Who Eats Whom?: Transcending the Real Purpose Behind Food Events in Children’s Literature (If Any!) Through Nonsense Literature

Abstract

Within children’s literature, food becomes the easiest way for adults to induct young readers into the existing social world order. This entire scheme of things gets overturned, when Nonsense Literature enters into the picture. Nonsense—with its penchant for reversing hierarchies—succeeds in breaking down existing power structures in order to create imaginations of an alternative world order. While this is true for most Nonsense, the case of Indian English Nonsense gets even doubly subversive as here the aspect of language also gets involved. Through a close reading of well-known children’s writers like Sampurna Chattarji and Anushka Ravishankar’s select works of Nonsense which dabbles with food and eating, this paper will try to show how Indian English Nonsense Literature appropriates the genre to play a dual function. Within its fold, food transcends its literariness not just to challenge the adult–child hierarchical structure but also the centre–periphery divide through which such hierarchies filter in. In that, this paper will argue that food events in Indian English Nonsense Literature transcend beyond a simple level of ridicule/criticism of the centre to debunking all kinds of centres altogether by giving a lot of agency to the child.