Dr.

Jharna Malaviya, International Journal of Research in Engineering, IT and Social Sciences, ISSN 2250-0588,
Impact Factor: 6.565, Volume 09, Issue 5, May 2019, Page 159-164

Clash of the Old and the New in Meatless

Days
Dr. Jharna Malaviya
(Assistant Professor, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Degree College, University of Allahabad, Allahabad)
Abstract—Meatless Days is a work of seminal importance that deserves to be studied in detail because it
raises many important questions about the future of postcolonial countries that seem to be drifting towards
conservatism and Islamic fundamentalism. The memoir is crucial for understanding the modern world in
which everything seems to be drifting towards neoconservatism. Each character in this brilliant portrait
gallery is memorable and unique in its own way and offers deep insight into the postcolonial psyche and rare
glimpses of the colonial and postcolonial mindset. Sara Suleri has enriched our understanding of the
innumerable contradictions that the postcolonial countries are trapped in. Meatless Days narrates the tale of
a nation that metamorphosed gradually into an Islamic fundamentalist nation. What makes the book special is
the fact that Meatless Days is not a mere retelling of the history of Pakistan; it is a very personal account of
all that happens to a family caught in social and political crossfire. Another issue worth discussing is how
Sara Suleri raises serious doubts about history and its authenticity. Suleri has tried hard to reveal how history
has only deceived and seduced the postcolonial world. Suleri also touches upon the question of language and
its politics in Meatless Days, making it indispensable for understanding the changing cultural matrix. To
explore Suleri‘s Meatless Days is to explore a number of issues that have assumed great importance in
contemporary literature and theory.
Index Terms—Cultural criticism, Feminist writing, Postcolonialism, Sara Suleri, South Asian Diaspora.

I. INTRODUCTION
The paper seeks to study the clash between modern and old ideas, values and beliefs in Meatless Days, a
tragic-comic memoir which is indispensable for understanding the postcolonial psyche. The paper examines the
contribution of Sara Suleri Goodyear as a postcolonial author who has enriched our understanding of the
postcolonial world by painting a fragmented world of half-baked modernity, where the clash between the most
modern and the most reactionary ideas takes place in every arena of social and political life. It becomes necessary
to examine Suleri‘s delineation of each character because they emerge in the autobiographical novel as bundles of
contradictions. To study Sara Suleri Goodyear, a Pakistani American author who was born and brought up in
Pakistan, is to study these contradictions that stem from the social and political upheavals that the postcolonial
world is going though.
Meatless Days offers a brilliant opportunity to see the postcolonial world from a woman‘s eye. Suleri‘s gaze is
essentially a woman‘s gaze. Meatless Days is a bittersweet tale of an expatriate woman looking back upon her
birthplace and trying to understand some important and enigmatic chapters of her past life. The book offers a
striking character study of the author‘s father, who was an out and out patriarch and the epitome of order, system,
authority, and discipline. Meatless Days has been studied by many scholars as a comment on patriarchy and
nationalistic narratives and an attempt to overturn hierarchies of dominance, but the purpose of the present paper
is to explore untouched dimensions of Meatless Days and to study it as an attempt to expose the nexus of power
and culture in the postcolonial countries today. The cunning manipulation of truth and history by ideologies is the
dominant theme of this intriguing memoir.
II. STORY OF A FAMILY AND A NATION

A. Power, Culture, and Patriarchy

Meatless Days is a painstaking attempt by a Pakistani expatriate to re-read some important chapters of the
colonial and postcolonial history and understand the present and its complexities. The author‘s father was an
Indian who migrated to Pakistan after the partition of India and became an influential journalist. The story
revolves around a domineering patriarch who abandoned his first wife and remarried a Welsh woman. Meatless
Days is a story not only of a family but also of a nation. It seeks to explore some unanswered questions about
power, culture, patriarchy, modernity and fundamentalism and their hidden interrelationships, which make it a
must-read.
Meatless Days is a brilliant study of a family in which the son grows up competing with his father (Suleri‘s
family called him Pip after the main protagonist of Charles Dickens‘ well-known novel, Great Expectations) and
retreats into another world to put, ―fresh air in between himself and Pip‘s tyrannical dependence on history and
women‖ [Meatless Days 101]. The book narrates the complex psychological struggle of a boy growing up in a
family overshadowed by his father‘s inhibiting presence. Suleri‘s father was a busy and successful journalist and

