Fasting Feasting Essay

This article attempts a cultural study offood and eating habits in Anita Desais Booker Prize short-listed raw, Fasting, Feasting. It shows how the ingestion offood affects acculturation process both in India and America in a multicultural context. Considering Foucaults capture that discourse is involved in the exertion of power, some of the discourses from the novel be scrutinised to reveal an oppressive power structure.Interestingly enough, the power structure of the novel revolves around a gastronomical centre and parents through repressive familial norms exert power. The linguistic strategies, such as repetition and interruption, used to uphold power are analysed by examining appropriate instances from the novel. Further, it shows how the novelist, through a transcultural bundle of representative characters as MamaPapa, Uma, Arun, the Pattons, Melanie, and Rod, assesses the cross-cultural culinary habits, divergences, and subversions involved.However, it concludes with the obs ervation that taking the novel as a dichotomous study of two cultures, the sensation Indian, on account of its spiritual dimension representing fasting, and the other, American referable to its plenty signifying feasting, would result in a myopic reading. Whereas, the real appealingness of the novel lies in the flux shown between fasting and feasting a digesting of the best of both the cultures. the very essence of Indian culture is that we be possessed of a mixed tradition, a melange of elements as disparate as ancient Mughal and contemporary Cocacola American (Salman Rushdie) From food, from food creatures, all creatures come to be. Gorging, disgorging, existence come to be. (Taittriya Upanishad) In the Indian cultural scenario, there has been a huge outcry about the safeguarding and perpetuation of the Indianness.This implies, apart from * Dr. T. Ravichandran is a Assistant professor in English, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, lIT Kanpur, India. LUCKNOW JO URNAL OF humanities VOL. 1, NO. 1, JAN-JUN 2004 Downloaded From IP 109. 161. 128. 204 on dated 23-Jan-2012 Members Copy, Not for Commercial sales agreement www. IndianJournals. com 22 T. Ravichandran Downloaded From IP 109. 161. 128.national identity, a culture characteristic of the sylvan and its inhabitants in terms of originality, purity, sanctity, and exclusivity. However, in a decolonised land that lost ofttimes of its originality andexclusivity in cultural conflicts, negotiations and transculturation processes besides gulping down some trinket from the colonisers and other foreign migrants, debating on a monistic culture is inappropriate.