Palatable Fictions

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.
net/publication/346496044
Palatable Fictions: Negotiating Narratives of

Consumption and Subalternity in Jaspreet Singh’s Chef
Chapter · November 2020
CITATIONS READS
0 227
1 author:
Rakhshan Rizwan
Utrecht University
8 PUBLICATIONS 5 CITATIONS
SEE PROFILE
All content following this page was uploaded by Rakhshan Rizwan on 10 December 2020.
The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

4 Palatable Fictions
Negotiating Narratives of
Consumption and Subalternity
in Jaspreet Singh’s Chef
The Tiger Ladies deploys textual representations of Kashmiri visual and

material culture as a means of fleshing out cultural human rights. In con-
trast, Jaspreet Singh’s Chef uses literary depictions of Kashmiri cuisine
and regional culinary customs in order to expose the gap in the human
rights that are available to citizens and “subaltern citizens” (Pandey,
“The Subaltern” 4735). I posit that Kashmiri cuisine and its representa-
tions should not only be exclusively viewed as a type of regional food-
way but also as a discursive entity. Representations of Kashmiri food on
national tourism portals, in local and regional cook books, in paintings
and on films are undergirded by narratives of desire and privilege. By
using Kashmiri food customs as its central subject matter, Chef engages
with and re-works these vexed narratives.
Kashmiri cuisine is different from other forms of Indian cuisine on
account of the fact that it does not make use of ingredients that are con-
sidered a staple in mainstream South Asian cuisine, such as onions and
garlic (Ganju xix). There are subtle differences between Kashmiri Pan-
dit and Kashmiri Muslim preparation methods and techniques, but both
forms of Kashmiri food make use of certain basic spices and ingredi-
ents in their dishes including “red chilis, fennel powder, asafetida, ginger
powder, cumin seeds, curd or yoghurt” (Ganju xix). These dishes, once
prepared, are eaten with plain white rice, instead of Indian flat bread or
roti, in order to balance the spiciness of the gravy (Ganju xix). Kashmiri
cuisine is reflective of the cultural hybridity of the Valley insofar as it has
been influenced by the cuisine of “Central Asia, Persia, Middle East and
Afghanistan” and borrows preparatory techniques and spices from the
cuisine of these different geographical regions (Chak 31).
Chef can be classified alongside other South Asian culinary-themed
novels such as Mistress of Spices (1997) by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
and Pastries: A Novel of Desserts and Discoveries (2003) by Bharti
Kirchner. These literary works commodify cultural difference as a culi-
nary practice and are immensely popular among the American reading
public for the selfsame reason (Mannur 86). Chef, Jaspreet Singh’s debut
novel is a Bildungsroman and features a young Sikh army officer, Kirpal
Palatable Fictions 159
Singh, who serves as a cook in the kitchen of the Indian army barracks in
the Valley of Kashmir. On account of the protagonist’s profession and his
posting to the army mess, descriptions of food and culinary preparation
constitute the narrative focus of Chef and as such, I argue that it falls
under the rubric of South Asian ‘food writing.’
Food writing is a genre of literary writing in which food “emerges as
a vital textual modality, one that becomes a means of articulating one’s
sense of ethnic or national identity” (Mannur 14). The ‘culinary-themed’
novel is considered a popular genre of writing within contemporary liter-
ature, particularly literature that is composed by minority or postcolonial
subjects, who are typically positioned at the margins of the nation-state
(84). In culinary-themed novels, racial, cultural or ethnic difference is
articulated through the mode of the appetizing and the consumable, and
as such, the literary text becomes a palatable, pleasing, and in a certain
sense, politically benign narrativization of otherwise vexed and loaded
issues of alterity, identity, and cultural difference (84). These forms of
food writing enable an Anglo-American readership to consume narra-
tives of otherness with minimum discomfort and guilt (83). For this rea-
son, the genre of food writing has also disparagingly been referred to as
“food pornography” by literary scholars (82).
‘Food pornography’ is defined as the commodification and exotici-
zation of culinary dishes for “mainstream readers using an Orientalist
understanding of food as a signifier of difference” (82). On the face of it,
food pornography appears to protect and popularize the cultural prac-
tices of a minority subject, but according to Sau-Ling Wong, in reality
this literary practice involves the removal of cultural and culinary prac-
tices from their appropriate social context, and their transformation into
strange, exotic edibles whose only purpose is to feed the appetites and
tastes of the metropolitan Western reader (5556). However, Chef is a
culinary-themed novel that is highly subversive and significantly different
from other examples of South Asian food writing, or food pornography.
Representations of food in Jaspreet Singh’s novel do not fulfill merely
a voyeuristic purpose; on the contrary, his text uses food to broach the
subject of rights. In this sense, Chef is a distinctive example of a culinary-
themed novel in which representations of culinary consumption function
as a larger critique of class stratification and of the difference in human
rights that are available to different citizens within a national polity.
It is however not the only example of subversive or transgressive food
writing, particularly within South Asian literary fiction. Salman Rush-
die, for example, makes use of gastronomic metaphors in his magnum
opus Midnight’s Children (1981) as a way of parodying the consumer
appetites of the metropolitan reader (Huggan, “The Postcolonial” 28).
In Midnight’s Children, India and its history transforms into edible chut-
ney and through this transmogrification, the novel appeals to the tastes
and particular appetites of its Anglo-American reading public, while also
being critical of their heightened desire to consume non-Western, particu-
larly South Asian literature, and their “complicitous enjoyment” of these
texts (Huggan, “The Postcolonial” 28).
In The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), which can be considered the
tale of an extended meal, Mohsin Hamid turns the city of Lahore into
an edible entity: “I enjoy the tea in this, the city of my birth, steeped
long enough to acquire a rich, dark color and made creamy with fresh,
full-fat milk. . . . Allow me to pour you another cup” (Hamid 15). In
this instance, it is unclear whether Changez, the protagonist of Hamid’s
work, refers to the city or the tea and the novel plays with this sense of
ambiguity, transforming the tale that he is narrating into a steaming cup
of tea. As he pours the fictional tea, he also pours his story into an attrac-
tive vessel for the American Tourist and invariably, for the Anglophone
metropolitan reader.
Similarly, when Hamid’s narrator depicts his home country for his
American girlfriend Erica, we hear that she “sip[s] at [his] descriptions
and find[s] them to her taste” (Hamid 27). In both instances the literary
narrative is cleverly turned into delectable beverage. In this way, Hamid’s
novel acknowledges the Western reader’s desire to consume postcolonial
literature while simultaneously mocking and satisfying the appetites of
its readership. The process of feeding the American Tourist in Hamid’s
novel is also a deeply political act because in certain instances it is used,
quite literally, as a device to silence him and to invert the power rela-
tions between them: “[T]he time has come to employ your tongue – for
taste, if nothing more, although I hope you can be persuaded to speak”
(Hamid 76). The shared meal becomes a way of exercising control over
the American Tourist’s ability and desire to speak and also serves as a
means of lulling him into a false sense of security.
In this chapter, I argue that Jaspreet Singh continues this tradition of
subversive South Asian food writing that uses its own consumability to
advance a critical agenda. Chef deploys visually striking and exoticized
depictions of food as a way of exemplifying the relationship between
human rights, consumption, and pleasure and as a means of exposing
the disparity in the rights available to “citizens” and “subaltern citi-
zens” (Pandey, “The Subaltern” 4735). I argue that Chef uses regional
food customs primarily to highlight the differences between the access
to pleasure and enjoyment that is on offer to Kashmiris as opposed to
non-Kashmiris.
The culinary aesthetic of Singh’s novel may be considered ‘porno-
graphic’ in some respects. Chef certainly uses delectable representations
of Kashmiri food and invites the reader to consume them. However, it
simultaneously exposes their complicity in the consumption of Kashmir
as a scenic territory, as a source of beautiful art objects and artifacts,
and as a delight for the palate. In other words, Chef uses local culinary
registers to offer a critical commentary from a diachronic perspective on
the touristic ‘consumption’ of Kashmir. In the first part of this chapter,
I analyze different representations of Kashmiri food as a discursive object
in selected cookbooks, national tourism portals, blogs and on film in
order to explore the culinary space within which Jaspreet Singh plots his
literary work Chef. I explore the relationship between human rights and
pleasure in the novel in order to highlight how certain ‘humans,’ in the
novel, are shown as having a greater entitlement to seek and consume
pleasure as compared to others. Finally, in the last part I show how this
difference in culinary pleasure and consumption functions as a rhetorical
means of highlighting the disparity in the human rights that are accessible
to citizens and subaltern citizens.
Filiation and Affiliation

