Culinary Cartographies: Mapping Indian Tradition in Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices

Abstract

This paper examines how Chitra Divakaruni uses spices, herbs, and food practices to trace and transport cultural knowledge across diasporic space. The novel stages an embodied cartography in which scent, taste, and ritual cuisine function as navigational tools for memory, belonging, and ethical relation. Through the figure of the Mistress—both healer and custodian of Ayurvedic and culinary lore—Divakaruni translates domestic foodways into public acts of care that mediate loneliness, repair broken relationships, and create cross-cultural solidarities. Reading the text through sensory and humanist lenses reveals how culinary practices operate as portable archives: they conserve ancestral know-how, adapt to new environments, and generate affective bonds that sustain diasporic communities. By locating tradition in everyday nourishment and healing, the novel reconceptualizes cultural transmission as a tactile, nourishing practice rather than a static inheritance.