Mehfil 2 - Khayali Pulao: On Writing Food

BookRising

Themes of food in literature inspire questions of resistance, cultural memory, gender and identity. This episode titled Khayali Pulao: On Food Writing touches upon food and food politics in Indian writing. Here, it is not merely a marker of identity, but can be a source of joy as well as pain and alienation. Writers Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Sumana Roy discuss the ways in which food operates to construct nostalgia and to evoke historical and individual memory. Along the way, it can also expose class, caste and gender divides in society. It may mean coming together as family and sharing bonds of sisterhood but fictions about food can also express hunger, poverty, displacement and subsequent marginalization. Roy reads the poem "The Astonishing Smell of Rice" by Birendra Chattopadhyayon which is about hunger and how the refrain is a reminder of circadian rhythms broken by hunger pangs. Divakaruni’s writings use food as symbols of diasporic identity and even feminist solidarity. She argues that food can bring about an ethos of feminist empowerment and sisterhood beyond the stereotypes of gender. Both writers come together to engage food in Indian writing across various registers. They highlight the significance of “eating cultures” and also reveal their favorite foods and what they like to cook!

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an Indian-born American author, poet, and Betty and Gene McDavid Professor of Writing at the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program. Divakaruni started out as a poet and her poetry collections include Black Candle and Leaving Yuba City. Her first collection of stories Arranged Marriage won an American Book Award and a PEN Josephine Miles Award. Her novels include The Mistress of Spices, Sister of My Heart, Queen of Dreams, One Amazing Thing, Palace of Illusions, Oleander Girl and Before We Visit the Goddess. She has also written a young adult fantasy series called The Brotherhood of the Conch which is located in India and draws on the culture and folklore of that region. Divakaruni's work has been published in The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, and her writing has been included in anthologies including the Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize Stories, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. Her fiction has been translated into 29 languages, including Dutch, Hebrew, Indonesian, Bengali, Turkish and Japanese. Divakaruni's novel The Mistress of Spices was made into film of the same name in 2005 starring Bollywood star Aishwarya Rai. and her novel Sister of my Heart was made into a television series by Suhasini Maniratnam in Tamil and aired in India, as Anbulla Snegithiye (Loving Friend).

Sumana Roy is an Indian writer and poet. Her works include How I Became a Tree (2017), a work of non-fiction; Missing (2019), a novel; Out of Syllabus (2019), a collection of poems; and My Mother's Lover and Other Stories (2019), a short story collection. Her unpublished novel Love in the Chicken's Neck was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize (2008). She is the co-founder and co-editor of the journal On Eating : A Multilingual Journal of Food and Eating. Her first book, How I Became a Tree, a work of non-fiction, was shortlisted for the 2017 Shakti Bhatt Prize. Roy is from Siliguri, a city in Darjeeling district of West Bengal. She writes a monthly column, Treelogy, in The Hindu about plant life. Her poems and essays are published in Granta, The Caravan, Guernica Himal Southasian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Prairie Schooner, American Book Review, The White Review, Journal of South Asian Studies, and Journal of Life Writing. She is currently an Associate Professor at Ashoka University.

Amrita Ghosh is Assistant Professor of English, specializing in South Asian literature at the University of Central Florida. She is the co-editor of Tagore and Yeats: A Postcolonial Reenvisioning (Brill 2022) and Subaltern Vision: A Study in Postcolonial Indian English Text (Cambridge Scholars 2012). Her book Kashmir’s Necropolis: New Literature and Visual Texts is forthcoming with Lexington Books. She is the co-founding editor of Cerebration, a bi-annual literary journal.

To inaugurate our Mehfil which means a celebratory gathering in Urdu, we asked Uday Bansal to compose a small poem for us. It was read out by Amrita Ghosh at the start of the program.

Tumhaari taal se betaal / Duniya tumhaari shaunq se ghafil hai / Taqaluf Chhod bhi do / Aao yeh tumhaari hi mehfil hai

This roughly translates as "cast off your inhibitions and come join our celebrations."

We want to thank Bansal who writes poetry in Hindustani, the confluence of Hindi and Urdu. Bansal has performed at the world's largest Urdu Literature festival Jashn-e-Rekhta in 2022 and has given a TEDx talk titled "Zabaan-e-Urdu" where he explores the misconceptions about the Urdu language and its relevance in today's times.