Jaspreet Singh, although not an ethnically Kashmiri author, unlike the
other Anglophone authors in this book, spent part of his childhood in the
Valley of Kashmir and also affiliates himself with other Kashmiri cultural
practitioners. Said has famously defined filiation as a relationship that is
“held together by natural bonds and natural forms of authority – involv-
ing obedience, fear, love, respect, and instinctual conflict,” whereas affili-
ation involves alliances that take “transpersonal forms – such as guild
consciousness, consensus, collegiality, professional respect, class and the
hegemony of the dominant culture” (The World 20). Apart from the fact
that Chef focuses on the contested territory of Kashmir, Singh also uses
affiliative gestures in his text as a means of placing himself alongside
contemporary literary voices emanating from the Valley and from the
Kashmiri diaspora in the United Kingdom and the United States. He
acknowledges his personal debt to Agha Shahid Ali, the pioneer of con-
temporary Anglophone Kashmiri writing, in the “Acknowledgement”
section in his novel. Along with this, Singh acknowledges Basharat Peer
for his “bold reporting on Kashmir that brought attention to ‘interroga-
tion camps’ like Papa-1 and Papa-2” (248). Basharat Peer, we have seen,
is responsible for popularizing the Kashmir issue amongst metropolitan
Anglophone readers, and to an extent, for re-inserting it into the journal-
istic public sphere with Curfewed Night. The reportage Singh alludes to
was largely brought to the attention of the local and international press
by Peer’s memoir. By mentioning this work in his own novel, Singh adds
his literary text alongside the contemporary strain of English language
narratives emanating from the Valley and from Kashmiri diasporas in the
West that are starting to proliferate in Anglo-American reading markets.
By virtue of this, we should consider Jaspreet Singh a “Kashmircentric”
voice (Kabir, “Postpastoral”). Although Jaspreet Singh is not a Kashmiri
subject in the strictest sense, he affiliates himself with Kashmiri public
intellectuals, standing in solidarity with other voices from the Valley
and from the Kashmiri diaspora abroad, in parts of North America and
Europe. Hence, I would argue, his Bildungsroman should be included in
the corpus of Anglophone writing in and about Kashmir published in
recent times. Apart from being Kashmircentric and having spent a size-
able portion of his childhood in Kashmir, Singh is also rooted in other
national geographies and transnational literary terrains. For example,
although he was born in India, he moved to Canada in the 1990s and
acquired a doctorate in 1998 from McGill University (“Jaspreet”). He
currently resides in and operates from the Canadian Rockies, and in fact,
Chef, which was his first novel, won a local Canadian literary award,
namely the Georges Bugnet Prize for Fiction (2009) (“Jaspreet”). Accord-
ing to the website of the Writers Guild of Alberta, this particular prize is
only awarded to an author who is a resident of the province of Alberta,
which highlights that Singh should be considered a Canadian author, in
addition to being categorized as an Indian, Indian-Canadian and a Kash-
mircentric author (“Awards”).
Jaspreet Singh’s novel Chef, published in 2010, revolves around the
life and coming of age of the young Sikh chef, Kirpal Singh, who enlists
in the army following the demise of his father, Iqbal Singh. Whereas The
Tiger Ladies depicts the kitchen hall and its adjoining areas as a cosmo-
politan, female-dominated space, in Chef the gendered, domestic space of
a kitchen is no longer the exclusive domain of the female members of the
household, but is, on the contrary, occupied by serving members of the
Indian army. Singh’s novel begins with an aging Kirpal on a train bound
for Kashmir, where he has been invited to serve as the head chef for the
wedding of General Kumar’s daughter Rubiya to a Kashmiri Muslim,
Shahid Lone. At this point in the plot, Kirpal, the protagonist, is suffer-
ing from terminal cancer and a recent CT scan has shown that a malig-
nant tumour is present in his brain. The train journey is punctuated by
frequent flashbacks as the protagonist recalls his first trip to Kashmir as
a newly inducted officer. The novel alternates between Kirpal’s past, as
a young army office, and his present, as a dying man travelling back to
Kashmir, a place which has continued to haunt him ever since his pre-
mature leave-taking from the armed forces and his flight from the Valley.
Despite the vehement protestations of his mother who imagines Kash-
mir to be a “foreign” place “filled with turmoil,” the young Kirpal nev-
ertheless decides to travel to the Vale as a newly-inducted military officer
(Singh 23). Here he is apprenticed to Kishen, a senior chef in the Indian
army who functions as an alternative father-figure and mentor follow-
ing the death of his biological father while in active duty in the army. In
the initial stages of his apprenticeship, Kirpal is more occupied with his
exploits in the kitchen and with women than with the troubled politics
of the Valley and the focal point of his everyday existence is the prepara-
tion and arrangement of seamlessly served delectable meals for General
Kumar, his only daughter Rubiya, and the motley of guests who visit his
residence on a regular basis. However, the apparent monotony and trite
domesticity of Kirpal’s situation is interrupted when his mentor Kishen
is demoted to the dreary icefields of the Siachen glacier following an ill-
fated episode involving a botched banquet.
This marks the end of Kirpal Singh’s brief culinary apprenticeship and,
with Kishen’s position as head chef vacant, he reluctantly takes the place
of his former mentor. This episode is the first of a series of tumultuous
events including Kishen’s eventual suicide in the icefields and the appear-
ance of Irem, the Kashmiri “enemy woman,” which compels Kirpal to
confront his own religious and ethnic biases. In a traditional Bildung-
sroman, marriage along with a successful apprenticeship mark the suc-
cessful socialization of the formerly reckless youth into bourgeois society.
However, in Chef, Kirpal Singh develops romantic feelings towards Irem,
a Kashmiri Muslim woman from the other side of the LOC (Line of Con-
trol). His love remains unrequited and instead of marriage, their relation-
ship results in his departure from the Valley of Kashmir. Apprenticeship
and matrimony, both of which are typically instrumental in the Bildung of
the protagonist and his linear socialization into mainstream middle-class
society, are instead represented as sources of discord and trauma in Chef.
One particularly traumatic episode is the rape and resulting pregnancy
of Irem at the hands of an Indian army officer. Bereft of hope and unable
to alleviate Irem’s situation, Kirpal requests an early retirement from the
army and returns to the quietude of his mother’s house. Subsequently,
after a lapse of many years, Kirpal returns to Kashmir following General
Kumar’s request, and during this time Kirpal learns about Irem’s fate
through Rubiya. Meanwhile, General Kumar, unable to accept the fact
that his daughter is entering into matrimony with an enemy, a Kash-
miri Muslim man from Azad Kashmir, commits suicide just prior to her
impending nuptials and in these apocalyptic circumstances, Rubiya post-
pones the wedding and leaves Kashmir to join her fiancé Shahid across
the border, leaving Kirpal fixated on the horizon as her bus becomes a
“little black dot” disappearing into the distance (Singh 246).
Kashmiri Food in the National Imagination

Jaspreet Singh’s choice of the innocuous and seemingly trivial subject of
local culinary customs to deconstruct fraught issues relating to Kashmiri
politics and identity is not an anomalous one because Kashmiri cuisine
has a special place in the Indian palate and the national imagination.
For example, on the Incredible India website, Kashmir is represented
as a destination on the culinary map of India. “Incredible India,” which
has become an enormously popular tagline for India globally, is the title
of the official website of India’s Ministry of Tourism and was coined as
part of a hugely successful marketing campaign launched in 2002 by the
Indian government (Kerrigan et al. 319). The campaign was aimed at
attracting international and local tourists as well as lucrative business
investments and deals to the region (319). This international tourist
campaign has been labelled as an exercise in “nation branding,” which
involves the deployment of highly idealized and aesthetic images of India
in order to create and project a particular perception of the nation and its
national community (319).
The main landing page of the Incredible India website consists of sev-
eral high-definition, flashing images of India that prominently feature the
Himalayan peaks and the scenic Valley of Kashmir, both of which lie in
Jammu and Kashmir. On the top of the page are a series of key links,
including “Festivals and Cuisine.” The latter is listed in the top right
corner of the home page. The section on cuisine invites the viewer to
“pamper” their “palate” with “exotic, diverse Indian cuisine” (“Incred-
ible India”). The icon titled “Recipes of India,” once clicked, presents a
visual representation of the culinary regions of India accompanied by a
score of classical sitar music.
Here, the letter ‘I’ of the ‘India’ in Incredible India, which is simultane-
ously also an exclamation point, is juxtaposed by a single red chili and
black peppercorns (see Figure 4.1). Ultimately, the dot of the exclamation
mark expands and transforms into a large thaal, or a plate, on which a
Figure 4.1 “Incredible India”.

Source: Incredible India. Ministry of Tourism Government of India, 05 Aug. 2015, www.
incredibleindia.org/food&cuisine/
description of the culinary delicacies of the Indian subcontinent appears
in text (Figure 4.2). To the left of the thaal, images of red chilis as well
as meat-covered skewers serve as hyperlinks to sections titled “culinary
regions” and a “glossary of recipes.” The blurb which appears in the
middle of the plate reads as follows:
It comes as a surprise to most people that India does not have a sin-
gle national cuisine but many cuisines. Indian food reflects in all its
glory the unity in diversity [of] the subcontinent. The major culinary
regions which boast of a distinct cooking style are Kashmir, Punjab,
Rajasthan, Avadh, Bengal, the coastal region, Tamil Nadu, Kerala,
Hyderabad and the Imperial cities of Agra and Delhi. It is not as
if these gastronomic regions have remained in watertight isolation.
There has always been a lively interaction between them and the
fusion of flavors and blending of cooking techniques has been the
norm and not the exception [. . .] Most of the Indian states today
have been defined using the linguistic principle. While this has served
political convenience and followed democratic aspirations of the
people, for the gourmet the political map can only be confusing. The
culinary regions do not always recognize man-made borders.
(“Incredible India”)
Figure 4.2 Description of Indian food ways as an expression of unity-in-diversity

Source: Incredible India. Ministry of Tourism Government of India, 05 Aug. 2015, www.
incredibleindia.org/food&cuisine/
On the Incredible India portal, ‘India’ is transformed into an enor-
mous thaal bordered by subcontinental herbs and spices that can be
readily consumed by both local and international tourists (Figure 4.2).
The image of India as a delicious platter upon which different culinary
regions co-exist and co-operate with one another functions as a vivid
metaphor for the nationalistic principle of “unity in diversity.” According
to the principle of unity-in-diversity, different religious communities are
assumed to be “equal and complementary partners” in the national com-
munity (Uberoi 201). Unity-in-Diversity is a shorthand or euphemism for
the idea of India as an avowedly secular and heterogeneous nation-space
where many different castes, ethnicities, and religious communities are
allowed to flourish and prosper, and where multiple religious traditions
are acknowledged as “equivalent sources of truth” (Uberoi 191).
The representation of India as a thaal also foregrounds the idea of
consumption and invites the viewer to ‘eat’ India with all its scintillat-
ing flavours and delectable curries. Descriptions of Indian cuisine include
the phrases “exotic” and “diverse,” which pander to the expectations of
Western tourists and emphasize both the alterity and racial, ethnic, and
religious heterogeneity of India as a national space, and as a community
(“Incredible India”).
Within this context, the Vale of Kashmir, images of which flash on the
main page of the website, with its long history of touristic consumption,
becomes an important culinary destination. Kashmir, with its mountain-
ous peaks and expansive lakes is presented as a culinary region on the
thaal, a delectable dish on the menu of India. By representing the dif-
ferent cultures and ethnicities residing within India as edible items, the
Incredible India website commodifies cultural, racial and religious oth-
erness. Rather than being foreign or threatening, cultural difference is
streamlined into a more palatable and acceptable form and each region
of the national territory is transformed into a delicious culinary destina-
tion. Through this transformation, the viewer is invited to interact with
these diverse regions as a pleasure-seeking consumer above all else, and
to negotiate cultural difference by way of the palate.
Historically, the valley has not been viewed as a locus of culinary
pleasure. Within the Victorian imagination, hand-woven pashmina
shawls functioned as popular signifiers of Kashmir (Zutshi, “Designed
for” 420). Narratives on Kashmiri shawls were helpful in bringing “the
empire home attempting to place that remotest of regions – Kashmir –
within the geography of the British empire” (Zutshi, “Designed for”
420). Local handicrafts, particularly Kashmiri shawls, were historically
consumed by upper-class British memsahibs in the mid-19th century, as
shown in The Tiger Ladies, as well as by international tourists to the Val-
ley (Zutshi, “Designed for” 432). The mountainous peaks of the Valley
and its hand-woven pashmina shawls, which were symbols of Kashmir
in the 19th century European imagination, continue to be synonymous
with the region even in postcolonial India. On the other hand, Kash-
miri cuisine was not the most ubiquitous or familiar symbol of the Val-
ley of Kashmir in the colonial imaginary. However, on the Incredible
India website, Kashmiri culinary customs mark the presence of Kashmir
on the postcolonial p(a)late of India and both local and foreign tourists
are invited to partake of the spices and flavours of Kashmir in order to
assuage their appetites.
In the representation of the Indian national space we encounter on
the Incredible India portal, Kashmir is co-opted as a distinctive mouth-
watering dish on the Indian national menu, which along with the other
culinary regions commingle to produce the flavourful cuisine of demo-
cratic India. Kashmir, in particular, as a Muslim-majority province, is a
valuable addition to the thaal and geo-body of the Indian-nation because
it is instrumental in terms of bolstering the secular credentials of the
nation, while, at the same time, contributing to its religious diversity.
On the Incredible India website, depictions of regional food customs
become a means of cementing India’s self-image as a tolerant and vibrant
democracy that is home to a multitude of ethnicities, religions, sects,
castes, creeds, and curries. In the words of Nehru, the first prime min-
ister of post-colonial India who was himself a Kashmiri Pandit, “We
have always regarded the Kashmir problem as symbolic for us . . . as it
illustrates that we are a secular state” (qtd. in Commuri 108). Not only
does the presence of India on the map of Kashmir bolster India’s secu-
lar credentials but it also, to an extent, debunks the two-nation theory
that justified the partition of the subcontinent on the religious principle
(Commuri 108).
In Territory of Desire, Kabir implicates Bollywood in the project of
creating, sustaining, and projecting the collective national desire for pos-
sessing Kashmir. She dedicates a significant part of the book to examining
the way in which “the cinematic apparatus of Bollywood [functions] . . .
as the nation’s mechanism for mobilizing desire for Kashmir” (23). She
also analyzes the functions of the Kashmiri handicraft as a “fetish object”
and a marker of desire on a national and individual scale, which perpetu-
ates the “pastoral fantasy” of the Valley of Kashmir as a paradisiacal
space (24). In this chapter, I make a critical addition to Ananya Kabir’s
articulation of Kashmir as a “territory of desire” by demonstrating how,
in addition to films, Kashmiri food and food narratives have also played
a significant and unacknowledged role in expressing India’s desire for
Kashmir. Kashmiri food and its representations on tourism websites,
recipe books, food festival pamphlets, and literary narratives also betray
signs of this desire and enable the framing of Kashmir as a consuma-
ble and desirable entity. The representation of Kashmir as a significant
culinary destination on the Indian geo-body contributing “flavour” and
“variety” to the Indian thaal, without any mention of the unappetizing
politics of the region, is symptomatic of India’s desire for Kashmir.
Consumable Kashmir
Annapurna Chak’s Kashmiri recipe book titled Multiple Flavours of
Kashmiri Pandit Cuisine also begins with familiar images of Kashmir
before moving onto a discussion of Kashmiri culinary customs. Chak
is ethnically a Kashmiri Pandit but grew up in a zamindar (landown-
ing) family in Orissa. Her mother regularly prepared Kashmiri feasts for
visiting Indian dignitaries with Kashmiri culinary treats in their ancestral
home. She writes:
Kashmir! The very name evokes pictorial images of snow-covered

