Food Odyssey- Mapping Identity and Belonging through Native Cuisine in A House by the Sea by Sikeena Karmali

How do cultural artefacts of food, rituals and customs shape the (Indian) diaspora in Sikeena Karmali’s work of a woman’s quest for her home will be the focus of the paper. This paper builds up the notion that the cultural artefact of food helps the immigrants unfurl questions relating to identity, citizenship, nationality and belonging in A House by the Sea by Sikeena Karmali. Mundane yet intensely symbolic items such as food are woven in complex and shifting ways into discourses of tradition and transformation, identity, and community. The immigrant on automation reconnects and recreates things from the past comparing and contrasting it with the present alien land. The pangs of dislocation are critiqued through culinary discourse. Food becomes a marker of national identity. The Indianness of an Indian immigrant is located from its ethnic cuisine. The symbol of food assumes an overwhelming importance as cuisine comes to be associated with the lost or abandoned homeland of the migrant.