Culinary Narratology in Everyday Life: Foodways and Identity ...

Culinary Narratology in Everyday Life:
Foodways and Identity Formations of South Asian Women Immigrants in
Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Mrs. Sen’s” and The Namesake
Abstract
Understood as cultural practices that display a set of behaviors, emotions and thoughts
in specific socio-cultural contexts, foodways and culinary activities are considered practices
of the self and constructions of identities. For South Asian women immigrants, food and
cookery even become an important metaphor for the continuity of identity in diaspora and
cultural retention that designate their migrant bodies as a site for self-articulation of nostalgia,
of resistance and of negotiable identity formation in the host country. This paper elaborates
the indivisible correlations between women immigrants’ gendered bodies, identity
re-formation and foodways in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Mrs. Sen’s” and The Namesake. It focuses on
how culinary narratives illuminate larger cultural questions about racial women bodies and
gender issues in diaspora. As Arjun Appadurai indicates, women immigrants’ perceptions of
foodways actually represent a relatively complicated process, involving a dynamic
“gastro-political” network to problematize issues of identity in displacement and cultural
practices in terms of gender. In the first section of this paper, I investigate the theoretical
discussions of the entangled relationships between women immigrants’ identity re-formation
and culinary praxis in the transnational contexts. Secondly, I examine women immigrants’
traumatic experience of disassociation engendered by the process of emigration and cultural
displacement. For them, culinary praxis act as ritualized everyday activities narrating the
lives of subjugated and marginalized female subjects in diaspora. In the third section, I argue
that culinary practices have subversively produced a sanctioned and important cultural space
allowing techniques of resistance as well as negotiation, within which the generation of
female immigrants’ agency can be actualized by degrees.
Keywords
Jhumpa Lahiri, “Mrs. Sen’s”, The Namesake, culinary practice, performative resistance,
technology of the self

Culinary Narratology in Everyday Life:
Culinary Narratology 1
Foodways and Identity Formations of South Asian Women Immigrants in
Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Mrs. Sen’s” and The Namesake
In social and cultural terms, foodways are pivotal to the intricate formations of
subjectivity and sense of self. From an anthropological perspective, food consumption is
considered a ritual activity that can illuminate broader social processes. For any society, its
food customs in certain time periods are associated with its internal coherences, revealing an
implicit order. Foodways serve not only to maintain the biological function of the human
body, but also to “make concrete one of the specific modes of relation between a person and
the world, thus forming one of the fundamental landmarks in space-time” (Giard 183). In
other words, every food practice, directly or indirectly, depends on as well as determines the
network of identity politics in specific historic-cultural contexts. Recent sociological studies
of food and the body have highlighted the area in which the construction of subjectivity and
self-identity interacts with foodways. 1 Understood as cultural praxes that display a set of
behaviors, emotions and thoughts in certain socio-cultural contexts, culinary habits and
preferences are considered practices of the self in that individuals produce in response to their
environment. In particular, culinary practices mark an influential trope in the studies of
diaspora and immigrants’ identity re-fashion. In a way, culinary praxes and foodways not
only inscribe or write upon immigrants’ bodies, but also mark them in specifically cultural
ways which can then be interpreted by others. Noted for its distinctively regional flavors
and culturally identifiable ingredients which can be traced back to immigrants’ homeland, be
it an imaginary or originary one, the representation of food in such diasporic narratives
mirrors the search for a sense of belonging and the possibility of getting re-rooted in an alien
land. To a certain degree, foodways and cookery become an important metaphor for
diasporic continuity and cultural retention, as well as marker of identity and cultural

Culinary Narratology 2
difference, designating the migrant body as a site for self-articulation of nostalgia, of
resistance and of negotiable identity formation in the host country.
In South Asian diasporic literature, the discussions of female immigrants and foodways
are further closely associated when it comes to the studies of their re-formation of
subjectivity in diasporic contexts. As Banerji points out, in the ethos of India, “South Asian
women have a pivotal role in food preparation, both inside and outside the home,” and
“cooking was considered to be one of sixty-four fine arts,” serving as an important factor in
successful marriages (116). Generally speaking, among South Asia’s majority Hindu
communities, strict dietary laws, religious observances and numerous rituals involving food
and cookery provide occasions for women to display their culinary skills. In this
socio-cultural milieu, it is inevitable that South Asian women, willingly or not, will establish
their perceptions of self and subjectivity depending on their culinary abilities, for culinary
forms have revealed the connections between individual and collective identities. In
addition, for South Asian women, culinary skills can be alternatively used as a technique to
undermine the otherwise unshakable patriarchal system that prevails across the boundaries of
region, culture and religion throughout South Asia. Males in South Asia are treated as
superiors in family and are to be appeased with appropriate offerings. Since food is the
most basic need, the dominance of power structure can be subverted by women’s clever act of
cookery, and thus they are able to manipulate their husbands after serving good meals. As
Heller and Moran highlights, the relationship between women and cookery has long been
considered ambivalent, since “women’s primary responsibilities for food making [are seen] as
gender bound and oppressive,” while cookery also “function[s] as a crucial means of
self-definition” (8).
However, caution should also be exercised when viewing food and food practices that
function primarily as unproblematic representational elements in cultural, social and
communal identity formations. It is a prevailing phenomenon that in India or in the Indian

Culinary Narratology 3
diaspora, views of food as part of life as it should be have ignored the fact that food discourse
is actually composed of “cultural scripts of gender” (Narayan 162). Counihan also responds
to this argument and notes that, regarding the preparation and consumption of food, the
well-established gender division of labor – men consume food and women prepare it – has
prevailed in social and cultural contexts (12-13). In other words, this notion of the gendered
nature of food as cultural praxis has mostly been taken for granted. Thus, this fact of
gendered inflection of food practices deserves more evaluation and exploration in a diasporic
condition within which women are considered responsible for preserving cultural resistance
to assimilation in a foreign land. The ambivalent position of the female diasporic subject
both as oppressed and maneuver becomes critical and deserves multiple-layered depth of
discussions, for “[w]omen are not only mobilized in the ‘service’ of the Nation, but they also
become the ground on which discourses of morality and nationalism are written” (Mohanty
356). The food discourses have thus become the terrain upon which the asymmetric power
networks of identity politics, cultural differences, and gender issues are mingled.
To contemplate the relationship between women’s bodies and foodways helps reveal the
rich textures of identity re-formation, especially for South Asian women immigrants in
diasporic contexts, for they are culturally displaced and thus more aware of what they have
lost and what they have been able to keep. Their perceptions of foodways represent an even
more poignant process involving a dynamic “gastro-political” network to problematize issues
of identity displacement and cultural praxis in terms of gender (Appadurai 494). For
women immigrants, seemingly simple acts of eating and food preparation are embedded with
complicated as well as contradictory cultural meanings that become inscribed on their bodies.
Although incapable of completely demolishing the structure of the dominant culture, be it the
process of Americanization or the constraints of Indian patriarchy, women immigrants have
forged themselves a space of power and creativity within it. With bodies dislocated and
displaced in an alien land, cooking as a metonym of culture serves as an artistic technique for