Himalayan ranges surrounding the valley, rivers gushing down the
foothills and plains, villages surrounded by greenery, terraced rice
plantations, orchards and meadows, houseboats and shikaras float-
ing on lakes and fields of lotus . . . truly a Paradise nestling in the
folds of the Himalayas. This land of fruits and nuts with its natural
beauty reflects not only through its exquisite crafts but also its fla-
voursome cuisines.
(Chak 14)
In this description, Chak begins with the most consumable aspects of

Kashmir – its scenic landscape and its handicrafts, before mentioning
Kashmiri cuisine. She moves from the realm of the visually appealing
but essentially inedible Kashmiri landscape to its more palatable parts,
its fruits, nuts, and cuisines. Through this movement from the ined-
ible to the edible, she transforms Kashmir, turning its mountain peaks,
its lakes, shikaras, and shawls into food and her cookbook invites
the reader to consume the sights and crafts of Kashmir alongside its
cuisines.
In a section titled “Recipes of India” on the Incredible India website,
a short video explaining the distinctive aspects of Kashmiri cuisine also
draws a comparison between the artisanship of the region and its rich
culinary tradition. “The intricate beauty of the carpets of Kashmir,” the
narrator reads, “is also encountered in the richness of its culinary culture”
(“Recipes”). Meanwhile, the screen flashes an image of a Kashmiri carpet
weaver, followed by images of a traditional Kashmiri kitchen where food
preparers pound and marinate copious quantities of raw meat. Here too,
Kashmiri material culture is rendered consumable by being compared to
the culinary culture of the region, both of which are represented as being
part of the aggregate pleasures and mystical lure of Kashmir.
Chak includes two monochromatic family photographs in her cook-
book, which appear after the “Acknowledgements.” The first image fea-
tured a grand, three-storied haveli and bears the title “Our Ancestral
Home in Cuttack.” The second image, captioned “My mother next to
Pt. Nehru and Dr. K.N Katju in our Cuttack House,” is focused on three
figures, purportedly the personalities mentioned in the caption, who are
seated in close proximity, on the floor. Chak begins the “Author’s note”
with a list of important dignitaries, including Pandit Nehru and Vallab-
hbhai Patel, who were frequent guests at her haveli in Cuttack and were
served “the choicest Kashmiri dishes,” which were painstakingly arranged
by the lady of the house (Chak 12). Chak names some notable Kashmiri
dishes that were typically served to the eminent political personalities:
“A host of mouthwatering dishes like the meat khubani, zafrani phirni,
pulao, kabargah, dum aloo, rogan josh, koftas, methi chaman, khoye ka
shufta, ‘interspiced’ with chutneys, raitas and pickles would be laid out
at the table with great care” (Chak 12).
Chak’s inclusions of images of Nehru and other notables in the
beginning of her book, along with descriptions of the preparation and
arrangement of Kashmiri cuisine for their titillation, bestows a cer-
tain stature on Kashmiri food. In Chak’s culinary guide to Kashmiri
Pandit cuisine, Kashmiri food, in all its vibrant flavours and variety,
is shown to be worth preparing and exploring because of its ability to
nourish and appease Indian heads of states and politicians. In the way
that Kashmiri cuisine nourishes India’s image as a progressive, secular
democracy, Kashmiri foodways, in Annapurna Chak’s book, provide
enjoyment to the heads of state of postcolonial India. Kashmiri food,
and Kashmir by extension, is made visible and rendered real, only vis-
à-vis its ability to provide enjoyment and diversion to Indian members
of the government.
The Food-Laden Shikara

On both sides of the border, Kashmiri food festivals serve as events
through which Pakistani and Indian citizens can partake of Kashmir as
a territory and space of boundless pleasure. In March 2016 a Kashmiri
food festival was held in a posh uptown hotel, The Pearl Continental, on
the historical Mall Road, in Punjab’s capital city of Lahore (“Kashmiri
food”). One food-festival attendee commented on how “Kashmir has
been an integral and beautiful part of Pakistan [and] he was happy to see
number of Kashmiri dishes here at the food festival” (“Kashmiri food”).
For him the lure of Kashmiri food, as a cuisine, was connected to the
desire for Kashmir, as a contested space. Consuming Kashmir food is
linked to the cartographic reclamation of the disputed territory of Kash-
mir, Pakistan’s lost but not forgotten paradise on earth. In mentioning
Kashmir’s status as an unbreakable part of the Pakistani nation-state, the
festival attendee uses nationalistic discourse to discuss the subject of local
Kashmiri culinary customs. “Kashmir” becomes the shah rag (jugular) of
the Pakistani’s geo-body; a counterpoint to the Indian claim that Kashmir
is atoot ang (an unassailable part) of the Indian nation. It becomes clear
that in consuming well-known Kashmiri dishes such as “hareesa, chicken
yakhani, tabk maaz, chicken boti, tawa qeema,” the festival attendees
are also indulging and fulfilling their appetite for the disputed territory of
Kashmir as a cartographic polity (“Kashmiri food”).
Almost a year later, in February 2017, tourism officials from the Jammu
and Kashmir Tourism Development Corporation (JKTDC), who were
expected to host and organize a food festival in Lahore, were denied visas
to the country, against a disappointingly familiar “backdrop of rising ten-
sions and cross-border skirmishes in Kashmir” (“Kashmir Food Fest”).
The event was advertised as a “big confidence building measure between
the people of the two countries” with the gustatory faculty functioning as
a means to enable Indians, to momentarily, “share” Kashmir, in the form
of its palatable and mouth-watering treats with fellow Pakistanis across
the border (“Kashmir Food Fest”). The Lahore Food Festival, which at
first instance appears to be a culinary event fundamentally disconnected
from high politics and international visa policies, in fact emerges as a
defining symptom and marker of the two. Organized and then subse-
quently cancelled in the same month that Pakistanis typically celebrate
“Kashmir Day,” the Lahore Food Festival was a casualty of fraying cross-
border ties. This fact is symptomatic, if only slightly and marginally, of
the gradual recession of Kashmir, its culinary pleasures and its politics,
from the mind and national palate of Pakistani subjects.
During the same month that the Lahore Food Festival was cancelled,
Wazwan, a Kashmiri Food Festival, was held across the border, in the city
of Bangalore. The flier (see Figure 4.3) for the food festival invites Indian
citizens to:
embark on a flavourful journey into the exotic land of Shikaaras,

as you experience the culinary wonders of Kashmir with a myriad
of delectable preparations brought to life by Kashmiri Chefs using
organic ingredients from the valley.
(Vidyalakshmi)
The culinary idiom becomes the primary means of consuming the “exotic
land” of Kashmir. On the festival poster, Kashmiri dishes appear to be
floating on what is quite possibly the scenic and iconic Dal Lake, while
the traditional Kashmiri houseboat – the shikara – depicted from above,
appears as yet another thaal brimming with delectable delights. The
inconsequential and diminutive bodies of the occupants of the shikara, a
male rower and his female passenger, represented in the same scale as the
rice pudding and the meat across it, are benignly offered alongside for
consumption. A display at the Kashmiri food festival in Bangalore also
featured a food-laden shikara, which is a reference to the commonplace
function of shikaras in Kashmir as vehicles transporting groceries and
food supplies to the occupants of Kashmiri boat houses.
The name of the food festival – Wazwan – is also suggestive of exotic
excess and boundless pleasure. The Wazwan is a traditional Kashmiri
Figure 4.3 The Poster for Wazwan Food Festival by Vidyalakshmi

Source: Vidyascooking, Blogspot, 24 Feb. 2017, https://vidyascooking.blogspot.com/2017/
02/kashmiri-food-festival-nook-aloft.html
banquet in which thirty-six dishes are prepared and served (see Fig-
ure 4.4). On a symbolic level, Kashmir as a well-stacked houseboat of
culinary diversions and delights, presents and perpetuates a familiar
image of Kashmir as a cornucopia of pleasures.
Figure 4.4 A Food-laden Shikara at the Wazwan Food Festival. Vidyalakshmi

Source: Vidyascooking, 24 Feb. 2017, www.vidyascooking.blogspot.my/2017/02/kashmiri-
food-festival-nook-aloft.html.
In popular Bollywood films from the 1960s such as Junglee (1961),

