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A Widow’s Diet: Negotiating Politics of Food and Widowhood in
The Anger of Aubergines
Rajbir Samal
Indian Institute of Technology, India
Binod Mishra
Indian Institute of Technology, India

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Abstract
Widowhood, in Indian society, is a dreaded condition of a woman after the death of her
husband. It is an imposed performance that entails a set of ritualized practices and behavior tomark her transition to the state of a woman without. On many occasions, this state is ensured
and maintained through multifarious rituals and practices, which range from restrictions onmobility, choices, and desires to injunctions on clothes, bodily demeanor, and food. This
physio-social exercise of control and restraint alludes to a framework of religio-cultural
discourse that renders widows as social and sexual non-beings. The present paper attempts tounderstand the state of widowhood through the analysis of two short stories in the collection,
The Anger of Aubergines (1997) by Bulbul Sharma from the perspective of food. Food andeating, being the elementary aspects of everyday life, become important signifiers in studying
the deprived state of widowhood. The paper intends to unpack the politics behind theimposition of a curriculum of gastronomic injunctions and food taboos on Hindu upper-caste
widows. Further, the paper conceptualizes the appetite of widows as a subversive category not
only in challenging the gender discourses behind their oppression but also in exonerating theirstatus as desireless beings.
Keywords: food, gender, widows, appetite, patriarchy

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In India, like elsewhere, widowhood is not a natural state of being for women. It is a transitionalsocial, cultural, and material becoming of a woman after the death of her husband. Widowhood
is an ordeal by the proximal society which seeks to impose this dreaded condition on them for
multifarious reasons. The gender structure of Indian society, due to its patriarchal nature, makes
the state of widowhood very excruciating. After the death of her husband, a wife loses her
personhood and, hence, transpires the erasure of her existence. For Hindu widows, especiallyupper caste widows, this is particularly true, as their subjectivity is deeply contingent on thelife of the husband. Uma Chakrabarti (1995), in her essay Gender, Caste and Labour,
underlines the rooted patriarchal notion that “woman becomes a social entity only when as awife she is united with her husband, the death of her husband represents the cessation of hersocial existence and the end of her personhood” (p. 2250). Taming of the sexual energy thatwomen innately possess is the other reason why women have to be bound in the shackles ofwidowhood. It is written in Hindu Dharmasastras1 that women, in general, have a wicked andlicentious disposition which can be ascribed to the bad karma in their previous birth (Sogani,2002). The very birth of a woman in the present life is premised on the negative connotationof karma which makes them as lustful and demoniac creatures whose destructive energy should
be controlled and channelized within the boundaries of marriage or repressed at all otheroccasions. Hence, after the death of her husband, society contrives inhibitions and restrictions
to control the unbridled sexual energy of widows, which culminates in the deplorable state ofwidowhood. Rituparna Bhattacharya and Suman Singh corroborate this argument with theirstudy on the Hindu widows living in Varanasi, which finds that a widow is “perceived as asexual threat” to the affinal family and the proximal society, resulting in social exclusion (2018,
pp. 766–777). So, widowhood becomes a medium of socio-cultural apparatus to be exercisedon these wanton widowed women to keep in check their promiscuous nature, and maintain thesocio-moral order of the Hindu tradition.
On most occasions, widowhood in Hindu culture demands women to follow the rituals ofpenance for their committed sins that resulted in the death of their husbands. It behooves astrict sense of atonement for not being able to carry out her stridharma2 in her present life. She
essentially becomes the reason for the death of her husband due to her bad karma in her
previous birth which she cannot counterpoise through her wifely devotions within the marriage.
Uma Chakrabarti (1995) calls out the incriminatory aspect labeled on widows referring to thelack of their virtuousness, “A true pativrata3 can never be widowed because she will never1
Dharmsastras are ancient Hindu religious texts that lay down the moral principles and the religious codes ofconduct for Hindus. It also prescribes the moral laws of punishment and atonements for righteous Hindus (Sogani,2002). See more, Kane, P.V. (1974). History of Dharmasastras: Ancient and Medieval Religious and Civil Law.
Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute.
2
Stridharma refers to the ordained duties and functions of Hindu wives towards their husbands (Chakrabarti,
1995, p. 2249). It entails a strict sense of fidelity and absolute subservience that the wives have to follow to leada righteous life. In Indian society, it is also used as an ideological mechanism to ensure social control over women.
See more, Leslie, J. (1989). The Perfect Wife: Tue Orthodox Hindu Woman According to the Stridharmapaddhati
of Tryambakayajavan. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
3
Pativrata is a term used in Hinduism to refer to the virtuous married woman who has made a religious vow tostaunchly remain loyal and devoted to her husband in life and even after that. The concept of pativrata is institutedin Hindu tradition to make widows “control their own sexuality and avoid transgressing patriarchal norms”(Sogani, 2002, p. 5).

