Engaging with the Partition Canon: Gastro-political narratives in Anchita Ghatak’s translation of Sunanda Sikdar’s Dayamoyeer Katha into A Life Long Ago

Abstract

The gendered experience of the Partition of 1947 has been a focal point of revalidation in the discussion of the mutilated bodies, the voices and the traumatic deferral of identities as Urvashi Butalia would point out in her The Other Side of Silence. The canon of Partition studies however has subjugated the diversity of the cultural borders by making the traumatic perception a central argument for the gendered identity. In this light, the paper seeks to challenge the ‘canon’ in the Partition memory as cultural theorist Jan Assmann would say, and attempt to reorient the narrative of the gendered experience of the Partition to produce the gastro-political sites of intersection. The patterns established of food consumption practices, of the production of food induces a tension that exists primarily on the margins of the Partition narrative and can only be intercepted by the translation, but the essence of the vernacular remains with words, and emotions that remain beyond translation. The paper examines the gastro-political notion of belonging and exclusion as it conceives the culinary language employed by Ghatak to surpass the local of the vernacular and through translation cement its position vis-à-vis national identity politics.

Keywords

• partition
• translation
• identity