The Influence Of Food In The Brotherhood Of The Conch Trilogy

An integral part of Bengali culture that Divakaruni keeps bringing back in all her works is food and several beliefs, rituals and practices associated with it. Food occupies a crucial place in her works. ShashiTharoor’s remarks about her first novel, The Mistress of Spices, hold true for her other novels as well:

Though Divakaruni does magic rather well, writing about the mystical spices in prose that rise lightly off the page like so many wipes of incense, she is best at realism. She has a keen feel for immigrant life.

ThahiyaAfzal in “The Confluence of Spices: Paradigms of Identity and Self Discovery in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’sThe Mistress of Spices” statesthat food indicates “the belief systems, religious rules, and complex ideologies of a particular person or character, or that of an entire community or culture, that may not be explained explicitly in a text.”

The present paper aims at examining how Divakaruni uses food in The Brotherhood of the Conch Trilogy.This series traces the fantastic adventures of a young Indian boy named Anand, a street urchin, Nisha, and their mentor, Abhaydatta. They are on a mission to return a magical object, a conch,to its original place in the Silver Valley in the Himalayas and to save the world from destruction.

The writer’s website states the following with regard to this novel:

Mythical, mystical — and impossible to put down . . . The Conch Bearer is a feast for the senses with a multitude of colors, smells, sounds, and textures. It’s a feast of the emotions as readers feel fear, hope, joy, trepidation, sadness, and wonder — right along with the main characters. And it’s a feast for adventure-lovers – a fast paced story that races across contemporary India to a dramatic climax in the