The kitchen and beyond: the romantic chronotope in Pakistani popular fiction

This research is an autoethnographic investigation of this distinctive national variety of fiction that is predominantly romantic in nature and offers insights into the fascinating reading culture of the country. Previous scholarship on women’s digests in Pakistan has been limited to questions of female emancipation, patriarchy, and regional politics, overlooking the multilayered digest fiction. Throughout this article, the term “kitchen literature” stands for multi-layered Urdu fiction published in the digests, which explores myriad social, psychological, and domestic themes including child abuse, domestic violence, trauma, feminism and romance. I selected this term for two major reasons: first, because the kitchen is a space strongly associated with Pakistani digests and their readers, and second because of the frequent use of the kitchen as a setting in digest fiction, regardless of its theme. This article analyzes the diegetic and extra-diegetic roles of the kitchen, and the interconnection of these roles, in the love stories printed in Shuaa, Kiran and Khawateen Digest.