Culinary Narratology 4
cultural struggle, re-construction of subjectivity and an opportunity for resistance or even
power. The kitchen, where the primary connection between women and food is played out,
has thus been taken as a newly-articulated space for self re-definition in the process of
migration.
In Lahiri’s works, such as “A Temporary Matter,” “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,”
“Mrs. Sen’s,” “This Blessed House,” and “The Third and Final Continent” in Interpreter of
Maladies, The Namesake, and “Hell-Heaven” in Unaccustomed Earth, the culinary narratives
concerning authentic Indian foodways serve as an essential connection with the female
characters’ notions of home, body and identity. Traditionally, South Asian women are
particularly subjugated to Indian patriarchal discourse which stereotypes and objectifies them
as the property of men, a situation further complicated by the traditional caste system.
Indian women are restricted to the domestic sphere, which reduces them to becoming simply
a means of providing nourishment and fertility, while acting as repositories of family honor.
However, within this structure of oppression, Lahiri portrays her female protagonists as
subversive forces, able to transgress the limited, gendered framework that has been
constructed for woman immigrants. Among the female protagonists in those works, Mrs.
Sen in “Mrs. Sen’s” and Ashima in The Namesake will be the focus of discussions in this
chapter for their poignant perceptions of culinary skill as the way to resist cultural
assimilation and as a technology of self in negotiating an identity in everyday life in diaspora.
They are the most salient female protagonists whose foodways and culinary arts are a
representational strategy, closely tied to a position of enunciation, self-articulation, and to the
performance and construction of self-identity. The discourse of foodways thus serves as the
locus of an interactive cultural dialogue and gendered discursivity, and the culinary narratives
in these texts serve as a mediating trope of tenuous self-conception and identity formation for
female immigrants.
“Mrs. Sen” and The Namesake especially focus on female immigrants’ anguish in exile

Culinary Narratology 5
and their difficulties in assimilating and adapting to American society. The female
protagonists in these works, Mrs. Sen and Ashima Ganguli, are depicted as characters
dispossessed of their community bond in India and, in a sense, stripped of agency while
joining their husbands in the US. Worse than their sense of being lost in adopting
themselves to a new culture, their husbands cannot seem to understand their existential
anxiety in the diasporic context. In their struggle to assimilate or negotiate hybridized
spaces within which they can anchor their new identities and achieve a certain degree of
self-agency in their diasporic life, these marginalized women’s insistence on the importance
of culinary practices in everyday life is transformed into a cultural praxis in which resistance
is embedded. We may thus ask why foodways and eating are particularly important in
Lahiri’s portrayal of South Asian immigrants. How does this focus on culinary narratives
illuminate larger cultural questions about racial bodies and gender issues in a diasporic
context? To what extent do the foodways of Indian cuisine provide a language of
self-conception and self-identity for these immigrant women? Moreover, why is it that
culinary practices have become a sanctioned and important cultural space within which
Lahiri’s first generation female immigrants can explore their anxieties about ethnic
difference? 2
These questions highlight the specific focus of this paper – to consider the entangled
relationships between identity formation and the politics of resistance as represented by
culinary praxis in everyday life. In other words, culinary praxis here is metonymically
interpreted as an extension of the body in a diasporic context, and thus turns the women
immigrant bodies as sites of cultural struggle. Like other cultural carriers, such as names,
festivals or clothing, food constitutes a vital part of immigrants’ sense of identity when they
settle in a foreign country. Culinary authenticity acts as a cultural signifier of stableness and
sense of belongingness inscribing itself indelibly on the female immigrant body. Mrs. Sen
in “Mrs. Sen’s” and Ashima Ashoke in The Namesake explore the connections between

Culinary Narratology 6
re-formation of cultural identity and the immigrant bodies through the rituals of eating and
culinary praxis in their everyday life in diaspora. In analyzing immigrant foodways,
Mannur points out, the culinary narratives in the studies of race and gender associated with
Asian immigrant experiences have become indispensible with regard to “how the depiction of
ritualized everyday activities might be a window of understanding into the lives of colonized,
subjugated, or otherwise marginalized subjects” (“Culinary Fictions” 57). Though
encountering distress of nostalgia, both of Lahiri’s protagonists use culinary practices as
either techniques of resistance or technologies of self to articulate their everyday perspectives
towards identity formation in diasporic life.
Mrs. Sen unwittingly enhances the racialization of her ethnic body by means of her
obsession with authentic Bengali foodways. Meanwhile Ashima, by her gradual
compromises between American and Indian cultures in everyday life, ultimately forms a
negotiable identity in diaspora through the practice of her native foodways. In a way, both
female protagonists articulate themselves by performing distinctive culinary practices, thus
signifying female immigrants’ either defying or negotiating identity in diaspora through
perspectives of everyday life. This paper aims at elaborating how the South Asian female
immigrants utilize ethnic foodways, a dimension of bodily habitus in everyday life, to
construct their own sense of racialized subjectivity, to mitigate their often difficult lives as
female immigrants, and thus to generate a certain degree of agency in the diasporic context.
Immigrant Women’s Alienated Bodies and Culinary Nostalgia in “Mrs. Sen’s” and The
Namesake
In most of Lahiri’s narratives, first generation South Asian female immigrants are
portrayed as figures deprived of agency, because their move to the United States was simply a
matter of accompanying their husbands. Different from the “much-touted highly educated,
urbanized professional” South Asian male immigrants, who consider the West as a source of

Culinary Narratology 7
inspiration and self-liberation and who aspire to an affluent lifestyle (Gupta 15-16), most
woman immigrants in Lahiri’s works, such as Mrs. Sen and Mala in Interpreter of Maladies,
Ashima Ganguli in The Namesake, and Ruma’s mother and Aparna in Unaccustomed Earth,
come to America with a sense of deprivation. As Lahiri reveals in an interview, these
woman, who involuntarily give up their community network in India, are living in the United
States simply because of their husbands, and they don’t have a self-defined identity or a
purpose of their own there (Frankfort 132). Among these first generation female migrants,
there is often a persistent sense of treating the India as their real home, and thus a feeling of
loss and a wish to return to their motherland some day, even though this wish becomes less
practical as they raise their children and grow older in their American homes. The
subcontinent thus remains a reference point, marking their ethnic origin and being the source
of their culture and everyday practices.
As a bodily habit, culinary practice has always been strongly linked to emotional
attachments and memories. Foodways are regarded as a powerful form of resistance to
cultural change, as Mary Douglas observes, since although accepting extreme changes of
environment, people appear “to be quite conservative in respect to basic, everyday, food
habits” (Active Voice 88). Thus culinary habits turn out to operate in resistance to cultural
changes, and so play an important role in maintaining identity. In addition, nostalgia is
definitely an element of discussion in food discourse. Smell, taste and even thoughts of
certain foods may easily elicit memories of an idealized past. The strong link between
culinary activities and memory are poetically elaborated in Luce Giard’s “The Nourishing
Arts,” noting that “alimentary habits constitute a domain where . . . past and present are
mixed to serve the needs of the hour . . . and to suit the circumstance” (151). Memory of the
past has become a strong aspect in these culinary activities. For diasporic women, personal
nostalgia may be interpreted as a kind of homesickness, a sense of loss, and a memory of
their past in which they can feel secure. Such nostalgia implies a bittersweet emotional state

