Recipes of Resistance: Food as Cultural Archive and Postcolonial Identity in South Indian Literature

Abstract

Food is not only basic; it is an account of cultural echoes, defiance, and identity. This paper investigates how culinary narratives in South Indian literature act as a framework to explore social hierarchy, postcolonial hybridity, and gendered exploitation. With a thorough reading of texts of Shoba Narayan’s Kitchens of Gratitude, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, and Krish Ashok’s Masala Lab, the paper studies how food functions as both a plot of revolt and nostalgia. Kitchens and recipes, frequently set aside as domestic spaces, are redefined as cultural war fragments where caste, class, and colonial settlement bisect. The paper argues that the culinary projection in these texts describes above tradition and taste, acting as a device to conserve shared memory and confronting presiding histories. In Kitchens of Gratitude, food sets off a language of connection and acknowledgement, indicating Bangalore’s cosmopolitan cultural frame. Roy’s narrative in The God of Small Things confines food to caste ordering and restrained love by making use of culinary metaphors to analyze social injustice. Ashok’s Masala Lab, while scientific in tone, recovers the cultural importance of South Indian cooking, combining humor with a postcolonial declaration of identity. By gathering the views of postcolonial theory, cultural studies, and memory studies, this paper brings out in what way food narratives represent the expanding dynamics of South Indian identification. It argues that culinary literature is not just about recipes but also opposition, recollection, and the recovery of the suppressed.