A man is what he eats (and what he doesn’t) : on the use of traditional food culture in Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting and Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace

Among the problems left open by two centuries of British colonialism, that of Indian modernity has yet to find a satisfactory solution. How can India become a modern democratic nation without mimicking the west on the one hand and without shedding her millennial culture on the other? Contemporary novelists, especially NRIs, have often addressed the issue both from a sociological and from a cultural viewpoint. Since food is a universal experience for human beings, which traverses political, gender, and castes boundaries, for a writer it may become a vantage point from which society can be observed, as well as an objective correlative of the characters’ plight, or even a clue to the author’s.