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editor who expected unquestioned submission from his family members and assigned them duties and tasks
without their consent. She comments, ―But then I had been so busy working for Pip that I had not stopped to
consider what it must have been like to live in his house and not work for him, that it might well have sent one to
the periphery, or to the hills.‖ [Meatless Days 101] The memoir recounts how all the sons and daughters of Zia
Ahmad Suleri had to part ways with their father as they grew up and how the family crumbled and nothing
remained the same: ―Something veered away from us at that point, I recall, because once we gathered back in
Rawalpindi that winter – we had moved again – the structure of a day felt different, as though the transition from
morning into afternoon had suddenly become a dislocated thing, filling us with unease. Our paths did not converge
with their formal regularity; they matched instead the new terrain on which we lived, the dissected plateau of the
Pothwar. Ifat missed Lahore: she returned there for college and got married too, urging us all into a consciousness
of reconfiguration. Shahid became a brooding boy, and hardly spoke at all.‖ (97)
The silent tussle of Sara and her brother, Shahid, with their father was in reality their broader tussle with an
oppressive, hegemonic and suffocating patriarchal order. Meatlesss Days is an account of the heavy price those
who dare to revolt against the social setup are forced to pay in conservative countries like Paksitan. But Sara Suleri
does not forget to suggest towards the end of the chapter that the conflict culminated in a kind of escape. Suleri and
her brother left Pakistan for good soon after, fully conscious of the fact that they were trying to escape history. She
writes, ―‗To walk away from such a history is all very well,‘ I pointed out to Shahid, ‗but it is less easy to walk
away from that other thing, from womankind.‘‖ [Meatless Days 104]

B. Revisiting History and its Narration

The title itself of the sixth chapter of Meatless Days, ―Papa and Pakistan‖, suggests striking similarities between
the author‘s father and her father land. Interestingly, the two alliterative terms mentioned above emerge as
intriguing synonyms and Suleri uses them to make readers understand that male domination is the same within the
family as well as the nation. Thus, while Ziauddin Ahmad Suleri succeeds in creating his new identity as ―Pip‖
(here, pun on the word Pip and Papa is unmistakable) in his family, the newborn partitioned state of India discards
its old affiliations to gain fresh identity as ―Pakistan‖. Both dump their troublesome pasts. Suleri brings out the
striking likeness of structures between the two incarnations of patriarchy by describing how both of them must
have ―hit upon their names‖ [110] in about the same decade (the 1930s). Suleri‘s intention here is clear – she wants
readers to realise how family and nation both are structures that work on the same principle of male superiority.
Sara Suleri does not forget to underline the impact of British imperialism on the two. Thus, a Rajput Salahria, who
is an employee of the Imperial government in India, aspires to change his identity and become an up to date and
trendy writer, Z. A. Suleri. This is very similar to what happens to the nation. Suleri explains how some ambitious
Indian Muslims in England aspire to become the constructors of a new nation and this aspiration leads them to talk
about Islamic independence and ―invent a new coinage‖ (110), Pakistan. Suleri comments: ―He ate up his past too,
in the manner of a nervous eater, so that my attempts to establish some sense of the narrative of his days always
filled me with a sense of uneasy location . . . but then I noticed all the detail he had to forget in order to pay
vociferous attention to his now, and saw that it was not my proper task to be dividing out the silence of his streams.
. . . I realised that there would always be mirages in his eyes for me, who had no way of knowing all the ground he
must have covered to domesticate his life. [Meatless Days 111]
This important and exquisitely crafted passage from Meatless Days explains why the author does not believe in
history and its narration. Like many other poststructuralists, Suleri questions the official representation of the past,
which is full of silences, deliberate omissions and distortions. The author feels that very much like her father, the
nation too has been ―eating up its past‖ (111) with the aim of constructing a present which suits its present needs.
By bringing out the similarities between her father and her nation, Suleri intends to show that eating up the past is
an act of violence. And Sara Suleri, the daughter who refuses to be part of this violence, responds by becoming
vegetarian; hence the title of the book, Meatless Days. Suleri‘s vegetarianism is a protest against the culture of
violence. Suleri discusses at length in the book how her becoming vegetarian was a political act.
Many authors have pondered this question of history and its narration before, but the clarity and personal
conviction with which Suleri raises it is striking and unparalleled in postcolonial literature. Suleri leaves no stone
unturned to prove that the process of construction of history is the same everywhere – her father and the father of
the nation both eat up their uncomfortable pasts. This realisation has important ramifications because a necessary
corollary of the rejection of official history is that personal histories gain new importance. Thus, each personal tale
becomes as important in this intriguing book as official records, if not more.
Suleri spares no one and nothing. Her Papa‘s tale is the tale not only of a man reinventing himself, but also of a
nation reinventing itself. She reveals how shattering all hopes of ―walk(ing) over him scientifically, his past our
archaeological site‖ [Meatless Days 112], Suleri‘s father silenced his early history. His past always remained
obscure to his curious children who were eager to know his past life. All that they were able to ―excavate‖ was that
their grandfather, who was ―a very pious man‖ [111], was a Punjabi Rajput from Sialkot who remarried a sixteen
year old girl at the age of fifty. The sarcasm on piousness is unmistakable here and a fitting comment on honeyed
representation of hard facts. It is through these examples that Suleri demonstrates how language ―creates‖ history.

