suleri household in Karachi, Pakistan.8 Suleri acknowl-
edges that only the poor had to go without meat on the meatless days,
but her nostalgic recreation of eating meat during those days emerges
at the expense of a discussion that might explore how and why those
days became busy for the domestic workers who had to procure ad-
ditional meat on the days preceding the meatless days. She refers to
what "we" used to eat during the meatless days, nostalgically recalling
that elaborate meat dishes were prepared, but does not explore the
role played by domestic workers in creating these sumptuous dishes or
what they might have eaten. Their labors remain largely invisible to the
nostalgic eye of Suleri, the adult writer, and Sara, the child observer.
Suleri wants to create categories to understand her historical and ma-
terial positioning as a woman, but "servants" are not "women," and
"cooks" are not part of her rhetorically constructed collective "we."
Following Michel Foucault, we must acknowledge the impli-
cit epistemic violence involved in codifying discursive language.
Linguistically, the very categories we use to describe alterity create new
hierarchies of difference. In the process of fashioning a language of
inclusivity, new systems of classification and hierarchical configura-
tions are set into motion. Suleri's feminist-cosmopolitan project con-
sciously rewrites the historical script, marking her affiliation with
cooks rather than with the leaders of the nations in the service of a
"feminine knowledge" (Carter 162) which "documents the perplexi-
ties of differences" (157). Yet Suleri's textual and political disruptions
are indelibly bound to her class privilege, implicitly jettisoning other
forms of knowledge. In producing an alternative discursive order, she
creates new systems of classifications, arrangement, and distribution.
Cooks and servants are non-actors in Suleri's narrative, and are denied
the pleasures of nostalgia, the very thing which fuels Suleri's desire to
re-imagine culinary practices, flout conventional narratives of authen-
ticity, and render an alternative history.
The desire to imagine cuisines as authentic manifestations of na-
tional essences continues to haunt the psychic dimensions of immi-
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22 MANNUR

grant nostalgia in South Asian American fiction. In Shani Mootoo's

short story "Out on Main Street," two South Asian Americans, immi-
grants from Fiji and Trinidad, feud over who can claim ownership to
a particular type of "Indian" dessert. Best known for her novel Cereus
Blooms at Night, Mootoo's fictional oeuvre inhabits interstitial diaspor-
ic spaces, unnamed and yet recognizable as diasporic contact zones.
"Out on Main Street" takes place in "Kush Valley Sweets," an eatery
in an urban multi-ethnic Canadian city. The unnamed narrator and her
girlfriend Janet, both Indo-Trinidadians, frequent Main Street to "see
pretty pretty sari and bangle, and to eat we belly full a burfi and gulub
jamoon" (45). Such visits are not unusual; spaces like Devon Street
in Chicago and Jackson Heights in Queens, NY often attract Indian
Americans and Indian immigrants seeking to connect with Indian cul-
tural (and culinary) life. But the text is not a simple narrative about a
lesbian couple who visits a South Asian immigrant neighborhood to
indulge and feed their nostalgia for "Indian" culture. The two main
characters might frequent Main Street to eat gulub jamoon and burfi,
two typical "Indian" sweets, and to look at pretty saris, clothing associ-
ated with India, but they do not visit to be reminded of India. Critical
of the forces that align the desire to consume with a longing to pre-
serve the affective hegemony of "Indian" food, the couple's nostalgia
for "Indian" food, rooted in their diasporic location, at once consum-
ing Indian food and at once distrustful of the hegemonic ideals of the
Indian nation-state, is necessarily rhizomorphic and anti-Manichean.
Their nostalgia does not attach itself to a specific place but attaches
itself instead to a more critical interrogation of how a set of cultural
practices can allow subjects-queer or straight, men or women-to

attach meaning to culturally significant acts.9 N

ly understood as cultural practice, can also be understood as critical
praxis. As Sunaina Maira has argued, "desire, in the cultural politics
of the diaspora, is closely intertwined with the collective yearning for
an authentic tradition or pure place of origin" (194). Maira's defini-
tion posits critical nostalgia, unlike mere cultural nostalgia, as a critical

praxis attuned to the politics of consumption. To consume culture in

all its varied forms, or to be nostalgic for cultural artifacts, is as much
about imagining an inclusive future, as it is about commemorating nos-
talgic memories of the past.
Because they enter the "Indian" neighborhood as a lesbian couple,
Janet and her partner are already outside the traditional heterosexual
framework of this particular cultural national space: their nostalgia is al-
ready coded as a form of critical praxis. The narrator explains, "mostly
back home, we is kitchen Indians: some kind a Indian food every day, at
least once a day, but we doh get cardamom and other fancy spice down
dere so de food not spicy like Indian food I eat in restaurants up here"
(45). Brilliantly naming herself a "kitchen Indian," the narrator marks
her culinary kinship to Indianness, without claiming the nation-state
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CULINARY NOSTALGIA 23

