Yellow rice and a Misnomer: The Hyperreality of Bangla Biryani, Armchair Nostalgia and Refugee Identity in the Urbanspace of Agartala

This article, as a combination of life-writing and mnemonics, reads into the intricacies that ‘Bangla biryani’, a popular dish of yellow rice available at Bangla market of Agartala provides in terms of the intrinsic grid of refugee experience (both real and virtual) and imagined loss that simulates gastronomic (armchair) nostalgia, blurring the boundaries of physical space of the land of refuge and the imaginary homeland lost. Bangla biryani for me, in stark contrast to the lived experiences and the ruminations of a ‘real’ refugee dislocated from the homeland and subsequently relocated in the land of refuge, has actually been an ‘invented tradition’, a simulacrum1 that emerged as a heady-mix of sensibilities infused by refugee food narratives of my grandma, the lived experience of my past in Agartala, familiarity with literature and films on partition and migration, as well as countless olfactory encounters with its aroma on the way past the Battala market and its iconic status, courtesy urban food vlogs flooding social media in the present timeframe, thus becoming a hyperreality. For third generation refugees like me born into refugee families, who lack the reality of the lived experiences of partition, forced migration and refuge, such cultural spaces as Bangla biryani offer scope to fabricate the authenticity of a refugee past never lived, except for repetitive episodes of engrossed listening to oral food narratives of the homeland. And in all its complexity and the problematic of its conceptualization and theorization, Bangla biryani presents itself as a space for engaging in an interesting discourse on refugee food narratives, authenticity and immediacy of its pastness and the processes involved in ‘cooking up’ a strain of nostalgia under the semblance of truth.