https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i3.083
The Uncanny Nexus: Food, Cooking and Memory in Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye
DR LISA JOHN MUNDACKAL
Associate Professor
PG and Research Department of English
Vimala College (Autonomous), Thrissur
Affiliated to the University of Calicut
Email: lisajmundackal@gmail.com
Abstract: In Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye, the acts of cooking and consumption function as mnemonic triggers that destabilise linear temporality, enabling the past to intrude upon and remould the present. The temporal disruption produces an uncanny effect, wherein the familiar that is embodied in the quotidian culinary practices becomes estranged, revealing suppresses narratives of displacement, colonial encounter, environmental changes and more. The sensorial immediacy of taste and smell further intensifies the process, thereby forging visceral connections between body, memory and landscape. This paper examines the intricate interrelationship between gustatory experience, culinary practice, and memory in Amitav Ghosh’s novel, foregrounding how these elements converge to produce an uncanny narrative terrain. Situating the text within the interdisciplinary frameworks of memory studies, food studies, ecocriticism, and posthumanist discourse, the study argues that both food and cooking function as epistemic and affective mediums through which submerged histories and alternative ontologies are retrieved and reanimated. It explores how the novel reconfigures food as a site of relationality, and in the confluence of human and non-human histories, it challenges anthropocentric modes of understanding, by foregrounding the agency of non-human elements in shaping human identity and cultural memory. This study positions food and cooking as central narrative devices that mediate the uncanny, offering new insights into the intersections of memory, ecology, and identity in contemporary Indian fiction.
Keywords: Food Studies, Memory Studies, Ecocriticism, Posthumanism, Culinary Practices, Cultural Memory, Amitav Ghosh, Ghost-Eye
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