Gastronomical Odyssey: A Take on Culinary Cultures

PARTIII

Gastronomical Chronotopes

Cartographies of Privilege in South-Asian Poetry in English

The name of the series (Gastronomical Odyssey…) invokes food, space and the sense of a unity within cultures about specific culinary practices. However, a culinary odyssey is often a bourgeoise endeavour, since the exploration of spaces that can be defined by food might belong primarily to the possession of certain privileges that not many can access. This paper is perhaps something of a misfit within this series, hoping to disturb the readers in a way that makes them look into the very basics which can afford a “gastronomical odyssey”. The reader is forewarned about the lack of much pleasure that may be derived from descriptions of the delectable; in fact the article is tainted with a near-perverse preoccupation with one’s right to food and right to spaces and with the implicit linkages between the two, using some South Asian English poetry as instantiations of alternative cartographies of consumption and deprivation, identity and belonging.

That public spaces are yet talked about in terms of gendered occupancy and therefore need must be territorialized is a misfortune of the culture that breeds this attitude. Furthermore, the distinctions between public and private, as between the sacred and profane, owe their firmness to bourgeoisie roots of privilege and self-righteous morality. For those whose basic rights to food and love are present only in absentia, such distinctions hold little value. The cartography of such deprivation, then, is directed by the dialectics of necessity and contingency. So, methodologically speaking, this paper will move through a Hegelian model of dialectics to consider the multiple forces that operate within a space of appetite, that govern the dynamics of such a space. Henri Lefebvre’s notion of space is central to the way possible social transformation is imagined within the politics of these poems. Therefore, with Hegel and Lefebvre on board there is little room of any political imagination that envisions a stable idea of a space, since stagnation is regarded as the breeding ground for oppression by both. Further, this paper uses food as a matrix of both space and time through the Bakhtinian concept of the chronotope, and seeks to chart access to privilege in two different brands of South Asian English poetry: the first by Jayanta Mahapatra, and then by Imtiaz Dharker.

I

“Dead hunger with its merciless worms”: Mapping Food, Sex and Deprivation

In the poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra one sees three ideas of space coming to collide against each other, embroiled in a battle over the two dialectics mentioned above. If on the one hand there is the space of the poor and the discriminated as the permanent ‘outside’,the space of the privileged (of whom the poet is a member himself) is that of the perennially ruminating “inside”. The question arises, then, which is the third space within a poetics avowedly devoted to depicting histories of oppression? It may be then argued that the space of poetry itself is this third space where contingency is pursued as the only possible pursuit for justice. The poems taken in this study are titled “Hunger” and “Taste for Tomorrow”: both using the idea of food as a half-empty signifier, hanging precariously between metaphor and material, inscribing histories of deprivation on tablets of time.

HUNGER

It was hard to believe the flesh was heavy on my back.

The fisherman said: Will you have her, carelessly,

trailing his nets and his nerves, as though his words

sanctified the purpose with which he faced himself.

I saw his white bone thrash his eyes.

I followed him across the sprawling sands,

my mind thumping in the flesh's sling.

Hope lay perhaps in burning the house I lived in.

Silence gripped my sleeves; his body clawed at the froth

his old nets had only dragged up from the seas.

In the flickering dark his lean-to opened like a wound.

The wind was I, and the days and nights before.

Palm fronds scratched my skin. Inside the shack 

an oil lamp splayed the hours bunched to those walls.

Over and over the sticky soot crossed the space of my mind.

I heard him say: My daughter, she's just turned fifteen...

Feel her. I'll be back soon, your bus leaves at nine.

The sky fell on me, and a father's exhausted wile.

Long and lean, her years were cold as rubber.

She opened her wormy legs wide. I felt the hunger there,

the other one, the fish slithering, turning inside... 

TASTE FOR TOMORROW

At Puri, the crows.

The one wide street

lolls out like a giant tongue.

Five faceless lepers move aside

as a priest passes by.

