Memories in Food, Food of Memories: Blurring Borders through Food and Foodways in Indubala Bhater Hotel

Food and foodways not only mark or construct our identity but also help us relive our memories.Precisely, our food habits, preparation, and emotional attachment to what we eat are cultural processes that map how an edible item becomes food.Besides being an important part of our cultural life, food and foodways are associated with individual and collective memories.They play an important role in reviewing our memories associated with little and sometimes insignificant moments of the past that form our personal history.On the other hand, food and food habits are connected with group activities in the form of production, preparation, and consumption, which help in reassessing the past by validating what should be remembered and what should not be relived in the past.This becomes more prominently discernible in the context of displacement or migration.The present paper intends to study Kallol Lahiri's novel Indubala Bhater Hotel (2020) to focus on how food and foodways not only become the source of sustenance for a widow who runs a pice hotel to support her family but also help her blur the border and arrive at the other side where her roots lie.