Savouring the Text: The Semiotics of Culinary Imagery in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things

Author

Prashanth Kuberkar


Abstract

 In the Indian English novel, food is seldom a mere setting, but serves as an intricate semiotic code that allows the expression of caste, gender, memory, transgression and postcolonial anxiety. This paper proposes a sustained strategy that the culinary imagery of Arundhati Roy's novel The God of Small Things (1997) provides for the novel. This article suggests that Roy's Ayemenem is a world of kitchens, pickle factories, banana jam, orange squash, and the ritualized presentation and denial of food, and that these images form a parallel plot which follows the main themes of the novel, the “Love Laws” of “who should be loved and how and how much.” Close reading of the text, coupled with the adoption of frameworks from food studies, postcolonial theory and feminist criticism, reveals three overlapping roles for culinary imagery—food as a symbol of caste/class boundary, most obviously in the touchability/untouchability economy surrounding Velutha, food as a repository of gendered labour and repressed desire in Ammu, Mammachi, and the Paradise Pickles and Preserves factory, and food as a vehicle for childhood perception and traumatic memory, as filtered through the twins, Rahel and Estha. The paper also places Roy's culinary poetics into the larger context of Indian English writing, and compares her techniques with other Indian English novelists who use food as a cultural metaphor, sketching out the differences in their approaches briefly. Roy makes the kitchen and the pickle vat into places where the past and the future are preserved, and where history, desire and prohibition ferment together; the analysis shows that culinary imagery is essential to the structure and thematic logic of the novel, not a mere flourish.

The God of Small Things' writing is invested with culinary imagery, which is also given a symbolic significance with respect to food.The God of Small Things' writing is filled with culinary imagery, which is also assigned a symbolic value in relation to food.



Keywords

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things, Postcolonial Literature, Indian English Literature, Semiotics, Culinary Imagery



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References


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