of "India" as her home. Lest we think that her version of Indianness

is a spiced down or watered down version of Indianness because the
food where she is from is not as spicy as Indian food "here," she adds,
"But it have one thing we doh make joke 'bout down dere: we like we
meethai and sweetrice too much, and it remain overly authentic, like de
day Naana and Naani step off de boat in Port of Spain harbor over
a hundred and sixty years ago" (45-46). In establishing the historical
conditions that brought her ancestors to the Caribbean, the narrator
provides details to render her love for unnaturally sweet Indian des-
serts intelligible. She also describes the foods that give her pleasure as
"overly authentic," thereby distorting the traditional hierarchy between
"home nation" and the diaspora. In such contexts, diaspora is typically
presented as "the bastard child of the nation-disavowed, inauthen-
tic, illegitimate, an impoverished imitation of the originary culture"
(Gopinath 317). But where diaspora and immigrants are often consid-
ered imitations of the "real" citizens in the home state, Mootoo's nar-
rator imagines a way out of the trappings of this hierarchical construct
of nation and diaspora, inverting the terms to figure the immigrant as
authentic and the "home nation" as the watered down version not on
par with the original found in diaspora.
At the same time that the narrator claims culinary kinship with
Indianness, she is cognizant of the regulatory mechanisms of cul-
tural citizenship, which exclude her because her performance of
"Indianness" deviates from the normative coding of gendered per-
formance. She admits, "Going for an outing with mih Janet on Main
Street ain't easy! If only it weren't for burfi and gulub jamoon! If only
I had a learned how to cook dem kind a thing before I leave home and
come up here to live!" (48-49). This passage foregrounds her desire for
sweets while voicing her discomfort at being in a space that views her
as an outsider because she does not speak Hindi, does not look Indian
enough, and is part of a visibly lesbian couple. She derives pleasure
from consuming sweets on Main Street but not from the looks that
unequivocally position her as an uninvited intruder. After she musters
up the strength to enter the eatery, she orders a jilebi and burfi for Janet
and a piece of meethai for herself, setting in motion a debate between
narrator and storeowner about competing notions of ethnic authentic-

ity and national legitimacy:

He opens his palms out and indicate de entire panorama a sweets and
he say, "These are all meethai, Miss. Meethai is Sweets. Where are you
from?"
I ignore his question and to show him I undaunted, I point to a round
pink ball and say, "I'll have one a dese sugarcakes too please." He start
grinning broad broad like if he half-pitying, half-laughing at dis-Indian-
in-skin-only, and den he tell me, "That is called chum-chum, Miss." I snap
back at him, "Yeh, well back home we does call dat sugarcake, Mr. Chum-
chum." (51) This content downloaded from
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24 MANNUR

Although she seems troubled by her inability to remember th

term-after all this is precisely the scenario she sought to avoid by
preparing herself before entering the store-the narrator displays no
outward signs of embarrassment. Instead she subtly rejects his smug-
ness for having "got it wrong." When she does use the term he insists
is correct, "chum-chum," she does not equivocate on her own per-
sonal linguistic choices. Instead, she parodically reiterates his words,
calling him "Mr. Chum-chum" and refusing to grant primacy to his
logic of namings. In response to his loosely veiled and all too familiar
question, "Where are you from?" the narrator refuses to give him the
satisfaction of acknowledging his underlying question, "What kind of
an Indian are you?" by retorting that back home, a place she refuses to
name, "we" call it sugarcake.
In its refusal to locate any group as necessarily "original," Mootoo's
short story undercuts notions of authentic, autochthonous citizenship.