Culinary Narratology 8
in which an individual longs for an idealized or purified version of an imaginary homeland or
an earlier time period. This yearning may instigate these diasporic women’s attempts to
recreate an aspect of their past lives by replicating the smells and the tastes of the past.
Lahiri’s collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, sheds light on South Asian
immigrants’ sense of alienation and isolation in adapting to American society. Of these
stories, “Mrs. Sen’s” represents South Asian female immigrants in their early years of
struggling to survive in geographic displacement. In a way, “Mrs. Sen’s” speaks for most
isolated women immigrants of Indian descent, as well as other origins, through its portrayal
of the poignant ambivalence of female immigrants intending to adapt to a new culture, but
simultaneously feeling a strong attachment to most aspects of their previous lifestyle, which,
however, are considered inappropriate in their new environment. In this story, Mrs. Sen, the
wife of an Indian professor who teaches mathematics at an American college, is portrayed as
a desperate first generation Bengali immigrant woman who ghettoizes herself in nostalgia for
her Indian life. She babysits Eliot, a young boy from a broken American family, and
Lahiri’s narrative pays great attention to Mrs. Sen’s meticulous preparation of food, quite
unlike Eliot’s mother, a career woman. 3 Based on Eliot’s observations, readers learn that
there are only two things that can make Mrs. Sen happy, which are letters from her family in
India, and Indian cuisine, which reminds her of home in India. In the detailed descriptions
of everyday foodways and food-related behaviors that appear in the story, fresh fish, which is
difficult to buy in the downtown supermarkets, is shown as being very crucial in her cookery:
“It was always a whole fish she desired, not shellfish, or the fillets that Eliot’s mother had
broiled” (123). In order to get fresh fish, Mrs. Sen has to rely on her increasingly reluctant
husband to drive her to her to a specific store. One day, she overcomes her fear of driving,
taking Eliot along with her to the store. Unfortunately, she has an accident, and although
Eliot and Mrs. Sen are not seriously injured, she is not able to babysit the boy anymore, and
the narrative ends.

Culinary Narratology 9
Mrs. Sen’s nostalgia, her inability to drive, her frustration at life in American society,
and her sense of isolation are thoroughly delineated based on Eliot’s perspectives. Mrs. Sen
represents the most expressive and poignant character in the spectrum of varied types of
South Asian women immigrants as striving against oppressions in diasporic life, for she is
portrayed as an extremely desperate woman immigrant with a displaced life filled with
estrangement and alienation. 4
Thus, her insistence on wearing saris on any occasion, on
cooking all meals with an Indian knife, a bonti, and on acquiring fish despite the
inconveniences, serve as examples of her nostalgia and self-articulation of resistance in an
alienating environment.
Living far away from her Indian family and community, Mrs. Sen has no one to speak to
in the United States, except for her husband. However, the communication between them
indicates an estranged and frigid relationship, as if “they were only distantly acquainted”
(112). “Mr. Sen teaches mathematics at the university” (112) is the only description Mrs.
Sen uses to introduce her husband. In addition, instead of identifying with Mrs. Sen’s
perceptions of alienation and frustration in adapting a new life, Mr. Sen does not appreciate
that his wife has given up her community and agency to join him in America. Although Mr.
Sen realizes how miserable his wife is, he makes no attempt to discuss it or consider her point
of view. This poignant maladjustment is further complicated when he intends to give Mrs.
Sen more independence by teaching her how to drive. Yet this kind of independence is
problematic, and the convenience is not for Mrs. Sen’s own good but for her husband, so that
he does not have to spend time driving her to the fish market. His neglect of Mrs. Sen’s
psychological frustration acts as a barrier to communications within their marital
5
relationships. Mr. Sen’s insistence that his wife should be able to drive without
understanding her fear and frustration eventually deprives her of the agency attained through
her cookery. To a certain extent, Mr. Sen fails to envisage that his wife actually connects
the fresh fish with her existential crisis, and that what is a significant method for her to

fashion her identity in America.
Culinary Narratology 10
Through Eliot’s eyes, Mrs. Sen’s loneliness and isolation are of particular poignancy.
She asks him, “Eliot, if I began to scream right now at the top of my lungs, would someone
come? . . . At home that is all you have to do. Not everybody has a telephone. But just
raise your voice a bit, or express grief or joy of any kind, and one whole neighborhood and
half of another has come to share the news, to help with arrangements” (116). At that
moment, Eliot understands that when Mrs. Sen speaks of home, she means India, not her
apartment in America. Another example revealing her sense of dispossession is her
description of female community and companionship in India. She tells Eliot that whenever
there is a wedding or a large celebration of any kind, all the neighborhood women come to
help. They “sit in an enormous circle on the roof of . . . the building, laughing and gossiping
and slicing fifty kilos of vegetables through the night . . . listening to their chatter” (115).
Just then, Mrs. Sen pauses to look at a pine tree through her living room window, saying
“[h]ere, in this place where Mr. Sen has brought me, I cannot sometimes sleep in so much
silence” (115). These contrasting images of America and India, deadly silence and lively
chatter, and of past and present, vividly illustrate Mrs. Sen’s feeling of being
ill-accommodated in her new environment.
In attempting to negotiate her pangs of loneliness and desperation, Mrs. Sen clings to her
identity by cooking fresh fish, which she considers symbolic of her hometown, Calcutta.
Indian cuisine here functions metonymically in relation to the formation of South Asian
immigrant identity, since “the whiff of belongingness, nostalgia, or hope is carried along by
the taste and aromas of a wide range of dishes” (Ganguly 126). In the midst of loss, Mrs.
Sen intends to re-create her familial and cultural connections with Indian and to re-locate
them in her present space. Hence, Mrs. Sen’s obsession with making traditional Indian
cuisine regardless of how inconvenient is easily associated with her intention to replicate her
Indian life in America. Within her private space in the university apartment, preparing and