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leave her husband, even in death. She will either die before him as a ‘sumangali’4 or willaccompany him in death” (p. 2250). Hence, a widowed woman is not considered a true
pativrata, and widowhood is used as a measure of atonement through which the woman canstill have some chances of carrying out her stridharma even after the death of her husband.
Here, the question arises then, how is the state of widowhood expressed in a patriarchal society
like India for the widows, especially for the Hindu upper caste widows, and why?
In Hindu tradition, the state of widowhood entails a set of ritualized practices to mark thetransition of a woman from the Subhgyavati (blessed) wife to an unfortunate widow. In orderto establish the state of widowhood as a condition of a woman without, the symbolic ideas of
patriarchy are given expression in ritualized patterns and cultural practices. The death of thehusband, without whom the widow ceased to be a social entity, is ritually expressed throughspecial ceremonies signifying the social death of the woman. The rituals and practices
encompass social restrictions in terms of mobility, choices, and desires to cultural injunctions
on clothes, color codes, and food. Uma Chakrabarti and Preeti Gill (2001), in their anthology
on Indian writing on widows, Shadow Lives, state that:
Codes of bodily mortifications, food restrictions, symbolic relationship with colour,
dress and access to spaces and ceremonies, were all elements that reinforced thepatterns of belief wherein the upper caste widow was regarded as entering a state ofsocial death when her husband died (p. 7).
The concept of widowhood stands as an antithesis to the idea of marriage which can be marked
by the different yet resembling set of rituals performed on the two occasions. On the one hand,marriage encompasses rituals like smearing of turmeric, adornment of red kumkum and sindoor,
braiding hair with flowers, and wearing a red sari, all of which symbolize female procreative
power and fertility, on the other hand, widowhood involves rituals like smearing out of sindoor
and kumkum, wearing white or ochre sari, ban on applying turmeric and in some cases tonsuring
head. The female sexual energy and potency which was once considered to be an integral aspectof married women’s life and rituals, turn into destructive and disorderly in the case of
widowhood. Hence, the rituals and practices during and after widowhood are performed with
the intent to desexualize the women. They are pushed to the liminal state of physically aliveand sexually dead, ultimately signifying their sexual death. Uma Chakrabarti (1995) brilliantly
sums up this state, “The customs and rituals mark a social and ideological resolution of thetensions inherent in a conceptualisation of widowhood in which the widow continues to exist
but is sexually a non-being” (p. 2249).
Along with the rituals of widowhood, there are some prescribed behaviors that the Hindu
widows have to follow, so that these can be insistent reminders of their deprived state. They
include sartorial injunctions regarding dress codes, impermissibility to access certain parts of
4

In Hindu culture, Sumangali denotes those fortunate women whose husbands outlive them. This indicates thematerialization of their ideal wifehood (Chakrabarti, 1995, p. 2250). Find more, Samanta, S. (1992).
Mangalmayima, Sumangali, Mangal: Bengali perceptions of the divine feminine, motherhood, and“auspiciousness.” Contributions to Indian Sociology, 26(1), 51–75.

