Memories Are Made of This

“THE MANGOES were always eaten slowly, reverently, their juice running down our wrists as though time itself had paused to let us taste happiness,” Madhur Jaffrey writes in her memoir, Climbing the Mango Trees. In much contemporary feminist life writing, food is bound up with nostalgia: mangoes, meals and kitchens are repositories of affection, patience, familial warmth and childhood. In Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s writing, particularly The Mistress of Spices, cooking is a medium through which women navigate memory, migration and emotional survival, and recipes travel across geographies, carrying the weight of longing. Jhumpa Lahiri, too, repeatedly returns to food as intimacy—in Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake, meals mark quiet reckonings with displacement, assimilation and the fragile ways love is sustained through ritual and repetition.

Several memoirs by authors from India’s marginalised communities read starkly against this mode—where food consoles, and nourishment becomes a metaphor. In them, meals appear stripped of flavour and nostalgia. Food arrives spoiled, rationed or forbidden, and the act of eating itself is often a reminder of humiliation rather than a benign symbol of homecoming. Few books show this more directly than Baby Kamble’s The Prisons We Broke. First published in Marathi in 1986, it is one of the earliest full-length memoirs by a Dalit woman. The English translation by Maya Pandit makes clear how blunt Kamble’s sentences are, how deliberately she avoids lyricism. Even moments of ritual abundance—a buffalo sacrifice; baskets of food carried to the goddess—turn quickly into a lesson in hierarchy, as portions are handed out according to caste, gender and age.

Kamble writes about hunger in the same register as she writes festivals or gods—flat, unadorned, factual. A child eats what wriggles in her bowl. A community receives leftovers after serving a goddess. There is the smell of stale rice, the taste of watery gruel, the silence of women waiting at the edge of the plate. The dull weight of scarcity is present throughout. The effect is quite disorienting because of an emphasis on hunger as routine. Humiliation, too, does not figure as a single event, repeating until it begins to structure the narrative. In this way, Kamble pushes against the dominant mode of feminist life writing, which leans on confession or redemption. There is no healing here, no attempt at consolation or transcendence. There is only the steady insistence on how people lived.

Kamble is not alone. Urmila Pawar, in her autobiography, The Weave of My Life, which was translated from Marathi and published in 2008, writes of mealtimes where men ate first, and women learned to survive on scraps. Bama, in her 1992 autobiography, Karukku, recalls school lunches where caste determined what and how children ate. Across languages, decades and genres besides life writing, writers have represented hunger in similarly unsparing ways. Jacinta Kerketta’s Angor, a 2016 collection of poems in Hindi, which documents injustices against the Adivasi community in Jharkhand, and speaks of barren fields and exhausted bodies, where hunger is a facet of daily life. In Bani Basu’s 1990 novel A Plate of White Marble, food is a tool of control. These texts come from very different places and vantage points, but all use food to write of deprivation, while refusing to romanticise it. Whereas food writing is often lush, they choose bluntness, repetition and omission. To read them closely is to see how literature can make hunger legible through visceral detail: the fly on the jaggery paste, the quiet waiting for scraps.