Culinary Narratology 11
cooking Indian food has become a sacred ritual to which Mrs. Sen devotes herself. Being a
women immigrant living in the United States because of her husband, Mrs. Sen lacks a
purpose of her own while overseas, drifting alone in disassociation. Therefore, it is
understandable that Mrs. Sen makes every effort to re-build her relationship with her
memories of the subcontinent. Ganguly suggests that for people in diaspora, “recollections
have taken on a special import because they represent the only set to discursive
understandings which can be appropriated and fixed; disambiguating the past permits people
to make sense of uncertainties in the present” (17). In other words, the immigrants’
recalling of their past helps cure the sense of fragmentation engendered by their emigration.
Different from her husband who acts like most male immigrants affirming the present and
asserting the western liberation that comes with living in a new country, Mrs. Sen tends to be
uncritical about her pre-immigrant lives and idealizes her past, which helps her to recuperate
a firm sense of the self. The idealization of the past serves as a strategy of coming to terms
with her present status of being alienated and marginalized.
As for the other female protagonist Ashima Ganguli in The Namesake, Lahiri introduces
her by closely associating her craving for Bengali food with her pregnant body and nostalgia.
Pregnancy is obviously unique to women, and for immigrant women it raises the prospect of
having a child in a foreign land, one who may well grow up to be a ‘foreigner.’ The first
page of The Namesake describes how Ashima is craving the Indian foods she used to eat
particularly while she is in pregnancy: “Ashima has been consuming this concoction
throughout her pregnancy, a humble approximation of the snack sold for pennies on Calcutta
sidewalks and on railway platforms through out India, spilling from newspaper cones. Even
now that there is barely space inside her, it is the one thing she craves” (1). This passage
shows that Ashima’s consumption of Bengali snacks is driven in part by her irrational and
nostalgic sense of taste, not only her biological needs. It is also her craving for certain
Indian foods that leads to her poignant contemplation of her situation of being a pregnant

Culinary Narratology 12
immigrant in the US. She is overwhelmed, and feels “so far from home, unmonitored and
unobserved by those she loved . . . [and] terrified to raise a child in a country where she is
related to no one, where she knows so little, where life seems so tentative and spare” (5-6).
Ashima, the pregnant subject, is alienated and fragmented by a ruptured life that is
“haphazard, only half true” (24-25).
Ashima’s perceptions of her physical boundaries have shifted, and she has the sensation
that her body is simultaneously herself and non-self, a feeling somewhat like that of being an
alienated immigrant. Consequently, Ashima’s body is caught in a state of double
estrangement, and she begins to realize that being an immigrant is a sort of lifelong
pregnancy:
a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an
ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to
discover that that previous life has banished, replaced by something more
complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is
something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of
pity and respect. (49-50)
With another life, which symbolizes an Other, existing and growing inside the body, the
process of pregnancy biologically “alienates” women’s bodily perceptions, and thus entails
the most extreme suspension of bodily externality of the inside (Young 50). This sense of
bodily alienation is analogous to the circumstance of being an immigrant in diaspora, for the
sense of bodily integrity in both situations is dismantled and in a state of flux. In pregnancy,
Ashima’s “automatic body habits become dislodged” (Young 50), and the continuity between
her customary body and her pregnant body is disjointed and broken. Analogously, as an
immigrant woman, she is also deprived of the firm sense of synthesis of her body in a
diasporic context, unable to perceive the border of where her body ends and where the
exterior world begins. Ashima compares her experience of pregnancy to the ambivalent

Culinary Narratology 13
situation of emigration, for both states indicate a ceaseless process of rift, alienation and
othering. Thus, catalyzed by craving for Bengali food, Ashima’s body has become a
contested site within which she is “betwixt and between,” in a state that may be called a
liminal period or threshold time when great change is possible. Her state of being diasporic
and being pregnant engender, in many ways, the transitional quality of the body, in which the
body’s physical boundaries in diaspora are ceaselessly changing.
Both characters Mrs. Sen and Ashima initially suffer from drifting among a
disassociated and dispossessed life due to cultural displacement. This experience of
alienation and estrangement seems to be unavoidable for immigrant women. However, to
survive themselves in this diasporic life, both characters develop their own way of coping
with the difficulties in an adopted society. In the next part, I will elucidate how they both
utilize culinary practices as means of resistance as well as ways of creating a more productive
perspective in diasporic life.
Women Immigrants’ Culinary Practices as Bodily Technique of
Self-Articulation in Everyday Life
Foods, foodways, culinary praxis and their gendered inflections in South Asian
immigrant women’s diasporic life are an important element in “Mrs. Sen’s” and The
Namesake. In the cases of Mrs. Sen and Ashima, their cookery has become a bodily
performative act to articulate their emotions and perceptions of their diapsoric life. Judith
Butler defines “performative act” as a reiterated doing, “not a doing by a subject who might
be said to preexist the deed,” but rather an act that creates the subject (25). To borrow this
notion of the performative dimension of everyday life, Mrs. Sen and Ashima’s subjectivity as
marginalized South Asian immigrant women is partly constituted by their continual acts of
Indian cultural praxis, including their culinary practices. To argue that culinary practices are
performative acts is to acknowledge the representative as well as the material qualities of

Culinary Narratology 14
food. In analyzing ethnic culinary praxis, Herbert Gans postulates the elaborate relationship
between immigrant foodways, ethnicity and identity formation as “expressive” and
“symbolic” (436). According to his argument, in consuming particular kinds of ethnic foods,
immigrants are able to immerse themselves in connecting to their cultural traditions without
being forced to incorporate themselves into their everyday behavior. However, Anita
Mannur has the opposite view, arguing that immigrants’ desire to consume certain ethnic
foods actually represents how they deliberately intend to racialize themselves in particular
and powerful ways (58). Thus, eating can serve as a performative act for immigrants as well
as an important site of resistance.
Reading culinary practices as a performative act of resistance relies not only on the
symbolic, but also the material qualities of food, as well as the ways food represents and
performs the solidity and materiality of the body. The association between what a person
eats and identifies with is always reiterated and reconstructed by daily quotidian acts.
Therefore, through the act of consuming particular foods, bodies can become social beings
that literally embody certain kinds of consciousness, such as a sense of nationality or
ethnicity. In analyzing the interactions between foodways and ethnic identity formations,
Jennifer Ho argues that food serves as a significant medium for compliance with and
resistance to Americanization (3). Cooking, eating, and choices of ingredients consequently
become explicitly political acts of resistance in demarcating boundaries of either inclusion or
exclusion and affirmation or negation within an imaginatively constructed home in diasporic
lives. For the female immigrants in Lahiri’s works, culinary practices may be considered as
routes toward the racialization of their characters into gender and class conventions. In
addition, food and eating also reveal what is imagined as linguistically impossible, gesturing
towards what is outside social discourse and forms of embodied knowledge that lurk at the
limits of textual possibility. In Mrs. Sen’s case, as she is silenced by her husband and the
normalizing influence of American society, the only way she can express herself is through

