Ingestion, digestion and revulsion of food and culture in Anita Desai's fasting, feasting

This article attempts a cultural study of food and eating habits in Anita Desai's Booker Prize short-listed novel, Fasting, Feasting. It shows how the ingestion of food affects acculturation process both in India and America in a multicultural context. Considering Foucault's view that discourse is involved in the exertion of power, some of the discourses from the novel are 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 assert power are analysed by examining appropriate instances from the novel. Further, it shows how the novelist, through a transcultural bundle of representative characters as Mama Papa, Uma, Arun, the Pattons, Melanie, and Rod, assesses the cross-cultural culinary habits, divergences, and subversions involved. However, it concludes with the observation that taking the novel as a dichotomous study of two cultures, the one Indian, on account of its spiritual dimension representing ‘fasting’, and the other, American due to its plenty signifying ‘feasting’, would result in a myopic reading. Whereas, the real charm of the novel lies in the flux shown between fasting and feasting - a digesting of the best of both the cultures.