Kashmiri ki Kali (1964), Jab Jab Phool Khile (1964) and Janwar (1965),
city-dwellers from the Indian plains travel to Kashmir usually for pleas-
urable pursuits and inevitably end up falling in love, oftentimes with
a Kashmiri native (Kabir, “Nipped” 83). This frolicking and falling in
love usually takes place atop a shikara. Bollywood films have played an
important role in creating and perpetuating images of Kashmir as a site
for touristic consumption and inexhaustible pleasure-seeking (89). In the
film Janwar (1965), Sundar (Shammi Kapoor) disguises himself as an
elderly shikara wallah, Subuktagin, in order to serenade Sapna (Rajshree)
and partake of her companionship without her knowledge. As Sapna
reclines on scarlet-coloured embroidered cushions, Sundar courts the
unsuspecting Sapna with florid ghazals and chaste, idiomatic Urdu, both
of which function as markers of his Kashmiri Muslim identity. Similarly,
in Kashmir ki Kali (1964), Rajiv (Shammi Kapoor), a wealthy young
man from the city, falls for a Kashmiri flower girl, Champa, played by
Sharmila Tagore. In a scene from the film, Rajiv parks his boat close
to Champa’s flower-filled shikara and sings paeans to her beauty, while
rolling and writhing on the embroidered cushion covers of the boat, as
Champa simpers and cowers shyly in the foreground.
The film Jab Phool Khile, like Kashmir ki Kali and Janwar, contains
several scenes that are shot in a shikara owing to the fact that the main
character is a simple, semi-literate Kashmiri shikara-owner named Raja
(Shashi Kapoor). Raja becomes romantically involved with Rita (Nanda),
a ‘modern’ Bombay memsahib who travels to Kashmir for leisurely pur-
poses and to escape her heady life in the Indian metropolis. In a cru-
cial scene, Rita, after hoodwinking her fiancé, asks Raja to row her to
Chaar Chinar in his shikara and on the way they race their boat with
another shikara. Rita climbs over the seat, comes to Raja’s aid, and helps
him row. In Jab Jab Phool Khile, Rita’s navigation of the shikara and
the engagement in strenuous activity alongside a Kashmiri Muslim local
accomplishes the same symbolic effect. She is shown retiring her uptight
self, and with the assistance of Raja, going native. We observe that shi-
kara rides used to be a staple in Kashmir films from the 1960s and they
enabled lovers to have a private moment for coquetry and romance, for
the recitation of lyrical poetry and for indulgence in melodious song-and-
dance numbers with each other.
In Mirza Waheed’s second novel The Book of Gold Leaves, which I will
discuss in the last chapter of this book, the female protagonist Roohi is
described as bearing an uncanny physical resemblance to Bollywood’s
“dreamgirl” Hema Malini, and for this reason, she goes by the Kashmiri
version of the Bollywood star’s name, namely “Heema Mali” (Waheed
115). A local dervish and soothsayer in the novel summons Roohi to
listen to his poetic performance in the main city square in the following
words: “Oh Heema Mali, how long will you stay in your balcony, my
dear. Come down. So, what if the hero is not here today?” (Waheed 115).
Both Roohi, and her lover, Faiz, long to indulge in touristic and romantic
activities together such as taking a shikara ride to visit Nishat Shalimar, a
Moghul garden on the bank of the famed Dal Lake. Faiz’s fantasy of riding
shikaras with his ardent lady love and of reclining on embroidered cush-
ions is inspired by and intertextually references certain iconic scenes from
popular Bollywood films set in Kashmir, including Jab Jab Phool Khile and
Kashmir ki Kali. Roohi associates shikara rides on Dal Lake with: “spar-
kling honeymooners from India, of aching, sentimental songs enacted on
their black-and-white TV by Shammi Kapoor and Dharmendra and Shashi
Kapoor and that face of utter magic, Sharmila Tagore” (Waheed 65).
In an instance in Waheed’s novel, Roohi expresses her desire to not
only ride in a shikara with Faiz but also to wear traditional Kashmiri
garb in order to adequately mimic Sharmila Tagore. Tagore plays the
character of the shy, coquettish Champa and wears traditional Kashmiri
dress throughout the film Kashmir ki Kali, a fact which Roohi identifies
in the following words:
I’ve always seen these people on shikaras, you know, tourist couples.
They wear clothes that we don’t wear anymore, then take photo-
graphs in the Nishat Bagh. I like the clothes very much. I’ve seen a
lot of it on TV. Remember Shammi Kapoor and Sharmila Tagore?
(Waheed 139)
By re-enacting iconic shikara scenes, which are common, as we have
observed, to many of the Indian films from the 1960s, and by miming
tourists visiting the Valley, Roohi intertextually references Bollywood
films. She casts herself as the rightful subject of romantic Bollywood tales
set in Kashmir and attempts to appropriate and lay claim to the different
sensual, artisanal, and visual pleasures that are contained within the shi-
kara. The shikara, as represented in Kashmiri literary fiction, Bollywood
films, and on food festival advertisements, is a metaphor for Kashmir as a
cornucopia of pleasures, including the pleasures of the body and the pal-
ate, which the viewer/reader is invited to access and consume. Instead of a
vehicular convenience that allows ordinary Kashmiris to navigate the lakes
and water-bodies present in the Valley, the shikara emerges as an image
symbolizing pleasurable excess and gustatory and sensual fulfilment.
Yeh Jawani Hae Diwani

Contemporary Bollywood films have, to a certain extent, departed from
the poetics of pleasure-seeking and merry-making, characteristic of their
predecessors, in order to negotiate the volatile politics of the region,
which have over time become impossible to ignore. However, films such
as Yeh Jawani hae Diwani, released in 2013, resuscitate the trope of
Kashmir as a land of pleasurable exploits. This film was nominated for
nine Filmfare awards that year – the most prestigious national award in
the Indian film industry – and is considered one of the highest grossing
Bollywood films worldwide (“Yeh Jawani”).
Yeh Jawani revolves around the coming of age of its protagonists
and star-crossed lovers, Naina (Deepika Padukone) and Bunny (Ran-
bir Kapoor), both of whom are shown to be polar opposites of each
other. Whereas Naina is a restrained, devout and bookish medical stu-
dent, Bunny is depicted as a hippie photographer, freewheeling across
the world, filming and photographing exotic people and places (Muk-
erji). Upon impulse, Naina decides to join Aditi and her group of friends
(which includes Bunny and Avi) on a hiking trip to Manali (Gulmarg,
Kashmir) and it is here that she unwinds, falls in love and becomes a more
uninhibited person. The transformation that Naina undergoes during her
time in Kashmir bears echoes of the transformation of other Bollywood
protagonists, who also shed the weight of custom and convention, while
involved in pleasure-seeking activities in the Valley.
The young people in Yeh Jawani indulge in a range of pleasure-enhancing
activities such as skiing, playing holi, camping, picnicking, and dancing.
In Yeh Jawani eating Kashmiri street food and picnicking on the moun-
tain slopes also become important modes through which the slick and
urbane protagonists of the film interact with the Valley of Kashmir. In a
revealing scene in the film, Aditi and Avi purchase street food from a stall
while observing a marriage party carrying a coy bride in a palanquin.
Bunny captures the scene with his video camera while sharing his views
on matrimony with his friend. The conversation which takes place is as
follows:
ADITI (TO NAINA): Don’t listen to him, Bunny is allergic to marriage.

BUNNY: Of course. Naina, if I give you the same food every day – daal
chawal – will you be able to eat it?
NAINA: Meaning?
BUNNY: Meaning marriage is like daal chawal for fifty years till you die.
Life should also have qeema pav, tangri kebab, hakka noodles. (Yeh
Jawani hae Diwani)
Daal chawal, a dish of boiled lentils served with rice, is considered to

be a plain-tasting, poor man’s dish within the region. The expression
that one has become reduced to eating daal is often used as an Urdu/
Hindi figure of speech to indicate that one has fallen on difficult times.
In the film, the jibe about consuming daal is, in fact, a metaphor symbol-
izing the sterility, monotony and blandness of matrimonial relationships,
whereas “tangri kebab” and “haaka noodles” are signifiers for sexual
freedom and experimentation. Daal also becomes a marker for the per-
sonal inhibition and reticence that Naina embodies whereas qeema pav,
tangri kebab etc, indicate a desire to indulge, to consume and to seek
out pleasure. In the context of their hiking trip in Kashmir, this desire
to consume and to seek pleasurable, possibly risqué encounters can be
considered synonymous with a desire to consume Kashmir.
The General’s Palate

Kashmiri food and its representation are usually tied to statist narratives
such as the narrative that Kashmir is a rightful part of the Pakistani or
alternatively, the Indian nation-state. As such, the consumption of Kash-
miri food is indicative, in certain cases, of the desire to consume, claim,
and secure Kashmir as a cartographic entity. In the food narratives that
we have discussed so far, in selected cookbooks, on national tourism web-
sites and in food festival fliers, Kashmir is often transformed into a dish
on the thaal of India or a shikara of pleasures, both of which invite view-
ers to interact with the territory of Kashmir primarily through the idiom
of one-sided consumption. It is within these loaded and fraught mappings
of Kashmiri food, as a space of gustatory pleasure and an expression of
cartographic desire, that Jaspreet Singh plots his novel, and embarks on
the task of negotiating the different associations of class, privilege, and
discursive power that are associated with these representations.
The upper-class Indians represented in Chef, such as the General and
his circle of friends and acquaintances, also appear to be influenced by
notions of Kashmir as a pleasurescape; a territory to be consumed and
ravished in a myriad of ways. Jaspreet Singh’s novel is largely set in the
1960s, the era in which the ‘Kashmir films’ mentioned in this chapter were
produced and disseminated. The attitude of the upper-class Indians in
Chef towards Kashmir and Kashmiris can be considered a product of the
cultural narratives perpetuated through Bollywood, in which Kashmir is
represented as a means of enhancing their pleasure. The General Sahab
in Chef, for example, pursues his pleasure primarily by consuming the
culinary delights that Kashmir has to offer.
Narayan argues that the primal and primeval potential of food to bring
disparate subjects together in solidarity: “gustatory relish for the food
of ‘Others’ may help contribute to an appreciation of their presence in
the national community, despite ignorance about the cultural contexts of
their foods – these pleasures of the palate providing more powerful bonds
than knowledge” (Narayan, “Eating”). The ‘others,’ in the case of Chef,
are Kashmiri Muslims. Singh’s novel shows us that the preparation and
consumption of the food of others does not always result in, or imply,
inter-religious understanding, affiliation or empathy. Instead, the ability
to consume the food of others is shown as being symptomatic of the
existence of unequal power relations and access to human rights which
exist between different subjects. This inequality is, in turn, only rein-
forced and consolidated by the act of consumption. For instance, General
Kumar is particularly inclined towards Kashmiri Muslim cuisine:
Dinner was the main meal of the day. Sahib had good taste and
appetite and a weakness for Kashmiri dishes. Mughlai mutton with
turnips, rogan josh, kebab nargisi, lotus roots-n-rhizomes, gongloo,
karam saag, the infinitely slow-cooked nahari, and the curd-flavored
meatballs of gushtaba. He ate these dishes licking his fingers and
used knife and fork for foreign preparation only.
(Singh 26)
General Kumar consumes these delicacies with his hands, which betrays
a certain intimacy and familiarity with Kashmiri food items. Here, eating
and consuming Kashmiri food is a marker of power and privilege. On
the other hand, food preparation, the slicing of ingredients, the prepara-
tion and the arrangement of dishes on the table are a marker of subser-
vience and class difference. The socially, religiously, and economically
privileged characters in Chef consume, while marginalized groups, reli-
gious minorities, women and lower-castes prepare what is to be con-
sumed. The colonel’s wife, for example, has all her culinary preferences
diligently attended to by chef Kishen: “Memsahib is vegetarian, Chef tells
me. Navrattan paneer and dal makhani have been prepared especially for
her. Lady fingers are also for her” (Singh 48).
On the other hand, the kitchen staff, which includes the chef Kishen,
his young apprentice Kirpal, the “assistant” and the server, prepare and
serve the food. The “server” is “shoved” into the room “bearing finger
bowls,” the “assistant” places “naans in the tandoor and phulkas on the
griddle” (Singh 52–53). Similarly, chef Kishen and Kirpal only enter the
main space of the residence and make their presence felt when it is time
for them to take orders for the meal: “It is time to come to existence,
Chef tells me. We come to existence only to carry out orders. He parts
the curtains briefly and enters the drawing room” (Singh 51). Kishen’s
statement highlights the fact that the preparers of food and their labour
are meant to be invisible. They come “into existence” for a short period
of time and encroach upon the main house only to take orders from the
General and his upperclass army guests.
The ability to either prepare or consume the food of the other is also
not sufficient to develop “fellow-feeling” for this disavowed, Kashmiri
Muslim ‘other’ (Slaughter 42). Chef Kishen, as we have observed, is
skilled in preparing an elaborate buffet of Kashmiri cuisine, namely the
wazwan with all its thirty-six dishes. Despite this, Kishen finds Kashmiris
and Muslims foul-smelling and considers it an affront to his sensibilities
to serve or wait on them. Similarly, General Kumar, despite consuming
Kashmiri food with relish, is an influential member of the Indian armed
forces stationed in Kashmir, and in the novel is shown to play a significant
role in anaesthetizing peaceful street protest and quelling rebellion in the
Valley. Consumption or preparation of Kashmiri food in the novel is not,
in and of itself, an expression of solidarity with a marginalized commu-
nity, nor does it function as a means of establishing dialogue with such
a community. In fact, the consumption of Kashmiri delicacies becomes
a powerful metaphor for other macro acts of consumption: the touristic
consumption of Kashmir as a picturesque space, and the exploitation of
Kashmiri bodies by members of the army and the upper-elite political
class. For example, when the colonel, his wife and the general are invited
to dinner, they engage in lively discussion and consume Kashmiri trout:
They talk about classical music, beekeeping, carpets, silkworms,