Culinary Narratology 15
her culinary practice. Similarly, for Ashima, it is also through cooking and feasts that she is
able to maintain and chronicle her diasporic life in a meaningful way.
Mrs. Sen’s Culinary Praxis as Performative Resistance and Generation of Self Agency
The detailed descriptions in the narrative of food and food-related behavior in “Mrs.
Sen” impact her immigrant experience. As the narrator notes, there are only two things that
can make Mrs. Sen happy: “the arrival of letters from her family” in India (121) and food that
reminds her of India. Some critics, such as Madhuparna Mitra, consider Mrs. Sen’s
enthusiasm for replicating the household life of her past as the reason why she is incapable of
dealing with the reality of her new life in the US. Mitra interprets Mrs. Sen as a tragic
figure in refusing to modify her food-related behavior and in not adapting herself to her new
environment (195). In other words, the experience of living in another culture, with its
different language, foods, and customs, will necessitate some change of routine, if not a
complete re-orientation of one’s daily life. There are some things subjected to change in
Mrs. Sen’s life; for example, the fresh whole fish that she usually cooks is not available
where she now lives, so she must substitute fish fillet for it. But she realizes that there are
changes, both large and small, that she will have to make if she is not simply to survive, but
to thrive in America. Mrs. Sen’s memories of her homeland do not guarantee her a
persistent, comfortable way to deal with the alienation of her life in America. Quite the
opposite, her nostalgia and her enthusiasm about replicating an Indian domestic life only
seem to more acutely highlight the contrast between her idealized past and the pathetic
loneliness of her present life.
From Elliot’s observations, the way Mrs. Sen prepares Indian cuisine in an extravagant
way in her apartment serves as a spectacle of otherness. Eliot describes how he likes
“watching Mrs. Sen as she chopped things” (114) in the “roped off” (115) area on the living
room floor. Moreover, the blade she uses, a bonti, curves like the prow of a Viking ship

Culinary Narratology 16
(114) and embodies a strong sense of exoticism. The way that Mrs. Sen prepares these
foods reinforces the performative aspects of her cookery: “Facing the sharp edge without ever
touching it, she took whole vegetables between her hands and hacked them apart . . . . She
split things in half, then quarters, speedily producing florets, cubes, slices, and shreds. She
could peel a potato in seconds” (114). For Eliot, Mrs. Sen’s preparation of foods is a
culinary performance. Through the preparation of Indian foods and telling Eliot stories of
her past life, Mrs. Sen allows the boy to see her in that far off world, all while they are really
in a tiny, confined space. Notably, this spectacle of otherness is covered up when Eliot’s
mother comes to fetch him, indicating that Mrs. Sen understands the suspect nature of such
otherness in her community. By the time Eliot’s mother arrives, Mrs. Sen always makes
sure that “all evidence of her chopping was disposed of” (117). Consequently, even in her
home Mrs. Sen must eventually submit to the alien and alienating American culture that is
never likely to understand or accept her story. All the traces of difference and foreignness
have to be covered up for she knows that the appearance of strangeness may cause the
prohibition of her secret space within which her agency can possibly be engendered.
Ganguly suggests that Indian cuisine functions metonymically in relation to the
formation of a South Asian immigrant identity, since “the whiff of belongingness, nostalgia,
or hope is carried along by the taste and aromas of a wide range of dishes” (126). Mrs.
Sen’s obsession with making traditional Indian cuisine is closely associated with her intention
to replicate Indian life in America. Within her private space in the university apartment,
preparing and cooking Indian food has become a sacred ritual to which Mrs. Sen devotes
herself in creating a small Indian world. Food is crucial in Mrs. Sen’s self-representation, as
her culinary practices provide her with a heterotopia, a sheltering space for her uneasy and
dispossessed mind. A heterotopia is best understood as an undefined space that serves as an
excellent hermeneutic framework in the analysis of Mrs. Sen’s resistance to the dominant
culture of her new home. Heterotopias represent places that offer multiple possibilities

Culinary Narratology 17
within which a spatialized “otherness” can flourish, and thus they operate as spaces
comprised of a multiplicity of real-and-imagined places (Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” 24).
The culinary practices conducted in Mrs. Sen’s kitchen or household open up a liminal space
between the mundane American world and her homeland far away. For Mrs. Sen, her
household represents a space of her own, which is beyond the reach of the normalizing and
assimilating force of Americanization, as well as her husband’s inconsiderate requirements.
According to Foucault’s notions of normalization, the subjects to be normalized must have to
be seen for “[t]heir visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them”
(Discipline and Punish 87). Consequently, when Mrs. Sen stays in her apartment, and
specifically in her the kitchen, her body is not under surveillance as a “marginalized other” by
the public, white-dominant gaze. Within this space produced by herself, surrounded by
familiar food materials, Mrs. Sen manages a sophisticated ritualization of remembering and
invoking the memories of her life in India. This is her own way of existing in the alienating
world from which her fragmentary yet tenacious memory of her past life will still live on.
Mrs. Sen’s insistence on the sensory construction of her Indian home is a way of
racializing her diasporic space in the foreign land. To a certainty, Mrs. Sen’s culinary art
can be regarded as performances in which home can be imagined and recreated through
associative Indian ingredients, flavors and tastes. More importantly, traditional foodways
fill her void of exile life and homelessness in acts of culinary belongingness that produces the
familiarity of home. By recreating the fragrances of home through the culinary occupation
of space in her apartment, Mrs. Sen is able to ward off her emptiness of solitude and sense of
dispossession as the customary culinary skills leads to poetic imaginings of far-away Indian
life which is brought into her current living space. Apparently, the making of Indian cuisine
has become a medium through which Mrs. Sen is able to transpose and recreate her memories
of the past within her present dwelling, albeit her arduous efforts turn out to be a tragic
failure.

Culinary Narratology 18
In this specific context, fish is regarded as a floating signifier that simultaneously reveals
and resists the colonizing imprint of otherness in the form of reconfigured culinary heritage.
The consumption of fish plays an essential part in Calcutta life. As Mrs. Sen recalls, she has
grown up eating fish twice a day, and people in Calcutta eat fish “first thing in the morning,
last thing before bed” (123). Eating fresh fish has become an inscribed urge within Mrs.
Sen’s body, incorporated in her daily life. In the US, where fresh fish is not easily to be
acquired, “[i]t was always a whole fish she desired,” the narrative voice observes, “not
shellfish, or the fillets that Eliot’s mother had broiled one night when she’d invited a man
from her office to dinner” (123). Due to its scarcity, each time when she has fresh fish Mrs.
Sen treats it very carefully: “she pulled the blade out of the cupboard, spread newspapers
across the carpet, and inspected her treasures. One by one she drew them from the paper
wrapping, wrinkled and tinged with blood . . .” (127). This behavior with the fish is a way
for Mrs. Sen to practice an important ritual in which she can find solace. To a certain degree,
the fresh fish gives Mrs. Sen the security of cultural belonging.
Lahiri uses Mrs. Sen’s hardships and set-backs in acquiring fresh fish as ways of
defining the external parameters of her terrain, which is understood in terms of her kitchen or
apartment (Kunow 168). Tragically, the route from Mrs. Sen’s apartment to the fish market
symbolizes an obstacle course that exposes her predicament as an immigrant whose lack of
mobility indicates a lack of capability in constructing a flexible identity. These
inconvenience and hindrance do not impede Mrs. Sen’s determination on cooking a fish in a
traditional as well as authentic Bengali way. Due to the humiliating experience Mrs. Sen
confronts on the bus while she was on her way home from seaside shop, 6 the second time
when Mrs. Sen has to get the fish by herself, she prefers to risk driving to the seaside rather
than take a bus. For once, she overcomes her fear and decides to use the car, taking Eliot
along with her. Yet on the way to the fish shop she has an accident: “she is startled by other
cars’ horn and hits a telephone pole on the opposite corner” (134). When the policeman

