Interpreting a culinary montage: Food in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies

Abstract

Jhumpa Lahiri, a Bengali American writer who rose to fame on being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her first work of fiction, is well known for her generous use of culinary images in her fiction. She writes about Bengali Americans and the daily challenges they face in their lives. This paper intends to examine the relevance of food consumption and its significance at the personal level as well as the broader political level in Lahiri's The Interpreter of Maladies (1999). At the textual level, the paper shows that food acts as an aid to compensate for the understated narrative style of the author. Further, this paper underpins the fact that food not only acts as an identity marker but also negotiates personal, racial, sexual and social identities of the immigrant subjects.