The storeowner who so vehemently polices the narrator's claims to

culinary kinship with "Indian" foods is no more "authentically Indian"
than the narrator and her girlfriend. He is not an "Indian" from India
but a Fijian immigrant of Indian descent. The Fijian storeowner's in-
ability to read the narrator as an "Indian," diasporic or otherwise, is
cast as aberrant in the framework of this story. Yet the larger cul-
tural logic from which such suppositions are based almost always po-
lices the line between what can be deemed as authentic, cultural, and
gendered citizenship, and the performance of ethnicity. To be seen as
"Indian" implicitly demands a particular set of performative behavior;
the Indian-seeming subject is only considered "Indian" if she speaks a
certain way and recognizes the "correct" way of doing things.
Mr. Chum-chum's insistence that the narrator learn the correct
names ascribed to particular sweets is further complicated because
of its gendered implications. The narrator is doubly offensive to Mr.
Chum-chum not only because she refuses to adhere to the rigid lin-
guistic rules, but also because she chooses to don queer butch attire.
The narrator sports a crew cut and wears blue jeans tucked into her
"jim-boots." Her outwardly masculine appearance does not correspond
with the storekeeper's expectations that the narrator accept the "tradi-
tional" mode of being an "Indian" woman. While she might privately
admonish herself for not having the "correct" word for things Indian,
she refuses to publicly affirm an exclusionary, chauvinistic version of

citizenship that devalorizes and delegitimizes her experiences simply

because she does not seem to fit into clearly demarcated categories of
nation, gender, and sexuality. Similarly, on a linguistic level, Mootoo's
staunch refusal to follow the mandates of speaking and writing in stan-
dardized English can be understood as a gendered response to linguis-
tic and political hegemony. Certainly, words could easily adhere to the
dominant orthographic pattern. As Sharmila Sen suggests: '"baigan' or

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CULINARY NOSTALGIA 25

'geera' could have easily been written as 'eggplant' or 'cumin' without

sacrificing the meaning. But . . . the 'baigan' and 'geera' are far more
evocative than 'eggplant' or 'cumin' because they are fossil sounds
bearing the impression of over a century-old Indo-Caribbean pres-
ence" (195).
In "Out on Main Street," cultural contacts precipitate a rethinking
of identity categories grounded on filiation. "Mr. Chum-chum" may
be as much a product of a labor-driven diaspora as the narrator, but
he identifies with a different version of national belonging-one that
views diasporic histories and cultures as pale imitations of the "origi-
nal." Within his framework, non-heterosexuality and non-femininity
are also not legitimate modes of performative behavior. Unlike filial
and rooted identities that map onto origin and filiation to acquire le-
gitimacy, the narrator's relational identity is mapped in movement. She
deploys a diasporic vocabulary and a non-conformist sartorial ethos.10
Rethinking these spaces and histories as points of relation and affili-
ation, rather than in terms of roots and filiation, creates spaces for
interrogating the contradictory lives mapped in multiple geographic
and identitarian spaces-racial, ethnic, and sexual.
The story repudiates a Manichean logic of belonging and not be-
longing, in which Indians from India are rendered as more "authen-
tic" (and therefore more knowledgeable or "correct") than diasporic
Indians such as the narrator and her girlfriend. It is, however, worth
noting the historical irony that binds the two characters insofar as both
characters' lives revolve around sugar. The narrator is the descendant
of indentured laborers from India in Trinidad, and the storeowners
are Fijian Indians, descendants of another labor-driven diaspora that
brought Indians to work in the sugar cane fields of Fiji in the nine-
teenth century. Patron and customer, then, have more in common than
a mere appreciation for meethai. Both are descendants of diasporic
workers, presumably brought to work in sugar cane fields; now owner
and customer feud over the "authenticity" of meethai-a food in which
sugar is the.primary ingredient. The animosity between the charac-
ters marks their palpable distaste for each other, but historical forces
establish a nascent fraternity between the characters based on similar
histories rather than on shared or acknowledged affinities.
Mootoo's story "Sushila's Bhakti," also set in a Canadian city, simi-
larly unravels the logic of culinary identifications within diasporic
memories. Sushila, the narrator, is an Indo-Caribbean artist who con-
tinually battles the racialized implications of what it means to be read
as an "Indian," "Paki," "Hindu,"- everything but Trinidadian-by vir-
tue of her brown skin, the "purest legacy left to Indians generations
away from India" (63). Like the narrator of "Out on Main Street,"
Sushila's relationship to Indianness is mediated through a rhizomor-
phic relationship with food and an understanding of the implicit rules
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26 MANNUR

governing consumptive practices and desires. Her feelings of r

ness and disconnectedness from "Indianness" come to life when she
finds herself using food in her art. When she chooses to do away with
painting her lucrative but colorless depictions of "large temperate-zone
fruit and immense cold-country vegetables," (60) opting to create art
evoking the colors of her childhood, she covers a canvas made from
a basmati rice burlap sack with clumps of metanil yellow food dye.
Her decision to purchase the coloring agent at an "Indian" store sets
into motion a brief debate over the "proper" use of things. The store-
owner from whom she purchases the food dye, an exile from Uganda
of Ismaili origin, is suspicious of Sushila's desire to purchase the food
coloring from the outset: "She explained that she was not using it for
food, but as a pigment for painting. And he said, yes, she can use it as
a dye, but not in food, he was obliged to make that clear. Actually, he
said, people always come to buy it for food coloring and he fulfills his
obligation to say that it is banned as food, but he knows what they are
really doing with it" (65). The storeowner assumes Sushila will use the
metanil dye as comestible, rather than as coloring agent, powerfully
speaking to a presumption about diasporic ignorance of homeland
conventions.

