Food, Senses and Memory: A Sensory Reading of Indian Fiction

Page No.: 14-21

Abstract

This study examines how food, sensory perception, and memory intertwine in four Indian English novels. Using interdisciplinary perspectives from food studies, sensory anthropology, and memory theory, the analysis focuses on select passages that emphasize tastes, smells, and domestic culinary practices. Drawing on theoretical work by Halbwachs, Nora, Assmann, and Connerton on collective memory, as well as recent food-memory scholarship, the paper investigates how novelists encode cultural memory in gastronomic imagery. Methodologically, combined close textual reading with qualitative coding of sensory motifs in the narrative. Close readings reveal themes such as food as cultural archive, taste and smell as embodied memory, kitchens and gendered memory, ritual food and diaspora nostalgia, and food politics in postcolonial society. Quotations from the novels are interpreted in light of theory. Overall, food emerges as a multisensory mnemonic device, as memories of food are deployed to re-create home in the diaspora and exist in recollections, nostalgias, and forms of forgetting. The findings underscore the multisensory nature of narrative memory in literature.