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Suleri‘s focus on language and its complicity in the game of power is worth noting. Thus, Suleri shows how in
their effort to know their father‘s past, she and her siblings ―dug up‖ from their father‘s past that he had earned one
degree in Persian and another in journalism. She says, ―. . . torn as he was between the literary and the political,
uncertain on which to land‖ [113), he abandoned his mother tongue for a foreign language, English, ―which was
history‘s language then‖ [113] to find himself ―first seduced by poetry and then by history‖ [112]. Suleri makes
painstaking efforts to lay bare the subtle complicity of language in manipulating history. Sara Suleri explains, ―He
was happy, then, feeling at the hub of himself and of history‖ [112]. Meatless Days is a beautiful exploration of the
lingering impact of colonialism. Suleri shows how colonialism has produced fractured modernity and fractured
personalities. Thus, the tale of Pip and Pakistan becomes an attempt to narrate the past from a new perspective.

C. A Comment on Patriarchy and Nationalism

Suleri does not hide her deep displeasure while describing how her father had redefined his filial loyalties by
giving the nationalist leader, Jinnah, the place that rightfully belonged to his father. To her, Jinnah was ―an actor,
certainly the most aware of all politicians of India of that time‖, who knew ―how to maintain a poetical posture in
its history‖ [113]. But Sara Suleri‘s father wiped out his real father‘s name and existence forcibly from his new
family‘s present and introduced Jinnah as the new ―Father‖ [112] of the family. Suleri recalls this ―absurd‖
episode and comments, ―But what an odd man to make familial: gaunt with elegance and intellect, the discourse of
a barrister imprinted on his brain, Jinnah, the maker of Pakistan was hardly an easy idea to domesticate – and yet
Pippy did it.‖ (113]
Thus, uttering ―a great good-bye to the extended family of Pakistan‖ [Meatless Days 117], Suleri‘s father
constructed his brand-new and spotless present upon the grave of his past. He began his new life after remarrying
a Welsh lady and ―cast himself with renewed ferocity into the printing of news‖. A successful career as a journalist
brought him name and fame too, especially after he started a new newspaper, the Evening Times. Thus, playing
with the double meaning of the word ―novel‖, Suleri tells her readers how he made his brand new life as ―novel‖ as
the nation‘s, thereby suggesting that both the stories were being penned consciously. Sara Suleri‘s observation has
a sharp hint of irony, ―For the next several years, Pip kept himself preoccupied by inventing newspapers and
procreating.‖ [117]
Zia Ahmad Suleri‘s ―affair‖ with history, according to Suleri, which started long ago with his decision to
become a journalist, continued till the last day of his life. However, despite his westernized lifestyle, he always
remained a very possessive husband and father and decided to return to his country with his wife and young
daughters after a long stay in England ―to forestall us lest we become totally possessed by someone else‘s history‖
[Meatless Days 119]. But new surprises were in store for him; after returning from England he discovered that his
history, ―dressed as the Pakistan Times, was waiting for him, beckoning him into the longest romance of his life‖
[120]. Suleri relentlessly attacks the double standards of her father and her nation both of whom had an obsession
with history. Thus, Suleri, like other postcolonial writers, refuses to see history as an objective, unbiased record of
the past. She problematizes simplistic notions and shows how the hidden forces (that are essentially male and
nationalistic) manipulate its narration.
Very much like the aggressive nationalistic discourses that call for complete and unquestioning submission and
obedience, Suleri‘s father believed that ―he had a veto over his children‘s lives‖ [Meatless Days 121]. He
demanded complete attention and made the young daughter wonder how ―just one man could keep us all so busy‖
[120]. She remarks acerbically, ―With the country absorbing every moment of his attention, papa thought it highly
unreasonable of his children to detract him from his proper duty by behaving as though they had lives.‖ [121] This
vitriolic comment explains the complete tale of an aggrieved heart that is ready to burst with indignation and
prepares ground for the following account of Suleri‘s flight from Pakistan, away from ―the endless circulation of
news‖ [123]. However, the sardonic and critical tone with which Suleri begins the tale soon melts into pathos.
Suleri paints poignant pictures of a fading full noon and evening weariness. Suleri recalls with pain how the
sudden death of his dear wife, and shortly thereafter, the terrible end of his eldest daughter, Ifat, left the tough and
indefatigable man tragically crushed and the author deeply moved at the sight of this ―tragic waste‖. She says, ―I
saw fear in him then, for the first time ever, as though my mother‘s absence made him immediately more
parochial, uncertain that the present was a place he could again inhabit.‖ [124]
Suleri overturns hierarchies in Meatless Days very deftly to show the flip side of reality. Thus, ironically, the
domineering patriarch appears in another light dependent on women and history. Suleri reveals how, much to
everyone‘s disbelief, the apparently self-reliant man was compelled to adopt a grown up girl who was quite
different in her social and cultural upbringing and taste as his daughter. Suleri discovered that he did this after the
death of his dear wife to forget an ―uninhabitable past‖ because, ―history was not sufficient then to keep the
demons from his soul‖ [Meatless Days 128]. Suleri shows how ―His old luxurious habit‖ [128] of forgetting
painful or troublesome history had come to his rescue then. Revealing the ironical dependence of the domineering
and tyrannical man on women, Suleri comments, ―It made us realise that Papa was more wily than we thought
when he constructed his terrible dependencies, always leaving himself room to move from one thing to the other.‖
[104] In such passages, Sara Suleri blurs traditional binaries deliberately, like a true poststructuralist, to show that