diameter of the most ancient plane trees, absence of railways in
Kashmir, loathsome Kashmiris, and picnics in the Mughal gardens.
Also, about Nehru when he was PM: an army helicopter would fly to
his residence in Delhi with Kashmiri spring water.
(Singh 52)
The conversation revolves around pleasure-centred activities (picnicking,

listening to music), the consumption of Kashmiri handicrafts and fabrics
(carpets, silk) and natural phenomena associated with Kashmiri land-
scape (spring water, gardens). The absence of railways in Kashmir, for
example, could be viewed as a hindrance to the mobility of tourists desir-
ing to travel through the Valley of Kashmir while on holiday. The Gen-
eral and his dinner companions betray a touristic impulse to consume the
Valley, its landscape and its exquisite art objects. They not only consume
the Kashmiri trout at the table but simultaneously also ‘eat,’ if only by
way of reference, the delectable landscape and handicrafts of Kashmir.
The image of Nehru’s helicopter bringing purified spring water from the
“peripheries” to the prime minister in the ‘centre’ (Delhi) has problem-
atic colonial undertones and in a sense, is emblematic of India’s relation-
ship with Kashmir.
References to the consumption of Kashmir in the form of its cuisine,
landscape, territory, and art objects are juxtaposed to a discussion of
“loathsome Kashmiris.” The colonel summarizes, and in the process,
oversimplifies the political aspirations of the Kashmiri people in the fol-
lowing words: “they bring along bloody men from bloody Islam, who
are in touch with militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and they have
occupied the bloody mosques, sir. They want bloody azadi, sir” (Singh
56). While the Kashmiri landscape becomes a delectable site of endless
consumption, Kashmiri bodies, especially, azadi-seeking, rebellious ones
with political demands are seen to be “loathsome” intruders despoiling
the perfection and plenitude of the land in Chef.
Subaltern Citizens
The ability to eat varied food items is indicative not of culinary open-
mindedness but of unequal power relations that exist between citizens
and subaltern citizens. The term “subaltern” traces its origins to Anto-
nio Gramsci’s article on “Notes on Italian History,” which was later re-
published in the form of his Prison Notebooks (Louai 5). Gramsci uses
the term classi subalterne (“the subaltern class” interchangeably with the
term classi subordinate (“the subordinate class”) (Gramsci 166). Louai
states that, in Gramsci’s usage, classi subalterne denoted any “low rank
person or group of people in a particular society suffering under hegem-
onic domination of a ruling elite class” (5). In the 1970s, the concept of
the subaltern was taken up by the Subaltern Studies Group, founded by
Ranajit Guha and five other historians, who desired to transform the way
in which the Indian freedom movement had been historically narrated
and theorized (Chaturvedi vii). They aimed to recover subaltern agency
and voice by narrating and recovering fragmented “histories from below”
(Chaturvedi ix). In the preface to the collection of essays published as
part of the Subaltern Studies series, Guha summarized the purpose of
the historiographical intervention staged by the Subaltern Studies Group:
The aim of the first collection of essays . . . is to promote a systematic

and informed discussion of subaltern themes in the field of South
Asian studies, and thus help to rectify the elitist bias characteristic on
much research and academic work in this particular area.
(Guha 35)
Gayatri Spivak’s famous essay, which begs the titular question – Can the
Subaltern Speak? – probed the limits of historical inquiry into the fig-
ure of the subaltern and the degree to which it is ever possible to recover
their voice, since the latter is itself constituted and represented by way of
different, competing discourses. Using the example of the figure of the
sati, the widow self-immolating herself on her husband’s funeral pyre,
Spivak writes:
Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-

formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine
nothingness, but into a violent shuttling, which is a displaced figu-
ration of the “third-world woman” caught between tradition and
modernization.
(306)
The sati is a cypher who either willfully participates in her own death and
honours tradition, a position Spivak refers to as “The women wanted to
die,” or she is a victim in need of the legislative gifts of Western imperi-
alism, a situation of “White men are saving brown women from brown
men” (296). There is a “manipulation of female agency” in the way that
competing discourses of sati represent the subaltern woman, and as such,
the possibility of recovering the subaltern’s voice, on an individual level,
or as a collective, is no longer available (Spivak 283). In such a context,
at first glance, the term “subaltern citizen,” coined by Gyanendra Pandey,
one of the founding members of the Subaltern Studies Group, sounds
like an oxymoron. Subalternity, after all, has been theorized as a space
of silence, an epistemic vacuum within historical and cultural narrative,
whereas the idea of citizenship implies access to civic, social, and human
rights, and entails a degree of enfranchisement and social mobility (Pan-
dey, “The Subaltern” 4735).
Recognizing this paradox, Pandey states that “subaltern citizen”
requires the juxtaposition of two very different discourses: “subaltern, a
relational position in a conceptualization of power . . . as Gayatri Spivak
has recently described it and “citizen”, a juridical figure in the pronounce-
ment of autonomy and rights” (4735). He defines subalterns as including
the underprivileged and disenfranchised: religious, ethnic and sexual

minorities; marginal nationalities; dispossessed indigenous com-
munities; immigrant labourers, the rural poor, urban squatters and
working people of numerous other descriptions; African American
and dalit women in the US and India.
(4738)
On the other hand, he uses the term “citizen” to mean “the bearer of
the legal right to residence, political participation, state support, and
protection in a given territory [and] . . . a more diffuse sense of accept-
ance in, and acceptance of, an existing order and existing social arrange-
ments” (4735). Spivak proposes closely policing who qualifies as a
subaltern subject, and critiques broad, non-specific applications of the
term to groups and subject positions that are, to varying degrees, able to
represent and speak for themselves and to negotiate a position within the
“hegemonic discourse” (qtd. in Olson 164). Highlighting this view in an
interview, Spivak cautions against inappropriate and ill-defined usages of
the political denomination of the subaltern:
subaltern is not just a classy word for “oppressed”, for [the] Other,
for somebody who’s not getting a piece of the pie . . . In post-colonial
terms, everything that has limited or no access to the cultural impe-
rialism is subaltern – a space of difference. Now, who would say
that’s just the oppressed? The working class is oppressed. It’s not
subaltern . . . Many people want to claim subalternity. They are the
least interesting and the most dangerous.
(qtd. in Olson 164)
In sharp contrast to this, Pandey argues for radically expanding subaltern

as a political category beyond the “archetypal figure of the . . . Third
World peasant,” who has consistently been a figure of interest and con-
testation within the Subaltern Studies Group, towards other categories
and conceptions of subalternity (Subaltern Citizens 273). Despite the ten-
sion and contradiction that is apparent in the term, Pandey proposes the
term “subaltern citizen,” which he believes, enables us to describe the
“subordinate status of certain citizens” and the “potential that the subal-
tern poses . . . of becoming a full member of the community, the village,
the neighbourhood and the polis” (“The Subaltern” 4735). According to
him, the notion of subaltern citizenship:
accurately describes what is a fairly common contemporary condi-

tion, the situation of lower-class, lower-caste, immigrant and other
minority communities, – women, gays, lesbians and other sexual
minorities, to take one kind of example – who have been granted the
status of citizens (rights-holders, inhabitants, subjects of the state)
without becoming quite ‘mainstream.
(Subaltern Citizens 276)
He writes that the idea of a subaltern citizen allows us to “reinforce

the point that not all citizens (or human beings) are born equal, that
many remain ‘second-class’ even when granted the formal status of citi-
zens” (4736). According to Pramod Nayar, a subaltern citizen is one who
“might technically be a citizen but has never been a part of the civil soci-
ety” (18). In Chef, Agha, the General’s Kashmiri Muslim gardener, is an
Indian citizen but he does not have the same rights as the General Sahab,
in whose house he serves. On account of a spurious suspicion that he is
surreptitiously planning the General’s death, and in an atmosphere of dis-
trust and religious tension in the Valley, he is unceremoniously removed
from his employment.
Kishen, the General’s chosen chef and Kirpal’s mentor, despite being a
Hindu member of the army, and being marginally more privileged than
Agha, is banished to the icefields of Siachen on the basis of a faux pas
committed while on duty. Kishen accidentally mentions his prowess with
preparing pork, and the excellence of pork meat, in the presence of Kash-
miri Muslim imams who have come to dine at the General’s residence
and to settle a delicate, political matter. The imams become suspicious of
the food that has been prepared for them and remain uncomfortable and
uneasy throughout the course of the visit. As a punishment, the General
instantly signs an order for the chef’s transfer to Siachen, a punitive meas-
ure that Kishen laments in the following words:
And yet in the end” said Chef, “no matter how hard we try – we are
low-caste peoples and we do not matter. Army belongs to officers,
Kirpal. I am worthless. I feed them, serve them, take ardors. I endure
the heat of the tandoor, and then I am let go, or I leave on my own.
My life has come to nothing. My work has come to nothing.
(75)
The Siachen Glacier is the ‘world’s highest battleground’ and is part of

the LOC, which is the de facto border between Indian and Pakistan-
occupied Kashmir (Parvaiz). Bose verifies the precise location of Siachen:
“At its northern end, the LOC terminates at a point called NJ 9842 in the
High Himalayas, beyond which lies a glacial region, Siachen, contested
between Indian and Pakistani forces” (295).
During exile in the icefields of Siachen, Kishen, who is in severe physi-
cal pain and is highly delusional, records his meandering and fragmented
observations in a journal. At one point during his long punishment, he
meticulously records the difference between a soldier’s ration, an officer’s
ration and the general’s ration, and contemplates these differences, while
struggling to maintain his sanity:
The General’s Ration

