Tasting Partition: Constructing imaginary homelands through culinary memories

People displaced from their homeland feel unbelonging in the adopted land, as their belongingness has adhered to a home from the past that is lost in time and cannot be returned to. The culinary differences of the host culture are also continuous reminders of the exile. This sense of loss gives birth to the process of joining the fragmented memories to negotiate with the experiences of hurt and construct imaginary homelands. In this paper, we will trace the culinary reimaginations of the lost homelands in two Bangla texts, Dayamayeer Katha (2008), a memoir by Sunanda Sikdar, and Indubala Bhaater Hotel (2021), a novel by Kallol Lahiri. Bengal witnessed numerous fluxes of refugees migrating during the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 that continued even after the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. Both texts are narratives of the Hindu refugee women reconstructing their lost homelands (desh). Though the two texts belong to different genres, they exhibit similar use of food ekphrasis to present a complex phenomenology of refugeehood. In Sikdar’s memoir, food is the embodied reality of the differences​ that are purported to be the underlying cause behind Hindu-Muslim and intercaste conflicts, offering the affected people’s reflection on the event of Partition. Lahiri’s novel deals with a refugee woman’s journey towards self-realisation and a silent holding onto the past through a personal engagement with food and recipes. The two texts reveal experiential nuances from the interactions of gender, caste, religion, class, and nationality. This paper shall investigate how, through food memories, desh is conceived as the embodiment of conviviality that has been​ irreversibly lost. In refugee narratives, culinary memories have the latent desire to return to the collaborative existence in the lost desh. They also become instrumental in the process of seeking rehabilitation amidst the alienation faced in the adopted land. With memory as the point of departure for studying the ‘food past,’ this paper will explore the working of historical consciousness in the culinary imagination of the homeland and explore the Partition and the shaping of identities as affected in the representation of food in literature.