And at the streets end

the crowds thronging the temple door:

a huge holy flower

swaying in the wind of greater reasons.

Thieme and Raja suggest, in their introduction to the anthology of South-Asian Food writing, that “eating habits denote a vast range of ideological positions, operating along a continuum that has complicity and resistance as its two end-points.” In ‘Hunger’ it is deprivation of one kind that leads to exploitation of another order, the perpetuator in either case remaining the same. The chronotope of food here is a double one- on the one hand, real food for sustenance only appears as hope, something the memory of which drives the current impulse, on the other hand is the proposed sexual intercourse as a means to that end, something intimate and private opened up to negotiation for something much more fundamental to human life. The poet-narrator’s sexual appetite feeds the appetite for physical sustenance of the lower-class (possibly lower caste) fisherman and his daughter. The sense of guilt with which the poet penetrates the hungry girl is split across his dual consciousness of feeding his own appetite in an unjust negotiation and of belonging to a strata of society which is perhaps for the circumstances of such glaring inequality. The second poem uses food more as a metaphor than as material. The lolling “giant tongue”-s of the lepers, the permanent outsiders to both home and the world, are hungry to belong, to be accepted within the folds of a religion while the silence of some omnipotent entity sighs with “greater reasons”. Food as benediction is awaited by those tongues, forever hungry.

In Jayanta Mahapatra’s poetry, then, the threshold space is the chronotope of food itself. Between metaphor and material, food hangs precariously as a reminder/hope of the times and spaces that the ‘outsider’ (read: less privileged) could belong to. Mapping food and the various journeys of appetites produces an ever-evolving sense of deprivation that haunts the poetic consciousness, seeking to be articulated as bodies that cannot speak except through hunger. Through poetry the space between the inside and the outside is negotiated, resistance is articulated, using access to food as a tool, using language to register the indomitable hunger of these bodies across public spaces.

II

“The Warm Naan is You”: Charting Desire, Charting Belonging

Imtiaz Dharker, with her mixed identity between Pakistan and the United Kingdom, finds herself as conflicted as a pair of star-crossed lovers contained within one psyche, not knowing which cultural allegiance fulfils which of her desires. Like much writing from the South-Asian diaspora, the search for home is nearly always articulated in terms of a feast which reminds one of ‘home’. In Dharker’s poetry, curiously enough, food seems to articulate desire in an immediate as well as a deferred sense, disturbing spatial networks of belonging, asking for a new kind of mapping altogether.

AT THE LAHORE KARHAI

It’s a great day, Sunday,

when we pile into the car

and set off with a purpose –

a pilgrimage across the city,

to Wembley, the Lahore Karhai.

Lunch service has begun –

‘No beer, we’re Muslim’ –

but the morning sun

squeezed into juice,

and ‘Yaad na jaye’

on the two-in-one.

On the Grand Trunk Road

thundering across Punjab to Amritsar,

this would be a dhaba

where the truck-drivers pull in,

swearing and sweating,

full of lust for real food,

just like home.

Hauling our overloaded lives

the extra mile,

we’re truckers of another kind,

looking hopefully (years away

from Sialkot and Chandigarh)

for the taste of our mothers’

hand in the cooking.

So we’ve arrived at this table:

the Lahore runaway;

the Sindhi refugee

with his beautiful wife

who prays each day to Krishna,

keeper of her kitchen and her life;

the Englishman too young

to be flavoured by the Raj;

the girls with silky hair,

wearing the confident air

of Bombay.

This winter we have learn

to wear our past

like summer clothes.

Yes, a great day.

A feast! We swoop

on a whole family of dishes.

The tarka dal is Auntie Hameeda

the karhaighosht is KhalaAmeena

the gajjar halva is AppaRasheeda.

The warm naan is you.

My hand stops half-way to my mouth.

The Sunday light has locked

on all of us:

the owner’s smiling son,

the cook at the hot kebabs,

Kartar, Rohini, Robert,

Ayesha, Sangam, I,

bound together by the bread we break,

sharing out our continent.