No questions asked.
An Officer’s Ration
Wheat flour/rice/bread 450g, sugar 90g, oil 80g, dal 40g, tea/
coffee 9g, salt 20g, porridge 20g, custard powder 7g, cornflour 7g,
ice cream/jelly 7g, condiments 600g/month, vegetables 170g, pota-
toes 110g, onions 60g, non-citric fruits 230g, citric fruits 110g, eggs
2, chicken 175g, meat dressed 26
A Soldier’s Ration
Wheat flour/rice/bread 620g; sugar 90g, oil 80g, dal 40g, tea/cof-
fee 9g, salt 20g, condiments 600g/month, vegetables 170g, potatoes
110g, onions 60g, fruits 230g, meat dressed 110g, milk (veg) 750g,
milk (non-veg) 250.
(Singh 121–22)
General Kumar’s “ration,” which is seemingly limitless, unlike the more

restricted menus of lower-class officers and ordinary foot-soldiers, is a
metaphor symbolizing his power and privilege. Tabulating the discrep-
ancies in the ration of edibles is a means of charting the difference in
the entitlement and rights that are available to different members of the
army. Rather than casting the Indian armed forces as a powerful and
largely monolithic institution, Chef reveals the complex intersections of
caste, class, and religious identity which dictates and determines the posi-
tioning of the different subjects within the army, and which results in
degrees of discrimination and privilege. Kishen’s written record of the
differences in rations is mentioned alongside accusations involving the
General engaging, in his absence, in sexual relations with and impregnat-
ing his long-time partner.
Female characters in Chef are compared to different types of edibles,
particularly varieties of fruit. Kishen, for example, describes the “smell
of a woman” as being superior to that of “the most sumptuous dinner,”
while Kirpal, on the other hand, compares a woman’s face to “a plate of
samosas left overnight in the rain” and mentions beautiful girls whose
skins possess “the shine of ripe fruit” or have “cinnamon skin” (Singh
10, 12, 21, 43). He also draws parallels between the Goan Ayah’s eyes
and “pods of tamarind” (Singh 38). Descriptions of women as different
types of edibles, varieties of fruit and spices, or even a whole banquet,
evoke notions of enjoyment and consumption. The female characters
function as cyphers: they are sexual objects who are meant to be ravished
and their bodies consumed. Chef uses culinary metaphors and analo-
gies to describe female subjectivities and, through this, foregrounds the
General’s privilege. He consumes what and whom he likes, including the
bodies of women he desires, with impunity and without fear of retribu-
tive action.
Depictions of feasting in Chef are often depicted alongside vivid scenes
of sexualized violence; the eating of Kashmiri food becomes a vivid paral-
lel to the exploitation of Kashmiri Muslim bodies at the hands of Indian
army officers. The General, and his powerful peers, are protected under
national legislation, in particular, the AFSPA (Armed Forces Special Pow-
ers Act), which makes it nearly impossible to launch an investigation into
the excesses of the army and, in the case of Chef, the sexual improprieties
of the serving officers (Chakravarty). The AFSPA gives armed officers
wide-ranging powers to police and inflict violence on Kashmiri bodies,
without the possibility of being tried in a civil court of law (Chakravarty).
Singh’s novel establishes a direct and unequivocal relationship between
culinary consumption and legal entitlement.
The Armed Forces Special Powers Act was enacted in 1958 to bring
‘disturbed areas’ under control (Ramakrishnan). The AFSPA has colo-
nial roots and is used as a means of granting members of the Indian
army immunity from prosecution (Morton 24). This Act, which is also
mentioned in both Curfewed Night and The Collaborator, allows mili-
tary officers to shoot civilians in geographical regions of India classified
as ‘disturbed areas’ (Morton 24). Kashmir is classified as a ‘disturbed
area’ and by framing Kashmir as “a space of exception,” the Kashmiri
population is “raped, tortured, kidnapped and murdered in custody with
impunity” (24).
Nimmi Kurian, writing in openDemocracy, adds the modifier “bor-
der” to Pandey’s term, and fleshes out the figure of the “subaltern border
citizen,” who is formally a citizen of the Indian nation-state and can,
in principle, claim the civil, social, and political rights promised by the
state, but due to local legislative acts such as the AFSPA, has these rights
routinely violated and infringed. Kurian refers to Indian citizens who live
in the “disturbed” border regions, as border subaltern citizens (Kurian).
Border citizens, Kurian argues, are positioned at the precarious and
volatile borders of the nation. I argue that as such they exist at the
extremities and fringes of the rights regime and from here, they negoti-
ate their access to civic and human rights. Chef draws attention to the
way in which legislation such as the AFSPA reinforces the subalternity
of subaltern citizens, particularly Kashmiri Muslims, and complicates
their enfranchisement as full citizens within the nation-state. The AFSPA
ensures that the entitlements of the General sahab and his fellow officers
far exceed those promised by the UDHR insofar as they actively violate
or infringe other peoples’ right to “life, liberty and security” as well as
protection from “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” (UN General
Assembly).
When Bina, the daughter of the former Governor of Kashmir, is to be
married, the menu of the wedding feast prominently features Kashmiri
dishes including “golf-ball-sized goshtaba. Tails of sheep. Paisley-shaped
naans. Moorish eggplant. Murgh Wagah [and] Rogan Josh” (Singh 187).
The event is attended by an upper-elite Hindu intelligentsia class from
the cities and the invited guests include Bollywood stars, military and
political elites as well as the Prime Minister himself. Here, the act of
consuming non-vegetarian Kashmiri food is not an act of solidarity and
affiliation with ordinary Kashmiris but is symbolic of the upper -elites’
exploitation of the Valley and its subjects for their own pleasure-seeking.
As the Governor and his important guests indulge in feasting and
merry-making, the Governor’s son coerces a Kashmiri woman to perform
sex acts on him, in return for securing the release of her brother who is
being held in unlawful custody. While the guests consume quintessen-
tially Kashmiri dishes such as goshtaba and roghan josh, the Governor’s
influential son consumes the body of a Kashmiri Muslim woman under
duress in a room in the house. The servers at the lavish wedding are
economically disadvantaged Kashmiris, whereas the wedding attendees
consuming and enjoying the food are mostly, upper-class non-Kashmiris.
Here, consumption in itself may not result in inter-religious affiliation
and understanding but, on the contrary, may be symptomatic of privi-
lege, power, and social inequality.
In Chef, the character who consumes the most and has the most Cath-
olic palate is Rubiya’s father, General Kumar. He not only consumes
Kashmiri cuisine, as I have emphasized, but also Hyderabadi, and North
Indian cuisine and exotic “dishes from Italy, France, Spain, Greece and
Russia.” (Singh 26). Along with this, he eats both vegetarian and non-
vegetarian dishes and is drawn to an array of different varieties of meat,
including fish, lamb, mutton and chicken. For dessert, he is served sub-
continental sweets and sweetmeats such as “Halva. Ashrafi. Jalaybee”
and fruits from Kashmir and other parts of India (53). In this case, the
cosmopolitanism of his palate does not translate into a cosmopolitanism
of the mind. In fact, General Kumar is depicted as a character in stasis: he
chooses to end his life rather than relinquish, or even probe, his religious
biases, as Kishen and Kirpal had done at crucial junctures in their self-
development. He aggressively resists change and transformation and, in a
certain sense, his death can be considered a willful resistance to undergo-
ing Bildung. When his only daughter, Rubiya, decides to marry a Kash-
miri Muslim from across the border, General Kumar prefers to take his
own life rather than to go through with her wedding. Despite consuming
the food and enjoying the invisible labour and devoted service of reli-
gious minorities and lower-caste subjectivities, he is morally repelled by
the idea of entering into familial bonds with a subaltern citizen.
The novel Chef deploys images of Kumar’s eclectic consumption of
subcontinental cuisine as a symbolic critique of class and of India’s
exploitation of Kashmir and Kashmiri bodies. It also foregrounds the
difference in the human rights that are on offer to citizens and subal-
tern citizens. Prakash Upadhyaya argues that the Indian political system
is a type of “majoritarianism” which “protects the interests of the tiny
minority who constitute its dominant caste and classes” (815–16). He
defines this majoritarianism as “a political idiom in which secularism is
subordinated to the nationalism of the Indian majority” and argues that
India’s nationalist movement overwhelmingly consisted of members from
its Hindu elite classes (817). Subaltern communities, he states, especially
lower castes, have “challenged the validity of a system which despite its
claims to consensual democracy, has bestowed power and privilege on
a handful of wealthy and well-connected members of the higher Hindu
castes” (819).
The image of General sahab’s cosmopolitan palate, where all cuisines
are supposedly welcome, only creates a false sense of equality between
disparate communities and their culinary customs. In effect it fore-
grounds the dominance of an upper-elite Hindu intelligentsia class over
the majority, including the Hindu majority, as well as other minority
religious groups. Kumar eats the food of whichever marginalized com-
munity he chooses. In fact, General sahab’s consumption of ‘Incredible
India’ through its culinary delights is merely a visual affirmation of the
self-interested consumption and exploitation of India by upper-Hindu
elites who are well-represented in Jaspreet Singh’s work.
In contrast to the Kashmir Valley, which is represented as a space that
offers opportunities for pleasure and indulgence to the Indian upper-elite,
the frozen borderland of Siachen is represented as the ground zero for
pleasure and human rights, as a barren wasteland where mostly low-
ranking, economically disadvantaged and low-caste officers of the Paki-
stani and Indian armed forces are stationed. The novel highlights the
enormous physical and emotional challenges that these soldiers have to
tackle on an everyday basis. Kishen recalls the difficulties experienced by
both the Indian and Pakistani soldiers posted at the Siachen Glacier.
Contrary to the sumptuous meals that he prepared for the General,
Kishen subsists largely on bland, low-quality canned food, which is
rationed to him and the rest of the soldiers. Their loss of basic human
rights is mirrored in their lack of access to culinary pleasure. Jaspreet
Singh highlights the corporeal pain experienced by Sikhs whose hair
become frozen at Siachen in order to symbolically parallel their height-
ened suffering as subaltern Sikh subjects within the armed forces. Kishen
plans a protest at Siachen, which he hopes will be covered extensively by
the Indian press. His purpose is to foreground the futility of the presence
of Indian and Pakistani troops in Siachen, and in Kashmir, by voicing the
suffering of the soldiers. During the course of the visit by the General and
the Indian Defense Minister to Siachen, Kishen ties them up in their tent
with the help of two other soldiers and then compels them to assemble
their troops and to summon the media to extensively cover Kishen’s pre-
prepared speech. He addresses the assembled soldiers in the following
words:
Ask what are we doing on this glacier, on these Icefields? Ask why
do we want to melt away this glacier? The kerosene and other poi-
sons we discard on the glacier end up in our holy rivers. For a long
time, we Indians have believed that the gods live up in the mountains.
Why are we wrecking the home of our gods? Why do we need Kash-
mir? Ask Does Kashmir need us? We shit on the glacier, and the shit
freezes and we have to break it with the rifles. And I say the same
thing to the bastards on the other side. What are they dying for, the
Pakistanis? This ice is no place for human beings.
(Singh 167)
Besides critiquing the militarization of Siachen and Kashmir by the

armed forces of both countries, Kishen’s speech is also an evocative appeal
on behalf of the “human beings,” many of them subaltern citizens, who
are forced to survive in subhuman circumstances, and are deprived of
the basic dignities – and the fundamental pleasures – of life. As a man
who enjoyed classical German music, preparing delightful dishes, and
sleeping with beautiful women, Kishen is shown to be an indefatigable
sensualist, an artist, and a hedonistic pleasure-seeker. Siachen robs him of
his virility, of the possibility of preparing beautiful meals or hearing Bee-
thoven’s Ninth Symphony, which frequently accompanied his culinary
experimentations in the kitchen. Realizing the depth of misery and loss
of pleasure he and his compatriots have to suffer through, he decides to
protest against the ill-treatment of low-ranking and lower-caste soldiers
in the army, the rampant corruption within the armed forces as well as
India and Pakistan’s ill-conceived desire to annex and control Kashmir.
The Democratization of Pleasure