Culinary Narratology 19
arrives and asks for her driving license she does not have one, and is so panicked that she
keeps repeating “Mr. Sen teaches mathematics at the university” by way of explanation (134).
Although Mrs. Sen and Eliot are not in any way hurt, Eliot’s mother takes him away and the
narrative ends. This incident actually reveals the critical tension between Mrs. Sen’s
struggle to replicate her attachment to her past memory of India, as represented by its
foodways, and an American culture that urges immigrants to assimilate. 7
Mrs. Sen’s story shows that food preparation has become a way for her to reconstruct
her own identity and to re-assert her subjectivity outside of any prescribed position as a
newly arrived immigrant woman. The possessive form of the story’s title, “Mrs. Sen’s,”
should be noted, indicating a sense of ownership, while the object she possesses remains
intangible (William 74). To possess something, one must assert the presence of subjectivity
and a sense of existence. The incomplete title thus indicates an on-going process of forming
autonomy. In a way, this apostrophe “s” may imply a kind of alternative knowledge and
autonomy which at least hints at more productive and nurturing ways of creating
relationships with others (William 75). Though unsuccessful, Mrs. Sen will keep striving
for her own definition of living in diaspora by utilizing her foodways and culinary arts.
Through the performative act of daily culinary praxis, food preparation serves as Mrs. Sen’s
technique of resistance to assert a certain degree of agency and subjectivity, which function
as alternative ways of implicit self-articulation to protest the dominant culture.
Nevertheless, Mrs.
Sen’s frustration does not completely equal a failure of her agency. Instead, it is de facto a
continuation of the display of her determined resistance that reveals her sense of agency. In
the first place, she has given her life to this marriage and moved to America, given up her
community life in India and her native language and thus tries to negotiate a place in this
foreign country. It is within this confined condition that she intends to preserve a certain
degree of her way of life – her insistence on cooking in a traditionally Indian way.

Culinary Praxis as a Technology of the Self in Ashima’s Diasporic Life
Culinary Narratology 20
As with Mrs. Sen, for Ashima in The Namesake food preparation is linked not only to
her reformation of subjectivity and re-negotiation of her ethnic identity, but also to her ability
to forge a connection with others. Overall, important occasions in Ashima’s life in the US
can be chronicled by a series of community gatherings associated with feasts, each of which
represent a common terrain for her to articulate the significant moments in the life stories of
her family and herself. These occasions include Gogol’s and Sonia’s baptism, known as
“annaprasan” – a rice ceremony and also and the first ceremony for all Bengalis (38-39),
Gogol’s and Sonia’s birthday parties, with hybridized American and Indian traditional foods
(78), a traditional and elaborate Indian feast for Gogol’s girlfriend, Maxine (148), a plainly
prepared mourner’s diet forgoing meat and fish for her husband Ashoke’s death (180-81), and
eventually, her farewell feast after she decides to sell her house and to “spend six months of
her life in India, six months in the States” (275). To trace these life events is also to witness
Ashima’s gradual change and her negotiation of a balance between assimilation and
accommodation in the US. These feasts and gatherings metaphorically serve as her life
journal, delineating important moments in her diasporic life.
In a way, cookery has become Ashima’s own technology or practice of the self that helps
her live a diasporic life. In light of Foucault, technology of the self means “a certain
number of operations on [individuals’] own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of
being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness”
(“Technologies of the Self” 225). In other words, at the level of individual everyday
practice, though situated in power regimes, individuals are still allowed a certain degree of
freedom and self-determination in the interpretation and application of the demands of power
network to their own lives. These technologies of the self range from the concrete
techniques used to order daily existence, to the spiritual significance attached to these
activities that individuals use in interpreting their experiences. In Ashima’s case, her

Culinary Narratology 21
practice of culinary skills represents her “arts of existence” which are, in Foucault’s words,
“those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of
conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being,
and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain
stylistic criteria” (The Use of Pleasure 10-11). In coping with the dispossessed life in
diaspora, cookery has become an important way to ease Ashima’s sense of uprootedness and
to further re-build a certain degree of self agency and autonomy.
In the first half of the novel, Ashima is portrayed as typical immigrant woman who fears
that her previous life will vanish and be replaced by “something more complicated and
demanding” (49-50). Hence, in the cultural aspects of everyday life, she privileges India
over America, as demonstrated by her choices of wearing traditional Indian sari and
preserving Bengali food recipes, despite all the inconveniences this entails (65). Dress and
food thus become salient cultural possessions that Ashima adheres to in her daily life in order
to maintain her familiar cultural identity. In the first half of her immigrant life in the US,
Ashima, a faithful, submissive wife as well as a caring mother, considers her husband and
children’s interests the most. After the births of Gogol and Sonia, children become
Ashima’s second focus with regard to networking with other Bengali immigrant families.
Her son Gogol’s baptism, the “annaprasan, his rice ceremony” (38), is the first big event that
brings other Bengali families into Ashima’s circle. Though Ashima tries her best to
replicate the authenticity of this important ritual, she still feels a sense of loss for she cannot
help wishing that her own siblings and parents could be there to feed and bless her son (40).
Initially as a newly arrived immigrant, Ashima perceives the US as a foreign country where
her son Gogol’s birth “so alone, so deprived” (25) due to the absence of elder relatives’
prayers and blessings for the new born baby. Therefore, the Bengali community serves as
her only “acquaintances” or “substitutes for the people who really ought to be surrounding
them” (24), providing solace and support. Whenever a decision is to be made, Ashoke and

