Eating India: Literary and cultural consumptions of the subcontinent

Eating India analyzes the function of literary discourses on Indian foods and spices in the formation of national and cultural identities in India, Britain, and Guyana. Each of the four chapters focuses on one of the following texts: George Francklin Atkinson's Curry and Rice on Forty Plates (1859), Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), David Dabydeen's The Counting House (1996), and Anita Desai's In Custody (1984). Embedded within markedly different historic matrices, such as the nineteenth-century British Raj, the late-twentieth-century market for Indian anglophone novels, and the East Indian movement for greater political representation and cultural recognition in the Caribbean, these texts display vital continuities in their categorization of a person, a nation, or a language as "Indian" by invoking signifiers such as curry, chutney, or masala (spice). Whether ridiculed by Atkinson as a repugnant symbol of post-1857 India or unabashedly valorized by Salman Rushdie as the special condiment which imparts cultural specificity to a novel in English, tropes of subcontinental foods work, with varying degrees of success, to delimit cultural configurations of Indianness.