In Chef, we encounter a powerful critique of caste and class differences
and of the differences in rights that are available to citizens and subaltern
citizens. Singh’s novel enables us to observe the discrepancies between
international human rights norms and national legislation, such as the
AFSPA, which ensure that high-ranking members of the armed forces
enjoy privileges and pleasures at the expense of other marginalized bod-
ies. Chef is not merely complicit in the commodification of Kashmir and
the transmutation of its political issues into delicious curries and meats
for the diversion of its readers. On the contrary, the novel stages a critical
intervention as far as the consumption of Kashmir by upper and upper-
middle class Indians is concerned. It goes as far as to attempt to bridge
the gap between citizens and subaltern citizens, with the latter category
extending to Kashmiri Muslims, to lower-castes (Kishen) and other reli-
gious minorities (Kirpal), by subverting the power relationship between
the consumers and right-bearers such as the General, his upper-class
friends, and the food preparers, including Kishen and Kirpal.
Reversing the role from subaltern citizen to pleasure-seeker and lover,
Chef explores the fraught romantic entanglement between Kirpal Singh,
a low-ranking Sikh subject and Irem, the Kashmiri Muslim “enemy
woman.” The story of Irem is a literary reconstruction and re-telling
of the story of the detention of Shahnaz Parveen Kausar by the Indian
armed forces (“India relents”). In 1995, Shahnaz Parveen Kausar, a Paki-
stan woman and a resident of Azad Kashmir, tried to commit suicide by
jumping into the Jhelum River to escape the taunts of her in-laws for
being unable to bear a child (“India relents”). Surviving the journey, she
accidentally ended up in Indian-controlled Kashmir and was captured
by Indian armed forces (“India relents”). Because she did not carry valid
travel documents, she was charged with illegally crossing the border and
was thrown into jail, where she was subjected to sexual violence (“India
relents”). She became pregnant as a result of this sexual assault and gave
birth to a daughter, Mobin, while still in prison (“India relents”). In Jas-
preet Singh’s narration of this story, Kirpal Singh, the General’s cook,
who is fluent in Koshur and is a master chef, is sent in to interrogate
Irem, and to gather information as to her purpose in illegally crossing
the border. In the process of conversing with, and cooking for her, Kirpal
begins to develop romantic feelings for the imprisoned Kashmiri Muslim
woman in his care.
When they initially meet, Kirpal who perceives Irem as the Pakistani
Muslim “other,” emphasizes the alterity of her cuisine which, in his view,
consisted of “chicken feet,” “snakes,” “lizards,” and a “young bull’s tes-
ticles” (Singh 133). The otherness of Pakistani cuisine with its inclusion
of meat parts considered repulsive (feet, testicles) as well as creatures
believed to be inedible (reptiles, snakes, lizards) is meant to highlight the
otherness of the enemy woman. According to Mannur, particular ethnic
and racial communities may be “demonized” through “visually marked
culinary idiom[s]” where the “other” is shown to consume wildly unpal-
atable and inedible dishes whereas, the “self” is positioned as the norma-
tive consumer of food (149). Chef Kishen’s religious stereotyping was
articulated in terms of offensive smells which marked the Muslim body
out as a malodorous ‘other’:
I was repelled by the smell of fenugreek and bitter gourd. Now I have
overcome that repulsion, in fact I have come to love the very same
smells I hated as a boy. But certain smells continue to be repulsive.’
‘Like what sir?’
‘Kashmiris,’ he said. ‘Badboo –’.
(42)
Conversely, Kirpal’s religious prejudices are expressed in terms of the

