The Story of a “White Sadlo” and a Meal of “Bhakhri and Salt”: A Gendered Reading of the Unspoken Narrative of Widowhood in Parita Mukta’s Shards of Memory

Parita Mukta’s Shards of Memory: Woven Lives in Four Generations (2002) charts the “interior story” of a Hindu Gujarati-speaking Kenyan-Asian family, over a span of four generations. This paper specifically examines Mukta’s text as a critique of the cultural history of widowhood in the East African Asian diaspora. The paper analyzes how Mukta uses biographical, autobiographical, and historical accounts of the “unspoken” narrative of widowhood of her paternal grandmother to demonstrate how gender and class were used as mutually reinforcing systems of subordination by an inherently patriarchal diasporic community. The text thus evolves from being just a domestic chronicle to a larger sociohistorical document. The paper also examines Mukta’s desire to embed the family’s legacy of hunger in the next generation of diasporics, in terms of the notion of “postmemory” and its possible ethical functions.