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the house like the kitchen, insistence on observing fasts, the permissibility of eating only
vegetarian food, and prescription on avoiding spicy food, amongst others. The Dharmasastras
prescribed that “A widow should give up adorning her hair, chewing betel-nut, wearing
perfumes, flowers, ornaments and dyed clothes, taking food from a vessel of bronze, taking
two meals a day” (Sogani, 2002, p. 7). What is important to note here is that food being a daily
act of sustenance, becomes one of the central mediums through which widowhood ispersecuted on women in the physio-socio-cultural realm. Hence, food can be an important
marker to read and understand the state of widowhood as “food and eating are at the core of
lives, inscribed in psyches, embedded in culture, vehicle and substance of social interaction,enmeshed with the relationship of the self to the world” (Sceats, 2004, p. 186).
The present article attempts to study two short stories in the collection, The Anger ofAubergines (1997) by Bulbul Sharma to understand how Hindu widows, especially upper caste
widows, are controlled by the structures of patriarchy through the restrictions and taboos onfood and eating. The paper conceptualizes the appetite of widows as a critical category in which
gender plays a significant part in keeping in check the alimentary and sexual desires of widows.
Further, it also strives to depict how food, in general, and appetite, in particular, can bring out
a subversive and agentic self in the widows.
Food, Women and Widowhood in Bulbul Sharma’s The Anger of Aubergines
Food is deeply enmeshed in Indian society and culture. The inextricability of food in Indianculture can be assumed by the array of rules and norms that are rooted and manifested throughthe culinary codes. The indispensability of food in birth rituals, marriage rituals, death rituals,
and other turn-of-life events makes food an important signifier in the rites of passage of Indianlife. Supriya Chaudhuri and Rimi B. Chatterjee (2011), in their introduction to the volume The
Writer’s Feast, note, “Indian culture gives enormous importance to food, to the customs
surrounding the preparation and serving of meals, and to the body of cultural assumptions andmyths associated with eating” (p. x). The semiotic value of food is well captured in the Indian
literary and religious texts that shed light on the condition of widows in Indian society. The
critical intersectionality between food and widowhood can be found in the ancient religious
texts like Dharmasutras5 and Dhramasastras to classical literary creations in Sangam poetry.
The dietary injunction in the Baudhayana Dharmasutra pronounces that “A widow shall avoid
during a year the use of honey, meat, spirituous liquor and salt” (Chakrabarti & Gill, 2001, p.
35). Similarly, the classical Sangam poetry describes the woes of widowed women in thefollowing lines, “Now my great husband is dead, I eat at untimely evening hours and the lilies
give me lily seed, a widow’s rice” (Ramanujan, 1985, p. 178). These ancient texts enunciate
the age-old disapproving relationship between food and widows. These alimentary injunctions
5

Dharmasutras are the authoritative Sanskrit treatises on Hindu social and religious life, containing guidelines
on social principles, moral precepts, and ethical norms that should ideally regulate the Hindu way of life. There
are four surviving Dharmasutras in the present era, and Baudhayana Dharmasutra is one among them whichcontains lines on the appropriate dietary habits for widows. Read Uma Chakrabarti and Preeti Gill’s edited volume
Shadow Lives: Writings on Widowhood (2001) to find such dietary injunctions on Hindu widows in the ancientreligious texts like Dharmasutras and Dhramasastras that are collated in the volume.

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still continue to haunt the lives of the widows which is also reflected in a number ofcontemporary literary texts, including Chchinnamasta by Ashapurna Devi, The Remains of the
Feast by Gita Hariharan, Water by Bapsi Sidwa, and the current text under analysis The Angerof Aubergines by Bulbul Sharma.
The Anger of Aubergines by Bulbul Sharma is a collection of 12 short stories and 20 recipes,
where each short story ends with one or two recipes mentioned in the story. The collection
explores the imbricated ways in which “food speaks about women and about how women speak
about food, and about how women speak about themselves through food” (Sarkar, 2019, p. 38).
The short stories become a kind of culinary testimonials through which women get “apowerful, highly charged, and personalized voice” (Abarca, 2006, p. 4). The individualized
and nuanced food voices of women in these stories make the collection a critical area of
feminist analysis. Further, the text comes forth as the gastronomic literature which “offers arich and complicated history of value-systems implicit in the preparing, serving and eating offood” (Chaudhuri and Chatterjee, 2011, p. viii).
When women are associated with food, they are most often seen as the producers andprovisioners of food rather than consumers, but Sharma’s narrative represents women as
embodied eaters and cravers of food. By focusing on the consumptive practices of women,
Sharma, in her stories, unveils several aspects and situations in the lives of women through theculinary perspective. Among these, widowhood remains central as the volume starts with thestory of her widowed grandmother titled Saying it with Cauliflowers. In the story, she describes
the culinary prowess of her grandmother and also delineates the eating practices of an orthodox
Brahmin widow like her grandmother. Another story that primarily focuses on theunconventional dietary proclivity of a widow is Constant Craving. By focusing on the different
consumptive ways of two widowed women in the two stories, Sharma represents theindividualized and contextual subjectivity of widows, thereby not straitjacketing the state ofwidowhood into a singular version.
Widowhood: A Curriculum of Forbidden Foods
Eating is a deeply personal act. But it is also a political affair in which “society, subjectivity
and the body are interrelated” (Lupton, 1996, p. 6). Allowing particular food to go into one’s
body involves taking into consideration a regimen of contexts, meanings, and socio-cultural
codes. For Hindu upper caste widows, the codes and norms of widowhood are ingrained intheir ways of eating as patriarchy finds women’s appetite and, by extension, their bodies “thelocus of social control” (Sceats, 2004, p. 63). Saying It with Cauliflowers, the preface story to
the collection The Anger of Aubergines, captures the personalized story of her Dida, thewidowed grandmother of the writer whom she describes as an orthodox Brahmin widow
following the rules of widowhood in the realm of culinary rituals. The writer describes her
grandmother’s usual culinary practices in the following way:
Dida sits and cooks on the floor of the kitchen. I see her chopping vegetables into tiny
pieces, cleaning rice, kneading dough or washing spinach leaves all through the day,28

