India on a platter

Abstract

"“Food metaphors are among the most vexing clichés of post colonial and diasporic fiction,” writes Tamara S Wagner in her essay on Malaysian and Singaporean diasporic novels. She not only identifies food metaphors as exoticizing devices, but also states that writers use them as an attempt at “self Orientalism” (31), a conscious mystification of a socially marginalized group for commercial reasons. The Mistress of Spices (2005), the cinematic adaptation of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel of the same name, is about exoticizing spices. Whereas Divakaruni’s fictional work posits spices as an empowering agency for the Indian community in America, in the film they are used as self-orientalising devices. We do not intend to decry the film on the basis of its being an unfaithful transposition of the fictional plot, but are interested to see how it deals with the issue of cultural conflict as depicted in the novel. Our main contention in this paper is that the novel propounds deep rooted multiculturalism, while its cinematic adaptation is preoccupied with exhibiting spices, which symbolize India and the Indian immigrant community, superficially, a phenomenon that Stanley Fish calls “boutique multiculturalism” (378)."(pg 1)