the literature I explore in this article makes the most homely of domestic spaces – the kitchen – integral to the plot construction. The literature published in popular Pakistani Urdu magazines, called “digests” by the consumers, is mostly comprised of plot-driven narratives. [...] I use the term “kitchen literature” to describe the fiction published in three popular digests in the country, the monthly Shuaa, Kiran and KhawateenDigest. The multi-layered digest fiction covers myriad social, psychological, and domestic themes including child abuse, domestic violence, trauma, and feminism. Some authors utilize romance plots of courtship and marriage to comment on social issues, but most popular narratives are celebrations of heterosexual love within the boundaries defined by patriarchal Pakistani society.
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I examine the fiction printed in the Shuaaa, Kiran, and Khawateen digests between the years 2001 to 2018. I have limited my research sample to a randomly selected fifty love stories, and confine my analysis to the diegetic and extra-diegetic roles of the kitchen, and the interconnection of these roles.
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Romance subplots often penetrate social commentaries in the form of happy endings: caring lovers for survivors of abuse, husbands who fall in love with their financially independent wives, and so on. However, newer forms of bildungsroman are emerging after the year 2016, which do not follow this reward trajectory of romance.
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The kitchen is not only the space where the essential union between the lovers takes place but also the extra-diegetic space where romance is usually read. The temporal markers in this chronotope are the declaration or acceptance of love, verses from some popular song, short poems and romantic wordplay. The short poems are either extracts from a popular, romantic poetic work or they are composed by the authors of the stories. These poems are usually placed at the beginning or the end of a meeting scene. For example, the first scene of Rehana Aftab’s “Let Me Live” takes place in the kitchen where the heroine, Samaviya, is busy cooking.
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