These 

are ways of remembering.

Other days, we may prefer

Chinese.

The poem enacts an actual journey across London, which resonates with other journeys made back home, food being at the heart of both journeys. The “ways of remembering” are many: food represents, in one and the same stroke of poetic eloquence, the more generic “taste of our mothers”, but also individual identifications of those who reside far away in both time and space. And in a frenzy of identifications “the tadka dal is Auntie Hameeda/the karhai ghost is Khala Ameena/ the gajjarhalwa is Appa Rashida” there is the sudden pause of a recognition that takes even the poet-narrator by surprise: “the warm naan is you”. Through food, then, desire is identified, channelized, and a chronotope of home is set up within a person who is the object of desire, using food as a catalyst. The “gastronomical odyssey”, thus far, is a success, since desire, food and home come together in the act of breaking bread which then becomes an act of “sharing out our continent”.

III

“A country had lost its freedom for peppercorns”- access as privilege

Histories of food have often been the histories of alliances: both national and individual. The section title invokes the moment of the colonization of the subcontinent, where AttiaHossain recalls the commodification of South-Asia because of its spices. One can also recall the many uneasy truces between the British and the subject races at orchestrated banquets described ironically by the same author (as also by Forster). However, there are also instances of camaraderie across various societal strata owing to the sharing of food, the last supper and Chaucer’s pilgrims being some of the more famous instances of those. However, in both examples, the utopia is ruptured by the appearance of the human quality of greed. The last supper operates primarily on the suspense of the betrayal drama and Chaucer’s pilgrims all vie to win a free meal for telling the best story. Sharing and Choice, then, seem to be born of that more fundamental truth about access. The space of the inn in either story is a crucial hint to the liminality of the affair, to the contingential nature of this camaraderie over food.

Food, as was suggested in the introduction, operates on the coordinates of necessity and contingency. The moment of freezing food as necessity is also to enter the commodity culture which paradoxically oppresses those who are often compelled to go without food. So, through poetry, it seems as though the poets constantly seek to dismantle the stability of necessity in a ceaseless search for contingency. This ceaseless search is manifested spatially: in Mahapatra through the constant renegotiations between the inside and the outside, and in Dharker through the constant “pilgrimage across the city”. Using food as both the tangible immediacy of material and the shadowy polymorphousness of the metaphor, spaces are charted, desires are relocated, and most significantly the premise of gastronomical odyssey-s is identified to be privilege itself: in both the cosmopolitan and the subaltern, in presentia and in absentia. Lefebvre says that no revolution is complete without reconstitution of its language and reallocation of spaces. If poetry is the mode of revolting against social and cultural discriminations for these poets, where food becomes the protagonist on the stage of history; then the spaces traversed by food become the new spaces of privilege, making food-cartography a constant act of deferral, and the chronotope of food a vision that stretches beyond a single frame of monolithic belonging.

Bibliography:

1. http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/hunger-71/, 12.24pm, 12^thnov 2014)
2. http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/taste-for-tomorrow/, 12.25pm, 12^thnov 2014
3. http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poem/item/2818, accessed 7.32 pm, 13^thnov 2014
4. The Oxford Anthology of South Asian Food Writing: The Table is Laid. Eds. John Thieme and Ira Raja, OUP, New Delhi, 2007. Pp: xxxiii
5. The Production of Space. Henri Lefebvre. Transl Donald Nicholson Smith. Blackwell, Cambridge. 1981.

Author’s Bio-Note:

Supurna Dasgupta is a research scholar in the English Department at the University of Delhi, with professorial aspirations. Though she is currently residing in Delhi, she would much rather be found between travel destinations and other readable objects. Apart from reading and living in a state of perennial surprise, she also writes occasionally, and some of her poems and articles have been published in a few journals, while her translation of an archival autobiography is awaiting publication from Zubaan.