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although she eats only once a day and fasts every other day like all orthodox Brahmin
widows (Sharma, 2005, pp. iv-v).
The interesting aspect of this description is the sharp contrast between her grandmother’s
productive aspect of food and her consumptive behavior. The sharp contrast in her culinary
behavior is hinged on the notion that a widow should eat a “bland vegetarian diet and on somedays be denied food altogether” (Mukherjee, 2007, p. 219). In this way, she resembles the
prototype of a Hindu widow whose appetite is constructed by the patriarchal mores ofwidowhood. Her appetite is not a biological one but a social one which is formed by the
subjectivity of an upper-caste Brahmin widow. Hence, Dida’s demeanor has been described as
one “who has always been frail and dressed in a widow’s white sari ever since I can remember,cooks and eats before the other members of the family” (Sharma, 2005, p. v). Her eating
behavior is a “microcosm of wider social structures and boundary definitions” (Lupton, 1996,
p. 7). It is also significant to point out here that the aged grandmother constantly remains
anxious about maintaining the pure status of her expiating widowhood. Hence, in the story,
there is “the invisible line that divides my grandmother’s kitchen from the rest of the house”
where “no one is allowed into this tiny, dark room which is swabbed and cleaned four times a
day by Dida” (Sharma, 2005, p. iv). The grandmother’s kitchen acts as the “symbolic
borderland” (Maji, 2019, p. 8), where the culinary rituals of widowhood can be followed.
Hence, the non-vegetarian and pungent-smelling items like onions, garlic, and meat are entirely
forbidden into her kitchen. Her culinary curriculum can be viewed as the ritual of penance,since widows are believed to be the reason for the death of their husbands due to their lack of
stridharma. But by undergoing her ritual of penance in the symbolic borderland, she can still
fulfill her wanting stridharma by ensuring her husband’s salvation. Further, the kitchen in its
spatial geography can be understood as the oppressive structure of the patriarchal society thathas formed Dida’s consciousness of becoming an atoning widow. In the story, Dida’s culinary
curriculum is not only spatial and material but also becomes very symbolic. It can be assessedfrom her utter repulsiveness to even touch the dining table which has stains of “rich, red meat
curries lashed with onions and garlic” (Sharma, 2005, p. v). The “polluted” dining table induces
apprehension to the extent of fear of getting contaminated in her subjectivity as an upper-caste
Hindu widow that she creates her own space of penance in the form of her kitchen. Deborah
Lupton argues that “subjectivity is not linked solely to the organic constituents of food, butalso to its symbolic meaning” (Lupton, 1996, p. 17).
Apart from observing the ritual of penance, the dietary ordinances on widows take up adifferent dimension of meaning, especially in the case of non-elderly Hindu widows. Sharma’s
story Constant Craving addresses this aspect of widowhood through the characters of Sumitra,a year-turn widow, and her widowed elderly mother-in-law. Sumitra’s mother-in-law
constantly exhorts her to keep fasts and remain steadfast to their dietary schedule based on the
lunar cycle, “The moon, as it waxes and wanes, tells us when to fast. It protects the virtue ofwidows and keeps the souls of husbands at peace” (Sharma, 2005, p. 87). Like the grandmotherin Saying It with Cauliflowers, Sumitra’s mother-in-law, called in the story as Ma believes in
the idea of ideal widowhood through the dietary form of atonement, but her exhortations of
dietary deprivation mean much beyond that. Her insistence on Sumitra’s alimentary

