Introduction

In Atima Srivastava's British Asian novel Looking for Maya (1999), Amrit sneeringly refers to recent South Asian diasporic fiction as ‘mangoes and coconuts and grandmothers … The Great Immigrant novel’. This verdict has also been applied to recent Indian writing in English. Thus Graham Huggan argues that ‘India … is more available than ever for consumption; and more prevalent than ever are the gastronomic images through which the nation is to be consumed.’ The tropes of food and eating, particularly in a familial setting, undoubtedly inform much current writing by South Asian Atlantic authors; and, on the basis of titles alone, some recent cultural productions do suggest that food has become a tired means of depicting South Asian diasporic life. This food-title fatigue can be traced to a body of work which includes such films as Mira Nair's Mississippi Masala (1991) in the United States and Gurinder Chadha's Bhaji on the Beach (1993) in the UK, and literary texts which include Carmit Delman's Indian Jewish American autobiography Burnt Bread and Chutney (2002), and Nisha Minhas's British Asian novel Chapatti or Chips? (1997). These works, none of which is actually about food, belong to a much longer list. What we are witnessing here are, arguably, forms of ‘ “food pornography”: [that is] making a living by exploiting the “exotic” aspects of one's ethnic food-ways’. That such material is used exploitatively – or is in itself clichéd, as Amrit implies in Looking for Maya – is, however, a more vexed proposition.