Culinary Narratology 22
Ashima constantly discuss the issue within this community: “Each step, each acquisition, no
matter how small, involves deliberation, consultation with Bengali friends” (64). After
Gogol’s annaprasan, there come more gatherings with elaborate feasts, including Sonya’s
annaprasan, birthday parties and every Indian as well as American festival. Gradually, the
Gangulys acquire new patterns in their immigrant life: “Every weekend, it seems, there is a
new home to go to, a new couple or young family to meet. They all come from Calcutta, and
for this reason alone they are friends” (38). Communal gatherings have become an
important facet of Ashima’s diasporic life. Being a dutiful hostess and preparing all the
foods, though exhausting, has become a way that she can define herself in the US.
The role of Indian feasts is reconfigured as a cultural signifier in The Namesake, as they
are shown as being crucial for the construction and maintenance of Indian communities in the
US. On the intertwined relationship between foodways and identity formation, food and its
various representations function as markers of cultural difference which generate the
formation of collective as well as individual identities within diasporic contexts. This
apparent mundaneness and anchorage in everyday life has always endowed Indian food with
a significance that is reinforced in another country, and it is consumed as both material and
cultural sustenance. To borrow Rushdie’s notion, Kunow notes that, on a cultural level,
Indian food is essentially a representation deployed to support the construction of Indian
diasporic communities as an “Imaginary Homeland” (157-58). In this regard, what is of
particular significance here is how food and related behaviors have been invested with the
potential to mediate distances from the subcontinent. Among all food related behaviors, the
routine gatherings of Indian immigrant families is of particular importance in The Namesake.
The close relationship between food and communal identity can also be traced back to
premodern or primitive societies, where “the rituals of eating, sharing food and other
activities around food serve to be an integrative mechanism for the whole community” (Falk
24-25). This notion of sharing food and forming a collective identity is further enhanced

Culinary Narratology 23
among diaspora communities, in which some immigrants tend to clutch all tradition in
resistance to cultural assimilation. In these kinds of communities, immigrants’ formation of
subjectivity is closely tied to the group, and their collective identity is realized by means of
communal feasts.
For first generation South Asian immigrants, the regular communal gatherings
further act as an important occasion to construct and cultivate second generation immigrants’
identity of Indian heritage. In The Namesake, most first generation Indian immigrant
parents hold a double consciousness, hoping that their offspring can adopt appropriate
behaviors and achieve success in American society, yet at the same time maintaining a strong
cultural sense of themselves as South Asians. Ashima is also alarmed when she finds her
ABCD 8 children becoming completely Americanized, without any trace of Indianness within
them, as she still feels unaccustomed to life in the US. 9
The “half true” life in the US that
Ashima perceives corresponds to the notion of the unhomely, a state that reflects immigrant
experiences as “something of the estranging sense of the relocation of the home and the
world in an unhallowed place” (Bhabha 445). To be unhomed is not the same as to be
homeless; the state of being unhomely indicates Ashima’s negotiation of living between the
newly acquired American space and her Indian upbringing, and particularly her struggle with
the Americanization of her children and her own attempt to raise them with Indian values.
Thus, she appeals to communal sustenance, hoping that the feasts may also help maintain her
children’s awareness of their Indian origins as well as to sate her nostalgia with familiar foods
and faces.
After many years of living in the US, Ashima gradually finds herself a balanced position
between resistance and assimilation, once again played out through festivals, gatherings and
food. For her children’s sake, Ashima learns to accept some American ways, celebrating
Christmas “with progressively increasing fanfare, the birth of Christ, an event the children
look forward to far more than the worship of Durga and Saraswati” (64) and at Thanksgiving

Culinary Narratology 24
Ashima learns to “roast turkeys, albeit rubbed with garlic and cumin and cayenne” (64), as
well as other American festivals Gogol and Sonia learn from school. As for the children’s
birthday parties, Ashima “cooks for days beforehand” and feels stressed due to the “task of
feeding a handful of American children, half of whom always claim they are allergic to milk,
all of whom refuse to eat the crusts of their bread” (72). In addition, there are other ways
that Ashima gives in to the hybridization of American and Indian culture. Although Ashima
constantly refuses to consume supermarket ready-made items, she lets Gogol and Sonia.
Thus, at Gogol’s insistence, Ashima “concedes and makes him an American dinner once a
week as a treat, Shake’n Bake chicken or Hamburger Helper prepared with ground lamb”
(65). To accommodate her children’s tastes as well as her own, Ashima has to maintain both
Americanized and authentic Indian cuisines at home. Gradually, her compromise over
foodways reveals her attitude of negotiations between two cultures.
Ashima’s production and consumption of hybrid foods with Indian and American
ingredients articulates an alternative dimension to diasporic culinary narratives. Her actions
indicate the possibility of communicative acts which can provide cultural mediations,
culinary negotiations and diasporic relocations. In preparing Indian foods in an alien
kitchen, Ashima learns how migration engenders complex changes in the deep structures of
her everyday life – a never-ending series of negotiations of self identity and a sense of
belongingness that shifts between home as a place of origin and home as a lived experience
of locality at present.
Woman without Borders
Food and social and cultural practices of cooking and eating are significant in charting
and maintaining a collective memory and self identity in a diasporic context. Food
preparation and consumption also reveals a great deal about gender and family relations, as

Culinary Narratology 25
well as cultural identity; hence the kitchen itself is an important site in terms both of its
signification and of the everyday practices by which immigrant women, such as Mrs. Sen and
Ashima, foster and reproduce an identity which is distinctive.
The Namesake starts with pregnant Ashima’s yearning for a traditional Bengali snack,
and the end of the novel also plays with the notions of food and the kitchen, with Ashima’s
final preparations for an elaborate farewell feast. Years after Ashoke’s death, with both her
children Gogol and Sonia living their own lives away from their parental home, Ashima
decides to sell the house she has lived in for over three decades and to divide her time
between the US and India. On Christmas Eve 2000, Ahsima hosts a farewell party in the
house where she has spent her life in the US with her husband and children. After the party,
Ashima will fulfill a plan that she had made years ago – to return to Calcutta someday:
Ashima has decided to spend six months of her life in India, six months in the
States. It is a solitary, somewhat premature version of the future she and her
husband had planned when he was alive. In Calcutta, Ashima will live with her
younger brother, Rana, and his wife, and their two grown, as yet unmarried
daughters, in a spacious flat in Salt Lake. There she will have a room, the first in
her life intended for her exclusive use. In spring and summer she will return to the
Northeast, dividing her time among her son, her daughter, and her close Bengali
friends. True to the meaning of her name, she will be without borders, without a
home of her own, a resident everywhere and nowhere. (275-76)
The imperative of returning to Calcutta becomes a feeling of ambivalence that possesses
Ashima. Rather than a blissful sense of certainty, Ashima is overwhelmed by the thought of
the move she is about to make – “to the city that was once home and is now in its own way
foreign” (278). Accordingly, she begins to ponder the notion of home, indicating that while
first generation expatriates always yearn to return to their homeland someday, it only really
exists in their imagination. More accurately, the homeland still exists, but they no longer