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deprivation can be read as a preventive measure to keep in check her widowed body after thedeath of her husband, since the widowed bodies can destabilize the socio-moral order of thesociety. Hence, Sumitra's mother-in-law sermonizes her, “You are not old like me as yet…but
try to be pale and thin as if the blood has drained from your veins. It is safer…no man will lookat you” (Sharma, 2005, p. 87). So, the food injunctions on non-elderly Hindu widows like
Sumitra call into question the material and cultural apparatus of patriarchy which causes
alarmist fear and apprehension around widows. In this regard, Uma Chakravarti (1995) statesthat “the widow of the dead husband is the object of real moral panic” (p. 2250). Hence, thestrictures on the Hindu widow’s diet are nothing but the physio-cultural apparatus to establish
control over the widow’s body so that she does not cause moral dyspepsia in the society.
Patriarchy demands not only control over the body of the widows but also their prospective
desires. Feminist Scholar Tanika Sarkar (2017) corroborates this notion by stating, “widow’s
life was circumscribed by Hindu ritual inunctions, which insisted on the self-abnegation of
their body and desire” (Sarkar qtd. in Shandilya, p. 21). In order to bring into action the control
of a widow’s desires, food taboos become one of the potent sites of patriarchal hegemony.
Sarah Lamb (2000), in her work White Saris and Sweet Mangoes, observes that:
The most common rationale as to why widows were pressed to eat vegetarian diets andrice only once a day, and fast on the eleventh day of the lunar month… was that thesewere defensive measures aimed at controlling a widow’s sexuality. The widow’s dietwas said to ‘reduce sexual desire (kām),’ ‘decrease blood (rakta),’ make the body ‘cool(ṭhāṇḍā),’ make the widow ‘thin and ugly,’ to keep her from ‘wanting any man.’ (p.
220)
Hence, in the story, the dietary dictates of Sumitra's mother-in-law are not only predicated on
keeping an emaciated body through food deprivation but also on creating a “desireless body”
through food abnegation. She instructs Sumitra, “Fast, Sumitra, fast when the moon tells you.
Your body should not be warm and plump, smelling of rich food, onions and garlic” (Sharma,
2005, p. 87). The mentioned foods inhibited by Sumitra’s mother-in-law are categorized as
rajasik and tamasik in Hindu belief and are believed to produce heat in the bodies of those who
consume them. They are further believed to excite sexual desires and worldly passion in the
consumers. Then, the dietary proscriptions on the rich, spicy and odorous food by Sumitra’s
mother-in-law in the case of Sumitra can be located within the regimen of physio-sexual
ordinances of patriarchy that is contingent on the view that women’s sexuality after the deathof the husband is ineffectual and should be curbed at all limits. The culinary curriculum of foodtaboos aims at this transformation of widows into sexual non-beings, resulting widowhood into
the sexual death of widows.
“Constant Craving”: Appetite as Subversion
The dietary practices in Sharma’s short stories are not only used as a medium to establish andsymbolize control over widows’ bodies and desires, but they also become an arena for positing
subversion and harboring resistance. Thus, in her stories, the widow’s consumptive practices

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“participate in a complicated relationship between power structures and human agency”(Malhotra et al., 2021, p. xvii). In Constant Craving, Sumitra’s life of widowhood is marked
by the strict abstinence from all kinds of foods to bring her into the religio-cultural frameworkof renunciation, discipline, and salvation, but her frank appetite for forbidden foods defies such
patriarchal underpinnings of widowhood. Hence, she thinks to herself:
What she found bewildering was that, instead of getting used to the strict regime offasting and eating less and less food, her body had turned defiant and decided to rebel.
It craved foods she had never tasted even as a young girl. For the last one month, on
Monday fasts she had dreamt of choley, paneer tikka, dahi kachori and even tandoorichicken – which she had never eaten in her life (Sharma, 2005, p. 88).
Sumitra’s appetite for these foods stands sacrilegious to the dietary code of Hindu widowhood
which bans all kinds of non-vegetarian, hot, and spicy foods. But at the same time, Sumitra's
appetite can be seen as a stark defiance of the religio-cultural order of widowhood which tries
to essentialize her as a model of patriarchal subservience. But through her appetite for tabooed
foods, she contrives to subvert the gender structure as “food acts as an agent of political andcultural resistance against the dominant social order” (Malhotra et al., 2021, p. xiv).
Speaking on the politics of eating, Margret Atwood suggests that “consumption embodies
coded expressions of power” (Parker, 1995, p. 349). In the story, Sumitra constantly ruminates
about foods that are prohibited to her as a widow, since widowhood entails a set of food taboos
and consumptive prohibitions to bring widows under the patriarchal yoke, leaving them nosense of agency. But food in itself is power and can allow “the possibility of challenge andtherefore of shifts in overall power relations” (Sceats, 2004, p. 142). Sumitra’s unabashedappetite for tabooed foods throughout the story foils the social and cultural expectations ofwidowhood. Hence, at one time, she imagines a tantalizingly creamy and sweet jam sandwich
and on the other, she dreams about sumptuous chole with crushed samosa. Her culinary
ruminations are so graphic that they propel her to act on her proclivities. Thus, she schemes tosend the houseboy, Raghu to the confectioner’s shop and bring one plate of choley with twosamosas. The idea in itself was so scandalizing to her that “she was so shocked by it that she
had to hold the tap for support” (Sharma, 2005, p. 90). The trepidation can be located at all themores and codes of the socio-religious discourses of widowhood and her own temerity inviolating it. But at the same time, her anticipation for consuming the forbidden food is very
telling:
She would eat very slowly, nibbling at the hot green chilli which always came with thechole. She would savour the slightly sour and spicy grains of choley and then bite into
the crisp pastry of the samosa, letting the potato filling melt slowly in her mouth. She
would not swallow quickly but allow only tiny morsels to go down the throat, bit by bit,so that the delicious, hot, spicy, sour and salty flavour would linger (Sharma, 2005, p.
92).

