Fasting Feasting Essay

This article efforts a ethnic study offood and eating routine in Anita Desai’s Booker Prize short-listed novel, Fasting, Feasting. That shows how the ingestion offood affects acculturation process at India and America within a multicultural framework. Considering Foucault’s view that discourse is definitely involved in the exertion of electrical power, some of the discourses from the novel are scrutinised to reveal an oppressive electricity structure. Strangely enough enough, the power structure of the novel involves a gastronomical centre; and parents through repressive familial norms exert electricity.

The linguistic strategies, just like repetition and interruption, used to assert electric power are analysed by reviewing appropriate occasions from the book. Further, this shows how a novelist, through a transcultural package of consultant characters as MamaPapa, Uma, Arun, the Pattons, Melanie, and Fishing rod, assesses the cross-cultural culinary habits, divergences, and bouleversement involved. Nevertheless , it proves with the statement that taking novel being a dichotomous examine of two cultures, normally the one Indian, because of its religious dimension which represents ‘fasting’, as well as the other, American due to its a great deal signifying ‘feasting, ‘ could result in a myopic reading.

Although, the real elegance of the book lies in the flux shown between going on a fast and great feasts – a digesting of the greatest of both the cultures. ” … the particular essence of Indian traditions is that all of us possess a merged tradition, a melange of elements as disparate because ancient Mughal and modern Cocacola American” (Salman Rushdie) “From food, from meals creatures, all creatures turn out to be. Gorging, disgorging, being turned out to be. ” (Taittriya Upanishad) Inside the Indian ethnic scenario, there has been a great outcry about the safeguarding and perpetuation of ‘ the Indianness. It indicates, apart from 5. Dr . To. Ravichandran can be described as Assistant Teacher in English, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, lIT Kanpur, India.

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IndianJournals. com 22 Big t. Ravichandran Downloaded From IP – 109. 161. 128. national id, a lifestyle characteristic of the country as well as inhabitants when it comes to originality, purity, sanctity, and exclusivity.

Yet , in a decolonised land that lost much of its’ originality’ and’exclusivity’ in cultural disputes, negotiations and transculturation processes besides gulping down a few novelty from your colonisers and other foreign migrants, debating on the monistic culture is incorrect.