The Flavours of Migration: Mother-Daughter Culinary Experiences in Preethi Nair’s 100 Shades of White

Abstract

The concept of resilience in diasporic contexts emphasises how individuals and groups deploy cultural traditions and adaptive tactics to confront hurdles and retain their identities in the backdrop of relocation. Masten underscores the power of endurance in adjusting to notable challenges. In a transnational environment, food functions as an important emblem of resilience, where it connects diasporic individuals to their cultural roots and promises a sense of continuity in a landscape of displacement. This paper primarily explores migrant mothers and their daughters’ culinary attitudes towards traditional foods in diasporic settings, focusing on the mother-daughter conflict in Preethi Nair's 100 Shades of White. Our analysis is guided by Masten’s notion of resilience and McCartney and Gill’s framework of Cultural Freeze, Convergence, and Compromise/Adaptation, offering novel perspectives in investigating Nalini and her daughter Maya’s interactions with traditional cuisines across cultural and geographic divides, addressing a lacuna in British South Asian women's literature. The novel compellingly displays the power of embracing forgiveness in culinary practices enabling the protagonists to incorporate English ingredients and habits, thus facilitating their assimilation into unfamiliar life in Britain. This paper endeavours to uncover how migrant mothers' and daughters’ food attitudes endure, adapt, and achieve equilibrium that values both their cultural traditions and the unique culinary traditions they find in foreign settings.