Poetry Palette: A Taste of India

                               

                                                                         Abstract

                                                               by Dr. Brian Mendonca


India offers a vast menu of foods. Variegated by culture, religion, state, terrain and tradition,

Indian food has something for everyone. How is this culinary cornucopia seen by travellers and

migrants in India? How do foreigners and Indians cope with changing dietary practices which

differ from their home state or country?


This paper tries to explore, through the prism of poetry, how Indian food reifies itself in different

kitchens, contexts and literatures. In so doing it relies on the author-poet’s self-published book of

poems A Peace of India: Poems in Transit to lay out the poetic terrain and to take the reader

through a culinary journey across India through his poems.


In its inquiry it proposes that a) Indian poetry in English is not taken seriously enough as a genre

of literature to represent the culture of food and b) There is a tacit hierarchization in presenting

various foods in literary studies.

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Abstract of paper presented at International Conference on ‘The Culture of Food: Literature and Society, ’M. E. S. College of Arts & Commerce, Zuarinagar, Goa, 25-27 February 2016. In the pix Brian provides conference feedback as one of the delegates at the Valedictory session at The Queeny, Velsao on 27 February 2016.