Jhol, Memory, and the Maternal Hearth: Food, Identity, and Female Agency in Pratim D. Gupta’s Macher Jhol (2017)

Abstract

This paper undertakes a theoretical analysis of Pratim D. Gupta’s Bengali culinary drama film Macher Jhol (2017) by applying the interdisciplinary food-studies framework developed in contemporary Food Studies. The paper wants to read the central signifier of the film, macher jhol (fish stew), as a multi-layered cultural text negotiation as an identity, memory, diaspora, motherhood and the politics of culinary authenticity in the Bengali context, through the theoretical apparatuses of Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Elspeth Probyn, W.E.B. Du Bois, Adrienne Rich, Carl Jung and Gloria Anzaldua, among others. The paper argues that, just as the Chicana foodscape functions simultaneously as a space of subjugation and radical empowerment in Mexican American literature, the Bengali kitchen and its emblematic dish operate as both an incarcerating and a liberating force in Gupta’s film. Food, in Macher Jhol, transcends its visceral properties to become what Barthes calls a ‘veritable grammar’ of cultural selfhood — a potent voice of the individuated and discursive self, formed in the act of negotiating the conflicting value systems of diaspora, domesticity, gender, and modernity.