Archives of Unspeakability

Food, Materiality and Emotional Aphasia in Indubala Bhater Hotel

Abstract

It is out of a recent turn in critical research that objects have started being taken seriously as potent elements in a circuit of emotional transaction. In The Politics of Nature (2004), Latour suggests that objects can be actants – “source[s] of action” (237) – that can “make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events”. Building on this idea, I would like to use the scope of this paper to look into the potential that food carries as a mnemonic tool and as a critical “actant” in a cycle of affective or e-motional exchange. Memory and food have been found to be intrinsically related in various past research, and present an association the tenacity of which can hardly be challenged. But what is it about food that makes it such a powerful site of (re)constructing memory? What specific memories does food have the ability to etch? More importantly, in fact, how do those memories invoke nuances from the past in ways that also seek to inform perceptions of the present and visions of the future? To delve deeper into these questions, this paper intends to do a close reading of Kallol Lahiri’s Indubala Bhater Hotel (2017), a Bengali post-partition novel that looks at the protagonist’s struggle in a new country (amidst the volatility wrecked by the Bangladeshi Liberation War and the Naxalite movement in Kolkata) through her navigation of her past memories of food, home and nation. I specifically aim to look into a certain emotional aphasic condition of trauma/displacement survivors in the text, and explore how food becomes an important material avenue for the protagonist to recollect private memories and attempt to survive in an alienated land post partition.