'AS MOTHER MADE IT': THE COSMOPOLITAN INDIAN FAMILY, 'AUTHENTIC' FOOD AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF CULTURAL UTOPIA

Abstract

This paper examines the aesthetics and pragmatics of packaged food consumption in the twin transnational communities of the urban middle class in Bangalore city in south India, and the diasporic middle class community in Boston, USA. It investigates the construction of an ethnic 'Indian' identity in a multicultural field through ritualized food consumption, focusing upon the relationship between 'authentic' consumption, the anxieties of motherhood and the politics of family provisioning among South Asians. / argue that severed are at play in the provisioning and consumption of Indian food. Food provisioning is fuelled by a metci-narrative of loss in which food consumption is seen as a narrative of affiliative desire that affectively recreates caste, micro regional and other social identity groupings for the cosmopolitan family. Fuelled by a narrative of anxiety over authentic foods-as mother them-the act of eating is transformed into a performance of gastro-nostalgia that attempts to create a cultural Utopia of ethnic Indianness that is conceptually de linked from the nation state. Finally, narratives of subterfuge, often invest the preparation of these packaged heat-and-eat home made foods, as cosmopolitan South Asian women attempt to be socially acceptable models of domesticity. The burgeoning transnational packaged food industry that enables such utopic eating is examined in socio-historical terms to complement the perspective by adding the component of the economic sub-structure that underpins this