alterity and uncivilized nature of Pakistani Muslim culinary customs.
However, subsequent interactions allow him to soften his stance towards
Irem, to the point where he wishes to make her experience “real Indian
hospitality” through food (Singh 134). Kirpal offers her a familiar Kash-
miri dish that meets the appropriate religious requirements, halal rogan
josh, as a way of securing her trust. He begins to discuss his recipe of
roghan josh with her, and this act of culinary affiliation, creates a degree
of affinity and warmth between them. Whereas previously she had
ignored his presence in her room, in this instance she interjects, and cor-
rects his recipe by telling him that tomatoes are typically not added to the
roghan josh and the intense red hue of roghan josh is derived from Kash-
miri chilis and mawal flowers. Kirpal patently fails to prepare rogan josh
according to the Kashmiri Muslim methods; however, his act of feeding
her and attempting to understand Irem’s ‘authentic’ recipe for rogan josh
becomes the means of securing her trust and eventually her affection.
After eating Kirpal’s carefully prepared rogan josh, Irem confides in him,
explaining the motivation for jumping into the Jhelum river, which car-
ried her to the Indian side of the border (138). Hearing about her per-
sonal struggles and narrow prospects as an illiterate woman living in
Azad Kashmir with difficult in-laws enables Kirpal to empathize with her.
He begins to overcome his own pre-conceived notions about the alterity
of her culinary customs, and the otherness of her religious identity, and is
instead moved by the precarity and vulnerability of her situation.
Kirpal retains her stained pheran, which needed to be dropped at the
washerman’s hut, as a keepsake and this article of clothing becomes a
precious memento of their meeting and the conversation that ensued
between them. The pheran which had “clung to her” when she had
plunged into the river carried her scent, or in the words of Kirpal, “the
sweat of a beautiful woman” (138). On account of its clinging to her
body, and smelling like her skin, it is almost a corporeal part of her. The
act of smelling her pheran is an intimate act that cements a closeness
between them that had been fomented during the course of their conver-
sation. While lying in bed, he no longer perceives Kashmir to be a space
of difference characterized by rebellious natives, but instead, for the first
time, feels himself to be quite ‘at home’ in Kashmir. Despite the funda-
mental dichotomy of their relationship, in which he is the interrogator
and she, the vulnerable subject, he is moved by the beauty and plight of
the Kashmiri woman from Azad Kashmir whose experiences exhibited
various shades of oppression and subalternity in her life in Pakistan, the
supposedly ‘free’ and liberated side of the border. This also serves as a
subtle yet powerful indictment of the state of human rights and political
freedom in Pakistani-administered Azad Kashmir. While the government
of Pakistan pays lip service to the Kashmiris’ right to self-determination
and touts the importance of the restoration of international human rights
in Indian-administered Kashmir, novels such as Chef use fiction to expose
the factitiousness of these concerns, by foregrounding the state of subal-
tern subjects such as Irem. Her bid to end her life is an act of desperation,
but also of agency. It is an emancipatory attempt at gaining control over
her pitiful circumstances that ultimately propels her headlong into the
middle of a complex political predicament.
Relinquishing his earlier suspicious, and diffidence towards her, Kirpal
begins to fall deeply in love with the beautiful, long-haired ‘enemy’ from
Kashmir. Irem is more disadvantaged than Kirpal because of her gender
identity, her illiteracy, and her political plight, but both Kirpal and Irem
are positioned as subaltern citizens. And while Kirpal and Irem are never
shown as fully able to overcome their subalternity in the novel, they are
able to experience a sense of closeness, intimacy, and agency which was
previously not available to them. During the course of her interminable
imprisonment, Irem’s scarf is forcefully removed and her long hair shaved
off. This makes Kirpal deeply aggrieved and compels him to remove his
turban and reveal his own coiled locks of hair to Irem, as a way of mak-
ing himself emotionally vulnerable before her. Their religious headwear –
her scarf, and his turban – are similar, visual markers of their religious
identity. In a dramatized and emotionally charged sequence in the novel,
Kirpal places his Sikh turban in front of Irem’s unraveled headscarf. This
act of unclothing, in the form of the removal of a religious garment,
draws them close to one another and becomes the basis for the growing
trust between them.
Kirpal’s ability to empathize and affiliate himself with the ‘enemy’
woman is also reflected in the modification of his culinary methods.
Before meeting Irem, he used to prepare rogan josh in accordance with
the rules of north Indian cuisine by using tomatoes to induce the red
shade of the curry and the tangy aftertaste. However, after becoming
familiar with Irem and her ‘Kashmiri Muslim’ way of preparing the dish,
he alters his recipe accordingly, replacing tomatoes with Kashmiri chili
and yoghurt. He becomes acquainted with the Kashmiri Pandit method
of preparing this dish, in which asafetida, fennel seeds, and ginger are
used, and at Rubiya’s wedding, he tries to incorporate all these culinary
styles in order to create a cosmopolitan rogan josh, which is a metaphor
for Kashmiriyat in the novel.
After meeting Irem and learning her recipe, Kirpal prepares rogan josh,
which can be consumed and relished by all Kashmiris – Kashmiri Pan-
dits who fled the Valley and Kashmiris Muslims from both Pakistan and
Indian-occupied Kashmir. This cosmopolitan rogan josh is a means of
healing the scission and bitterness between these different Kashmiris, and
of restoring Kashmiriyat, but it also turns subaltern Kashmiris from mar-
ginalized food-preparers into consumers. The cosmopolitan rogan josh is
meant to satiate and cater to all Kashmiris irrespective of the dietary, his-
torical, and religious differences between them. It functions as a means of
overcoming the rift between the Kashmiri Muslim and Kashmiri Pandit
communities and of suturing the historical wound of the Pandit exodus
that took place in the 1990s. The blending of the two unique culinary
traditions leads to the creation of a dish that satiates the taste buds of the
different ethnic communities living in the Valley of Kashmir, reminding
them of the gustatory bonds that tie them together, and acting as a pallia-
tive to the mutual suspicion and distrust that exists between them.
The image of the rogan josh functions on different levels. The selection
of Rubiya’s wedding as the venue to debut this new dish is appropriate
because Rubiya, an upper-caste Indian Hindu, is marrying a Kashmiri
Muslim, and in that sense, the dish mirrors their inter-religious marriage.
It is also a labour of love, a tender creation developed by Kirpal, as a
token of the unrequited love between him and Irem. As Irem licks her
fingers while consuming Kirpal’s rogan josh, as we have seen, she is no
longer represented solely as a victim, of domestic abuse in Pakistan and
of forceful detention in India, but as the recipient of pleasure (Singh 137).
In Sanjay Kak’s documentary, Jashn-e-Azadi (How we celebrate free-
dom), Shakeel Bakshi, a political activist states that, “Kashmiris are a
unique people who even after a prolonged struggle, and five hundred
years of being colonized, didn’t give up on the smallest of their traditions –
the wazwan – Nor could anyone make them do it either” (“Jashn”).
Food, particularly the Kashmiri wazwan, is here turned into a site of
political protest, and the reclamation and preservation of local culinary
customs and its pleasures for Kashmiris is seen as a mechanism of resist-
ance. Similarly, in Chef, Irem and Kirpal are cast as pleasure-seekers, and
not just marginalized subjects and victims. Jaspreet Singh’s novel pushes
both Irem and Kirpal towards full citizenship, and at least momentarily,
minimizes their subalternity by giving them access to the full range of
pleasures and rights that are available to the most privileged members of
society. By propping up the desires of subaltern citizens, Jaspreet Singh’s
novel promotes the democratization of desire and pleasure and seeks to
make pleasure and enjoyment accessible to all members of the human
community in equal measure. Chef uses representations of the inclusive
rogan josh to position ‘subaltern citizens’ as deserving of dignified treat-
ment and inalienable rights, and to advocate for their inclusion into the
mainstream as equal members of the national community.
Conclusion
The image of the thaal, which we encounter initially on the Incredible
India website, is similar to the image of the cosmopolitan rogan josh in
Chef. Both are visual imaginings of India as a democratic nation-space.
The thaal is offered as a delight to largely pamper the palate of the privi-
leged, and to titillate the touristic gaze, whereas Kirpal’s rogan josh is an
egalitarian culinary treat meant to be consumed and enjoyed by all Indian
subjects equally, including a subaltern underclass that is typically excluded
from the spheres of pleasure, political participation and human rights.
They, in particular, are invited to ‘eat’ and consume the culinary pleasures
as well as the rights offerings of the nation-state. Kishen’s sensitively pre-
pared creation is aimed at making the gustatory pleasures and rights of
democratic India indiscriminately available and ‘edible’ for all its citizens,
such that the gaps in rights between citizens and subaltern citizens can be
negotiated and overcome. Representations of regional culinary customs
on national portals, cookbooks, and in literary texts often reveal class,
caste and religious inequalities and differences, as I have shown through-
out this chapter. But in Singh’s novel, culinary images are deployed to
incisively critique, and ultimately, to attempt to iron out these differences
and to advocate for a true democratization of pleasure and rights.
References
Ali, Syed Asad. “Kashmir Day Does Not Mean Anything to the Average Pakistani.”
The Express Tribune, The Express Tribune, 5 Feb. 2016. www.blogs.tribune.
com.pk/story/32118/kashmir-day-doesnot-mean-anything-to-the-average-
pakistani/.
Chak, Annapurna. Multiple Flavours of Kashmiri Pandit Cuisine. Partridge, 2015.
Chakravarty, Ipsita. “Why the Armed Forces Special Powers Act Is Not Leaving
Kashmir Anytime Soon.” Scroll, 30 July 2016. www.scroll.in/article/812637/
why-the-armed-forces-specialpowers-act-is-not-leaving-kashmir-anytime-soon.
Chaturvedi, Vinayak, editor. Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial.
Verso, 2012.
Commuri, Gitika. Indian Identity Narratives and the Politics of Security. SAGE,
2010.
Dhillon, Amrit. “In India, Caste System Ensures You Are What You Eat.” Post
Magazine, 26 July 2014. www.scmp.com/magazines/postmagazine/article/
1558061/you-are-what-you-eat.
Ganju, Chandramukhi. Koshur Saal: Traditional Quick & Easy Kashmiri Cui-
sine. Mount Helicon Press, 2009.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci,
translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, Elecbooks, 1999.
Hamid, Moshin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Hamish Hamilton, 2007.
Huggan, Graham. “The Postcolonial Exotic.” Transition, vol. 64, 1994,
pp. 22–29. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/2935304.
“Incredible India.” Ministry of Tourism Government of India, 5 Aug. 2015. www.
incredibleindia.org/.
“India Relents, Lets Pakistani Woman Go.” The Washington Times, 5 Aug. 2002.
www.washingtontimes.com/news/2002/aug/5/20020805035620-3615r/.
“Jaspreet Singh.” Penguin Random House Canada, 10 June 2018. penguin
randomhouse.ca/authors/117750/jaspreet-singh. 2012, pp. 694–97. Google
Scholar, www.lifesciencesite.com/lsj/life0904/108_11581life0904_694_697.pdf.
Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. “The Kashmiri as Muslim in Bollywood’s ‘New Kash-
mir Films’.” Contemporary South Asia, vol. 18, no. 4, 2010, pp. 373–85, doi:
10.1080/09584935.2010.526201.
Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. “Nipped in The Bud? Pleasure and politics in the 1960s
‘Kashmir Films’ ” South Asian Popular Culture, vol. 3, no. 2, Oct. 2005,
pp. 83–100.
Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir.
U of Minnesota P, 2009.
“Kashmir Food Fest Runs into Pakistan Visa Hurdle.” The Hindustan Times,
7 Feb. 2006. www.hindustantimes.com/india/kashmirfood-fest-runs-into-paki
stan-visa-hurdle/storyqAh1S33KJsANLO0CGTJ2KO.html.
“Kashmiri Food Festival Begins.” The Nation, 12 Mar. 2016. www.nation.com.
pk/12-Mar-2016/kashmiri-food-festivalbegins
Kerrigan, Finola et al. “Nation Branding: A Critical Appraisal of Incredible
India.” Journal of Macromarketing, vol. 32, no. 3, 14 May 2012, pp. 319–27.
Google Scholar, doi:10.1177/0276146712445788.
Kurian, Nimmi. “India’s Subaltern Border Citizen.” OpenDemocracy, 14 Oct.
2014. www.opendemocracy.net/openindia/nimmikurian/india’s-subaltern-border-
citizen.
Louai, El Habib. “Retracing the Concept of the Subaltern from Gramsci to Spi-
vak: Historical Developments and New Applications.” African Journal of His-
tory and Culture, vol. 4, no. 1, Jan. 2012, pp. 4–8.
Mannur, Anita. Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture. Tem-
ple UP, 2010.
Martin, Kathleen. “Traditional Responsibility and Spiritual Relatives: Protection
of Indigenous Rights to Land and Sacred Places.” Indigenous Rights in the
Age of the UN Declaration, edited by Elvira Pulitano. Cambridge UP, 2014,
pp. 198–227.
Morton, Stephen. “Sovereignty and Necropolitics at the Line of Control.” Jour-
nal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 50, no. 1, 2013, pp. 19–30. Google Scholar,
doi:10.1080/17449855.2013.850213.
Mukerji, Ayan, director. Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani. Dharma Productions, 2013.
Narayan, Uma. “Eating Cultures: Incorporation, Identity and Indian Food.”
Social Identities, vol. 1, no. 1, 1995, pp. 63–86.
Olson, Maria. “Citizenship Education without Citizenship? The Migrant in
EU Education Policy on European Citizenship – Toward the Margin through
‘Strangification.’ ” Education for Civic and Political Participation: A Critical
Approach, edited by Reinhold Hedtke and Tatjana Zimenkova. Routledge,
2013, pp. 155–70.
Pandey, Gyanendra. Subaltern Citizens and Their Histories: Investigations from
India and the USA. Routledge, 2010.
Pandey, Gyanendra. “The Subaltern as Subaltern Citizen.” Economic and Politi-
cal Weekly, vol. 41, no. 46, 18 Nov. 2006, pp. 4735–41. JSTOR, www.jstor.
org/stable/i401939.
Parvaiz, Athar. “Killer Siachen – ‘Where a Pakistani Soldier Dies Every Four Days
from the Cold.’ ” Dawn, 8 Feb. 2016. www.dawn.com/news/1237803.
Ramakrishnan, M. “AFSPA Explained: How Does It Work Exactly?” Livem-
int, 28 May 2015. www.livemint.com/Politics/ZppBTWeVoJCVAKRIjyhCVI/
AFSPA-explained-How-does-it-work-exactly.html.
Read, Robyn, and Owen Percy. “Experimental Writing: Jaspreet Singh in Con-
versation with Robyn Read and Owen Percy.” ARIEL: A Review of Interna-
tional English Literature, vol. 38, no. 2–3, July 2007, pp. 171–84.
“Recipes of India.” Incredible India. www.incredibleindia.org/food&cuisine/.
Said, Edward W. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Harvard UP, 1983.
Singh, Jaspreet. Chef. Bloomsbury, 2010.
Slaughter, Joseph R. Human Rights, Inc: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and
International Law. Fordham UP, 2009.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak.” Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg.
U of Illinois P, 1988, pp. 271–313.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, and Ranajit Guha, editors. Selected Subaltern Stud-
ies Subaltern Studies. Oxford UP, 1988.
Uberoi, Patricia. “Unity in Diversity?’ Dilemmas of Nationhood in Indian Calen-
dar Art.” Contributions to Indian Sociology, vol. 36, no. 1–2, 2002, pp. 191–
232. Google Scholar, doi:10.1177/006996670203600107.
Upadhyaya, Prakash Chandra. “The Politics of Indian Secularism.” Modern
Asian Studies, vol. 26, no. 4, Oct. 1992, pp. 815–53. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/
stable/312941.
UN General Assembly. “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” United
Nations, 1948, www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/.
Vidyalakshmi. “Kashmiri Food Festival @Nook-Aloft, Cessna Business Park,
Bengaluru.” Vidyascooking, Blogspot, 24 Feb. 2017. www.vidyascooking.
blogspot.my/2017/02/kashmirifood-festival-nook-aloft.html.
Waheed, Mirza. The Book of Gold Leaves. Penguin, 2014.
Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to
Extravagance. Princeton UP, 1993.
“Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani Leads Filmfare with 9 Nominations.” India Today,
16 Jan. 2014. www.indiatoday.intoday.in/story/yeh-jawaani-hai-deewanifilm
fare-ram-leela-chennai-express/1/336554.html.
Zutshi, Chitralekha. “Designed for Eternity: Kashmiri Shawls, Empire, and Cul-
tures of Production and Consumption in Mid-Victorian Britain.” The Journal
of British Studies, vol. 48, no. 2, 2009, pp. 420–40.
View publication stats

Palatable Fictions

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Palatable Fictions

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

Palatable Fictions: Negotiating Narratives of

Chapter · November 2020

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

The Tiger Ladies deploys textual representations of Kashmiri visual and

Filiation and Affiliation

Kashmiri Food in the National Imagination

Figure 4.1 “Incredible India”.

Figure 4.2 Description of Indian food ways as an expression of unity-in-diversity

Kashmir! The very name evokes pictorial images of snow-covered

In this description, Chak begins with the most consumable aspects of

The Food-Laden Shikara

embark on a flavourful journey into the exotic land of Shikaaras,

Figure 4.3 The Poster for Wazwan Food Festival by Vidyalakshmi

Figure 4.4 A Food-laden Shikara at the Wazwan Food Festival. Vidyalakshmi

In popular Bollywood films from the 1960s such as Junglee (1961),

Yeh Jawani Hae Diwani

ADITI (TO NAINA): Don’t listen to him, Bunny is allergic to marriage.

Daal chawal, a dish of boiled lentils served with rice, is considered to

The General’s Palate

They talk about classical music, beekeeping, carpets, silkworms,

The conversation revolves around pleasure-centred activities (picnicking,

The aim of the first collection of essays . . . is to promote a systematic

Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-

the underprivileged and disenfranchised: religious, ethnic and sexual

In sharp contrast to this, Pandey argues for radically expanding subaltern

accurately describes what is a fairly common contemporary condi-

He writes that the idea of a subaltern citizen allows us to “reinforce

The Siachen Glacier is the ‘world’s highest battleground’ and is part of

The General’s Ration

General Kumar’s “ration,” which is seemingly limitless, unlike the more

Besides critiquing the militarization of Siachen and Kashmir by the

The Democratization of Pleasure

Conversely, Kirpal’s religious prejudices are expressed in terms of the

View publication stats

You might also like

Figure 4.1 “Incredible India”.

Figure 4.2 Description of Indian food ways as an expression of unity-in-diversity

Figure 4.3 The Poster for Wazwan Food Festival by Vidyalakshmi

Figure 4.4 A Food-laden Shikara at the Wazwan Food Festival. Vidyalakshmi