Cultural Preservation and Cultural Assimilation in Shoba Narayan’s Monsoon Diary: a memoir with recipes

Abstract

Migration has become increasingly common in recent times and with it comes the challenge of understanding and adapting to the new cultural environment. The difficulty of blending into their new environment while simultaneously struggling to preserve their own cultural identity from their homeland can be seen in Shoba Narayan’s popular food memoir Monsoon Diary: a memoir with recipes (2004). This paper deals with the cultural differences between India and America and how the author, Shoba Narayan manages to hold onto her inherent Indian culture and at the same time try to explore, adapt and assimilate with the American culture. This paper also analyses how food is used as a symbol to represent the cultural differences. Food is an essential and integral part of everyone’s life, deeply interconnected with the culture, rituals, way of living of a particular place and its people. A foodoir or a food memoir captures the role of food in a community’s culture more vividly than any other element. This dynamic between cultural preservation and cultural assimilation is a not much researched area and it offers an insight into the experiences of immigrants abroad and thus will help people to resonate with the characters and incidents in the novel. This paper has used the MLA Ninth edition for research methodology and documentation.