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Sumitra’s description of consuming the desired food almost reaches an orgasmic expression inits details. In her mental process of relishing the dish, food almost becomes tantamount tosexuality. A.K Ramanujan (1999), in his essay Food for Thought, writes that food in Indianculture is often associated with the “metaphor for sex” (p. 88). Thus, food here can be read asa “metaphoric expression of displaced desire” (Raja, 2005, p. 75). Further, in a vindictive
patriarchal culture that forbids and punishes widows for expressing their desires conspicuously,
the desire for tabooed food is nothing less than an act of subversion.
In Sharma’s story, Sumitra’s aberrant appetite ends in her unmaterialized desire of having thelonged chole with samosa, as her mother-in-law arrives at the crunch moment of Raghu
delivering the food parcel to her and she kicks it away, thinking it to be garbage brought throughthe misgivings of the crows. Though her appetite does not come about to be fulfilled within thestory, through her simple act of desiring forbidden foods, she de-essentializes her subjectivity
as a desireless non-social being. Further, through her non-abiding appetite, she poses an actual
threat (though temporary) to the normative socio-cultural codes of widowhood. Hence,
Sumitra’s act of transgression in the culinary realm offers possibilities of reclaiming
subjectivity and gaining personal agency for the widows.
Conclusion
By reading the consumptive practices of the widowed characters in Sharma’s short stories, thepaper staunchly argues that widowhood is a performance scripted by patriarchy to hand oversocial and sexual death to women so that they can be brought into the normative gender
structures. Despite having centuries elapsed and the laws like The Widow Remarriage Act, The
Widow Property Act, and The Prohibition of Child Marriage Act being passed, widows stillreel under the socio-religious regime of patriarchy. Martha Chen (2000), who conducted widescale research on the condition of widows in India, writes that “The orthodox ideology…
continues to remain quite powerful in women’s lives, conditioning their identity, behavior, andperspectives” (p. 11). Similarly, a recent study by Rituparna Bhattacharya and Suman Singhalso indicates that the lives of Hindu widows are “tangential upon an assemblage of structural,cultural, spatial, and familial violence” (2018, p. 770). In spite of such orthodoxy andvulnerability, widows still manage to carve out spaces and ways of surviving and resisting thepatriarchal structures in Hindu tradition through different mediums (Bhattacharya & Singh,2018). Hence, the paper proposes the simple act of eating as a site of micro power to resist thesubservience to patriarchy and subvert the gender structures, which primarily actuate the stateof widowhood. Further, through the analysis of Sumitra’s subversive appetite, the paper also
debunks the notion that widows are entirely desireless or non-agentic beings. But they are fully
embodied beings, grappling with the ways and routes to assert their “real” selves and desires.

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IAFOR Journal of Literature & Librarianship

Volume 12 – Issue 2 – 2023

Sarkar, S. (2019). Saying it with Cauliflowers: Food and Gender in Bulbul Sharma’s Short
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Corresponding author: Rajbir Samal
Email: samalrajbir@gmail.com

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