That food can serve as a way to understand gender relations has by now been well established. Counihan (2005) has tried to understand the relationship between food and gender in terms of how control of food production, distribution and consumption contribute to men’s and women’s power and social position (1). Secondly, Counihan also looks at how food symbolically connotes maleness and femaleness and establishes the social value of men and women (1) Taking a comparative historical perspective the sociologist Jack Goody pointed out that class, caste, race and gender hierarchies are maintained, in part, through differential control over and access to food (1982).

For women writers, food is a telling indicator of the power relation between the genders. Food imagery is abundant in their narratives and, very often, becomes the dominant metaphor the protagonists use to describe people, landscape, and emotion. Women’s writing manifests “diverse areas of engagement ranging from explorations of female culinary sensuousness, creativity and authority in cooking, to the exercise of power or political responsibility through food and acts of eating, to the revisiting of earlier depictions of women’s sexuality through appetite and eating, from Genesis onwards” (Sceats, 2003: 2). As Sally Cline has pointed out, women appropriate food as a language because traditionally they have always been associated with food (1990: 3). For women writers, prohibition on the public display of female appetite and the social taboos which surround women and food are political acts. Women are rarely represented as eating in literature because consumption symbolizes veiled expressions of power. Therefore, the very act of eating is political.

In Indira Goswami’s fiction eating is used as a symbol of power and is a subtle way of examining the relationship between women and men. The powerful are characterized by their eating and the powerless by their non-eating and are even at times, reduced to food. One of the most powerful scenes in Indira Goswami’s most-acclaimed novel Datal Hatir Uye Khowa Haoda, translated into English as The Moth Eaten Howdah of the Tusker, has to be the one where the protagonist Giribala, a widow, who, since the death of her husband, had eaten only rice and boiled pulses with some vegetables, breaks the restrictive rule for Brahmin widows prohibiting meat-eating. In this scene which is a wonderful rendition of the working of greed and temptation, the narrator comments:
Giribala darted into the palanquin room and picked up the pot of mutton cooked with black beans. She forgot everything... religion and rituals, wisdom and restraint... she started gulping it down in great haste (2004: 144).

In the forties of the twentieth century there were strict restrictions in place regarding the consumption of non-vegetarian food by Assamese Brahmin widows. Violation of this code of conduct was seen as the most serious act of transgression and the guilty had to undergo some purification rituals ascertained by patriarchal society. In The Moth-Eaten Howdah of the Tusker widows are not allowed to go to the family kitchen: “She [Giribala] took a step towards the kitchen. Durga, from the middle of the assembled women, cried out, “Don’t go there! The stove for cooking fish is kept there” (2004: 15). In this novel, the idea of the impurity of woman is best seen in her relationship with food.
Sceats (2003: 34) argues that cannibalism in literature usually appears in one of two forms: the depiction of the literal eating of human flesh, and the use of cannibalistic desire or behaviour as a metaphor. William Arens’s pioneering work The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy demystified the myth of ritual cannibalism. Arens argues that the idea of savage cannibalism has little basis in empirical reality. It is for the most part an imputation to the Other, the Savage, or the Alien that he is engaged in a tabooed practice of man-eating. This in turn is a colonial projection providing a justification for colonialism, proselytism, conquest, and sometimes for the very extermination of native peoples. In contrast to Sceats (2003) I would like to argue that after William Arens’s demystification of the myth of ritualistic cannibalism, it is the use of cannibalistic desire as a metaphor that has been kept alive by women writers.

Peggy Reeves Sanday sees ritual cannibalism as a sophisticated means of regulating social and psychological categories in society, a way of maintaining the social balance of power. For her, cannibalism is about power and control. It is an act of domination motivated by subject/object polarities in which the person eaten is seen as the social “other”. Her words strongly evoke Simone de Beauvoir (5), and this resonance strengthens the correlation between Sanday’s social study of cannibalism and Goswami’s fiction. Woman is the “other”, and hence the eaten. Quintessentially, for both Indira Goswami and Sanday, “Cannibalism is never just about eating but is primarily a medium for nongustatory messages - messages having to do with the maintenance, regeneration, and, in some cases, the foundation of the cultural order” (Sanday 3-4).

Indira Goswami’s Devi Pithor Tej (Under the Shadow of Kamakhya) is a novella set against the background of the temple of Kamakhya in the 1930s. In this novella, the protagonist Padmapriya is sent back to her parent's home when her husband's family wrongly suspects that she has an incurable disease. The husband finally comes back to take her home and at his moment of glory of accepting her back is shocked to know about the incidents in his wife’s life during the two years of his absence.