Culinary Narratology 26
belong there. Living in diaspora, be it forced or voluntary exile, usually leads immigrants to
a broken identification with and alienation from their previous and present cultures and
homelands. Such returning immigrants are always in a state of not belonging, a state of
in-betweenness in both countries. Even so, as for this “unexpected life” that her husband
gave her in the US, “which she had refused for so many years to accept” (280), this diasporic
life has become an indispensable part of Ashima’s existence.
Consequently, she is aware that returning to Calcutta is unlikely to cure her
long-standing sense of loss at being an expatriate. Instead, it may lead to another sense of
loss and disorientation for Ashima. The most salient change is that “she will have a room,
the first in her life intended for her exclusive use” (275). It is important that this room of
her own will not be equivalent to a kitchen of her own in her house on Pamberton Road,
where she acted as hostess, prepared foods, read books and wrote greeting cards to her
friends. It is also to the kitchen where she first went when she learned of the death of her
husband. For the past three decades, Ashima has made her kitchen the center of her home,
the place that ties familial and communal bonds together. Returning to India, she is only a
guest, no longer a hostess who can claim the place as her home. For thirty-three years she
has missed her life in India; however, from now on she will miss her job at the library, the
women with whom she has worked, the parties she has thrown, the days living with her
children, and she “will miss the country in which she had grown to know and love her
husband” (279). What grips her now is the ambivalent sense of home, the state of being a
woman “without borders, without a home of her own” (276). “Though she still wears saris,
still puts her long hair in a bun, she is not the same Ashima who had once lived in Calcutta”
for she will return to Calcutta as half Indian, with an American passport and American social
security card (276). This ambivalence with regard to her identity actually provides
multiple-layered perspectives about “what it is to be a hyphenated individual” and “what are
the ramifications for the self of a body that no longer responds to the homeland without

Culinary Narratology 27
qualification” (Mishra 195). The notion of homeland may not necessarily or arbitrarily
associates with the place of one’s birth.
Lahiri’s depiction of Ashima’s struggle as a woman immigrant in the United States
represents the collective predicament of people who have migrated elsewhere, who are
“without borders, without a home of their own, a resident everywhere and nowhere” (276).
There is the sense of belonging as well as not belonging to the country of adoption. Placed
at the crossroads of cultures, Ashima has preciously clung to the values she imbibed during
the first nineteen years of her life, her formative years in India and her ancestral culture,
which are not so easy to eradicate. Similarly, after all her years living in the US, she is not
able to discard these experiences either: “[T]hough she still does not feel fully at home within
these walls on Pemberton Road, she clearly knows that this is home nevertheless – the world
for which she is responsible, which she has created, which is everywhere around her, needing
to be packed up, given away, thrown out bit by bit” (280). For Ashima, the journey of
migration generates the split between home as a fixed place of origin and home as the sensory
world of her everyday experience. For her, the notion of home is no longer defined as
spatial locality, but is rather a temporal thread in which memories and nostalgia for the past
are invested, alongside her lived experiences in the present and future with her family.
Conclusions
In “Mrs. Sen’s” and The Namesake, Lahiri uses the female protagonists to elucidate the
interconnections between the exploration of agency and the ways these women are
marginalized as Others. These characters exhibit a spectrum of agency in terms of the
degrees of their resistance, from Mrs. Sen, a flattened, one-dimensional, submissive
immigrant housewife, to Ashima, who is able to more fully express her agency through
cookery, although both are caught between the conflicting demands of two different cultures.
The diasporic perplexity these women immigrants confront demonstrates itself to be a

Culinary Narratology 28
paradox – for these female protagonists often demonstrate both agency and at the same time a
lack of it. Lahiri’s delineation of female immigrants reveals a complexity of displaying
agency in diasporic context.
In the representations of diasporic life considered in this chapter, foodways are central
for the representation, performance and maintenance of a diasporic identity. As for female
immigrants, when food preparation is complemented by personal choice, it can be an
empowering bodily practice, a performative action. This article tries to trace the processes
of bodily as well as cultural performance and representation as organized around female
immigrants’ culinary narratives. Mrs. Sen, saturated in the anguish of her lost homeland,
remains self-consciously aware of her ethnicity, driving long miles to acquire a necessary
food ingredient for a favorite Bengali dish. She tries to recreate her familial, social, and
cultural past in India and relocate them in her present spaces; hence, her ethnicity as South
Asian American is performed in everyday life in terms of her cookery. Unlike Mrs. Sen,
who ends in frustration, the other female protagonist, Ashima, adopts a more dynamic model
of dealing with the past. Ashima revises her yearnings for home and memories of India
through the lens of the present within the space of diaspora. Her cookery has become her
technology of the self in everyday life, a way to build familial and communal connections
whereby she is able to reclaim agency and create an alternative notion of home for herself.
For both women immigrants, they display their aesthetics of living style in diaspora with
culinary arts, creating a sense of self by making themselves “at home” in “alien kitchens.”

Notes
Culinary Narratology 29
1 See Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile bodies: Toward a Corporal Feminism. Sydney: Allen and
Unwin, 1994; Schilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage, 1993 and Bryan
S. Turner (ed). The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory. London: Sage, 1991.
2 Lahiri portrays varied types of first generation women’s attitudes towards the concept of
cultural assimilation. Different from Mrs. Sen and Ashima, we also have the kind of mother
in “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” who prefers her daughter to embracing American
culture, without a burden of their past history.
3 Lahiri has been criticized for repeating the stereotypes of the dichotomy, portraying
western womanhood as self-assertive, cold and self-centered while the traditional Indian
mothers are warm, motherly and thoughtful.
4 Madhuparna Mitra writes that “Mrs. Sen’s” is perhaps “the most poignant” story in
depicting a female immigrants uprooted from her “comfortable upper-middle-class” home in
Calcutta and re-rooted in the new continent America (193).
5 As Noelle Brada-Williams indicates, the recurring themes of Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection of
short stories are the barriers to and opportunities for human communications in communal,
marital, extra-marital and parent-child relationships as well as the dichotomy of care and
neglect (451).
6 The first time Mrs. Sen decides to get fresh fish on her own is when she takes a bus to the
seaside. However, Mrs. Sen confronts the most direct racist marginalization on her way
home from the fish market. Specifically, she is confronted by an old lady and the bus driver
who interrogate Mrs. Sen about the bag she carries. This trip is an unpleasant experience
that deepens Mrs. Sen’s recognition of being an outsider in this society.
7 Mitra’s questioning the need to make “assimilative compromises” seems to carry a message
indicating a teleological intention that all immigrants aspire to a successful assimilation.
8 Critics have described second generation immigrants as “American,” “Anglo-Indian,”
“NRI” for “Non-Resident Indian,” or “ABCD” or American born confused deshi.
9 Lahiri portrays various first generation women’s attitudes towards the concept of cultural
assimilation. Different from Mrs. Sen and Ashima, we also have the mother in “When Mr.
Pirzada Came to Dine” who prefers her daughter to embrace American culture without a
burden of history.

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Culinary Narratology 30
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