Vol. 7, Issue 2, Part D (2025)

This Paper explores the ways food serves a s a crucial site of cultural memory and signifier of diasporic identity. Utilizing Lahiri’s complex depiction of immigrant experience, the analysis begins by tracing food as a cultural archive through which cooking practices and ritual play a vital role in sustaining ties to the ancestral home and transmitting the past to future generations. The fictional kitchen, the dinner table, and the feast become symbolic places where culture is deposited, recollected and repeated. The second concern is with identity and belonging, and looks at how culinary practice mediates the characters’ balancing act between Bengali tradition and American assimilation. Food becomes a contested arena of cultural negotiation, sometimes a point of alienation, but also a place where belonging can be rediscovered through hybridity and adaption. The article, finally, considers the symbolic association of food, nostalgia, and memory. Tasting home in The Namesake, Culinary markers in The Namesake bring back taste of home, stir memories of familial intimacy and cook up emotional frugality in the middle of dislocation. Embedded within these descriptions is a view of food that seems to exceed its role as nourishment to become a medium for communicating the affective links between past and present, while orienting the diasporic underpinning of being. Placing Lahiri’s tale in the context of wider deliberations centering food, memory and migration, this paper suggests that culinary acts in The Namesake function as cartographies of belonging locales which delineate the symbiotic relationship between exile, legacy and cultural selfhood.