In Under the Shadow of Kamakhya Indira Goswami marks a step ahead of The Moth-Eaten Howdah of the Tusker in terms of exploring the dynamics of symbolic cannibalism. The predominant motif here is that of woman as food. Goswami illustrates how symbolic cannibalism has become an institutionalized way of life and how the behavior this generates is perceived and socially sanctioned as normal human behavior. The presentation of cannibalism as the governing social ethos “exposes the disturbing foundation of a violent relationship between the sexes that is only thinly camouflaged as civilization” (Parker, 1995: 364).

Under the Shadow of Kamakhya develops through a series of contrasting images between red and white. Red signifies the colour of blood, of human and animal sacrifice. The colour of the gomed ring that Aghor Bhagabati gave his son in law is red too. In contrast, Padmapriya is constantly associated with white: all through, she is in search of white flowers to make an offering to the goddess. The spot on her back, which becomes the pretext for her husband to throw her out of his house, is white too.

Moreover, both the leading male characters – Bhubaneswar and Sambhudev, are associated with carnivorous animals.

Men and women hunt each other like prey and symbolically consume each other just as hunters once devoured animals. In the world of Under the Shadow of Kamakhya, hunting is no longer necessary and has been outmoded by the hunting of human enemies. The protagonist Padmapriya has been already disowned by her husband Bhubaneswar under the pretext that she is infected with leprosy. Lavanya, Padmapriya’s only friend, believes that Bhubaneswar had not even seen her beautiful body; had he seen her beautiful body it would not have been possible for him to throw her out of his house. Therefore, Lavanya repeatedly asks Padmapriya to see and offer herself as a prey for “flesh-eating man”. Indira Goswami deliberates creates a disturbing image of women as food and draws a parallel between the way in which human flesh is devoured by man-eaters in the jungle and the way in which women are devoured by men:

Men are like wolves. Once they taste flesh they turn into man-eaters … Haven’t you heard how the man-eater swallows even the blood-soaked clothes of their victims? Human flesh is intoxicating. And the craze for human flesh is even more powerful in humans than it is among animals (2001: 48).

When Padmapriya accuses Lavanya of being shameless, the latter claims that she knows what men want.
Goswami highlights the way women’s bodies are devoured in patriarchal societies and then disposed off like waste:

I’ve heard that these men chew your body like they chew sugarcane. And once they have sucked the last drop out of you, they spit you out (2001: 43).

Most of Indira Goswami’s heroines initially appear as victims, and their oppression is laid bare through their relationship with food. Given the patriarchal nature of language and its incapacity to accommodate female experience, it is expected that women choose an alternative, non- verbal form of communication. The collapse of language, the insufficiency of words as a mode of communication, is a recurring theme in Indira Goswami’s work. Under the Shadow of Kamakhya highlights the insufficiency of words as a mode of communication at the very beginning when Padmapriya looks out through the window of her dark room and sees a group of pilgrims walking up towards the temple. The group of pilgrims contains three old men and two old women along with a few children. The stooping posture of the old as they climb up makes the narrator compare them to a flock of storks. The stork is a unique bird in the sense that it has no syrinx. It is a mute bird, and can give no bird call.

Padmapriya is as mute as a stork. While this constitutes an unequivocal symbol of powerlessness, Goswami illustrates how women can use their bodies as objects of resistance against the system of oppression designed to control those bodies. Lavanya’s presentation of Padmapriya as food makes the latter seem a symbol of powerlessness, but Padmapriya also uses the image of her body as food in a subversive manner. Even as she capitulates to the image of herself as food and the control this represents, she finds a way of subverting that control. What is a form of control and degradation becomes a form of power.

Goswami makes the protagonist Padmapriya turn upside down the traditional power equations of gender by presenting her as someone who plays the role of the willing victim of her husband’s cannibalistic desire to take her revenge upon him for the wrongs that he had committed against her. Two years after being deserted by her husband, she comes across him in a marriage in the neighbourhood. Lavanya makes plans for the rendezvous between Bhubaneswar and Padmapriya in the backyard. The images at this moment are sensuous and are of symbolic value. As Padmapriya waits for Bhubaneswar, she sees the hide of a goat which was killed for the marriage-feast being spread on the ground. It is a moonlit night and the moon is compared to the exposed breast of a young girl who had just taken a bath in the Brahmaputra. Lavanya advises Padmapriya for the one last time before she meets Bhubaneswar:

“Don’t use words. Try to speak with your body. When a young girl speaks to her lover in this way all his pride, anger, rage, everything disappears. The tiger gets transformed into the sheep” (2001: 69).

