Analysis Of Stanley Ka Dabba And The Tiffin Box

The curious little tiffin box has always had a twinkling effect amidst the drudgery of routine activity and daily work. From toddlers, trying to peep inside the half-closed tiffin boxes in the very first period of their school by delicately lifting their lids with their little fingers to those teenagers, waiting eagerly for the bell to strike at the recess hour when they can share their tiffin, the cult of the tiffin has always lifted the spirit of the scolded mischief-making backbencher or an average Indian worker struggling to meet targets. Recent scholarship on food studies has made it possible to theorize the concept of tiffin; in the light of such theories this paper attempts to interpret the various tropes implicated in the tiffin-box that has been fictionalized in two film-narratives of 2011 and 2013 – Stanley Ka Dabba and The Lunchbox.
Tiffin in India has been an eighteenth-century outgrowth of colonial administration that resulted from the necessity to adapt to a work culture demanding a revision of the rituals and patterns of eating in the tropical climate. In the languid and humidity of hot days, lunch mutated into its slighter and lighter avatar in the form of the tiffin to acclimatize to the changing work conditions under the sahib regime. And very soon tiffin came to symbolize those transcendental
Here in this life, it automatically engenders for the giver the same thing as itself: it is not lost, it reproduces itself; in the next life, one finds the same thing, only it has increased. Food given is the food that in this world will return to the giver; it is food, the same food that he will find in the other world. And it is still food, the same food that he will find in the series of his reincarnations [ … ]. It is in the nature of food to be shared out. Not to share it with other is ‘to kill its essence,’ it is to destroy it both for oneself and for others. (Mauss