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truth always lies somewhere in between. Thus, the inner seams of the postcolonial world lie exposed and hint at
the presence of something bigger and larger that is controlling the lives of even those who are at the helm of our
society.
Meatless Days is an attempt by a woman to look back upon her past and the past of a nation. Her gaze is
essentially the gaze of a woman trying to bring to light all that has been left unrecorded and unacknowledged by
men who wrote history. C. Vijayshree‘s comment on Meatless Days is worth noting in this regard: ―Sara Suleri‘s
autobiographical novel, Meatless Days significantly begins with the statement: ‗Leaving Pakistan was of course
tantamount to leaving the company of women.‘ She recreates them in memory and writing and reconstructs the
nation – historically and politically – through the lives of the women in her family. Female empowerment emerges
only through a process of re-membering, a necessarily inventive tracing of the history of Pakistani women within
the violence of the repressive state.‖ [11]
One such episode which she vividly recalls in Meatless Days is of her break-up with a man whose ―greatness‖
was stifling for Suleri. It is contemptuously titled, ―Goodbye to the Greatness of Tom.‖ ―Greatness‖ emerges in
this chapter as a derisive metaphor for patriarchal master-narratives. The author seems to have little tolerance for
these male master narratives of domination and assertion and they become a butt of constant ridicule and mockery.
The intriguing chapter traces Suleri‘s convoluted journey towards complete disenchantment with the old feudal
ideas she had grown up with. ―He felt,‖ she discloses, ―like an anachronism of my soul‖ [Meatless Days 84]. Thus,
Meatless Days is also the story of a young woman growing out of the aura that such ―greatness‖ is wont to
construct. It is the story of a woman rediscovering herself in a conservative world. Suleri tells us the tale of her
gradual disillusionment with Tom‘s ―Greatness‖, which she deliberately shatters to pieces in the end.
While narrating the story of Tom, Suleri confesses, ―Here is where I fault myself, for my lazy deferral that
allowed me to believe I could actually locate my own framework in someone else‘s building‖ [Meatless Days 78].
Suleri‘s candour is worth noting in the book and makes it a challenging account of an intriguing journey by a
rebellious woman who is trying to locate her own framework in her own building. The story of Tom is a story
which almost every woman of the postcolonial countries can today relate to.