Throughout the novel Lavanya does the talking for Padmapriya who is almost like her alter-ego. Lavanya only restates what Padmapriya had already decided to do. In fact, a little while before this encounter with Bhubaneswar, she asks Sambhudev, the man who sacrifices animals in the temple:

“Sir, I want to offer my own blood, I want to worship the Devi with my own blood. I have only two desires, two ambitions” (2001: 59).

Sambhudev of course advises her against making an offering of her blood because she is a Brahmin.

Meanwhile, Bhubaneswar and Lavanya rush down the steps to meet Padmapriya in the backyard “like some predatory animals attacking a prey” (2001: 69). Bhubaneswar tries to move away from Padmapriya but she grabs hold of his hand, places it on her breast and starts crying. Then, to the surprise of Bhubaneswar, she takes off her innerwear to show the white spot on her back that was taken for leprosy. At this moment the third-person narrator comments:

The bright moonlight and the soft glow of the earthen lamps transformed her skin to molten gold, which gleamed and shifted magically before his eyes (70).

They pass the entire night in the backyard as Bhubaneswar gladly walks into the “trap” set by Padmapriya. From this moment on, Bhubaneswar’s sleeping desire is rekindled and he starts frequenting the house of Aghora Bhagawati, his father-in-law. Very soon he is accompanied by his friends on his regular visits to Padmapriya’s house. A few days later it is discovered that Padmapriya is with child and Bhubaneswar makes a public confession that the child is his. In the final scene of the novella, Padmapriya confesses to Bhubaneswar that the child’s father is none other than Sambhudeva.

While powerlessness is primarily symbolized by non-eating, the body, that which food fuels, becomes a secondary site of powerlessness. The body politic is superimposed on the physical body. Because the body becomes a site of subjection for women, Goswami’s heroines experience a strong sense of unease about the body. She is particularly agitated by the realization that the way animals are treated, killed, and consumed is no different from the way people treat each other. The way that killing is linked to eating suggests that eating, like killing, is an expression of power. Padmapriya once has a nightmarish dream in which she sees a buffalo being prepared for sacrifice:

She saw the look on the faces of the men preparing the buffalo for sacrifice. The buffalo was lying sprawled on the ground. Its hooves and horns were tied to the ground, tied to little pegs in the ground. Some of the men were pouring pitcher after pitcher of water on the buffalo’s neck to soften it for the knife’s stroke. She felt a sharp pang of sympathy for the struggling animal, its horns bound, hooves secured, the poor helpless creature. (2001: 63-64)

Through such imagery Goswami demonstrates the devastating effect the metaphor of cannibalism has on women’s lives. The association of the food metaphor with such negative states subtly highlights how imperative it is for women to transcend this traditional association and forge a new, more positive relationship with food.

Carol Adams (1990) argues that patriarchal power is embodied in the practice of eating meat which, she argues, involves the linked objectification and subordination of animals and women. But women can rebel through vegetarianism which, from this perspective, is a political statement: a rejection of patriarchal power and values, an expression of feminism, and a claiming of female power over self and nature. “Meat eating measures individual and societal virility” (Adams, 1990: 48). Indira Goswami, a practicing vegetarian in real life, was an unequivocal critic of the practice of animal sacrifice. There is no doubt therefore that she, like Carol Adams, linked the subordination of animals and women.

References:
i. Adams, Carol. 1990, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian CriticalTheory, New York, Continuum.
ii. Arens, W. 1979, The Man Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy, Oxford, Oxford UP.
iii. Cline, Sally. 1990, Just Desserts: Women and Food, London, Deutsch.
iv. Counihan, Carole M.1998. “Food and Gender: Identity and Power” in Food and Gender: Identity and Power (Ed. Carole M.Counihan & Steven L. Kaplan), Overseas Publishers Association, NV.
v. De Beauvoir, Simone. 1988, The Second Sex, London, Picador.
vi. Goody, Jack. 1982, Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology, Cambridge University Press.
vii. Goswami, Indira. 2004, The Moth-Eaten Howdah of the Tusker, Delhi, Rupa.
viii. Goswami, Indira. 2001, Under the Shadow of Kamakhya (Trans. by Apratim Barua) in The Shadow of Kamakhya, Delhi, Rupa.
ix. Parker, Emma. 1995, ‘You are what you eat: The politics of eating in the novels of Margaret Atwood’ in Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly & Critical Journal. 41.3: pp 349-368.
x. Sanday, Peggy Reeves. 1986, Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System, Cambridge, Cambridge UP.
xi. Sceats, Sarah. 2000, Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
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