Sushila's thoughts return to food when s

own inability to navigate the unwritten co
instance, is the metanil food dye to be used as comestible, despite be-
ing deemed inedible, and when is it deemed acceptable to use it as
a coloring agent? Her own discomfort with navigating the terms of
consumption-when to follow the rules and when to flout them-
culminates in a yearning for "accurate details of Trinidad" (66) and a
concomitant recognition of the fallacious nature of her desires: "as
[Sushila] tried to unblur details, to sort out which festival is which,
the act of forgetting and remembering and inventing reminded her
of her grandmother, who, like so many other Trinidadian Hindus and
Muslims she knows, refused to eat either beef or pork because she
couldn't remember which one it is that she, as a goodBrahminwoman
wasn't supposed to eat" (66).
Sushila describes her grandmother as a religious woman who takes
it upon herself to instruct younger generations about Hindu cultural
life. And yet ironically, she "forgets" one of the cardinal rules that have
distinguished orthodox Hindus and orthodox Muslims and passes on
new histories and traditions to the generations below her. Because she
cannot recall dietary rules that have traditionally separated Hindus and
Muslims in the subcontinent, Sushila's grandmother and her commu-
nity of Trinidadian Hindus and Muslims establish an alternative cu-
linary logic implicitly disavowing pure genealogies yoking food con-
sumption with religious identity. The gastropoetic and gastropolitical
logic which traditionally differentiates between Hindus as non-beef

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CULINARY NOSTALGIA 27

eaters and Muslims as non-pork eaters becomes submerge

a nascent fraternity organized around culinary practices e
tween "homeland" rivals because both Hindus and Muslim
consumption of pork or beef.1
However, the story does not readily answer whether Sushila's grand-
mother's forgetting is mediated by a desire to deliberately, and strategi-
cally, narrow the gap between Hindus and Muslims and the implica-
tions this has for understanding nationhood from the vantage point of
diaspora. As Ernest Renan reminds us, "the essence of a nation is that
all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have
forgotten many things"; nations and collectives are forged through
collective acts of forgetting historical wounds (11). For diasporic com-
munities, spatially and temporally distanced from the geographic pa-
rameters of the nation-state, a collective sense of nationhood, an af-
fective longing for the home, and a fear of "losing" tradition m
into a desire to retain viability and visibility through a systema
tempt to ossify the fragments and shards of cultural practices
"authentic."
In the interstitial spaces created through Mootoo's fiction, however,
the future of diasporic communities is forged through creative act
of misrecognition and the deliberate blurring of ostensibly authen-
tic details. But it is doubly significant that culinary practices and sites
of alimentary exchange become the sites upon which age-old anxiet-
ies about cultural purity are resurrected. Immigrants, as both Jaffrey
and Suleri point out, are deeply invested in the ontological purity of
their cuisines. Suleri's narrative is one that casts doubt on the certitude
with which expatriates adamantly and passionately defend the alimen-
tary practices of the homeland. In its very conception, Meatless Days
is ambivalently situated between Suleri's desire to reject the official
rendering of history, and her refusal to acknowledge the class-based
implications of her own nostalgically rendered histories. Nostalgia for
what was consumed in her pre-emigration home powerfully charges
Suleri's narrative, but newer hierarchies, blind to class inequities, mere-
ly replace the gender hierarchies which Suleri flouts in order to ren-
der history otherwise. Read through and against Suleri's memoirs and
Jaffrey's cookbook, Mootoo's stories complicate a simple logic of what
we might think of as multiculturalist eating, a consumptive practice
which commonly posits eating together as a way to overcome racial
and ethnic differences. Mootoo's short fiction implicitly points
bankruptcy of any idealized notion that diasporic existence nec
produces fraternity between characters who share similar histo
migration and displacement. Such utopian desires imagine eatin
a solution to the fractious malaises of the world but are predic
sentimentalized and dehistoricized understandings of the po
consumption. The conditions of diaspora do not transcend d
es of race, class, gender, and sexuality, "nor can diaspora stand
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28 MANNUR