D. A Portrait Gallery of Postcolonial Women

Meatless Days is a postcolonial classic that has enriched our understanding of the complexities and inner
contradictions of the postcolonial world. Sara Suleri is one of those few postcolonial writers who overturn the
public/private dichotomy successfully and reverse the dominance hierarchies completely. Suleri reflects a clear
influence of postmodernism and poststructuralism. Thus, the private becomes political. Meatless Days is
indispensable for understanding how history is manipulated by powermongers. Suleri makes a sincere effort to
read between the lines and expose the process itself of the deliberate distortion of truth and facts by patriarchy and
nationalism to smooth out unwanted creases.
C. Vijayshree writes in her book on immigrant women writers who have migrated to the west from the south
Asian countries, ―Women writers often evoke a female community in their work and forge a female bonding. In
fact, in moving away from their familiar social milieu, they are severed from a network of female friendships
which is not easy for them to develop outside their homes.‖ [11] Vijayshree‘s remark is helpful in understanding
what Suleri means when she says that leaving Pakistan was tantamount to leaving the company of women.
Meatless Days is virtually a portrait gallery teeming with striking portraits of different women. One such portrait
is that of Dadi, her grandmother, who is the epitome of old feudal values. Her Dadi, who was born in Meerut in
India towards the end of the nineteenth century symbolises the old world and her eccentricities are all part of her
existence which seems governed by deeply rooted instincts and centuries-old habits. Suleri shows how her habits
and her irrationality were shaped by a highly repressive and patriarchal social system. The character sketch of her
whimsical Dadi, who ―with her flair for drama had allowed life to sit so heavily on her back that her spine wilted
and froze into a perfect curve‖ [Meatless Days 5] is invaluable because to Suleri she was the stubborn and precious
remnant of a past, which her father had buried long ago and which had somehow ironically ―seeped into his new
domestic life‖ against his wishes. Suleri‘s Dadi is, in fact, the inaccessible and bygone world of colonial India.
Suleri recalls, ―Her bodily presence always emanated a quality of being apart and absorbed‖. [6] Suleri deftly
brings to life her lean and thin Dadi of ―voracious appetite,‖ who emerges in her memory with her straw mat and
Quran, her heavy spouted brass water pot and sewing baskets with which she sewed in winters, ―palm-sized cloth
bags that would unravel into the precision of secret pockets‖. [7] ―But,‖ the granddaughter adds thoughtfully,
―none such pockets did she ever need to hide, since something of Dadi always remained intact, however much we
sought to open her‖. [8] Thus, characters like Dadi make Meatless Days a must-read for understanding the
postcolonial culture and its building blocks.
Shattering the myth of India as a land of spiritualism and asceticism, Suleri recalls the octogenarian‘s deliberate
display of religiosity on the one hand and her comical weakness for food on the other. She comments, ―We
pondered but never quite determined whether God or food contributed to her most profound delight.‖ [Meatless
Days 9] Suleri‘s Dadi becomes a fitting portrait of a woman who spent her whole life in the suffocating darkness

