Food Symbolism in Srishti Chaudhary's The Lallan Sweets

In Srishti Chaudhary’s The Lallan Sweets, the laddoos produced at the Lallan Sweet Shop have long left people intrigued not just for their unmatched taste, but for the mystery of a secret ingredient that holds generations of curiosity. The crowd in front of the laddoo shop reminds people of their childhood, makes them drool and fully appetizes the readers. As Lala Ji’s grandchildren compete to inherit the shop, they embark on a quest to uncover the hidden recipe, making food not just a treat but a legacy to be earned. The infusion of food into the narrative runs as a metaphor throughout the whole story. A deeper scrutiny of the novel reveals that stories like this are not merely light-hearted tales of familial bonding. Instead, the laddoos—an iconic Indian sweet—conspicuously bind the story together through their symbolic significance. Through the lens of food semiotics, this paper explores how food operates as a site of cultural memory and emotional labour in The Lallan Sweets. The research investigates how the representation of food in fiction becomes a site of legacy, particularly for the female protagonist Tara, who competes with her male cousins to earn her right to inherit the family sweet shop. Food, as a site of cultural memory, transforms everyday acts of eating and cooking into vessels of historical continuity, emotional resonance and collective identity.The emotions surrounding the metaphor of food are multilayered in this story, prompting deeper inquiry into questions such as: How does food encode cultural memory? How are gender roles around cooking and inheritance presented and subverted? How do the sweets produced at Lallan Sweets function as material archives of diasporic memory? These are some of the questions that my paper will explore.