as an epistemological or historical category of analysis separate and

distinct from these interrelated categories" (Braziel and Mannur 5). In
"Out on Main Street," patron and customer are not able to establish
a form of what Svetlana Boym has described as diasporic intimacy
simply because they have shared histories of dispersion and relocation
(252-53). Indeed, it is possible to be nostalgic for "Indian" food with-
out being nostalgic for "India," and the storeowner's misogyny and ho-
mophobia stand in the way of establishing any sense of ethnic-based
kinship among people in the diaspora simply because they might find
pleasure and sustenance in consuming the same types of food.
Culinary discourse, as this article demonstrates, is ambivalently
coded and complexly situated. Within the tradition of immigrant lit-
erature, culinary discourse sets in motion an extended discussion about
the imbricated layers of food, nostalgia, and national identity. Through
such discursive renderings of nostalgia, it becomes apparent that these
homelands, both phantasmatic and contradictory, become spaces that
are limiting or emancipatory, and typically both at once. In this context,
consuming ethnically coded food is more than a cultural activity close-
ly associated with kinship and ritual; it is also a long-standing material
practice in global commerce and exchange. Culinary discourse there-
fore bears witness to the complicated historical processes that have
occasioned international migration and diasporic dislocation, however
ambivalent one might be about the actual process of dislocation.

Notes

I am grateful to R. Radhakrishnan, Sean McCann, Sunaina Maira, Allan

Punzalan Isaac, Martin Manalansan, Jon Okamura, and Christine Yano for
their feedback on various drafts of this article.
1. For more on the debate about food studies as "scholarship lite," see Ruark
p. A17 and Williams-Forson.
2. Notable exceptions include Ho, Wong, and Xu.
3. Suleri's and Mootoo's own relationships with "home" and a "homeland"
are complicated by their status as bicultural and multi-racial subjects. Suleri,
who was born to a Welsh mother and a Pakistani father and currently lives
and works in the United States as a professor at Yale University, offers a poig-
nant glimpse into her fractured subjectivity as she comes of age within an
upper-class household in postcolonial Pakistan. Oscillating between life back
"there" in Pakistan and "here" in the United States, Meatless Days attempts
to retell the author's experiences of growing up bicultural and biracial and
to cast asunder the categories and mechanisms used to construct an auto-
biographical narrative of one's life from a temporally and spatial
present. With her multi-racial status (Irish and Indo-Caribbean), South Asian
Canadian author Shani Mootoo earned literary fame with the publication of
her novel Cereus Blooms at Night as well as her earlier collection of stories, Out
on Main Street and Other Stories.
4. See Carter, Dayal, Grewal, Koshy, Lovesey, and Ray.
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CULINARY NOSTALGIA 29

5. At a linguistic level, Jaffrey reinscribes North Indian hegemony.

she notes, "we call our Indian bread roti, and we call the Western ty
dubbul (double) roti, probably because of the expansion caused by
(245) without explaining that "roti" is the Hindi term for "bread
Dravidian language (Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, or Malayalam) speakers may
not refer to "bread" as "roti," or "dubbul roti." Throughout the cookbook,
Jaffrey uses English names for recipes; where the original language is provid-
ed, it is Hindi (perhaps because the recipes are from Uttar Pradesh and Delhi
where Hindi predominates), implicitly creating the impression that Hindi is
the language of all Indians-a practice that has been sharply critiqued in
other contexts as an act of linguistic hegemony.
6. See Achaya and Appadurai.
7. Ingredients that to many seem to be inextricably part of an Indian diet are
not always autochthonously Indian. Cashews, tomatoes, and chili peppers
are not native to the Indian subcontinent, but indispensable in many Indian
dishes brought to India from South America via Portugal and Spain between
the 1500s and 1800s due to colonial expansion into the "New World." Many
of Jaffrey's recipes call for ingredients such as chilies, cashews, pineapples,
and tomatoes-foodstuffs that entered Indian palates and languages through
the workings of colonial trade.
8. As Gayatri Spivak might suggest, it would perhaps be slightly disinge
ous for Suleri to try to speak "for" her servants, who are, in terms of
positioning, closer to being subaltern than Suleri (or Spivak herself)
ever be.
9. See Maira. For a discussion about how cultural forms such as bhangra
sic or Bollywood film are imbued with new meanings by queer South As
communities, also see Gopinath.
10. Also see Mani.
11. For a more precise articulation of the term "gastropoetics," see Roy.

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