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of a backward and colonised country with the result that she ―did not notice the war just as she did not notice the
proliferation of her great-grandchildren‖ [10].
Meatless Days offers an interesting comparative study of two women characters, one of which appears to be
spiritual and another worldly. Thus, on the one hand is the portrait of her Dadi, who was ―impossibly unable to
remain unnoticed‖ [Meatless Days 11] and who had quietly ―seeped instead into the nooks and crannies of our
forgetfulness‖ [12] and on the other hand is the enigmatic and quiet mother, ―who occupied an increasingly
private space.‖ [13] The contrast between her Dadi and Suleri‘s mother is noteworthy. While the apparently
abstemious Dadi demands total attention, Suleri‘s mother, who leads a worldly life, appears completely
unassertive and undemanding.
Another striking portrait in Meatless Days is that of Suleri‘s beautiful elder sister, Ifat, who, much against the
wishes of her family, married a man who came from a very conservative family. If Dadi represents the old world,
Ifat represents a generation caught in the middle between the old and the new. Suleri could never fully understand
her sister‘s decision to marry Javed, a man who was completely opposite in his outlook and upbringing. She tries
to explain: ―For a while I was perplexed, until slowly I saw that rather than at a man, I should be looking at the way
Javed signified to Ifat a complete immersion into Pakistan. She was living here for good now, she must have
thought, so why not do it well? And what greater gift could she have given my father than literally becoming the
land he had helped to make?‖ [Meatless Days 140]
The minute study of the inherent contradictions of modern Pakistan makes Meatless Days a precious document
of modern history. Ifat‘s story shows us a Pakistan which is still full of gruesome tales of bloodshed and medieval
brutality. Ifat‘s story takes us to a remote and semi-barbaric world that still thrives in modern Pakistan. Ifat, whose
husband loved playing polo, discovered to her horror after her marriage that polo originated in the valleys of
Kaghan where tribes played with an enemy‘s head instead of a ball. Similarly, when Ifat went with her
mother-in-law to the family‘s ancestral village in Punjab to perform the customary annual sacrifice of goat, she
discovered that the cruel and inhumane rite was an accepted and traditional atonement which was regularly
performed on the very spot where Javed‘s proud great-grandfather had killed his infant child with his own hands.
The only crime the child had committed was that of being female and thereby bringing a disgrace to her family‘s
name. The greatest horror was the return of her husband from Bangladesh war with his mind stuffed and distorted
with gory tales of human killing. Suleri shows how Ifat herself had to pay with her own life the price of loving the
heart of a land that is still half-barbarous. Suleri recalls tenderly, ―Adrift from each familiar face she had known,
what energies my sister devoted to Pakistan‖ [Meatless Days 29]. Ifats‘s story reflects Suleri‘s impatience with the
ugly customs and ossified social institutions that many modern countries of south Asia still glorify and idolize.
In Meatless Days, while Sara Suleri‘s siblings choose to quit Pakistan and escape a terrible predicament, Ifat
emerges as a character that represents those who try to embrace a culture which secretly worships violence. Ifat‘s
story is the story of the brutal murder of beauty and innocence in a land which fosters reactionary ideas and forces.
Suleri‘s is a dark and grim world where questioning everything ceaselessly or escaping and slipping into a liminal,
ambiguous, indefinable space is all that the writer can offer as a temporary respite and this is where the limitation
of Suleri‘s worldview lies.
Unfolding another facet of the story of Ifat, Sara Suleri shows the silent tussle between her sister and her father.
As the story complicates, Ifat appears in a new light – as the alter ego of her father. Sara Suleri recalls vividly the
tragicomic clash between a father and daughter who loved and hated each-other intensely and were equally
obstinate and stubborn. Suleri reveals that Ifat had inherited this ―flaring spirit‖ [Meatless Days 139] from her own
father. Like her rigid father, Ifat could never learn the ―art of moderation‖ [139]. The younger sister recalls, ―From
him she learned her stance of wild inquiry, the arrogant angle at which she held her head. It was her gesture of
devotion to him, really, the proud position she maintained when – to the complete devastation of domestic serenity
– those two wills clashed. It made me groan aloud to think that Papa could not see that Ifat was simply loving him
for what he was when she handed back to him, gesture by gesture, his prickling independence of style.‖ [139] This
subtle understanding of human relationships and the tenderness with which she remembers Ifat makes reading
Meatless Days an intense and fulfilling experience.

III. CONCLUSION
Meatless Days is a book which is necessary for understanding the main contradictions of the postcolonial world
today. It communicates powerfully a vivid sense of the predicament of people living in the postcolonial countries
where power and culture have formed an unholy nexus with feudal and patriarchal values and are influencing
surreptitiously historical narratives, language, religion, and personal life. Suleri‘s world is one in which every
human being is trapped in prisons of her own making and this makes it impossible to know the truth, understand
the real world, and remain unbiased and unprejudiced. The paper concludes that reading Meatless Days is
experiencing a world where the most powerful amongst us are as weak, vulnerable and helpless as the weakest
amongst us. The paper can help understand how postcolonial authors are reversing hierarchies and challenging
binaries and reflecting the influence of postmodernism and poststructuralism.

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Suleri‘s grim world, which is full of countless tales of human weakness, loss, suffering, misunderstanding and
short sightedness, is a powerful comment on how each one of us is a slave to ideologies and cultural discourses
from which there is no way out. The only faith Suleri has is in questioning and probing every idea, every thought,
every notion and staying vigilant and alert to avoid getting cheated or carried away by ideologies that distort truth.
To conclude, Meatless Days is vital for understanding how the postcolonial world, which has its own set of
problems, is still coping with a problematic past that has seeped into its present.

IV. REFERENCES
 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, New York: Oxford, 1993.
 C. Vijayshree, “Survival as an ethic: South Asian Immigrant Women’s Writing,” in Diaspora: Theories, Histories, Texts,
Makarand Paranjape, Ed. New Delhi: Indialog, 2001.
 Sara Suleri, Meatless Days, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.

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