Intermingling of Collective Memories with Food in Lahiri’s Fiction

This paper aims to present an alternative reading of Lahiri’s fiction by subverting the perception that food serves only as a substance of nourishment for human beings and by interlocking of collective memory, group membership and culture with food. According to the principal argument of the paper, food, in Lahiri’s literary texts, becomes an instrument of restructuring of Indian immigrants’ cultural peculiarity in America and giving rise to the awareness of cultural and social groupings which play an active role in reconstruction of collective memories as well as challenging the fact of overall extinction of commonly and collectively shared cultural values of Indians. The Namesake (2003) and “The Third And Final Continent”, a short story from Interpreter of Maladies (1999), will be analyzed by extending the meaning of food further to such an extent that definably characterizes the fundamental pieces of immigrants’ native origins that have been harboured in the face of distance.